Look, I have thoughts (we all should). Some of them transgress somebody's tender sensitivities, perhaps vigorously. Those people are invited to take a chill pill and read with an open mind. Failure to do so may cause heightened blood pressure, pulse rate, shallow and rapid respiration, vertigo, vapors, hysteria, a headache or even apoplexy.
You were warned.
To begin, I think Truth is a crafty fox. For reasons known only to itself, it evades us at every turn, preferring to exercise its superiority over us by letting us stew in our own ignorance and unexamined beliefs.
Unlike Socrates, I do not believe the unexamined life is not worth living, it is not a life, properly understood: It is existence, consciousness to be sure, but vital, energetic, capable of changing time and space for the better? Nope.
For that, the hard work of thinking is required.
Truth, however, has vulnerabilities. It yields, quite submissively, to logic and demonstrable facts. That it does so means it is not eternally unchanging, as demonstrated facts can change: Science, for example, does this all the time. Simply recounting, more accurately, the number of bison on the Great Plains can affect Truth.
It is also quite defenseless, requiring seekers to locate it and advocates to describe it. It has no personal imperative to be known.
But it is powerful: Like a megaton weapon, it can in the hands of its possessors devastate even the physical in short order, rendering once familiar landscapes unrecognizable.
It is also subtle: When it has won its victories, its struggle to be birthed is most often forgotten and it recedes into a background it created.
It's also bigger than us: It will always have surprises in store. It will never submit to complete cataloging. In this, it provides us humans with endless hours of amusement as we struggle to free another bit of it from hiding.
So, this blog will go chasing this most elusive goose. It will employ informed opinions as hypotheses to be tested and will often find itself no closer to Truth than it began. But it will make the effort. And you should too.
Herewith, my first informed opinion, informed by experience and education, literature and the double-slit experiment: Presume duality in everything and do not dismiss it without conclusive evidence. Male and female, left and right, particle and wave, past and future in a perfect balance we call the present, all these are dualities with real consequences. Look around you and you will see more, and I do not think you will be force-fitting the model onto reality; there really are dualities in the universe and, in the nature of a natural universe, there always will be. I suspect most, maybe even all of them, are eternal. I know some, like good and evil, are, but I'm not so sure we've got particle and wave right. I'm no physicist, but I cannot help but wonder if they are not unified in some way we have yet to uncover.
Or not.
Much of what is to follow will not be polemic, but observational, implying questions rather than posing them. You are free to run with them wherever you wish. Honest inquiry is always welcome here, no matter where it goes.
Let me lob one thought that has remained with me for years: Perfect justice seems to me to be incompatible with law (rules). Calling our legal system a "justice system," is simply dishonest. And that it is no justice system is perfectly okay so long as we abandon that illusion and accept rules for what they are: Imperfectly-fitted tools we use to build imperfect (and therefore perishable) civilizations.
More on that to follow. Welcome aboard, free thinker.
