CAN WE KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT THE COVID-19 CRISIS?

WHAT IS THE TRUTH?

© 2020 Edward R Close

In the current situation, with the world awash in conspiracy theories, how can anyone know what the truth is? Very often, the debunkers of conspiracy theories have fewer actual facts about the subject in question, than the conspiracy theorists do. So, what to do? One answer is to do your own research. Try to find an unbiased source, and look for the truth yourself. This sounds so simple and basic, but is it? How does one determine the truth for one’s self? What is the truth about 5G? Is there a deep state? evidence Does anyone really have the time, patience, brain power, and intensity of effort to search for and find the truth about any very complex question like this? Or do we have to settle for what we believe, or can be led to believe, as the truth? This is not a trivial question!

I have been told that I have one of the highest IQs ever recorded. If that’s true, shouldn’t I be able to get to the bottom of just about any reasonable question that anyone might ask? Marilyn vos Savant of St. Louis Missouri, listed in the Guinness Book of Records as having the highest IQ ever recorded, has implied that she can answer just about any question. She has written and published a column called “Ask Marilyn” since 1986, where she attempts to do just that. One of the greatest recognized genius polymaths of all time, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, said “For every question there is an answer”. Well actually he probably said “Für jede berechtigte Frage gibt es eine Antwort“ - because he was German. Anyway, what I want to ask, and try to answer here, is the question: Can the truth be discovered by force of pure intellect alone? The answer is NO! And, of course, as you might expect, I am going to tell you why the answer is no, just in case you might like to know.

Pure intellect operates on the principles of logic. And one proceeds from question to answer by one or both of two methods of reasoning that are called induction and deduction. Induction is reasoning from the specific to the general, and deduction is reasoning from the general to the specific. Together, with some additional conditions, they make up the scientific method.

Induction: start with observations > detect a pattern in the observations > describe the pattern in the form of a hypothetical theory > if all observations conform to the pattern, accept the theory as true.

Deduction: Start with a theory that has been confirmed by induction > form a hypothesis about a specific situation > make observations > if the observations conform to the theory, accept the hypothesis as true.

The Austrian-born British philosopher of science, Karl Popper, declared that for a hypothesis to be scientific, it must be falsifiable. This has been generally accepted by mainstream scientists as part of the scientific method. What this means, in plain English, is that if a hypothesis, - general or specific - can’t be tested by inductive or deductive reasoning, then it isn’t a valid scientific hypothesis. However, if the falsifiability requirement is rigorously applied, most of the basic concepts that mainstream science is based on today cannot be considered to be scientific! The basic concepts underlying physical, biological, chemical, medical, and especially psychological science were just feasible assumptions, not falsifiable hypotheses. That’s a topic that Dr. Neppe and I have already discussed pretty extensively. The reason I bring it up here is that it illustrates an unescapable fact: pure intellectual reasoning cannot be used to determine truth!

To really understand why this is true, we have to look a little deeper into intellectual reasoning. Take anything you consider to be true, and look carefully at why you accept it to be true. You will find one of two things: either you have accepted it from someone else who is considered to be an authority, or you figured it out for yourself. In either case, the reasoning can always be traced back to what logicians call at least one a priori assumption. What is an a priori assumption? It is something that is believed to be self-evident and untestable. In other words, something that either appears to be so obvious that there is no need to prove it, or something that is not falsifiable. But, of course in that case, it is also unscientific.

My point is that intellect alone, however powerful, cannot determine the ultimate truth or falsity of a statement, because something proved by logical reasoning, is only true if the a priori assumptions it is derived from are true. The inductive and deductive reasoning process used in the determination of truth or falsity always start with a priori assumptions. This is one reason why scientific truth is always changing. The history of science, just during the last seventy years, which is about how long I’ve been aware of such things, is sprinkled with concepts that were once considered to be either true or false beyond doubt, that are now considered to be exactly the opposite. Scientific hypotheses proved to be either true or false, have often been overturned after a major scientific discovery. Examples of such reversals include Earth-centered models of the universe, Darwinian evolution, continental drift, single point human origin, the fixed size of the universe, and our understanding of the nature of space and time, matter and energy! We like to think that intellectual reasoning and the scientific method are infallible and that their application lead to the establishment of  universal truths that will never change, but that simply is not true.

So, what is truth? From an intellectual point of view, there is no such thing as absolute truth. What might be even more surprising to many, is the demonstrable fact that almost everything we think we know about physical reality is illusory. The idea that a physical object, like your physical body, is can ever be at rest in space and time, is perhaps the most beguiling illusion of all. I may think I am sitting completely unmoving and still in my chair in my home, but at this latitude, I am actually racing around the center of the earth at about 800 miles per hour, and at the same time I am moving around the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour. Why don’t I feel the effects of this motion? Experience with lesser motions tell me that I should. I certainly feel the effects of going around a curve in an automobile, or changing direction in an airline jet.  

Why don’t I feel the effects of whirling around the curvature of the earth or the curvature of the earth’s orbit around the sun? There is an answer for this question, having to do with the way the human body compensates for the effects of those motions, but it would take several pages to explain, and for the purpose of this post, it would be a side-track, so I’ll leave it for you to reason out for yourself, if you want to. The point is that things that we assume to be true in the physical world are often illusions created by our physical senses. There is growing evidence that neasrly everything we once thought we knew is wrong, and even what we believe now about physical reality we exist in may be illusory. This is at least part of the reason that scientific truth is a moving target.

There are many examples of how scientific truth changes over time. Modern science has revealed that, contrary to what our senses tell us, matter is not solid, space and time have no independent existence of their own, and we have no idea where everything came from, or where it’s going. The only thing about the physical universe for which we have indisputable evidence, is that it is dynamic. It is constantly changing. If some of those changes, like the movements of the sun, moon and planets weren’t cyclic or periodic, science wouldn’t be able to predict hardly anything, and our understanding of physical reality would be like shifting sand beneath our feet.

Mainstream scientists, philosophers and logicians would have you believe that there really is no such thing as absolute truth. Adding to this uncertain state of affairs, lawyers, politicians and liars, (but, as Mark Twain famously said, I repeat myself!) tell us that reality is whatever they can make us believe it is. They seek to persuade us to believe in realities that doesn’t actually exist. So, if our physical senses, lawyers and politicians work in ways that fools us, hiding more about reality than they reveal, where do we go to find the truth? The answer to this puzzling question is as simple as it is profound: We mut look to that which we experience directly.

We certainly do not experience the physical world directly. The sonic and optical sciences and related neurology make that clear. Our sense organs receive impulses of energy bouncing off of physical objects which travel along neurological paths to our brains, where images are formed that we take to be consistent with reality. But as we noted above, this process often creates illusions. What do we experience directly? That would be consciousness. But consciousness has been very carefully deliberately kept out of science and intellectual analysis throughout the history of modern civilization. The creation of a truly quantum calculus (see earlier posts) leading to the discovery of gimmel, the non-physical part of reality, changes all that. It allows us to put consciousness into the equations of science, and expand our analyses beyond the physical. Thanks to this discovery, we are now at the point where Nikola Tesla’s prediction may actually come true: "The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

Question: How does all this help us find the truth about the COVID-19 crisis? Answer: It gives us a way to determine the validity of any hypothesis, even a conspiracy theory. How it does this will take a little more explaining, but the effort on my part to present the explanation, and the effort on your part to read it, is, in my opinion, worthwhile. It will serve as another example of the power of quantum mathematics in the form of my Calculus of Dimensional Distinctions (CoDD), and as another validation of the Close-Neppe paradigm shift to a consciousness-based model of reality known as TDVP (the Triadic Dimensional Distinction Paradigm).

The good news is that once the most accurate, validated model of the crisis, developed in conventional math, has been converted to a corresponding quantum math model, and a specific conspiracy theory has also been converted into the quantum math as a hypothesis, that specific conspiracy theory can be falsified or validated very quickly and easily. The bad news is that the conversion of the model and the conspiracy theory to the equivalent quantum math forms can be very difficult and time consuming. To understand why this is so, see my introduction to the CoDD in Appendix B of the AAPS Vol. 1, Is Consciousness Primary? and George Spencer Brown’s Interpretation of the calculus for logic, in Laws of Form.

Finally, when the truth is known, what can we do, and what should we do? These are important questions that we must find a way to answer. TDVP and the discovery of gimmel gives us hope, and a new, more powerful way to solve such problems. 

ERC 4/11/2020