Week 4 -- Kierkegaard Continued


Truth is Faith
In a sense I can agree that a belief in truth ties directly into faith; not religious faith, but rather the faith that what you believe is true is actually true. We cannot certify that anything is 100% certain, we can only increase the probability of it being certain by lowering the amount of assumptions we make about it. The remaining piece of this, however, has to be ascertained with the faith of believing that, based on probability (or perhaps something else, depending on the person), it is in fact certain.

How much does being right matter?
It depends, both on what you’re being right about as well as what actually matters. Since my background is in Finance, I’ll give a related example: say you’re buying a big bet on a stock going up. You’d want to be right on this simply based on the fact that, if you are right, you make a ton of money, and if you are wrong, you lose a ton of money.
However, money and trading isn’t everything to everyone, and in this case we’d want to look at a more fundamental, scary idea of our principles and perspectives being right. I would say that being right about this does matter… in a way. If you have the wrong principles or perspectives, then it can lead to major downsides and restrictions in all parts of life.

Conforming to the Old Gods
This is an interesting concept; that over time people have gotten to lazy to find their own truth, and to find their own God, that they’ve instead decided to follow the “defaults” that have been provided to them over time. I also believe that these default gods can allow a person to find their own god through them; for example, I might start a Protestant, but over time my ideals over what the protestant god and religion ought to be changes to fit moreso my own mindset and principles.

The Definition of Truth
Truth is an ultimate state of being. That is, a fundamental key principle that is real in the set of existence with which we inhabit. For example, if we were to absolutely prove that 1 + 1 = 2, would be able to assert that 1+ 1 = 2 is a Truth; it exists within the nature of reality.
As I described above, we can only increase the probability that a belief is a Truth; we cannot be certain that anything in life is ultimately a Truth. However, a Truth would hold up in every circumstance, and anything can be derived correctly from a Truth. Truth needs no assumptions.

Blind Faith
Having blind faith without properly increasing probability by removing assumptions is possible, but I don’t think it is advised. The reason that I don’t think this is a good thing to do is based on my answer to the question “How much does being right matter?”. If your principles and perspectives are based on what you believe to be Truth, and if you suffer major downsides from having poor principles and perspectives, then in this case having Blind faith would be bad.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 6 -- Nietzsche Continued

Will to Power I don’t believe its true that the sole goal of all human beings is to gain power. I can think of a number of people who would not have any sort of happiness with a large amount of power, and would rather leave the control to someone else. Intrinsic Goodness I don’t think there is intrinsic goodness, much like I don’t think there is intrinsic evil. All actions can be seen as being a percentage of good and evil, at least to make things simpler. So we could say that an action is 60% good and 40% bad, or vice versa. A Necessary Power I can understand the concept of necessary power – of a necessary relationship between master and slave. But I am not sure what the real-life example of it should be. Certainly, it would make sense that it would be something within economics, as our world has only so many natural resources. The system of capitalism always requires someone to be on the bottom, and so this might be relevant. Slavery as a choice Didn’t know we...
Read more

Week 12 - The Final Week

The idea of self/existing with the self The reason that I chose the self was because I believe at the end there really is only the self. All other things – work, family, money, partners, logic, god – all these things are purely temporary in the end. The one thing that you’re stuck with, day-in day-out, is yourself. Your mind, your thoughts, and your philosophy; and thus the goal of life should be to train the self to be as healthy and high-performing as possible. Freeing yourself from the influence of others (environment vs. true self) I don’t believe that there is really a way to completely free yourself from the influence of society. Like I mentioned previously, the essence of society itself comes before your existence, and due to the age of society and its grasp upon the world, it will always in at least some way circumvent you from acting completely independently. But I think that that’s alright, since there is no real reason to act completely independently; just take the...
Read more