Not-ism E-Book

Bartlomiej Rohard Warszawski

• Herausgeber: B. R. Warszawski Great Thinking Tank ApS
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 181

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

There are things we know and things we don't know. Things we don't know (yet), can be tested. To test them, we need to believe in them first. Belief comes before knowledge. I wrote this book to myself, to explore the limit of knowledge and found that behind it was: belief, the multiverse, inspiration and not-ism!

Leseprobe

* in case someone somehow is in doubt:

These reviews are fictitious, but the book is not.

THANK YOU

This book would not be possible without:

my wife

Karen Marie Elise Rohard Warszawski

my children

Agnete, Rasmus, Nohr, and Leander

those who helped me

Jakub Bogumil Warszawski

Marjorie Skiba

Anita Hummelshøj

Betina Noe Favrholt

Tanja Dinsen

Hanne Marie Rohard

And all the wonderful people

with whom I had great debates with

and all the people who disagreed with me,

but who in a way also helped shape this book

THANK YOU ALL!

NOT-ISM

IT’S OKAY NOT TO KNOW,

A BOOK ABOUT BELIEF AND PROTO-BELIEF

© 2022 B. R. Warszawski Great Thinking Tank ApS

https://bartek.dk

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. For permissions contact: [email protected]

Author & graphics: Bartlomiej Rohard Warszawski

Publisher: B. R. Warszawski Great Thinking ApS, Præstø, Danmark

Print: BoD – Books on Demand, Norderstedt, Germany

ISBN 978-87-974092-2-0 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-87-974092-0-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-87-974092-1-3 (EPUB)

Version 1.0.1

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

The book has multiple illustrations with text. Most eBook readers can make the image larger by clicking, double clicking, or pinch to zoom.

The book can be read from start to end. I have tried to write a lot of chapters that can be read separately and in any order. Of course, some chapters reference knowledge from previous chapters, but on the other hand it also might give a different understanding than reading the book from start to end. Reading a few chapters should communicate the main point. Reading more chapters will give a bigger depth and perspective.

If you want to read it from start to end, then I have marked the chapters with:

(‼)

I find it more important

(-)

I find it less important (and can beskipped)

Of course, your opinion might be completely different from mine, so it’s up to you to decide how you want to read this book.

(-) A short definition of an ism and not-ism

Note: “(-)” means this chapter is less important and can be skipped.

An ism is a system and language to describe what something truly is.

Philosophers have used many kinds of ism’s to describe “what something truly is”, while not-ism acknowledges that it is impossible to describe what things truly are, and instead describe “how something differs from everything else that we already know”.

INTRODUCTION TO NOT-ISM

(‼) What is an “ism”?

In ancient Egypt lived a group of people who invented the 1st version of the alphabet-ism (short: alphabet), but they used hieroglyphs instead of Latin-letters (a, b, c, etc.).

Alphabet-ism is a sorted system of symbols and the people used it to describe the world around them. It was used very practically to build archives of stock, logistics, and for trade. History of the ancient kings were also written down to remember their heritage and inspire new generations.

Alphabet-ism was a system, a worldview, a philosophy to live after, since it brought a lot of prosperity with it.

Unintended it also brought darker sides, such as discrimination. People with a name that begins with a symbol in the start of the alphabet (A, B, C, …) are often first to be selected, while people with a name that begins with a symbol in the end of the alphabet (…, W, X, Y, Z) are often last to be selected.

To counter this discrimination, the reverse order was used, but people in the middle where always in the middle, while people on each end fluctuated between first and last.

Alphabet-ism was meant to mirror our world with words and define what is real and what was written is expected to be real. Except that alphabet-ism can also be used to write a lie or incorrect things by mistake, which doesn’t mirror our world.

There were also the phenomena where a person’s experience couldn’t be written with the existing alphabet-ism. The person got frustrated because they couldn’t communicate their experience, while the people without the experiences got frustrated because they didn’t want to deal with “unreal” things. The mathematician Pythagoras killed his student Hippasus by drowning, because Hippasus showed that √2 couldn’t be written as a fraction (i.e., ⅓). A fraction is a form of alphabet-ism for writing numbers.

The best part is that this account was written 700-800 years after Pythagoras had died, so maybe it is an anecdote? (it could be true or false, but we can’t be sure, even though it is written down). What we can be sure of, is that plenty of people have died, because they didn’t agree with the existing ism in power.

(‼) What is “not-ism”?

“Not” can be viewed as the opposite of something, but it can actually be “something else”. “Not black” does not necessarily mean “white”, but can be any other color. Including colors, we haven’t any name for yet.

Same goes for “Not true”. Many would think “not true” is a “false”, but can also be a paradox (both true and false at the same time) or something unknown (not true or false yet).

This can make some questions easier. For example, Socrates “know thyself” can be translated into: “how are you different from others?” It’s much easier to answer, even though it’s still not easy.

Not-ism accepts imperfect knowledge. The more we learn, the more differences we can find in older knowledge. It also means that not-ism can never be final or complete. It will continue to grow as long as we find new concepts.

Technically not-ism is not a philosophy, but something else. A philosophy tries to find the truth, while not-ism accepts that only temporary local truths can be found (which it also accepts as a temporary truth). There might be an objective truth out there, but we will probably never know it (only believe in it - and we should, but more on this topic later).

(‼) What difference does a “not” make?

Once upon a time, there was a vase standing on a table. Whenever the kids, in the house, bumped into this table, the vase moved a little to one side. One bump and the vase moved, but nothing else. A second bump moved the vase even further, but nothing else happened.

A third bump moved the vase further than the vase had ever been, but nothing happened.

It would seem another bump wouldn’t make a difference, but it did. The table was replaced with “not table” (in this case it meant “air”). The vase fell down on the floor and broke - it was a huge difference.

To measure when something ends, we need to get beyond the end to experience what comes after.

(‼) The temptation of knowledge

In the beginning was the objective reality and within it emerged many systems. One of these systems could simulate many of the other systems in simpler ways, and this system was called “knowledge”. Knowledge was a seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. It could predict the future of many other systems and brought wisdom and good to the beings who applied it.

Everything seemed good, but knowledge came with a temptation: that it is better than the objective reality. That it didn’t only predict the objective reality, but actually created it.

Many fell into this temptation, and stopped calibrating knowledge to the objective reality. Why should they, if knowledge created the objective reality?

It was okay for a while, until knowledge got out of sync with objective reality. Knowledge couldn’t predict anything anymore and the beings worshiping it became angry that the objective reality would rebel against knowledge. There was and still is no greater pain than to think you are right, when you are not.

These being held on to their so-called knowledge, and with it came anger, resentment, and war. Order and prosperity couldn’t be maintained.

The suffering lasted until all those beings either died or re-accepted that knowledge wasn’t better than the objective reality and needed to be calibrated to it. Everything got better for those beings, until they fell for the temptation again and again.

This cycle repeats to this day.

(‼) The truth about truth!

The first question comes, what is truth?

Let’s start with something simpler such as “true”.

True is an adjective (a property of something), while a truth is a noun (a thing).

There are many definitions of what the objective reality is, but we will talk about it in a later chapter.

A truth needs to be true, otherwise it would be a falsehood, a paradox, or something unknown.

A truth is different from a falsehood, because a falsehood is a sentence that is different enough from the objective reality.

A truth is also different from something unknown, because something unknown is neither true or false. It may become true or false, but then it is not unknown anymore.

A truth is also different from a paradox, because a paradox is both true and false at the same time. How? Well, it’s a paradox. It breaks the ism that tries to describe it. We can describe the way towards it, but not what actually happens.

A truth is also different from something indescribable, because it is like a paradox, but the difference is that we can’t get to it, like a paradox.

We know of the indescribable, because some ism’s contain smaller ism’s. So, a greater ism can show what a smaller ism doesn’t.

Decimal numbers (like 1.5) show what exists between whole numbers (…, 1, 2, 3, 4, …)

A 1,5 is indescribable with whole-number-ism.

There might also be ism’s that never overlap.

The trouble is that to describe an “other ism” would require an even greater ism that contains all 3 isms.

This can be experienced as an adult, when watching two children having a conflict. One child judges out of one ism, while the other out of another ism. As an adult you might see both of their ism’s from your greater ism, but they just can’t see each other.

(‼) The truth in not-ism

Not-ism is not an -ism (like Alphabetism). The system doesn’t try to describe what things truly are, but how they differ from all the other things we have subjectively experienced.

Does it mean that there is no truth in not-ism?

This is where we need to split truth into temporary truth and objective truth.

A temporary truth is the differences between something and other things we have experienced. It is true in its current state, until we experience more things and can correct it.

An extreme example is to see a picture of a blue room, but later to find out that the picture is taken with a filter on (no red color), and the room is actually purple.

Not-ism accepts that facts can change, when more data becomes available. Many people think that facts are objective and stable, but they are not. Some facts seem to be more stable than others, but we can’t prove if they are eternal, until we know how to measure something eternal.

This is probably why people dislike statistics, because it’s easy to come to many different conclusions, depending how the data is viewed, sorted, filtered, valued, etc.

So, a temporary truth is a statement that is similar enough to the subjective reality we have experienced or measured.

An objective truth is outside of not-ism. It is the hidden red thread that shows us the way towards understanding the objective reality. This is more a process than a statement, where existing temporary truths can be verified, reproduced, restructured, and deprecated.

We try to map the objective truth, because knowing it enables us to predict it. The difficulty is, that our maps are only temporary truths.

The biggest problem about describing objective truth is that something objective needs to always be true. Language (and ism’s) are often perceived as linear going from start to the end, but actually the end can change the start. Let look at the following sentences:

“I picked up a car with my hands yesterday. It was a toy car”

The first sentence seems impossible, until the last sentence gives it a new context. So, to describe something objectively would require a sentence that can’t be changed by any future context. We could make a rule, that nothing can be redefined, until we redefine the rule. How? Because paradoxes are also part of language.

(‼) Four levels of knowledge

1st level - empirical knowledge

The 1st level of knowledge is easily verifiable, like measuring the temperature of a room, or measuring the distance between two objects.

2nd level - academic knowledge

The 2nd level of knowledge is academic and builds on knowledge from the 1st, 2nd and 3rd level. Knowledge takes time to create, verify, and reproduce. Some of it can take a lot of time.

Often it is cheaper to trust knowledge from a reliable source. A book of physics (2nd level knowledge) is built from experiments that other people performed (1st level knowledge).

The trouble is that it needs to be true and no amount of trust will fix a falsehood.

Multiple studies have been done, where scientists misuse statistics and methods to promote results, they have been paid to get. Source: https://cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/RSS2015NegativeResults/pmed.0020124.pdf.

John Bohannon made in 2013 a software that could write biomedical scientific articles which looked like real scientific articles, but were pure nonsense. He wrote 300 articles and over half of them were accepted through a peer-review. Source: https://slate.com/technology/2015/04/fake-peer-review-scientific-journals-publish-fraudulent-plagiarized-or-nonsense-papers.html)

It doesn’t happen out of greed or evil, but because our scientific theory is also an -ism in itself. It means there are unknown areas, the paradox border, and indescribable outside.

2nd level knowledge can create a house of cards that can crash at some point - and it has happened many times.

3rd level - religious knowledge

The 3rd level of knowledge is the most expensive type of knowledge. When a house of cards, of 2nd and 3rd level knowledge, crashes, it has very costly consequences for the society.

The survivors of such a crash, collect the pieces together and try to learn “what went wrong” to avoid it happening again in the future.

This type of knowledge is difficult to reproduce since it often requires a society to collapse (and who wants to pay such a price). So, what history tells us is that people maintain this knowledge as a religious ritual with historical references.

Older religions didn’t have an advanced language or abstract logic, so their historical references are stories. They described these concepts in a hero journey. Even today it is easier to understand a concept, when a hero implements it through action.

The postmodern world also has it. It is free speech, democracy, property rights, etc.

History has shown multiple times that when free speech is removed then horrible things start to happen to individuals. We could try to remove free speech from the West today, but who dares to try it?

Some 1st and 2nd level knowledge do show that some areas of free speech are problematic. We chisel out part after part out, and maybe one day it will disappear.

Sometimes 3rd level knowledge becomes obsolete or even worse: “wrong”. Where we would continue this ritual, because we believe it is very important.

This is again dangerous, because too many of these can have a huge cost. A national institution that protects a set of rituals (can be a church), starts to kill people who disagree with it. It happens even today, just try not to pay your taxes and see what happens.

There are also examples, where a nation with too many obsolete rituals gets outcompeted by other “barbaric” nations.

The correct and not obsolete rituals do bring value, so they need to be protected and maintained. The best way to do so is through institutions.

4th level - God’s knowledge

This is where the objective truth exists. It is unreachable in not-ism and therefore can’t be known if it truly exists. We can believe in its existence, and try to get closer and closer to it.

It resembles the tower of Babel, where people thought they could build a tower to reach God in the sky. Instead, not-ism is an acceptance that we can’t reach it, but also that we should build toward it.

We believe in its existence, because we keep on finding greater and greater isms that can describe what we couldn’t before. We can’t tell yet if this trend will continue forever, but so far it has.

4th level knowledge is indescribable, but we can try to recalibrate our 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level knowledge to it. Recalibration happens when we retest it. So, the only difference with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level knowledge is the price to test it.

Many religions support the belief in 4th level knowledge. For example, it is forbidden to make an idol of God, because our idol will only be temporary local knowledge, and not an objective truth. Islam also forbids to draw an image of Muhammed, so we don’t confuse “the one who points” with “what is being pointed at”.

Not-ism is also 3rd level knowledge: “that knowledge is imperfect and temporary”, which means this book is not perfect either, but the temptation is there of course.

Some people will disagree with this book and they should! If they are right, then we can replace it with something better. If they are wrong, then we have more data to support not-ism.

We are all a part of the labyrinth of life.

(‼) The labyrinth of life

Peter was a boy, who loved to solve labyrinths.

One day his parents took him to the entrance of a huge labyrinth and he was very excited!

His mind easily scanned the near parts of the labyrinth to avoid short-term dead-ends.

Some paths though, were too long and too complex for his mind, so he had to try them out.

He learned from experience that some paths were good and some bad.

At a point he got to the end of the labyrinth. He was excited that he finally managed to solve it! He went into the exit only to find out that this labyrinth was only a tiny part of an even greater labyrinth! He was surprised, disappointed, but also excited.

He met other people in the labyrinth. Some passed by quickly, some became friends. He even met a girl that he married and got two kids with!

After years and years of walking he finally scanned all the possible paths of the greater labyrinth. The problem was that there was no exit. Well, there was a blue door, but it was locked and he didn’t have the key. Disappointed, he went back to the entrance.

To his surprise his parents were not waiting for him and the world outside was actually just another labyrinth! Could it be that his parents didn’t send him inside a labyrinth, but actually only into a pathway? A pathway that didn’t have an exit. He was angry and tried other paths with his wife and his two kids.

He also visited a path to his parents home. The house was now sold and somebody else lived there now.

He went further and further and tried new paths. He met plenty of people. Some went his way. Some went other ways. Some wanted to go where he came from. He tried to explain to them all the dead-ends he had met. Some listened, but some didn’t.

Once he met an army that forced him and his family to follow them. He was sent out scouting dead ends and the army took care of his family. He didn’t dare to reject orders, because he saw what had happened to the other families that did so.

One day the army he served met another army. They battled for some time and many people died, including his wife. The other army won and Peter was forced to join it.

Peter now realized that this labyrinth didn’t only have physical dead-ends, but also dead ends for people and armies of people. The ruling army decided which pathways were okay to explore and which weren’t. At least this new army was less strict than the previous one.

At some point the army got less and less strict and let Peter out of the army. He was very free to explore. His kids got old enough and wanted to explore their own paths, so he let them go. Sometimes they met and shared their stories.

One day he went up and up in the labyrinth. It had to be a mountain of some sort. At the top burned a fire and beside it was a key form and some blue iron ore.

Peter put some of the iron ore into the form and put it over the fire. A key was formed with the engraving: “the key of blue door”. He got really excited and ran down the labyrinth mountain.

He went down and down and met his two kids. They were drunk and beating up a third kid. Peter got so angry and started fighting with his kids. He managed to stop the fighting, but accidently also broke the blue key. Peter made the kids apologize for their behavior and went back up the labyrinth mountain. He knew that and had to build another key. It wasn’t easy, because he now had to mine the blue ore first.

Peter and the three kids went all the way back to find the blue door. It was a long way and he was getting old. His legs and back hurt. When he saw the blue door, he felt young again, even though the pain of old was still there. Maybe his parents were right after all! Maybe this was the exit?

Peter unlocked the door and opened it. What he saw was different from what he had previously seen. It was beautiful but at the same time looked just like another labyrinth.