The truth is unknowable. What we believe is truth is our perceptions, and people we respect agreeing with our perceptions. That is, "it's all belief", and always will be. To know something, one must be one with it; in contrast, every human being is limited and imperfect about external reality.
Hence in politics, we can have similarly large groups of sane, intelligent people, yet with radically opposed interpretations of reality and values. Exhibit A are those of the current apologists for Israel who are sincere, as opposed to us. No, we're not "the realists", vs "the deluded"; we just believe we are. That's not a criticism of us, it's just a description.
If we can recognize this, maybe we can recover the humility necessary to successfully conduct ourselves again. The path forward needs to include interactive dialog, where each claim can in turn be tested by an opponent. This is now missing in nearly all MSM, especially when/where they have abolished comments.
And comments are only an unstructured version; we have yet to come up with good structures, ones that aim to "map" reality -- say, by "vote", the congruence in multiple human interpretations of it. Meanwhile, the word "knowledge" and its variants should, eventually, become obsolete; words that are human-centered (e.g. "belief") needs to take its place.
The truth is unknowable. What we believe is truth is our perceptions, and people we respect agreeing with our perceptions. That is, "it's all belief", and always will be. To know something, one must be one with it; in contrast, every human being is limited and imperfect about external reality.
Hence in politics, we can have similarly large groups of sane, intelligent people, yet with radically opposed interpretations of reality and values. Exhibit A are those of the current apologists for Israel who are sincere, as opposed to us. No, we're not "the realists", vs "the deluded"; we just believe we are. That's not a criticism of us, it's just a description.
If we can recognize this, maybe we can recover the humility necessary to successfully conduct ourselves again. The path forward needs to include interactive dialog, where each claim can in turn be tested by an opponent. This is now missing in nearly all MSM, especially when/where they have abolished comments.
And comments are only an unstructured version; we have yet to come up with good structures, ones that aim to "map" reality -- say, by "vote", the congruence in multiple human interpretations of it. Meanwhile, the word "knowledge" and its variants should, eventually, become obsolete; words that are human-centered (e.g. "belief") needs to take its place.