INTRODUCTION

“In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.”

— Buddha (Unverified)

What is truth? How to arrive at truth? To begin with, why are we, anyway, “stuck” with ignorance?

POST-TRUTH

Curiously, why is the contemporary human society moving away from truth? Dictionaries have started adding the words like “post-truth”. As this wiki entry shares:

As of 2018, political commentators have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in many nations, notably Australia, Brazil, China, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others. As with other areas of debate, this is being driven by a combination of the 24-hour news cycle, false balance in news reporting, and the increasing ubiquity of social media and fake news websites. In 2016, post-truth was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year due to its prevalence in the context of that year’s Brexit referendum and media coverage of the US presidential election.

ADVERSARIAL COLLABORATION

Though, on the flip side, it is good see tools like “Adversarial collaboration” picking-up. For example, in politics (How We Empower Political Extremists), in Business (Better Business Strategy Through Adversarial Collaboration) in philosophy (Accelerating Research on Consciousness: Our Structured Adversarial Collaboration Projects) and elsewhere.

Andreas Kluth reports (What Is Consciousness? Scientists Compete to Find Out – Bloomberg, Jan 2021):

The method is called adversarial collaboration. In science as in life, people usually have lots of theories about stuff. Logically, those can’t all be true at the same time. And yet many theories live on indefinitely in the safety of their intellectual silos. So the solution is to invite proponents of conflicting narratives to identify some point of contradiction that can be tested. That would let us falsify the wrong theories, which is a good definition of progress.

This notion isn’t totally new. In 1919, Arthur Eddington, a British astronomer, used a solar eclipse to test two conflicting theories — Isaac Newton’s notions about gravity and Albert Einstein’s on general relativity. (Einstein’s won). But there’s been no large-scale research of this kind with the active participation of dueling scientists.

The Templeton World Charity Foundation wants to change that. The nonprofit funds research on some of humanity’s biggest questions, especially those at the intersection of science and spirituality. That includes consciousness.

[to be continued…]

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