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09 December, 2014

On Propositions; Perception, Truth, and Belief.

When it comes to propositions, that is claims or statements about the way things are or ought to be, there is some fundamental areas to be understood. First, there is a dualism to reality. There is the physical external objective reality. Things exist the way they are regardless of whether they are observed or not. For instance, the sun was consuming hydrogen in nuclear fusion and emitting light and heat before any person ever existed to be able to describe it.

The other side is our own subjective internal realities. This is the way we see things. It is inherently subjective because we depend on our brains to interpret the signals from our nerve endings, our eyes and ears, etc. in order to sense the world around us. It is possible for a person to have a misunderstanding of some thing because of a fault somewhere with that person. For example, a color-blind person cannot see the color red, so many cities put a small blue light emitter inside the red light at traffic intersections because that most color-blind people can see. In this way sometimes our understanding of the world around us can become flawed. This is one thing that must be understood when discussing beliefs, perception and reality.

Another way that what we believe can be wrong is other beliefs affecting them. A religious person may be a creationist because they believe in their god. To the creationist the idea of accepting evolution as the fact that it is would undermine what they believe about their god, that the Bible stories are supposedly true. More precisely, that the Bible or the Qur'an is the literal "word of god". This is intellectual dishonesty, rather than physiological flaw. The creationist rejects evidence because he or she wishes to preserve his or her beliefs.


So, the internal reality, our individual belief about the way things are can differ wildly from each other. Sometimes several different views are correct, sometimes one is and others are not, and sometimes none are correct. Also sometimes there is also no real right or wrong, as is the case for preferences or tastes. These are even more subjective. If I say I believe mint chocolate chip is the best flavor of icecream, you may disagree, but neither of us is wrong. But, regarding the belief of most that the traffic light is red, and the belief of color-blind people that the traffic light is blue, both are correct. In the case of many traffic lights, since a blue light emitter is placed in the center of the red light emitter, both colors are being emitted. Both very different internal realities of different people are accurate to the objective external reality. The only thing is most people are unaware that there is a blue light emitter also there, because the blue emitter is smaller and centered inside the larger red emitter. To the color-blind person it looks like a less saturated blue light than it would if the blue emitter were alone, because the red light emitter is emitting light that looks white to them.

© 2014, Joshua Michail

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