False Fiction

This morning the boyfriend and I got into a rousing discussion on gaining knowledge and reason before tossing off the covers. My attitude is one that you can gain knowledge without the use of reason. He argued that you can't gain knowledge with out reason. We went round and round creating examples for our metaphors only to come to the realization that we have different definitions of knowledge. His is more specific than mine. My definition of knowledge is any item - a data point without a judgment of false or true along a path of discovery.

I went on to say that you can gain knowledge through observation, which doesn't include reason at all. Of course you can apply reason to your observation and gain different information, but that doesn't preclude you gaining knowledge without the use of reason.

Anyway, he went off to work and I started my day checking my email. In which I came across the following horoscope courtesy of Rob Breszny.

Last May, workers cleaning up garbage on Britain's highest mountain made a startling find. There at the top of Mt. Ben Nevis was a piano. How did it get there? Three years earlier, hikers in Indiana's Yellowwood State Forest stumbled upon an equally inexplicable anomaly: a massive boulder lodged in the topmost branches of an 80-foot-tall chestnut tree. These are your metaphors of the week, Aquarius. I bet that you too will find seemingly out-of-place things in high places. Don't dismiss them with a flick of your rational mind. Give them a chance to change your thinking about the nature of reality.

Which reminds me of an item on my todo list: Build a solar powered hot tub on top of a remote mountain range in the Mojave.

To do this, I have to not only build it from scratch with no infrastructure, but truck in all the materials, including the water. Because, there are no springs on top of this range. And to add to the difficulty - it's a day hike to the summit.

But before I get started on that, perhaps I'll start looking up.

Comments

[S]

"How did it get there?" 24 men carried it up on poles.

http://www.jmt.org/news/2006/piano_2_pr.html

[heather]

I wonder if I can get those 24 people to help me with the hot tub. I think it's great that they carried it all the way up there. The act of doing that is enough reason for me. ;)

[Lars]

If you can't gain knowledge without reason, you're left to claim either that animals have no knowledge, or that they're able to reason. Both make me uncomfortable.

But it's of course just a matter of how to define words. Actual reality is not too hard to understand here, and remain unchanged by any (re)definitions.