hand help: “I reject your reality and substitute my own.” - Help.com

Man you are so hard to read. I will read this anyway.

beleiving is artificial in a way. You can also just be open and know things through intuition. truthsense or the beginners mind.

or experience

i love spinoza. i say always search for truth. even though you may never find it, or if you by chance do you probably won’t know it, search for complete truth.

why pursue in the face of futility? because it is man’s nature to order the chaos around him, and if we believe we are ordering to the best of our ability we are content.

sometimes a man has settled upon what he believes to be true and he will budge no further. though the people around him may curse him for being so foolish, he will guard this “truth” until the death, content at having found it with the best of his abilities. The happiest man in the world is the man who, testing and studying his truth still finds no flaws after observing it for years on end.

yes, definetely

yes, the only problem is that sometimes happiness degenerates to contentment, which in turn is reduced to apathy/monotony.

i think that the truly happy man is the one who questions his beliefs and finds that the answer only strengthens his convictions more.

Yes, always look for the truth. But we need ideals as well.

I tend to believe people, and I believe in people. That hurts me every now and then, because you can cheat me. Sometimes I hear: “then don’t trust people”.
But I have to trust people in general, until they have proven distrustful. (of course I don’t trust a salesperson who is obviously lying).

But I have met people who distrust people until they prove trustworthy. I would not like to live in a society where everybody is like that. I will rather get hurt every now and then, than lose my faith in people.

I somehow also believe that it in the end will prove advantageous to trust.

Trust but verify.

wow, thats like my favorite quote, whose was it originally? the one in the title.

it was Spinoza, as it says in the post.

ha ha, wrong quote! sorry, the one at the top was said by Adam Savage, as far as i can tell. :)

Tictac, trust and truth is not the same. Trust is something within yourself, something of your own choice. It is something that you give, or that is given to you. I can trust somebody I already know is not even telling the real thing, only that I think he is honestly trying his best to do it.

But truth is more impersonal. Truth is out there, to be found. I dislike when people negotiate the meaning of the word, like saying “it is my truth, because…” or saying “it became true to me, because…”.
Then they are compromising the concept of truth, when they rather should have used other words to describe things.

I am thinking the same way as Ben do, about how things work. I must find out. I just HAD to know the technical reasons why a woolen sweater shrinks in the washing machine, so I found out. Hehe, I don’t know why I wanted that knowledge, but I just had to find out.

The same about the straight lines of tall poplar trees lining fruit fields - why do they have the same length for hundreds of yards, then another length for another few hundred yards, but apparantly irrespective of local soil conditions or small streams passing nearby? I just had to know, so I called a professor at an agricultural university.
Hehe, I caused a lot of trouble because they did not know.
“What a stupid question”, he said. But he laughed and explained that he called it “stupid” because he did not know. A week later he called me and told that they had discussed it for a week and reached a conclusion.
So now I know.
Hehe, an outmost useful piece of knowledge….

Scientists are looking for truth. They can be most worty of trust, even if their findings later would be found out to be not true. Niels Bohr is a good example. He even got the Nobel Prize for something that later turned out to be a bit faulty.
But the error did not smear his reputation and he certainly earned the trust he was given. Because he told what he believed, and his findings were outmost useful for the further development of science, despite the errors.

the concept of truth is only that, a concept. there is no such thing as concrete truth. ;)

Lacuna, that was too easy!
I understand what you mean, because it is used as a wide concept. And the width of it is the reason for not being able to pinpoint “truth” in some matters. But that is because of inadequate definition of the word, or rather of the situation where it is used.
But the conclusion “there is no such thing…” is used when people give up, when they stop looking for the truth. And I think that is a mistake, because then you accept things and stop thinking, and stop learning.

If you accept my above definition, where I made it impersonal and free from opinions, there is certainly a truth in most matters.

If somebody is dead, he is dead. “Not entirely, because his impact on us still lives”, you may say. But then you are talking about someting else, only that the language wasn’t used enough (or simplified). Then I would have to specify, saying that he is physically dead. And that would be true.

If we give up on truth, we’ll go backwards.

no, you can search knowing full well that it does not exist. do we not search perfection? do we not strive toward Utpoia?

at which point is a person dead? when their heart stops beating? when they can no longer move their muscles on their own? when they can’t breathe without the help of a machine? when their brain waves cease? it’s just as complicated as when life begins. which is the truth?

Yes we do. But knowing that we will not find it, does not mean that it does not exist.
However, both “perfection” and “utopia” have definitions which are within yourself, based on what you feel are important matters to you. As soon as you can specify exactly what you look for in order to call it “perfect”, you will also increase your chances to find it.

And the truth is there, whether you find it or not.

Again it is a matter of specified definitions. A man running to catch the bus is apparantly alive. A year later he is dead and buried since 6 months. The time of death is somewhere inbetween, that is the truth.
Now if you look for further specifications, you must decide what you look for. If you look for the time when his heart stopped, that true time was there. If you look for when his beard stopped growing, that was 2-3 days later if his body wasn’t destroyed before. So all the truths are still there, subject to your specified definitions of what you are looking for.

Same goes for when ‘life’ starts. All the truths are still there, to be found.
We have a lot of different opinions about when life begins. But that is not because of inadequate definitions of “truth”, but because of various definitions of the concept “life”.

It is easy to mix up those things.

perhaps you may define what perfect is, but how do you know that to be ‘true’? you can only say that is true for yourself. so the only truth you can find is to find evidence that is closest to supporting the definition of truth that you have created?

i have had dissagreements with molotok in the past,

but i like to agree with the idea that truth is what is. it is what does not change, despite what we think.

it can exist, or is their nothing beyond what we think?

there must be more beyond what we think, and know, because we are here.

therefor i conclude there must be truth.

the question is how to find it.

i guess the contentment depends on the person tom.

if you are content not to have answers, you acheive what you wish. you find no answers.

if you need them, people often fail at finding them. how can they be happy if they fail?

so, it really depends on if those who need answers ever find those answers or not.

Lacuna, you missed my point there.
What you personally define as criterias of ‘perfect’ is an OPINION and has nothing to do with truth.

If ‘perfect’ to you is that it does not rain, your opinion is that it is perfect when it does not rain.
While it may be TRUE that it does not rain, that is not ‘perfect’ to somebody else.
But it would still be true that it does not rain.

^Okay, wtf happened there? My computer’s ******.
Oh maaaan, am I out of my depth here. But let’s see how this goes:
Contradiction and questioning are the seeds of consciousness. “Things do not connect. I want, but don’t have. I dream of having. I imgaine.” Hm that quote wasn’t strictly relevant but its been in my head all day.
And skepticism isn’t strictly natural like you said, but when you think about it, nature and the world’s kind of trained humans over the years not to trust things as they seem.
A cactus is prickly and looks inedible, but the juice inside will certainly save your *** in the desert. Some frogs in South America look small, vulnerable, and brightly-coloured so they’re easily spotted by predators, but if you eat one of them you’ll be poisoned to death within the hour. So maybe this God, He/She/It or whoever the crap is supposed to be in charge meant for us to evolve to be questioning and skeptical of how things appear, because it meant that as we grew smarter we’d start questioning the real big stuff (instead of yknow, cacti and frogs).
But does looking for the answers make us happy? Well for me I try not to think about how the universe and reality work on a daily basis because my head would just crack open from all the wondering. I’m probably just going to wait till I’m dead and see if I get any answers then, and if I don’t well I won’t really mind cause…I’ll be dead. I’m comforted by the thought of a higher being watching over me and rooting for me, but I also don’t like the thought of it being able to see me in the bathroom!
God, I hope that all made some kind of sense.

interestingly, some cactuses can actually make you sick if you drink the water in them… very loopy even…

i dont know what either of you are talking about, but somehow it did make sense.

A very interesting question. It is just as i say, I am a vampire, and yet i will never be able to prove this to your sufficient desires.

Perhaps a well balance of the two would be more appropriate, demand as of to why, and believe until proven wrong, or until proven right depending on the situation.

for if you are all one way, you lose information that may be well needed, and indeedly true, of coarse all truths are decided of by each and every individual, weather or not they are instructed to believe one way. another problem in both beliefs

just because one believes it, does not prove anything, for another will find just the same amount of proof of why not to believe it, and back it up just as well

do i make sense?