The Introduction
Welcome to my thoughts — the ramblings of a curious, distractible, and sometimes intelligible person, published for all to read. I thought it might be useful to explain why this blog should exist at all, especially because the last thing the internet needed was another halfwit like myself regurgitating someone else’s ideas in public. My best defense is that my motivations are purely selfish. I am writing in the hopes of personal gain. Specifically I am writing:
- As a tool for increasing my situational awareness, or, my ability to understand the world around me.
- As a tool to make connections with other curious people inhabiting the same virtual world as me.
I might also add, as reason 2.5, that I am hoping that releasing my thoughts into the virtual world sparks the ignition of wholly unexpected, positive outcomes. I’ll never know unless I try.
Robert Pirsig wrote the following about the pursuit of scientific truths in his fictionalized autobiography, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
“He studied scientific truths, then became upset even more by the apparent cause of their temporal condition. It looked as though the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort...The more you look, the more you see... What this means logically is that as you try to move toward unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it! It is your application of scientific method that is causing it to change!”
The same ideas can be found in the clichés: “every fact has a half-life”, “strong convictions, loosely held”, and “the more you know, the less you realize that you know”. My skeptical half, ironically, sees this idea as perhaps the only thing which can be accepted without reservation.
To be clear, my skeptical half doesn’t deny the existence of an objective reality, or refuse to accept some things as true and others as false. It simply believes in the inevitability of progress, and in humanity’s capacity to update our collective intelligence for the better— to replace worse explanations with better explanations, and to do so ad infinitum.
And therein lies the explanation behind True for Now. If humanity’s collective intelligence undergoes a complete rewrite regularly, how can the understanding of a single, unremarkable individual be expected to remain correct for any significant period of time? It’s improbable at best.
The following collection of thoughts then are what appeared to be the truth to me at the moment of their writing. Time and progress will then decide when to cast them aside as falsehoods. Please read them forgivingly.
Thank you.