Here is the Forward to the book. I have between 60 and 100 pages of rough
work on more of the methodology and definitional details which I'll
dribble out as I can make them convey any sense.
I will focus first on my definitional distinctions within the next few
days.
Hope I'll get TONS of editorial comment!
Hal Popplewell
GaltJohn22@aol.com
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Taking Out The Garbage
and other chores...
Hal Popplewell
FOREWORD
The most important tool with which we deal with the world is our own mind.
There is a hitch with this though.
Our mind is an imperfect computing and logic device. It is CAPABLE of
near perfection in logic BUT we learn much that is not true. Garbage in,
garbage out, as they say.
So, here we stand as adults with minds chock full of wonderful insights,
perfect truths, and garbage. As we view the world we view it through a
powerful, unconscious, interpretive "lens" this lens consisting of our
beliefs. Beliefs founded on that mixture of insight, truth, and garbage.
When we take in a new "fact" the fact must come through this lens. In
this process the "fact" may easily be distorted.
For example:
What person A's eyes see: Two people are arguing. One is white, one is
Hispanic.
If person A does not like Hispanics what they may STORE is "Hispanics are
argumentative"
It is a fact that two people are arguing, since you see it with your own
eyes you believe what you see and store is a fact. What you store may not
be what you saw yet, with that stored memory, you store another "fact":
that you saw this with your own eyes giving the memory the weight of fact.
Though it is a difficult pill to swallow, each of us have minds which have
random bits of this garbage strewn everywhere, interleaved with the
truths. Worse, all of this generates even more garbage as the distorted
lens of our beliefs continue to change what we see, hear, and touch to
something quite different when it is stored! Even KNOWING we have garbage
does not either get the garbage removed nor protect us from ever-more
garbage mounting within us!
Now, our mind is our most personal possession because it IS us. We are
it.
That is, our most
intimate self is chock full of garbage. Every, single one of us.
Thankfully, we are all chock full of wonderful insights and perfect
truths, as well. We are born with a mind which is reasonably blank in
conscious terms. But, from the moment we can feel or hear or see we begin
to fill this grasping void with facts and interrelationships. And we
learn more than mere facts, we learn how to "roll our own" facts out of
the facts we have, chaining facts together in inferences, deductions, and
syllogisms to produce shining new facts all our own: these we call
insights.
Now, our teachers are not always clear and are, themselves as full of
garbage as facts. So we begin to collect garbage and make it our own. To
our mind the rusted tin can filled with mold is a silver teapot to set
proudly on the dining room table of our mind. Because it was handed to us
as a child by someone who told us: "This is a silver tea pot!" Take a
walk around the rooms of your own mind with this realization that perhaps
half of what you are seeing is actually not at all what is really there.
A god's eye view of these rooms and their furnishings would show us a
bizarre collection of works of art and greasy, discarded newspaper hanging
side by side over the mantlepiece!
I cannot help, now, on seeing someone oh so seriously extolling the
virtues of their own opinions as truth, imagining the eclectic decorations
of that mind and smiling ruefully at us all!
Let me give a tiny and unimportant example from my own childhood. I read
Tarzan Of The Apes as a child of about 7. One of the apes, a rival of
Tarzan's (and a big BULLY!) Was an ape named Terrkoz. For who knows what
reason, I read this name for the first time as Terrox. Though this ape's
name may be mentioned and correctly spelled perhaps 100 times in this
book, I continued to hear Terrox each time I encountered his name and
stored it as such in my memory. Years later when I was a vastly more
mature 12 year old, I read the book again. "Hey!" said I, "Something has
changed, Terrox has been misspelled as Terrkoz!" Encountering the name
again and then again I realized I had mis-stored it. Yet today, if you
asked me his name and I answered quickly I would, indeed, utter Terrox.
That is just the type of hairpin we're dealing with!
The realization that my own mind was full of garbage probably began at
that very moment at the age of 12 and blinked on and off in my
consciousness for years to come. Somewhere in there I set out on the
mission of taking out the garbage, and I have been working tirelessly and,
probably, ineffectually at it ever since.
This book presents the methods I derived and a few of my own journeys to
The Dump. The reader is cautioned that this book, too, is at least half
garbage. Sorry, its the best I can do today.
-- Hal Popplewell GaltJohn22@aol.com