::I have stumbled on my new IS topic. haha. Even though my original topic has already been approved by the Cambridge KI committee, I'm going to twist it abit to suit this new idea.
Ideas are precisely the theme of my new IS. In my IS, I'm going to look at ideas and more specifically, this thing that we call memes. Memes are infectious ideas that hijack our brains. As described first by Richard Dawkins, and then by Daniel Dennett, memes are the ideas that survives. As a student of epistemology, I am looking at memes specifically at its relationship to science.
A generalization I'm going to propose is that all successful ideas of today are memes. The most successful of all would be scientific laws. These laws are reliable and tested. I am not disputing their usefulness, but I'm disputing their truth. An idea does not need to be true in order to be useful. A case in point is the idea that there are human rights. It is a human convention and it may not be true but it is certainly useful. And useful ideas are spread to others and soon it's ubiquous. The most successful ideas are the best memes, not truth.
Truth in fact is beyond our comprehension. Truth, as described in justified true belief, is external and a property that we can check. While it is certainly external, we have no way of checking that it is true. This is because our minds are limited and can only have subjective interactions with nature. In fact our limited brain power make us prefer simple elegant truths that fit nicely with our existing conceptions of the world. Truth is out there and any idea that comes from interaction between ourselves and the world is not truth.
We can not achieve true objectivity. Science is flawed and since the truth sets us free, we will never be free.::

.:firestarter blogged on 5:54 AM:.
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