Gradients of truth
Sven Gelbhaar
8/21/2018
What do we mean when we say “something is like something-else?” We mean that
they share some set of attribute(s). Maybe the same primary color; maybe
weight; or maybe something entirely abstract like “good.” We deal with a rather
chaotic world, where nothing is precisely 1 unit of measurement, or even the
exact same color. Everything is “almost” like something that we can comprehend.
The problem is that some things are completely axiomatic, and aren’t “like”
anything else at all. Like love, the most pregnant of all English words. Love
can be an appreciation and respect, as per our love toward our families, or love
can be a passionate desire to be around the object (or person, hopefully) in
question. Or it can be the frail raport we build with our “fellow men”, while
communicating absolutely nothing with, say, a pleasantry or two while going for
a stroll. So what is love then? Love is a series of concepts with variable,
some might claim un-veracitic, meanings. How depressing, until we ponder
something even more un-nerving. Everyone sees the world through different
leitmotifs. One person sees a doctor curing a child of some attrocious disease
that civilization has triumphantly rolled out, while another sees a child
potentially ending up with Autism due to the Mercury which exists in the cure.
This example is a little extreme, but the same can be said about just about
anything. Another example: I see the green grass, and someone else, observing
the exact same scene, focuses on the cars driving by. The exact same
qualia/sensory-input, yet diverging observations.
So what can we do about it? The poets would like nothing more than for this to
be the case, but the empirically motivated scientists want everything to be
concrete — rigidly wrong or unfailingly correct.
This is nothing new. We are all aware of the difficulty of expressing exactly
what one thinks, if the reader has been to other parts of the world than where
they were raised. But why does all this matter?
As of late, everyone from Jim Carey to everyone (it seems like) on FaceBook is
touting the human species is in fact one organism. The pundits claim that they
are “waking up” from the illusion of individuality, and this is dangerous. This
sort of ego-death of the individual has, in the past, led to Nazism, Fascism,
and god only knows what else. What these people fail to understand is that
species-level ego is no different from individual ego.
More importantly, I’d say, is that there might exist concepts and phenomenon
which are axiomatic, and we could be missing something as-yet unthought-of. We
are born with all sorts of capacities: such as higher reasoning, which we spend
8+ years in Universities to refine, yet there might be something completely
novel to the human, all-too-human world view missing from our ability to allude
to. Something that cannot be compared to anything else. _ is LIKE _
would fail us. What that something, or those somethings, is/are I have no idea,
but I’m hoping to discover it/them.