The Father of Modern Science
This kind of thing is not just a silly story but actually does happen. One of the most notorious examples was that of the Father of Modern Science, the brilliant, 17th century mathematician, Galilei Galileo. Galileo had constructed his telescope to show how the earth revolved about the sun and not the sun around the earth. Since Copernicus advanced this hypothesis it had caused great controversy. Galileo now had proof.
When he demonstrated this, many highly intelligent people even refused to look through the telescope, so frightened were they of what they might see.
Some people had such a strong dose of cognitive dissonance that they forced Galileo to his knees and made him withdraw his evidence and recant his discovery.
In 1633, Galileo, now 70 years old, sick and completely blind, was forced by the pope to make the arduous journey to Rome to stand trial for "heresy". Urban VIII, taking time off from cannibalising the Colosseum to build his Barberini palace, accused Galileo of causing "the greatest scandal in Christendom" for contradicting the Scriptures.
Galileo thought of himself as a devoted Catholic. He argued that the bible was not a scientific text and that we should not expect its "scientific statements" to be taken literally. He argued that it presents no challenge to faith that both nature and the bible are divine texts and cannot contradict one another.
On 21 June, after a long trial, he was found guilty of heresy, by the Inquisition. Not only that, he was bullied and actually forced into covering up his evidence. The pope demanded that he be tortured if he did not obey:
The said Galileo is in the judgement of the Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, namely, of Laving believed and held the doctrine which as false and contrary to the Sacred and Divine Scriptures that the sun is the centre of the world and does not move from east to west, and is not the centre of the world.
Weary and broken, the old man knelt before the pope and made his confession:
"I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenao Galilea, Florentine, aged seventy years ... must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immobile".
His trial was a grave and solemn milestone in the history of the Church only surpassed, in poignancy, by the trial of Jesus before Pilate.
Galileo was a brilliant mathematician and a pioneer of science which, of course, does not rely on superstition. He advocated the idea that "The Book of Nature" is written in mathematical characters, a view which is enough to make him a founding father of the scientific method.
The universe which Galileo observed at the end of his telescope totally dwarfed the one that people were seeing with their ordinary vision. He tried to show that it was important to consider the value of new observable phenomena as a way of escaping from weak truths and moving to better ones.
The 17th century, superstitious, ecclesiastical, Roman brainusers experienced such cognitive dissonance from Galileo's discoveries that, to their everlasting shame, they chose to abuse and bully an old man rather than to change their own mind.
The cognitive dissonance endured so strongly that it was only in 1993 (after a 12-year Pontifical Commission!) that, in a belated burst of Christian charity, the Vatican brainusers finally "forgave" Galileo for letting the sun out of the closet. Better late than never, I suppose.
Dosage of Dissonance
It may be that some of the material in this book gives you a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. It is difficult to design the ideal dosage of dissonance.
What is fine for some readers and is just enough to help them to open up their mind will, on the other hand, be too strong for others and cause them to close down.
For example, earlier drafts of this book were more provocative in tone and probably too much so. So I sought the opinions of a fairly wide range of brainusers - different ages, different cultures, different professions, different backgrounds.
After receiving the generous and valuable feedback of hundreds of readers (especially that of my father who is the fairest man I have ever met)
I completely rewrote the book and tried to find a better balance between the information I have left in and the information I have left out. Thanks to them it's a better book but the faults you may find are still mine.
At the end of the day, dear brainuser, my own goal for this book has always been to generate enough cognitive dissonance to make it interesting reading but not so much as to close your mind.
Brain Freebie! - Chapter 3 - PLATO
PLATO'S ORIGINAL idea was that there is such a thing as objective, 'absolute truth'. Plato's 'truth' idea (like all his ideas) was a product of his imagination.
He was the younger friend of Socrates whom he admired greatly and who was also his mentor. It was Socrates who invented the interrogatory style of argument involving strings of questions seeking either a YES or NO response.
It's an old dinosaur known as the Socratic Method but it still survives in our legal system and could be seen on TV shows like LA Law and the O. J. Simpson trial.
Both Socrates and Plato became two of the greatest thinking hackers in Western history. To me, the most fascinating of Plato's works is Symposium because it's an insightful account of how it all began at a typical dinner-party back in Athens, around 400 BC, with Plato, Socrates and a few friends.
It's witty, entertaining and shows how their discussions and banter, laced with much wine and bawdy gossip, produced a small collection of thinking ploys, concepts, software and viruses that, amazingly, have dominated Western thinking right up to the 21st century.
Most destructive of all these inventions has been the Plato Truth Virus.
In the Western world, Plato is recognized as the one who put thinking on the map. Plato figured that the more one thought about matters and the more one tried to discover and understand their true essence or form, the more insights one could experience. But he also decided (and this is the killer) that thinking was NOT an open-ended process.
Plato figured there must be a finite end to a thinker's relentless search for meaning, an ultimate destination to a thinker's efforts, so he called that destination objective 'truth'. Uh-oh! Big mistake!!
Today, 2,500 years later, much of Western society still behaves as though there actually is such a thing as an objective, absolute truth. Somehow oblivious to real world consequences, many Western universities and colleges are full of discussions about 'truth', 'right', 'wrong', 'good', 'evil', 'honesty', 'justice' and so on.
This all spills out into society so that Big Government, Big Religion, Big Business, Big Brother and other groups invoke these 'absolute truths' as the basis for their policies and the justification for their actions - so often with horrific consequences.
The trouble was that once Plato had invented his truth concept, it existed. Subsequently, when other thinkers came along Plato's invention infected their ideas like a virus - and so we name the virus after him, the Plato Truth Virus (PTV). Gradually the activity of thinking came to be subverted by the insidious truth virus.
Some thinkers inevitably claimed to have found - The Truth.
PTV, the truth virus, began to control the thinker's set of intellectual claims and so we see a number of philosophies and doctrines and movements that claimed to have discovered absolute truth and gave notice of filing their claims:
"Stop looking! ... We have the truth! ...
We are right, you are wrong! ...
We are good, you are evil! ...
Believe in the truth or be damned! ...
The truth is on our side! ...
We know what's right!
Do what we tell you, or else! -
Crush the infidel! - Kill the unbeliever!"
My-Teacher-is-Right - Your-Teacher-is-Wrong
The problem for the observer is the number of conflicting claims to absolute truth and unique rightness.
The seductiveness of PTV is also what makes it so destructive and deadly: everyone wants to be the one who has 'The Truth Therefore, everyone infected with the virus claims to be uniquely right and that's where the carnage begins.
From time to time teachers like Buddha, Jesus and Confucius have emerged in the different cultures of the world.
Most people are free of PTV and many have benefited from their teachers' messages of goodwill.
Sadly, these teachers are often upstaged by greedy PTV-infected franchisees who claim to have exclusive rights on their teacher's intellectual property.
Who can blame the original teachers for the sickness of their followers?
So often, in the name of peace and goodwill, infected followers fight with a sick rage and burning hatred. The brain virus so distorts the original message that it would be unrecognizable to the original messenger.
People have become more interested in the 'truth status' of the message than the message itself. Perhaps it is more important to be an 'effective follower' than to be a 'right follower'.
originally posted at http://www.thinkers.com/chapters/preface.htm
Preface
Truth 'R' Us ........... Coming soon
