DATA AND DESIRE

A cold Saturday morning, I'm feeling lazy and not really sure of 
what I want to do with myself. The week turned out very windy but 
there wasn't actually much rain, and today is the coldest it's been 
for a little while. There was a thunder storm very late at night a 
few nights ago, which I've been waiting for to try out my cloud 
charge monitor, but I was in bed half-asleep and my enthusiasm for 
electrostatic investigations wasn't quite enough to overcome the 
attractiveness of remaining so.

I've discovered some philosophical musings that I jotted down one 
night on a piece of scrap paper and left here as the foundations 
for a future phlog post. Before bed I often sit on the couch just 
thinking to myself for half an hour or so, getting progressively 
colder this time of year because I turn off the heating early in 
order to save power. This time my thoughts apparantly wandered into 
analysing why there are "things that we believe without knowing, 
and that we believe we don't want to know".

I've written a bunch of isolated statements which I intended to 
thread together seamlessly, but I'm not sure that I can, or that I 
can be bothered to at least, so I'll just dump them.

 The greatest meaning arises from the greatest want. Meaning is 
 born of desire.

 Truth is the balance of desire and observed data.

 Rationality is our illusion to save us from disillusionment.

 The balance of knowledge and belief that we seek is a social 
 construct.

The last statement folows a theme that I expanded on in a personal 
sense with my earlier post here:
gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2020-10-05Running_from_the_Hurd.txt

The first two are pretty much just variations on "we see what we 
want to see", but trying to invoke the image of physically 
measuring data compared with the desire for a particular conclusion 
from it.

The remaining point on rationality is a bit more striking for me. 
In many ways I'm devoted to the concept of rationality - coldly 
analysing data and rejecting emotional and impulsive 
decision-making. However through pursuing rationality it's often 
proven to be nothing but an illusion, because the truths on which 
it is founded are themselves directed by one's own emotional 
desires. It exists at some levels only as a concept to grasp 
alternatively to how someone religious may instead choose faith, 
saving one's self from facing the uncertainties of an individual 
reality.

 - The Free Thinker