"To grow up is to shrink in importance. To learn is to gain ignorance."
Paradoxes?
No: linguistic tricks. Those sentences are true, but so are their opposites; as are an infinite number of variations thereon. What matters is what they mean, and what they mean depends on their context. And the ultimate context is the unique state of the readers' minds at the moment of comprehension (whatever that may mean).
How different to computer programming! The Machine, by definition, can always be put into a Known State: the human mind cannot. John von Neumann modelled his computing architecture on how he believed the human mind worked. And there are brief moments when it appears to be so; when we are being logical and rational, for example. But most of the time our minds are not that simple. Instead of a single CPU we have a multitude of them. Our minds are not machines, they are ecosystems; and stochastic ones at that.
Have you ever deceived or bribed yourself? Or kept one thing at the forefront of your mind to keep other things out? Or surprised yourself doing something while thinking you must not do it? There are a myriad such examples, all true: yet none are The Truth, Absolute.
There are people who will not understand what those of us who've had these experiences are talking about. Some will deny that we are making any sense at all. A few may violently demand our silence.
Human cultures are stochastic ecosystems too. (Unsurprising, really, as culture arises from human interaction).
Is there anything we can all agree on? Is there any kind of Truth that can unite the living, the dead, and the yet to be born?
Religionists believe so; and yet the evidence is against them.
Scientists believe so; and yet there is evidence against them, too.
I believe so, and not as a linguistic trick. I think what unites us, what appears to be, by all the evidence, to be an Absolute Principle of the Universe, is approximated by a simple question:
What happens next?
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