60-40 Rule part 3: defense from no-god view

OK, so this one isn't strictly a no-god defense because those of you who believe there is a God will also find this defense relevant as well.

I said I could defend my rule. That doesn't mean "prove" - it means "defend". You actually can't really "prove" anything other than mathematical formulae. Everything else in the universe can only be determined to a high degree of statistical probability - which will always remain short of actual proof. But the stuff we accept as the basic knowledge and understanding of life isn't stuff that's proved - it's stuff that can be shown to be reasonably defensible.... except for the really obsessive among us who go way beyond looking for "reasonable" and consequently never really believe anything anyone else says.

My first defense: it is impossible for any one person, or any group of people or even all of humanity together (even should the impossible miracle occur causing us to actually work in concert instead of at logger heads with each other) to know everything about anything. No matter how much you constrain the variables, tighten the focus of inquiry, magnify the details, you simply cannot ever get all the information relevant to even the simplest idea. You can get a lot; you can get enough for a good sound reliable basis of understanding. But you can't get it all. There's always going to be other stuff that you don't know that could change what you do know if you knew the stuff you don't know.

With the infinite amount of information (and potential information) that could impinge on any one idea that any one of us holds, the possibility that we've got all the necessary knowledge about that idea is just not statistically probable. And, as noted earlier, information - the same as molecules, bats, and thought structures - is continuously coming into existence and going out of existence. We're never going to get all of it, or even a significant amount of it, for even a small part of what we believe.

My second defense: In order to think at all, to create ideas from thoughts and knowledge, we must select particular information to examine, particular phenomena to investigate, particular sets of ideas to put together into larger conceptual structures. Thinking is essentially a function of discrimination, selection, elimination, picking the parts to look at and the parts to not look at.

The selection process by which we think, by its very nature creates a huge reservoir of unconsidered information. It also means that the conclusions we reach are completely contingent on the set of variables we have selected for examination.

Then on top of that, as quantum physics has demonstrated, any one variable can be inextricably connected to other variables, thus constraining the nature of the experiments and of the knowledge gained trough the experiments.

Ideas are like that. They've each got tendrils interconnecting with numerous other ideas, thought fragments, unconscious motivations. You can't examine any idea in a pure state, independent of it's many shadowy, vague, nebulous connections.

The ideas we hold are all entirely constructed from selected variables - thoughts, information, knowledge - which by necessity will restrict the resulting ideas. It's just seriously improbable that anyone or any group or even any idea is right more than 60% of the time, or includes more than 60% of true stuff.


I've run over the word limit my brother advised me to keep, so my third defense is in the next post