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Seek, Not Find

By this, I mean, seek truth but never find it. This is a perilous edge to walk. Without basis, nothing can be built. With a frozen basis, nothing can be improved. When we admit that we know we are wrong, that we are at fault or faulty, only then can we fix those mistakes and soar.

In science (when it is not a religion), we talk about that which is falsifiable and that which is not. Our model of reality approximates reality, but critically, its bounds must be testable, and if it is found to err with experiment, then we must only consider that model up to its error. So, the luminiferous aether cast aside, Newtonian physics where convenient.

As soon as we hold onto some belief, and we begin to use it as the foundation for further thoughts, considering its error becomes more and more difficult. When we relearn something, we must also consider all of the considerations which followed the original learned "fact." In a mathematical system with an altered axiom, this is as simple as rechecking all of the proofs. In the complexity of the world, it may take a lifetime to rid the implications of a rotten assumption. If you grow up thinking people on the other side of the fence are evil, and then you find out that they are just people, then you are probably going to have some amount of visceral/system 1/habitual reaction to them regardless of your knowledge.

As we get older and have more experiences, as our minds "crystallize," we need to work extra hard in order to process corrected ideas because (likely among other reasons) there is more information which needs to be reconstituted. This process of correcting and making consistent propositional knowledge is inherently circular and continuous.

This is also related to why new ideologies need generation(s) to saturate a population. It is psychologically painful to reprocess ideas. The safe and easy thing is to justify a wrong opinion. When we let go of that wrong opinion, there is a tendency to feel loss, inadequacy, like we have wasted our time, or other bad feelings. I like to consider bad feelings as ancestral knowledge and strategies which have been selected as working (perhaps due to interactions with other feelings of people in the population and not related to a logical assessment of the situation). We cannot currently cast out the wisdom of the old or transcend our biological forms. We are stuck in these bodies, and as beings also capable of logic, we can only try to make sense of these ancestral wisdom nuggets. It is efficient to have a consistent framework of thought. When we question ourselves, it takes a lot of time to find internal consistency, and we can literally fragment our own minds (let alone when these narratives cross multiple people). Therefore, there is a cost-benefit analysis that can be done: will the negative impact of this wrong thought exceed the cost of rewriting the mind to reflect the improved principle.

Imagine you have a friend who really loves chocolate doughnuts, and they agreed to go to go-karting with you provided that you give them a chocolate doughnut. They're really adamant about it. You tell them don't worry, to meet at the karting center. On the drive there, you stop by the store and get doughnuts. A dozen glazed. Of course, in your rush, you forgot chocolate. Though, if you stopped and asked yourself, what did your friend say, you might remember how their eyes sparkled when they nearly sung out their desperate chocolate desire. So, you know everything, but your mind is fragmented. The whole drive over there, you still think your friend (soon ex) will go go-karting. You know they want chocolate doughnuts. You know they need chocolate doughnuts to go go-karting, and you know that what you have sitting next to you is a stinking box of warm and gooey disappointment. In this case, you have "found" truth - "my friend will go go-karting," but what you need to do was to go back a step, forget the assumption, and seek.

To make oneself consistent, it isn't easy. It's painful. It's easy to say - "I don't care what you want, we're going go-karting." Well, as they say, control the world, control the narrative (history goes to the victor). It is equally as true, control the narrative, control the world. Control and narrative feed back into each other. This may be one reason why sticking to an idea is a highly-adapted behavior. You save the cost of a mental rewrite, and you can make your version of the truth a reality. Win-win. Of course, in this case, it may be obvious: enjoy the doughnuts and the go-karts.

It's not always true though that we can establish our predesignated truths as reality. Though, some may try. If the train has already left the station, you can't convince the platform employees to let you on. Their or your belief doesn't change whether there is train there. This is an objective statement, not a statement about what an individual thinks they or others may do which can change. In this case (or in the case of stubborn individuals, in other words, an inability to make your truth shared), we must give up our idea "the train is here." The train has left the station. It is these statements we must not find fastened in our minds. We must continuously work them out (seek).

An example of a mental framework which acts as a useful approximation of reality without having a basis in reality is these bits of propositional knowledge I'm mentioning. I don't believe that the statement "the train is here" actually exists in that form in the brain. This realization of knowledge is an encoding of what is most likely stored in another form for most people (human thought processes operate very differently, see also aphantasia and Feynman's counting experiment). So, I should be open to (and in fact welcome) a different expression or way of thinking about these tid-bits which distinguishes my textual representation of them from a truer semantic form.

But it's damn hard! So, I am using this to remind myself to always seek and not find truth. To force myself to go through the pain of reconstituting my mind, and to risk roaring fragmentation at every opportunity. There are strategies, ways of organizing thoughts in order to avoid some of these problems (orthogonality, thinking about things in terms of their reasons, rather than establishing derived ideas as fundamental truths). These are great strategies for organizing a program. Well, many ways the mind can be programmed just like a computer. For instance, mnemonics are really convenient ways to achieve linear lookup of facts in your mind.

Too: seek but not find "seek but not find." Yes. We cannot juggle everything, but what we can, toss in the air.