NEW APPROACH PART EIGHTEEN

 

WHAT IS THE TRUTH?

© Copyright 2022, Edward R. Close, PhD

Introduction

I have a friend who is a certified member of more than 30 high-IQ societies, with very high-level entry requirements. Even most of the members of MENSA would not be able to qualify for membership in them. No one would doubt that my friend is an exceptionally gifted person. But he is not very happy. Why would he feel the need to join so many high-IQ societies? What is he trying to prove? What should he do with his life? Is his life worth living? These are serious questions that I will not try to discuss further in a public forum because I respect my friend’s privacy, and because the academic subject of intelligence is only peripherally related to the subject I want to discuss in this post. I do, however, want to make a point that I think is relevant:

A person’s intelligence quotient (IQ) is nothing more than a measure of his or her relative intellectual potential. That number alone is not very important. What the individual does with that potential IS important.

When I was a junior in High School in Houston Missouri, my classmates, and I were given a battery of aptitude tests and the standard Stanford-Benet IQ test. Most of us didn’t take the tests very seriously. They were administered by Mrs. Roberts, the school’s guidance counselor, for the purpose of helping us know what we might be able to do with our lives. We were shown our scores on the aptitude tests but were not told our IQ scores - for obvious reasons. The guidance counselor, who also taught English, knew that I was interested in science and mathematics, and she also knew that I had very little interest in other subjects. What Mrs. Roberts said during my private counselling session, changed my life forever. She said: “You scored in the 99 percentiles on all of the aptitude tests, and your IQ is good enough that you should be successful in science, engineering, or anything you might choose to do.”

Students were being told at that time that people going into professional careers should have IQs in the 120 to 125 range. So, I assumed that I had probably scored somewhere in that range. I was curious about how I had done on the IQ test, but when I asked, she said: “Your score on the IQ test is unimportant. It’s just a measure of potential. What IS important, is what you do with that potential.” She paused to let me think about what she had said, and then continued: “If you become the greatest scientist who ever lived, but can’t communicate what you learn to others, it is meaningless!" I knew that what Mrs. Roberts had said was true, and from that moment on, I began to take my education more seriously.

Looking back, I realize that none of us lives in a vacuum. While success in life depends primarily on our own thinking and actions, what we have, the raw material of mental resources that we have to deal with life, is what God and our ancestors gave us. I know that some of my ancestors, including a great grandfather on one side, and a great uncle on the other, were well-educated professionals, but beyond that, I know very little about them. My ancestors immigrated from Europe, England, Scotland, and Ireland to America from about 1720 to 1850 and eventually to the Midwest. My grandparents on both sides came to the St. François Mountains before Missouri was a state. It was still part of the Louisiana Territory on the frontier of a new nation. They came here seeking the freedom to live their lives as they saw fit.

The two small villages, where my parents were born, about 20 miles apart, were basically mining camps, several days’ journey by horse and wagon south of St. Louis. Life was hard, and they worked hard to help support their families. Education beyond the eighth grade was not an option for either of my parents. My mother dreamed of being a dancer, but she never had the opportunity to fulfill that dream. Because she was one of the eldest in a family of ten children, she had to help care for her younger siblings, and she married my father at the age of 19 and became a mother and a housewife. My father had some natural skills and the ability to build things, so he became a carpenter, later a small business owner, and after World War II, a police officer.

I was born in the relatively peaceful time period between World War I and World War II. When I began talking at the age of nine months, my mother realized that I had a better than average ability to learn, so she began teaching me to read and write and basic math before I was old enough to go to school. School was easy for me, and my parents encouraged me, telling me that I could be anything I wanted to be. My maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather were of German descent, and my best friend was from a family of German descent, so I learned German at an early age, and because I found languages interesting, I started learning Spanish and French at the age of eleven or twelve. Algebra and geometry were easy for me, and I discovered Einstein’s special theory of relativity the summer I was fourteen. It opened a fascinating new world for me, and I decided that I wanted to be a physicist.

I was blessed to have the ancestors and parents I had, to be born when and where I was, and to grow up close to nature in peaceful times, and finally, to have the opportunity to apply myself in ways that might benefit my family and maybe even humanity in general. When the tests indicated that I had the potential to succeed at whatever I wanted to do, it simply verified what my parents had been telling me from day one: I could be whatever I chose to be. Unlike my friend who is obsessed with IQ, I knew that IQ was not nearly as important as motivation, so I applied myself in order to try to achieve whatever my potential might be. I never knew or cared what my score was on that high school IQ test, until I was 72 years old – technically a senior citizen. Why and how I came to know my IQ is not important, but I learned that I had scored above 165 on that high school test. Later, my scores on the graduate record exam, the Army General Classification Test (AGCT), actuarial systems analysis tests, and a High-IQ society test, taken when I was 25, 28, 50, and 72, respectively, indicated that my IQ was higher than 165. But the rarity of IQ scores above 165 makes assigning an exact IQ number meaningless, and as Mrs. Roberts the guidance counselor said, what my IQ may or may not be, is really unimportant. What I do with whatever potential I may have, is what’s important, and that brings us back to TDVP.

My only reason for revealing the fact that I have an IQ in the same range as people like Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Pauli, and Gödel, scientists who have discovered some of the deepest secrets of reality, is to lend credibility to the claim that TDVP is the long-awaited paradigm of the future that expands science to include non-physical reality. Dr. Vernon Neppe and I have certainly made this claim - because we believe it - and it has also been made in writing by others too, namely some of the 200-plus scientists world-wide who have reviewed our work. Those whose statements lauding TDVP are quoted in many of our papers and books, include some very accomplished individuals with PhDs in physics, geophysics, astrophysics, and other sciences.

Having an exceptionally high IQ does not necessarily give one an advantage in life or make one happier than most. In fact, a person with an IQ above 175, lacking other positive human qualities like emotional maturity and social skills, may become a very unhappy, lonely, antisocial individual who will never fit into normal human society. In this regard, IQ is not unlike other relative measures of human existence and abilities. Physical size is a good example. In America, the average height of adult women is 5 feet 4 inches (2.63 meters), and the average height of men is 5 feet 9 inches (1.75 meters). A few inches more in either case can be an advantage. But the advantage goes away when it becomes extreme. Excessive height becomes a negative for women quicker than it does for men. A woman who is 6 feet to 6 feet 2 or 3 inches tall may be good at sports, but the extra height will be a social disadvantage. A man who is 6 to 7 feet tall may be good at sports, and still be considered normal otherwise. But a woman who is 7 feet tall or more, and a man who is 8 feet tall or more is likely to be disadvantaged in many ways.

In IQ scores, anyone with a score within one standard deviation (15 points) on either side of the average score of 100, which includes 68% of the population, should not have much trouble fitting in. Those in the 115 to 130 range will, like good athletes, be capable of being successful easily, and those in the 130 to 145 range (the MENSA entry level is 132) should be able to excel and still fit into society quite well. This would be comparable to 6-to-7-foot athletes. Those with scores from 145 to 160 should be exceptional at whatever they do, like the top echelon of athletes who often become celebrities, but just as often have problems fitting into society; and those with IQs much above that will, like people who are 9 or 10 feet tall, not fit in anywhere very well. All they can hope to do is to use their special gift in some marginally beneficial way.

What does IQ have to do with truth? Not nearly as much as people with above average IQs like to think it does. Successful people, especially those in the 130 to 160 IQ range, because of their exceptional ability to reason, often believe that whatever they reason to be true, is true. More often than not, however, they are wrong. Some highly intelligent people, despite their potential to do good, actually do great harm. Because they know they are very intelligent, they convince themselves that they are superior to everyone else and believe that that gives them the right to tell everyone else what to do. There are many historical examples, pharaohs, kings, tyrants, and dictators, people who essentially believe that they can replace God. Unfortunately, as the world population increases, there are more of these psychopaths.

The reason that people sometimes outsmart themselves in this way, is because they fail to examine their own a priori assumptions. That is to say, their own brilliance blinds them to the fact that the logical system they believe in is based on some assumptions that have been accepted without proof because they cannot be proved using the logical system within which they arise. This self-referential fact about all consistent logical systems was proved by the brilliant mathematician Kurt Gödel in 1933. The logic proving this fact is called the incompleteness theorem. (Note that a mathematical theorem is not a theory. It is a hypothesis that has been proved.)

Before we go on to discuss what truth is, I want to be sure that you get three very specific things from this introduction: 1) You shouldn’t accept what any human being says as truth on face value, because conclusions produced by even the most intelligent person who ever lived, no matter how brilliant and no matter how logically rigorous the reasoning may be, may still be wrong if even one assumption behind the system of logic being used is wrong. 2) Be aware that the most impeccable logical reasoning, perfectly applied, may not be able to prove the truth or falsity of a given statement, in the context of the logical system within which it is stated, however  true or false it may sound. 3) These two pitfalls in the search for truth can only be avoided by in-depth critical examination of basic assumptions. In the first case, wrong assumptions must be identified based on direct evidence, and removed or replaced. In the second case, basic assumptions may have to be expanded or augmented, based on direct evidence, before the statement can be proved to be true or false.

Practical Application of TDVP in Today’s Reality

We have a very serious situation in the world today, with several groups of intelligent people espousing conflicting beliefs about what the truth is. These conflicting beliefs have already caused a lot of violence and will probably lead to more violence if the truth isn’t revealed and recognized. Is there a way to determine what the truth really is? Yes, there is, and it involves the critical examination of basic assumptions as discussed above, followed by comparison of the conflicting belief systems with existing truth, and correction.

In the last post, we answered the first of the three questions posed at the end of post number sixteen. We uncovered the truth about who you are. You are not a name, you are not what you do, and you are not a physical body. You are a quantized bit of pure consciousness. This totally refutes the basis of identity politics so prevalent today. As pure consciousness, you are immortal and forever part of Primary Consciousness, the reality behind all things. The reality that is Primary Consciousness has been detected by physical science as the Zero-Point field within which all objects in the physical universe exist as temporary continuity perturbations.

Understanding these truths brings about the realization that violence with evil intent harms everyone, including the perpetrator, and ultimately, it is the perpetrator who will pay the most. This raises the concepts of good and evil, which also have to be related to truth and falsehood, existence, and non-existence. while exploring these relationships, I will address the remaining two question from post number sixteen. Questions two and three were: 2) How can you recognize what can help or hinder your physical, mental, and spiritual progress? And 3) how can you find the path leading to the ultimate goal? To answer number two, we begin by examining the basic assumptions behind the concepts of truth and reality.

Truth and Reality

Historically, mathematicians and logicians have chosen to separate truth from existence in the basic assumptions of logic and the primitive equations of mathematics, in order to make the proofs they produce as general as possible, so that resulting theorems and syllogisms can describe the universal principles and laws of the natural sciences. This approach served us very well until Max Planck discovered that physical reality is quantized. Recall that in earlier posts, we saw that in order to develop a consistent system of quantized mathematical logic, reality had to be defined as everything that exists. Thus, in the quantum calculus of TDVP, truth is equivalent to existence, and existence is reality, but in the mathematics of contemporary mainstream science, this equivalence is not recognized except in special cases where the equivalence is obvious.

An in-depth examination of basic assumptions has revealed a paradox in contemporary science, providing us with a basis for making some progress. Revising this basic assumption of reason by restoring the equality of reality and truth, as required for a logically consistent quantum calculus, resolves the paradox, and the process of infinite descent leads to the discovery that the non-physical aspect of reality that we call gimmel, and the discovery that we exist as quantized non-physical consciousness are two aspects of the same thing. That thing, which I am calling Primary Consciousness, is the fabric of the universe and the only reality. With the truth that the existence of a stable physical universe is only made possible by the existence of quanta of non-physical reality in atomic structure as well as in consciousness, we can proceed in future posts, to answer questions two and three.

ERC – April 2, 2022