Here's LOFF56:
"Hey Pete,
I've been a long time away, but I've been following this interesting exchange between you and Rick...
Here's my two sense...
Actually I'm going to ignore the main part of the debate about licensing parents.
But I'm interested in your statement about Reality with a capital "R". In your previous entry you used gravity as an example of an unquestionable "R"eality. You also stated that "it (reality) is not all subjective or relative".
I actually strongly disagree with this.
Even with something as simple as saying gravity has only one effect (that of a person falling towards earth) is technically wrong. Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein said that it's just as correct to say that the earth falls up towards you as it is to say that you fall down towards the earth. Gravity is relative. And everything in the universe is relative according to Einstein.
I believe that this applies very importantly on a human level as well. If you and I have two different opinions on a given topic, my opinion doesn't exist only in the framework of your "R"eality and your opinion doesn't exist only in the framework of my "R"eality. We could be saying two completely contradictory things, the sky is blue and the sky is red, but within the contexts of our own realities we are both correct no matter how disparate the facts are. Think about it... If for some reason, I've learned for as long as I can remember that the sky is red, how absurd would your claim be that the sky is blue? It's all relative.
This plays an important role when dealing with other people or groups of people. If a group of people believe that they will be received by 17 virgins when they die, and we simply dismiss that idea as heathen, surprise surprise, they get mad and eventually start throwing bombs at us. But the fact is we don't know anymore than they do about what happens to you (if anything) when you die. Our insistence to constantly ignore the relative nature of reality is what isolates us and causes us harm.
Now I would postulate perhaps that the collective conscious of the world does in fact have a "R"eality, an average reality if you will, but I think if any one person postulates that they are tapped in to that, I'd say that they are... well... living in their own reality.
We all have to accept our humble relative view of reality, and understand that as much as we know individually and as a whole we will never be fully aware of the absolute truth. No matter how sure we are.
600 years ago 100% of all people in the world believed that the sun revolved around the earth. And they were absolutely correct in relation to their relative understanding of their Reality (with a capital R). And not one person would have ever been deemed unenlightened based solely on that belief.
Everything is relative. Period. Ask Einstein."
PL's response:
Hey L56 - Welcome back!
What Einstein said actually about things being "relative" was that our experience of things was relative, not that Reality (capital "R") was relative.
Einstein: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."
Einstein also said that E=mc2 (that the energy in matter is equal to its matter times the speed of light squared), and he said he knew that this was True (capital "T"), and he would leave it to the scientists to take ten years in the laboratory to prove him right. (In fact, they just proved it last year!)
The reason we get people in other cultures so mad at us (and visa versa) is because we in fact act like everything is relative, like it's all a matter of opinion, and so it becomes a shouting or shooting match as to who's right, instead of a genuine search for the Truth together. In this galaxy, in this Universe, in this dimension, L56, the sun never revolved around the earth, no matter how many people thought so.
How do I know? Ah! That's the real issue at hand for you, I sense. How can anyone know anything for certain? Well, I refer you back to Einstein who said many things from a place of definitive knowing, including this: "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
In other words, if you are simply using your brain, your intellect, then it is true that you cannot know anything except how much change you have in your pocket, and even then you still have to count it. But if you are connected to your deeper self, to the part of you that has access to the universal truths that rule this realm of existence, you can know some things with certainty.
How to get there is another story, but a good story, about discovering what the human being is really capable of when unblocked emotionally and decongested from conditioning and archaic belief systems.
To be continued...
Hmmm.... Interesting...
ReplyDeleteRe: Einstein and relative experience vs. relative reality. You are correct, to a certain extent, Einstein did formulate a Reality with a capital R. But as mere humans, how can we possibly live outside of our experiences?
Einstein's absolute "T"ruth equates (I think) with my postulation about an "average reality". He indeed did say that there is an absolute "T"ruth, and he even told us what some of that is. But even Einstein still had only his relative view of the world in which to personally experience. If he felt that he was only sitting with a girl for a minute he wouldn't be able to change his feelings to abide by the universal truth that it was an hour. He would still FEEL the minute. And that was his reality (with a lower case r).
I think what I'm saying ultimately is that our relative realities are much more pragmatic constructs than a Reality (with a capital R) which is constantly in need of revision. (By the way, even some of Einstein's equations which he postulated as "T"ruth are still being modified and refined today to reflect new discoveries.) Especially when it comes to sociological issues. Physics is one thing because experimentation can (more or less) prove or disprove "T"ruths. But Sociological problems are much more complicated and can't be solved to a "T"ruth through experimentation.
Hence I still stand by my stance that everything is relative.
Also I don't think we get into arguments with other nations (or people) because both sides think that everything is a matter of opinion. I think we get into arguments because both sides think that their side is correct as a matter of FACT. It's not an opinion to a Muslim that they will be met by 17 virgins in heaven, it's a FACT to them. It's not an opinion that Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior to a devout Christian, it's a FACT. We'd be a lot better off if both sides said: "you've got your opinion, I've got mine."
Overall though I see your point, and I'm not ruling out that we might both be speaking the t(T)ruth... both with a lower case "t" and a relatively uppercase "T".