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Comment by jjb123 | Hacker News Reader

Truth is not to be found by picking everything to pieces like a spoilt child. -from this very article

Why not? Picking everything to pieces is exactly what those people (theoretical and practical scientists) who seem to have the most success in approximating truth do. These are the methods that best produce accurate predictions about the future and best produce designs for new technologies that actually work.

That's not "truth" though, that's "reality" or "the physical world" and the two notions are quite different.

Beliefs are what we use to model how the world is and what the results of actions and experiments will be. Reality is what actually determines those results, regardless of what we might believe. Truth is then the set of beliefs about the world that accurately model reality. And I'll say it again, the scientists who spend decades picking things to pieces are the ones who end up with the most accurate beliefs. They find the most truth.

>Truth is then the set of beliefs about the world that accurately model reality.

That's just one of the definitions of truth, and a quite naive one at that. Not just philosophy, even epistemology have not been using this for ages.

It's a correspondence definition. And actually I understand correspondence has been one of the most popular theories of truth since Plato and Aristotle, continuing to the present.

It's also known as Analysis, which is the opposite of Synthesis. Analytic thinking is central to science.

A child who knows his toys well might find it tough to ignore liberties taken in discussing them.

As someone interested in mindfulness for its own pursuits, I want to learn what's in my teacher's head, rather than listen to them try unsuccessfully to tie that to what's firmly in mine. I'm sorry to say it's distracting :)

I find that pill very hard to swallow. It's just too self-serving. Any religious figure is going to try to convince people not to pay any attention to the "man behind the curtain."

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