Some things are important, for some people, some of the time ... but in the Grand Scheme there are many other things that need to be overlooked so that proper attention can be paid to more important higher-level issues. If I get bogged down pondering which fingers need to twitch to hit which keys, for instance, my typing will grind to a halt and I won't get anything substantive written. If I start to fret about which neurons are firing in which parts of my brain, or which electrons are transitioning between which subatomic states, I won't be able to think about ethics very effectively.

Yet it's still crucial to have somebody who has tunneled down to the lower levels of reality. There needs to be an "evidentiary chain", if you will, of validated connections between infinitesimal ur-events and everyday perception (and up to the heights of not-everyday grand philosophizing). It's analogous to the rôle of fact-checkers in journalism, or controlled clinical experiments in medicine. Without a solid foundation, all we have is wish-it-were-so-ism ...

(see also MessyAndNeatCategories (30 Jun 1999), KnowHowAndFearNot (19 Nov 1999), AlteredNative (24 Jan 2002), ThinkAgain (29 Aug 2002), InvisibleWeb (8 Dec 2002), ...)

TopicThinking - 2003-05-23

(correlates: DangerousPlaything, OnOneFoot, Free Will Facts, ...)