In the ongoing tradition of replies that deserve their own blog post. This one is a follow-up to the “Ada Lovelace was not the first computer programmer” thread.
Emotion, to me, is my starting point; it is also an important element of the way I communicate.
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I also think that truth is just about anything anybody else wants it to be. ‘Truth’ is a word that is available to me in sea of many other words.
This reminds me of when, discussing God with religious people, if a person says that god is a faith issue for them then there is no point arguing anymore because you have boiled it down the fundamental difference between that person’s view of the world and yours. This is similar to you and I.
Truth is subjective.. Your emotions are your guide.. That is a view I can neither understand nor condone.
Truth is not whatever we want it to be. I believe there is a standard of truth that transcends our emotions and perceptions. That is why I go through efforts to clarify what I am talking about, in this instance that the claims that Ada Lovelace was “the first programmer” are false. You don’t get to answer “yes” or “no” depending on whatever you feel you want to, there is only one answer. Whatever you want to define as a program, if you make the statement that Ada was the first to write it, then the fact that Babbage wrote it for her nullifies the idea that she was the first making the answer a “no”. Plain and simple. The question of whether Babbage was the first is separate, and “giving her the benefit of the doubt” is wishful delusion.
Living on emotions is a bad idea. Should the anti-Semite live on his or her hate? Does the racial lies they tell about Jews, which are truly believed by themselves, be the “starting point” for them? Do my protestations over the claim that that Jews slaughter non-Jews in order to use their blood for knead matzes for Passover [1] get legitimately pushed aside against claims that “emotions are my starting point” or does the truth matter?
The world is full of untruths; these are worse than lies because they are normally believed sincerely and thus are much more dangerous, the architect of untruth is emotion. Our societies are filled with victim ideologies like feminism and blackism which keep people in enshrined in a miasma of hateful emotion about how abused they are. This enables them to rationalise the evil their abuse of others. Emotional thinking is perhaps the cause of most of the evil in the world. Lesser versions of this effect cause people to raise other people like Ada Lovelace on a pedestal, the reason is to make themselves feel better, to satiate their own self worth by raising it for another person of the same group as they are, therefore raising themselves with it. It is not something that secure people do.
Your worldview is wrong. Truth is important and it is not whatever you want it to be.
Sources
[1] http://missingpeace.eu/en/articles/132-articles/11-salah-soltan-repeats-blood-libel-while-attending-a-conference-about-interfaith-and-coexistence
Posted on: Saturday, July 17, 2010 5:08 PM