simplicity wrote: ↑Wed Sep 15, 2021 5:56 pm
So you actually believe you are a completely independent thinker? I hate to break to you, but 99.999...% of everything you have ever thought has already been thought by others [about 100 million times (+/-)].
How does the fact that others have also thought what I think or had those thoughts before I did, make my own thoughts not mine. Most of what I know I learned from others because there is just too much for one individual to discover for themselves and it would be foolish to reinvent everything when someone else has already done that work, but for me to have that knowledge I had study what others wrote, use my own judgement and reason to understand and determine whether what was being written was true or not. I had to use my own mind to learn from others. To just accept what others write or teach without understanding whether it is true or not is not learning, it's credulity and that kind of so-called knowledge is superstition.
Since you seem to be implying my thoughts are not my own, as though they were things everyone else thinks, why is it that almost everyone disagrees with my views, as you do. Since there are damn few others who think what I think, who are those one's you think I'm only emulating.
simplicity wrote: ↑Wed Sep 15, 2021 5:56 pm
You are really caught up in your own way ...
Whose way are you caught up in?
simplicity wrote: ↑Wed Sep 15, 2021 5:56 pm
... nobody else cares what you think.
Well, I would have thought so. What difference does make what I think? So it does bewilder me a bit that so many people seem to feel compelled to tell my how wrong I am and try to prove it and ask me all sorts of inane personal questions.
Am I not supposed to discuss my views with those who have so little interest in what I say, they must comment on it? When I see something on a philosophy site that defies all reason and truth, am I not supposed to comment?
simplicity wrote: ↑Wed Sep 15, 2021 5:56 pm
We are all here to simply exchange views with other people who enjoy such [not to convince others that we have figured it out]. And believe me [although it's impossible], should "somebody "figure it out," everybody will know in five minutes.
That's doubtful! There is hardly a single discovery in history that wasn't resisted, and those making them persecuted and vilified. The last thing most people want is the truth and they will go to almost any length to evade it.
Look how long it took, "everybody," to accept the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo and the persecution Galileo endured. It took twenty years for William Harvey's discovery that blood pumped out from heart, returns to heart to be accepted.
In 1902, Rear-Admiral George Melville, chief engineer of the US Navy, wrote in the North American Review, that attempting to fly was 'absurd'. In 1903, Simon Newcomb, professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University published an article which showed scientifically that powered human flight was 'utterly impossible,' and would require the discovery of a new force in nature. A few weeks later, Wilbur and Orville Wright did the scientifically impossible.
For five years after the Wright brother's first successful flight, most American scientists, science editors, and science writers in the
NewYork Herald, the
North American Review, and the
Scientific American dismissed the many demonstrations of powered human flight as a hoax.
Humphry Davy's demonstrated nitrous oxide anesthesia in 1830, and by 1842 chloroform and ether were being used to perform painless surgeries, but academia, especially the religious versions, and the medical establishment resisted and repudiated the use of anesthesia which was not fully accepted until after 1850.
Every electronic device or machine we use which is powered by electricity from the power grid, as well as, the power grid itself is proof Michael Faraday was not the charlatan his contemporaries accused him of being when he announced he could generate an electric current simply by moving a magnet in a coil of wire. The truth and significance of his discoveries were not recognized until after his death.