Monday, August 17, 2009

True Power and Scientific Method Part 1.

Having just read the Wikipedia post on 'power', I thought I might explain something that most people miss.

Power is not limited to our influence on others, or even to others and our environment. Rather, power also encompasses our internal thoughts and the other worlds we might imagine we inhabit. Let me explain.

If one accepts the premise that the input from one's personal human perception is 'assembled' or 'constructed' into a view of reality, then it soon becomes apparent that we have more power over reality than it might first seem.

But because this premise is not universally accepted, and even may seem to have been disproven by the scientific method, we should first start there.

We can begin with the fact that our sense perceptions change as we age. A 60 year old will often be unable to hear frequencies that a younger person might have no trouble with. You might say that the 60 year old is handicapped, but what is really happening is simply that the 60 year old has a different set of perceptions to work with. Because a younger person may not be able to perceive things the older one might catch, such as mannerisms, tone of voice, and so on.

To take this further, another 60 year old may not be fluent in the same language, which means their perception will be quite different than another person of the same age.

It is easy to pass this distinction off as rare and unusual. My thesis is that it is much more pervasive than the average person realizes. Indeed, it can be the source of complete miscommunication, strife, wars, and other conflict. I'm not alone in this view. You can find information specialists that have a much better handle on this concept than me. What I want to point out is simply that it exists.

Since we obviously construct our world based on our abilities, emotions, and past experience, it may follow that the whole construction is too complex to dwell on. Perhaps we should just take our construction at face value.

Of course, this is what the vast majority of us do. It could even be said that all of us do this at least part of the time. Indeed, the scientific method is aimed not at confirming our world view, but at discovering inconsistencies in it and from these inconsistencies, expanding human knowledge.

To this end, we are constantly conceptualizing. We are taking our perceptions, rearranging them, constructing various categories and fashioning something we call 'reality' based upon a personal system that most likely follows a pattern of doing what worked before.

Now, there have been various methods of altering this construction that have been 'discovered' throughout history. The most prevalent today is, again, the scientific method. And that is well and good. The scientific method might be categorized as a method for developing reliable and repeatable constructions that can be shared among more than one person. It is this sharing that gives the method its power.

Like any method, however, it carries limitations. More on these later.

Ok, that was strange...


Just now, I did the last post twice, because the first time, when I posted it, it went to someone elses blog.
So I had to rewrite it, and left part of it for this post, since it was on a different subject, sort of.
The topic before was spending coherent time wisely, as opposed to the post into another person's blog, which I doubt has happened to many other people. I would regard that as a state of incoherent time, especially since I thought I was in this blog. What I finished the first version of that post up with was my comments on blogs. Since no one reads them, aren't they just an exercise in solipsism? (See my book.)
The upshot of it is that the blog becomes more of a seashell journal. It is out there for someone to pick up, but the likelihood is small. What turned me to this thought was my perusal of the hype behind The Secret', a movie and book that basically repeat Napoleon Hill's classic series starting with 'Think and Grow Rich'. What they have that Napoleon didn't have is a hype machine backing them up.
Because it's all popular for fifteen minutes or so, that will be the subject of another entry later. For now, the important thing is to realize that the hype takes on a life of its own. Or is the important part really that the hype is different from the actual concept. Or is the important thing that the hype is not the important thing, in fact, that hype is overused in this paragraph.
These and other rhetorical questions will be answered later, or maybe never.

What else is there to read?


As my time in this world (the one other people can understand) grows short, I'm trying to spend moments reading better things than the daily news. As a result, I've taken to finding authors on the Nobel Prize winning list, because, why should I waste my time on drivel. George Bernard Shaw famously said "90% of everything is trash".
So lately it's The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, the book mentioned below, and now a book of short stories by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.
I've said this better before, so I won't say it again:

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