DevPlayer <devpla...@gmail.com> writes: > Do you not see? For ... > One man's delusion is another man's epiphany. > One man's untruth is another man's belief. > One man's logical undenighable truth is another man's small part of a > bigger picture.
Those are just not true. A belief that doesn't match reality is a delusion. That doesn't change when someone thinks it's an epiphany: it's still a delusion. If a claim about reality doesn't actually match reality, it's untrue. That doesn't change when someone believes it: it's still untrue, or claims it's “part of a bigger picture”. If you make claims about reality, then you'd better be ready for them to be subjected to the tests of reality, or be ready for ridicule if you can't back them up with such tests. If, on the other hand, you claim a “bigger picture”, then that's just another scope within reality and you haven't escaped any part of your burden to demonstrate that reality. If, on the gripping hand, you want to make claims that are *not* about reality, then be very clear about that at the beginning and don't try to shift the goalposts later. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_geometry > "Euclid's axioms seemed so intuitively obvious that any theorem proved > from them was deemed true in an absolute, often metaphysical, sense. > Today, however, many other self-consistent non-Euclidean geometries > are known, the first ones having been discovered in the early 19th > century. An implication of Einstein's theory of general relativity is > that Euclidean space is a good approximation to the properties of > physical space ..." Yes. Anyone who claimed that Euclids axioms hold in real spacetime was *wrong*. If they believed it, they were *deluded*. There was no shame in that before the discovery that Euclid's axioms don't hold in real spacetime. But, once its falseness has been demonstrated, to handwave about “one man's truth” and “bigger picture” is an attempt to avoid the admission that the claim was false. It is uncomfortable – sometimes painful – to admit that one's belief does not match reality; and hence natural and common for us to seek to avoid that admission when the evidence is against our belief. But that doesn't lessen the delusion. -- \ “Human reason is snatching everything to itself, leaving | `\ nothing for faith.” —Bernard of Clairvaux, 1090–1153 CE | _o__) | Ben Finney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
