the objective unknowable truth

2018.03.26
Maybe the strongest but weirdest thing my Evangelical Christian upbringing left me with is a sense that there IS an objective, absolute Truth that transcends all creeds and other preconceptions and can even make value judgements - potentially bridging the chasm between "Ought" (How Things Should Be) and "Is" (How Things Are) - but that this Truth is ultimately unknowable, and so any group's claim to perfected, or even superior, insight into it is unverifiable and suspect - especially insight via special revelation and not skeptical enquiry.

And to cling to such a claim (of perfected knowledge of the Truth) and end up being Wrong would be an unforgivable sin.

"Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it" --Vaclav Havel (or more likely André Gide.)

This also drives my pseudo-martyrdom, my typical willingness to sacrifice bits of my own comfort and resources if a best guess of The Truth says that a greater good would be served by my doing so. So I am compelled to sacrifice up until the point that says a best guess would say hey, I'm worth something too, and what I'm giving up might be (Objective Truthfully) of more value to the collective world with me than meeting that other need.

I suspect that this driving force has been with me since my teenage years, but only in the past few am I so aware of it. (Also, I'm reviewing https://kirk.is/2017/10/21/ as another, even more long-winded exploration of some of these topics.)

(I think it's telling that Grammarly urges me to say "the best" and not "a best". No way man. There's no single best because life has too many spectrums to measure stuff on.)


As a left leaning person, what do you like about conservatives? I thought this was gentler and more thoughtful than many things I've seen on Quora and FB.
CNN: Where fat goes when you lose weight - spoiler: it's not converted straight into energy (i.e. we don't have a Fusion or Fission reactor in us...), it's not just pee'd or poo'd out, it's not converted into muscle... instead it's turned into CO2 and water! 10 lbs of fat turns into 8.4 lbs of CO2 (and I admit it's always weird to think of the weight of a gas...) and 1.6 of water.

This is kind of a delightful fact, and a nice mirror image of what I learned in 2013, how trees build themselves out of air (and some minerals from the ground, and I think water.) In both cases, the conversion back and from of air with more solidish stuff defies our intuitions.
Janelle C Shane uses a neural net to generate new Dungeons and Dragons monsters: I love the subtle nerdness of the noun, adjective format- really brings the "Monster Manual" aspect home for me.
Because I believe in giving back, I have put the Knux' 1974 on Wikipedia's List of songs named after dates. (I'm partial to 1974 for obvious reasons, so when I thought of Smashing Pumpkin's 1979 and Prince's 1999 I figured there's gotta be a list...)
They're both better after a couple of beers.
Carrie Fisher, on similarities between Paul Simon and Harrison Ford

I love some of the old NES video game music, like Mega Man series and of course the Mario stuff they explore "what makes it sound fun" here...
SPOILER: it can have a lot to do with the same stuff that makes New Orleans Street Band music fun. (Insert wistful dream to get more competent about arranging music here... I think videos like this might help a little bit)