Short idea (192): There are two political parties in the United States. Younger members of each party are sure they are right and members of the other party are wrong and maybe even evil. Older politicians may feel this but become more practical and are willing to compromise in order to get anything done. But there is a third position: Neither party is completely right but that each expresses a part of the truth. Compromise is not a process where good makes a deal with evil to get at least some good. Rather it is a struggle that leads, if it works, to incorporating the goodness and truths of both parties into a higher, more complete good and truth. This struggle can take centuries.
Short idea (195): There are beautiful ideas and there are true ideas. Occasionally we find a beautiful idea that turns out to be true. And, occasionally, we stumble across a true idea that we come to see is very beautiful.
Short idea (200): Perhaps the most seductive things in the world are words — including the words that come into your head.
Thinking, Truth, and Reality
I separate Thinking (which is an activity), Truth (which can be the result of Thinking, and Reality.
Using spatial metaphors, thinking can be used to make a point or a series of points. It can be a series of unrelated points, or it can proceed in a line from one point to the next. This can be done in a step by step manner that obeys the rules of logic, or in a more random and, perhaps, intuitive manner. Logical thinking involves work and is active. It can be sharp and clear and clean or fuzzy and muddy and confused. Thinking can arrive at the truth or hit on the truth or lead us to truths.
All Thinking is Real and part of Reality. Truth is Real and part of Reality. Thinking can help us deal with Reality, but it Thinking does not give or take us to Reality. Thinking is one dimensional (points) or two dimensional (lines of thought), but any Reality is multi-dimensional. Though thinking is part of reality, a piece of reality, it can also be a veil that keeps a thinker away from other parts of reality. It can be a buffer between a person and reality. Thinking is about something: Reality, on the whole, isn't about anything — it just is. Thinking is an activity (passive or active) done by someone and felt to be going on now; Reality, on the whole is not done by anyone and is not felt by anyone to be anything or at any time.
Thinking is one or two dimensional, but there can be different lines of thoughts about the same topic. So it is possible to have a whole web of thought, as it were, and this web can be thought of as three dimensional. In so far a thought process or series of thought processes take place over time, thinking can be thought of having a fourth dimension, the dimension of time. But each line of thought (qua line of thought) can be thought of as represented by a series of positive real numbers. Reality is thick with Reality, as it were. Continuing with the mathematical metaphor, it has more than four dimensions, and many (or all) can not be represented with real numbers. The dimensions of Reality would be represented by irrational numbers.
Thinking, at best, gives the Truth, but the corresponding Reality is always bigger than the thought or the truth about it. Thinking never gives Reality. At best it gives Truth. In a parallel manner, it can lead to Falsehood but not Unreality.
There is such a thing as the Set of all Thoughts of all human beings. There is no Set of all Real Things.
No matter how logical a person's thinking, no matter how true his or her conclusion, this does not mean the person has fathomed or grasped the Reality about which he or she is thinking. Reality always escapes thought. Reality is not a series of Truths; it is bigger and deeper and thicker and richer, to use another series of metaphors.
Finding a Truth can be dangerous for a thinker in that, it can lead to an incorrect feeling of security that one has mastered the corresponding Reality. Thinking about war and arriving at Truths about war is not the Reality of war. Truths about sex and thinking about sex are not sex.