Executive Summary

• Overcoming individual difference in perception
• Realizing when even science is failing us
• Essential grounding for what’s coming next
• My own personal actions for entering the interregnum

As I’ve mentioned, it’s difficult to hold a sensible position in today’s world.  The keepers of the (anti)Social Media artificial intelligence (AI) reins are making it so.

Various groups of people today hold entirely different truths in their heads.  Their senses of reality are shaped by unique and specialized diets of information served up uniquely to them by increasingly sophisticated AI algorithms.

There’s no common ground because various factions are holding entirely different bits of information.  This is nothing new to the human experience.  Here’s one of the oldest known parables.

A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: “We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable”. So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, “This being is like a thick snake”. For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant, “is a wall”. Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.

This quite ancient parable leads us to the idea of individual differences in perception.  The trick, as always, is to understand that your own perception is as limited as any of the blind men.

We each live within a cave of shadows in Plato’s allegory.

However, during this interregnum people have become quite frightened and confused and so, predictably, many default into certainty.  “These aren’t shadows, they are the truth!”  “It’s a goddamned wall, why can’t you perceive it that way!!”

When Even Science Breaks Down

It’s gotten so bad that scientists – trained in the rational arts (presumably) – have become, in some cases, completely illogical.