The Jewel in the Eye of the Golden Apple

[kiya]

All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.

The Kemetic groups often jump up and down on polyvalent logic, starting out with the multiplicity of creation myths: the idea of teasing out the essential truth and essential meaning from each set of stories, looking at the way it represents the world and the way things unfold from story-as-angle-of-approach, this is very natural to me. Myths are reflections, ways of looking at the world; finding images in them is what they're for. The explicit treatment of myth-as-koan, as the puzzle which can be unlocked to lead to deeper truths, broader understandings, I find very appealing.

One of the ideas of chaos magic is that truths are tools; the ones that one picks to use in the moment are the ones that are the most useful to the particular situation. This strikes me as being similar but disjoint from my basic philosophy ("I believe in what works"); it more often seems to resemble "If it works, believe it. (For at least as long as you need it to work.)"

I collect truths; this feeds into my eclecticism, because I'm never satisfied with the truths I have, no matter how much they work for what I am doing. There's always another potential tool somewhere, and many of them do fiddly things that I can't do with the tools I have. As I said tangentially earlier, I can't just pick up any tool and use it -- but I collect and prepare any tool that strikes me as true just in case I find a situation where that truth is the one that I was needing to have. It gives me a flexibility that I think I need, in part because I'm so tradition-inclined; this ability to pick up a new tradition that suits better gives me the capacity to adapt without changing my values notably.

I was talking with teinedreugan about this a bit on the trip home, and about how the ancient Egyptians were so change-averse that they tended to reconceptualise changes into things that had always been somehow. He made the useful comment that he didn't think that that was a universal; a society that lasted as long as theirs did has to acknowledge change. But considering change as a new way of looking at an established truth, illuminating some new facet of it -- that lets those who are able to adapt fully adapt, while those who need the old ways to persist can assimilate it that way. And it's a polyvalent approach, encompassing new and old simultaneously.

The trick with collecting truths is that sometimes they don't matter. (Meaningless in some sense.) Or they don't apply. (False in some sense.) Knowing which truth is a useful one to apply in the moment is an artform; it's a skill that one develops through working with truths. Which ways of approaching the situation render it tractable; which ways of approaching the situation produce meaningful results; which ways of approaching the situation blow it up spectacularly?

There's an argument on the SDMB that's doing the theism/atheism thing again, and there are people there -- as always -- who want all truths to get filed through science, as the sole arbiter of meaning. And I am -- as always -- struck by the limitation that puts on allowable truths, on usefulness. I cannot believe that these people have never used truths that are not constructed through falsifiability; that is beyond what I'm capable of imagining in humans, a life without an experience of beauty or a use of allegory or the reasoning of similarities and resonances. I wish I could point at that and say that it is of value even if it is not whittled down to the quantifiable. I have purposes in the world that are not scientific; I would not consider science to be an efficient or effective tool for accomplishing them. Too often that argument comes across to me as insisting that I should have different goals, or should choose suboptimal means for accomplishing them. (This is called "rationality". Sure.)

There is a graceful means of weaving truth and truth together; taking only one truth is attempting to make a tapestry of only warp. It doesn't matter what the truth is; all truths are limited by being single. "Before there were two things", before the First Time, before existence; likewise, before there were two truths.

Meanwhile, I'm pondering what sort of elemental magical system might evolve out of the primordial-chaos forces of the Ogdoad, and also delighting in that rather Discordian overview of Their nature.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

this is not relevant, but I had to make sure you saw this even if you didn't make it to Making LIght:

egyptian plush gods

[kiya]

Ooh, they've got more than the Anpw one. :}

[ardaniel]

I sort of have to wonder if the Ogdoad are where Mike Mignola kiped the idea for the Ogdru-Jahad in Hellboy.

Except, you know, all Evil and Great Old One-y.

And I actually had to go *make an icon* before I could make that useless comment. Go me. More cough drops.

[brooksmoses]

One of the ideas of chaos magic is that truths are tools; the ones that one picks to use in the moment are the ones that are the most useful to the particular situation. This strikes me as being similar but disjoint from my basic philosophy ("I believe in what works"); it more often seems to resemble "If it works, believe it. (For at least as long as you need it to work.)"

This is remarkably similar to the process of engineering modeling; the only difference being that we tend to refer to the relevant tools as "falsehoods" rather than "truths" (at least when we're being pedantic). This, I think, is on account of the fact that we tend to consider it more important to be reminded that they are false in some sense, rather than that they are true in some sense; the fact that they are true in some sense is implied by the fact that we use them.

Take, for instance, calculating the flight of a baseball. F=ma (with m the rest mass of the object) is wrong; general relativity shows that we need to use the inertial mass, which increases with velocity. And calculating the inertial mass with the net velocity is wrong; the individual atomic and subatomic particles have relative motion that needs to be taken into account. And giving them a single velocity is probably wrong if we take quantum mechanics into account. But F=ma works (to within the precision we need), so we use it, and ignore the complications. All engineering is like this, every bit of it.

[ibnfirnas.livejournal.com]

Q: "How many physicists does it take to screw in a light bulb?"
A: "Assuming that the light bulb is a perfect sphere..."

Lots of disciplines work this way, in my experience. It's clearer in engineering, but everyone's operating on those sorts of useful falsehoods. So far as I've seen, those're what we're taught first, and most folks never go far enough education-wise to be told that it just isn't so. I'm considering the music scale, with which you can never quite tune a guitar because it's actually not quite accurate in terms of pure tones; the initial forms a martial artist is taught, some of which are called "blocks" but are actually precursor components of advanced ch'i-strikes; the pedantic rules of applied magic that exist mostly as moral safeguards rather than actual laws; or the way, in religion scholarship, we shorthand it and say "Buddhism says" or "it says in the Upanishads" even though religions don't say anything (the practitioners do, and that's very different and infinitely more complicated) and anything we say from a scripture in translation is an interpreted approximation, so on, so forth, ad infinitum.
I imagine simple things like standing up and moving might work that way too. We'd go crazy, otherwise. What if we actually had to think about our -actual- spatial position and velocity and so on, in the act of getting up from a chair, rather than assuming, momentarily, that the chair is staionary?

[brooksmoses]

(continuing the previous comment)

The trick with collecting truths is that sometimes they don't matter. (Meaningless in some sense.) Or they don't apply. (False in some sense.) Knowing which truth is a useful one to apply in the moment is an artform; it's a skill that one develops through working with truths. Which ways of approaching the situation render it tractable; which ways of approaching the situation produce meaningful results; which ways of approaching the situation blow it up spectacularly?

And this is exactly what's known as engineering judgement -- the primary skill that distinguishes a good engineer from a passable one.