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aliceinreality

Tawny
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Surf Rock Mess by aliceinreality, literature

2byfour
AngryPinecone
13ways
rocker6661313
okto
2byfour
HTindle
13ways
ilona
cranberrydreams
okto

Deviation Spotlight

  • United States
  • Deviant for 18 years
  • She / Her
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My Bio
Current Residence: Tulsa, OK
Favourite genre of music: changes too often.
Favourite style of art: i'm a big fan of things that stop me in my tracks.
Operating System: OS X Tiger ^_^
MP3 player of choice: iPod. because any other choice is a vote for mediocrity.
Wallpaper of choice: "lost in time" by ilona
Personal Quote: the irony of the information age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion.

Favourite Visual Artist
Marla, m.c. escher
Favourite Bands / Musical Artists
mewithoutYou/boards of canada
Favourite Writers
ee cummings, donald miller, francesca lia block
Tools of the Trade
pens, moleskines, music, and an eye for the hidden bits of things
Other Interests
theology, Truth, people, motive, design, all that jazz.

photog

0 min read
i don't know that my pictures are getting any better, but i've found that shooting through the viewfinder forces me to compose the shot better.  hopefully this means that the pictures i take are getting more interesting, but i can't promise anything.
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new camera!

0 min read
my terrific bestest best friend mark romberg gave me (well, sort of) a Fuji Finepix S2500 with a 512MB memory card.  oh em gee, does it ever have good color.  now i just need to take it out with me and not be so afraid of looking like a dumbface. also, mark is my favorite. spaceeba, mark! and, devArt? LET ME USE CYRILLIC!  kthxbye.
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critique!

0 min read
i really want to get better at what i do, artistically.  i'm planning on taking photography I in the spring, but before then i am basically adrift on my small boat made of a point-and-shoot digital camera and some basic knowledge on how to use it interestingly. all this to say that i want real critique from people qualified to give it.  i want someone to say "this is neat/okay, but this would help."  i also want someone to give me tips on how to better use my Canon Elph, and on what kind of manual camera to use during photography I (even though, chances are, i'll have to borrow from a friend.) so, please, when you look at anything i have he
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Profile Comments 72

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wtp pax christi?
i don't remember ever saying it to you, but it means "peace of Christ". i'm pretty puzzled by your inquiry, as i don't remember ever commenting you. o.O

also, what's the "p" in "wtp"? o.O
what the porn xD

its in your signature, and its a relief company her ein holland
Sigh. I got to your page by following an argument on artistic decency and then was distracted by the Field Marshal... Anyway, I feel very clever pointing out that by capitalizing "truth," it is always negated.
Odd how statements we wish not to believe require the most proof. However, I am pleased that my aphorism was found lacking as evidence. Any discourse on this subject is going to suffer from the conceptual fuzziness inherent to words, but maybe the "feel" of the argument will suffice.

I am assuming that by "Truth," we might understand a vague notion of "ultimate" or objective truth--succinctly "the way things are." That is the underlying "engine" of reality, the mechanism that controls the workings of the universe. It is difficult to see how an idea as deceptively fundamentally "self-evident" as that could be false, but consider the case in which there are a number (possibly infinite) of those engines and that reality is the "average" result of those many mechanisms.

However, I think that for our purposes, we are really talking about something subtly different. We are considering "the way things are" as experienced by humans. I believe that any human experience of reality is either false or should be treated as false by the very reason that it _is_ a human experience of reality.

In my view, an experience of "Truth" may be obtained in one of three ways:
1.) It has been deposited into human minds via some outside source
2.) It has been induced from reality by observation
3.) It is the result of reasoning mechanisms that rely purely on an internal
algorithm separate from any external input (essentially the cases not
covered by 1 and 2)

Since case #3 relies on no external information about reality, we can reject any result of this process as being "ultimate truth." It would be like reaching into a container with an infinite number of items and picking exactly the right one. The probability of that event is exactly 0 (really).

The next simplest case is case #2, because humans are imperfect. People do not perceive the world as it is. Instead, our perceptions are based upon a sampling of physical properties that are used to construct an operational representation of reality.

Our sensory experiences with the world are models. Models are representations of a system that obey a simplified set of rules, which mimic the properties of the system on which they are based. For instance, meteorologists use models of the weather to cast predictions. Actual weather systems are far too complex to consider. Only the parts of the weather that past measurements suggest are the most reliable predictors are used to make forecasts.

The things we believe about the world are also models. We observe phenomena (events) in reality and then induce possible underlying explanations. Those explanations are models (c.f. Hidden Markov Models). At some point, a person will observe something that is not explained by the current model. Once the model is thus shown to be incorrect, people sometimes work on creating a better model that fits the new data. When that process occurs, it is called science. If the strange observations are ignored or jammed into a faulty model, then no progress in developing an understanding of "ultimate" truth is made. Even the best scientific theories are false, but scientists are continuously trying to improve them. To have a given theory be correct is also like reaching into a container with an infinite number of items and picking exactly the one you were looking for.

So far, ideas about "Truth" that come from cases #2 and #3 don't look very promising, so we have to turn to case #1. Ultimately, all models are wrong, but what if we could get help from an source that KNEW something about the underlying engine of reality? Then, we wouldn't need to worry about models--it would be a direct link to "Truth." Let us call such a source of ultimate truth "God." Yet, there are some conditions that must be met before we can accept outside knowledge as part of "Truth." First we need to suppose that God only gives humans correct information. We also need to assume that God has no competitors: other sources that appear to be Godlike (possessing of "Truth"). These other sources might be called Satans. If Satans exist, then humans could be unable to determine if part of "Truth" came from Satans or from God. Additionally, it must be the case that an individual's experience of "Truth" can not be duplicated or lost by mental conditions such as delusion, hallucination, memory loss, etc.

Unfortunately, in order to know those things about the possible sources of "Truth" or "Truth-like" experiences (I would call this Metatruth), people would have to have the ability to uncover "Truth" independently from outside sources. For instance, we might experience that God is the only source of "Truth" and that God never lies. Yet, it is possible that a Satan might tell something to that effect in order to mislead us into accepting all "Truth" without question. If we make an unfounded guess about the reliability of this knowledge, which we might call "Faith," then our _experience_ of "Truth" is in danger of diverging from the _real_ "Truth." However, the two ways that people might discover "Truth" on their own have been explored in the treatment of cases #2 and #3.

Since people cannot discover "Truth" by their own means and prior knowledge of "Truth" is required to accept any "Truth" from an external source, then we reach the conclusion that any experience of "Truth" must be treated as false. The best we can accomplish is to adopt a model of reality, which we know will be wrong. Those models constitute the lowercase truth; human experiences based on approximations of reality. Thus, by capitalizing "truth," it is always negated.

This is perhaps bleak, but there is some hope. Intelligent life can modify the universe. We may not be able to predict the Earth's weather as it now, but consider the possibility of a weather machine. A weather machine would command sufficient energy to "override" the natural weather and replace it with whatever the operator desired. It would then be very possible to predict the weather--just look at the setting on the weather machine. Likewise, intelligent life might eventually have the capacity to create a "virtual machine" that runs over actual reality. This system would become a source of "Truth." And that system is "The Omega Point."
p.s.- please check out mr. orwell's essay, as well:
[link]
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