Facts of Life

Facts are slippery customers. .. you might think they were "events or things known to have happened or existed" or "a truth verifiable from experience or observation" or "a piece of information" ... as Collins English Dictionary has it.

If only language was so precise in the war of words, where the word is commonly confused with the thing described. The map is not the territory and the menu is not the meal ... if you want to understand this problem, Alfred Korzybski's "General Semantics" may help ... his chilling assertion: If a psychiatric or scientific enquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures ... is worth considering ... more accessible is Robert Anton Wilson on You Tube.

History, as is known by many historians, is usually written by the winners ... the powerful, or rather at the behest of the powerful, who have vested interests in certain narratives. Some victors' versions are questionable, some downright false.

At the quantum level it seems that what is observed depends on the observer.
Max Planck, pioneer of quantum physics,  is quoted as saying: When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change ...

David Bohm, one time Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, was so intrigued by the uncanny similarity between J.Krishnamurti's philosophical view "The observer is the observed" and the evidence from the famous double slit experiment, that he sought him out and spent many hours and days and years in dialogue with him, examining every topic in forensic detail ... one of their many conclusions, after examining thought itself, was that thought itself was limited.
The resulting book: The Limits of Thought, sits in the small library in the small cottage, where this is being written, alongside Quantum Theory, Bohm's classic textbook ... incomprehensible to this limited brain, but awaiting a wandering physicist or mathematician ... Wholeness and the Implicate Order is difficult, but almost within reach, along with Thought as a System ...

So, it's tricky, but not impossible, allowing that what we took as factual in constructing a world view, may turn out false, requiring a revision in line with a better fact, or a paradigm shift to a world view in line with the times, to make some progress.

There is another small problem ... that objective reality may not exist and that the relative reality is that each of the 7 billion people on the planet perceive the world uniquely through their own reality tunnels ... as Robert Anton Wilson called it ... clearly levels of group think vary ... highly individualist cultures like the BSA hold highly divergent views, tribal cultures less so.

Ultimate Reality is another question for another day and anyway will certainly not submit to thought, which is by definition limited.

Perhaps.

It's a lovely sunny spring day here in the North Pennines of England. A dry April so far, though plenty of time for snow yet. Lambing storms they call them.