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Old 12-04-2008, 04:17 PM   #6 (permalink)
cardboard adolescent
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Join Date: Nov 2005
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but there's a difference between truth and accuracy. just because a model is accurate at making predictions doesn't mean it tells you what is actually happening, you build your own ignorance into your systems. i can build a system that says the sun will rise tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, etc. and it will be very accurate. but that doesn't mean that i know what the sun is, why it rises, what it means for it to rise, what the relation between the sun and the earth is, etc. it might be true, but it is only true in the context of my own ignorance. while it seems that we get closer to Truth as we decrease our ignorance, there is also the understanding that everything we understand about reality has to be translated from what it really is into what we can understand, and what we consider "reality" is really just a representation of our mind. thus, just because this representation gets more complex, it can never transcend its status as a representation, and as such can never actually bridge the gap between the contextual and the universal. so the ultimate truth of the human condition is paradoxically that we can never reach any ultimate truth. science operates on the opposite assumption, and hence leads us away from the ultimate truth.
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