Einstein and Tagore

Religion and Secularism
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I’ve been exploring Brain Pickings lately, the best of what you can find on the internet. I’ve always wanted to spend some time with this conversation between Einstein and Tagore. In the excerpt, you see where many of our visitors get there woo-woo. Tagore says Brahma truth can’t be accessed by the mind, and that a table only exists as an image in our minds, it’s not ultimate truth. To me, he’s just making that up as something you can’t get to so he can tell how to try to attain it.

Einstein actually exceeds Tagore’s experience of a oneness with the universe, and he says so at the end. He says beauty may be subjective, and the art we leave behind will just be material, it won’t contain beauty, but truth exists without us. The Pythagorean theorem won’t cease to be true just because there are no longer symbols on paper representing it. He can’t prove this, so he admits it’s a belief. But I’m with Einstein, of all the things I’ve been asked to believe, I would most like to believe that there is Truth, and maybe even that some mind in the future could know that is has come very near to approximating what that truth is.

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I like the idea that the truth is what has happened. History has had only one course and that course is independent of the ability of any mind to comprehend it.

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I like that idea to, but it’s unobtainable. If truth is “what has happened” then we can never really know what truth is because all we have is the subjective records of what happened. They say, “History is written by the victors.” I found out the other day that my kids never learned about Japanese internment camps or the US dropping the only two nuclear weapons to ever be used in war from their history classes. They instead learned some form of American Exceptionalism BS.

While actual history is what it is, we can never see the actual history, only the flawed representations of it which we record. So we can never know real, unadulterated “truth”, just “truth” as seen through the eyes of the historians examining the records, giving us at least two points of adulteration, the records and the interpreters.

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I like that idea to, but it’s unobtainable.
I think that is Einstein's point. Because he can't even prove that a capital T Truth exists, let alone know it, a belief in it existing is based on faith. He doesn't dismiss it or make up something about it, he gives some reason for believing it, then admits those reason are not that great, but still bases his worldview on the idea.
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@ Lausten

Have you familiarized yourself with David Bohm’s physics and philosophies ?

I ran across this:

"Pribram believes that if psychology is to understand the conditions that produce the world of appearances, it must look to the thinking of physicists like Bohm."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tOTX7oI5Vs
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Just briefly. Thanks

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Widdershins: “While actual history is what it is, we can never see the actual history”

I suggest it would be more accurate to say we may never see the actual history. Whatever memory we have or record we see may or may not be true to the “actual” history. We may never know whether what we think we know is correct or not. That’s where we begin talking ourselves in believing or accepting something. Epistemological nihilism?

On the other hand, I expect what we experience in the present is pretty much the truth, especially if we leave off interpreting it.

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I usually don’t comment on old threads, but the “related topics” led me here. It got me thinking about the “why” of why I ask why. Or, put another way, is philosophy just navel-gazing? I hope not. I hope that discussions about who we are and what’s true will lead to a more livable world for people who have not yet been born. Someone did that for me, so that’s my motivation.

An application then of what is beautiful and what is true, for me, is talking with young people. Until the brain gets fully formed, short-term pleasures tend to take up the mind’s capacity. Somewhere, in our twenties, if we have any sense at all, we start to settle on something, something that’s “true” to us. So, here’s the philosophy of that:

First, we can’t know for sure if something is absolutely true. We can posit that if we do something there will be a result. We can measure that and place values on those outcomes. We do this intuitively when we reflect on our past and ask ourselves if we are happy with who we are.

We can see if our idea that we consider true causes harm, either to ourselves or others. If we are going to pursue this true thing, practice it, use it, get better at it, then any harm it might cause should be minimized. Being minimally harmful is a basic value that I won’t go into in this post.

Second, to have your truth be something that has you thrive in the world, and maybe contribute to the world thriving, don’t make it a dogma.

Dogma ends the pursuit of truth and when taken to an extreme leads to harm regardless of how true or good or healthy the ideas are. If any challenge to your truth is only met by resistance and eventually anger, then what are you pursuing, the truth, or the defense of the truth? If your truth is so true that it should be obvious to everyone and it is provable beyond a shadow of a doubt then you have ended all pursuits, all growth, the idea of searching for wisdom is obsolete. That would be great if it was the ultimate truth, but nothing like that exists.

As Einstein explained to Tagore, truth is something that we believe in. It’s a basis for the scientific method; that the laws that we describe and create formulas for are consistent in all places through all time. When they don’t apply we have places that we can’t go, like the “time” before time existed, or the event horizon of a black hole. We can’t prove that our theories are provable.

We can only hope to find our place in the world of competing ideas and a range of values. In a world where harming others is rewarded, I can’t prove that not causing harm is a value you should have. I can combine all the knowledge we have of evolution, climate, neuroscience, everything, and come up with some psychology that is testable and some chemistry to help us feel “right”, but my idea of right should still be questioned by the next generation.

4/11 edit: clean up the “minimally harmful” section.
4/14 edit: add connecting words in 3rd paragraph that were missing
5/7 note: I said consistent laws are a basis of science, but it’s really a conclusion Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them • Richard Carrier Blogs