Tonight, we are talking about the law of pragmatism. I find myself thinking often on this.

Has anyone established a truly reliable model of reality? Some are pretty workable, but they often have big holes even though they work well. In much of our seeking after knowledge and truth, we are forced to resort to an acceptance of “good enough.” If we insisted on perfect accuracy, could we accomplish anything?

No. It would always be reiterated. A great deal, if not the majority of invention, is accomplished not from the inventor knowing exactly what they wanted to do, but from having only a generalized notion of a possible need that could be filled. They actually manage to design something when they arrive, not at the perfect solution, but when they begin building something “good enough.”

Serendipity. Indeed, exactly. Quantum physics says that how something behaves has as much to do with how we manage to observe it as it does with how it exists by itself anyway, and anything we experience has both its apparent form and an equally real measure of potential energy or potential “form.” So as much as we are lead to say that we know what something is or that we know what we are doing as if it were an absolute certainty, is it really?

Ironically, when we’re most certain we’re usually called on it and we’re more likely to get in an argument about it. When we’re most certain is when our neural nets are firing the most loudly, which really says nothing more than we are heavily biased to believe whatever we claim to be certain of.

We discussed a little of the quantum uncertainty of physical existence, how our perception and the physical reality differ from each other, and that’s a notable degree. One example of how you can experience one of these false barriers is really rather simple. Our eyes are normally set up to preserve colours in opponent pairs. Of the four primary colours, we perceive only one set of either pair. If we perceive something to be yellow, we won’t perceive it to be blue. If we perceive something to be red, we won’t perceive it to be green.

And the other pairs can get mixed up. Yellow for green for example? Yes. As functional as these splits are, they aren’t a literally true behaviour of light which means they aren’t the literal true range of colours.

They performed an experiment to test the opponent pairs phenomenon, and what they found is when the eye has been exposed steadily enough to these opponent pairs, and I don’t mean fatigued, just steadily stimulated, the brain can begin seeing new colours. Ranges of colour we don’t normally see. The funny thing is, though it was established that the subjects were really seeing new colours, they had literally no way of describing them. We never see red as green, but we can describe things as being redish or greenish. These colours that show up between the opponent pairs fall outside of our brains ability to categorize them.

Well, what does this have to do with today’s topic of the Law of Pragmatism? Our perceptions and thus our models of the world are not literally true as is illustrated by that experiment and actually many more as well, and though they are not literally true they are true enough to be functional. We are forced to live with assumed “truths” that aren’t factual because if we didn’t we couldn’t function at all. What is also true is that each individual has to work with a subtle set of variations on truths that we superficially accept as “standard” based on social consensus. Our life experience never actually matches the agreed upon “real life” that is an accepted social standard in our society.

So we’re always stressed to be normal because we can never get there? Very true. We even marginalize those who, although functional, deviate so much from the norm that they create conflicts in the publicly accepted perception. They are perceived as weird or eccentric or even treated as if they were untrustworthy whether they have ever violated the public trust or not.

So none of us actually live in “real life.” We all live in some sort of rough approximation of the fiction people speak of as real life. What determines the truth of any belief is not whether or not the person has “the facts”, because nobody does. What determines the degree of truth of any belief is the degree that the belief allows the person to survive and achieve their goals. We could call achieving personal goals “thriving.” This seem reasonable?

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~