What if my life had a mission and I didn't complete it (the latter) before I completed it (the former)?
My intention in writing this had been to complain about how my life has been a failure. But, I am failing to follow through with this plan, largely because my wife Sara just spent a few minutes with me learning about Logo with turtle graphics, and that made me feel better.
Seventeen and a half years ago, I sat down and thought about what my mission might be, and wrote a Mission Statement.
It has been said, "there is no new thing under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
Readers who were on the planet in 1966 might remember ELIZA, an early chatbot (anachronistically existing before that designation existed).
Consciousness (described here in Wikipedia) is not one of its attributes; ELIZA is clearly a mechanism.
No worries, we are secure in our hope for salvation from the prisons spoken of earlier in this blog.
As a reminder, the prisons are due to: gravity, metabolism, time, society, perspective, thought, and death.
We are born prisoners.
We are bound to the surface of our planet, by gravity. Leaping may give us a meter. Dreaming of flying gives some satisfaction, and has led to actual flying machines, now within the reach of many of us. For a brief moment — hours at most — we are off the surface. A few adventurous souls have reached low earth orbit, some for months. Even fewer have ventured further. All such altitude gains are temporary. We must soon return to the surface.
Last Sunday we talked in church (sacrament meeting). Partly to put off preparation, and partly because it was there, I was playing around with a little web page produced by a program that I wrote many years ago. The program's job is to display a random verse from the Book of Mormon.
Most verses are short enough to display nicely on the screen of my iPhone, and I just pull one down — to cause the page to be reloaded — to see the next random pick. As I was doing this, I was galvanized by a verse that appeared (Alma 29:9) because it was precisely what I needed for the topic of my talk.
This is about some of the theories of truth, triggered by the previous post, "Concord without Confusion", during the writing of which this author discovered the consensus theory of truth, and marveled greatly.
The consensus theory of truth is defined on Wikipedia as, "the process of taking statements to be true simply because people generally agree upon them."
The author prefers the correspondence theory of truth in which, according to Wikipedia, the truth of a statement "is determined only by how it relates to the world and whether it accurately describes (i.e., corresponds with) that world."
A notation supporting a rational basis for peace. The notation itself, based on Popper's three worlds, was introduced in an earlier post, Contrast without Confusion. I'm proposing that this notation could be used by rational people to understand each other, even in the face of conflicting beliefs.
The purpose of the notation is to write down things that are true, and can be accepted as true, by both parties. From there, from that basis of shared truth, a discussion could ensue peacefully and clearly.
By "truth" is meant here agreeing to use the correspondence theory of truth, leaving aside other possibilities such as the coherence, consensus, or pragmatic theories of truth.
