Portholes of Thoughts

5 posts / 0 new
Last post
maberl's picture
Portholes of Thoughts

We are portholes of thoughts
opened by a system we call life somewhere in what we call time.
Without any requests without any choice But we have this moment this thought and imaginations, so I guess we have enough to rejoice.
we see a lot happening a lot of amazing things through it. We also see other portholes but not actually their thoughts.
what we see is the actions from those thoughts. we try to identify everything we see and remember it and assess and process it to make more thoughts. And sometimes, As we see these thoughts trapped in an arranged order of space, we want to own that arrangement and imagine it to have it forever. But we don't know and we don't realize neither do we like, that no matter how much we hope this would not possibly be the scope. we as we are maybe nothing but nothing is maybe really something.
so Before it shuts give it a goal and strive to get to and to atleast see your shores.

Subscription Note: 

Choosing to subscribe to this topic will automatically register you for email notifications for comments and updates on this thread.

Email notifications will be sent out daily by default unless specified otherwise on your account which you can edit by going to your userpage here and clicking on the subscriptions tab.

ThePragmatic's picture
Poetic, and very true.

Poetic, and very true.

And in our porthole of thoughts, we reach out into the world around us, trying to discover it, understand it and learn about it. To communicate we need to overcome our inherent subjectivity, find common ground we can agree on with others:

- They say this is hot? Ouch, yes it was.
- They say I might fall if I walk along this little ledge, but I didn't the last times I tried, ha! Ooops, ouch!! Maybe they were right, maybe I'll have to change my mind about that being totally safe? Better try again...
- Tommy said dragons exists. Wow, that's so cool. But now my parents says that dragons don't exists. Perhaps I should ask more people? Perhaps I should ask Tommy how he knows that dragons do exist?

Here, were we trust our parents more than anyone else, people with selfish and sometimes even sinister purposes, cut in and push in 'belief without proof' on the mind of the child. Instead of allowing the children to learn how to think for themselves, learning how to sort out lies from facts, they get force fed with faith. The natural curiosity of children should not be smothered and replaced by faith.

The process of discovery is a large part of the beauty in life. It is our natural state, and it should remain so.

maberl's picture
Thanks Pragmatic

Thanks Pragmatic

I am glad you caught the vibe and also appreciated it...........these are some of the few phylosiphical thoughts I find my self lost in sometimes and going round and round...

Most of the people absolutely do not get it and then reply by rejecting the idea....well thats a great turn off.......I believe not everyone ( free thinkers) find themselves lost is such thoughts.......this one is actually in addition to one of my previous posts about the reality of existence.........I did use some metaphors though

And also i am not a professional writer so sometimes I could fail to deliver the ideas perfectly......but anyway do not want my ideas to get lost thats why keep sharing them here to find like minded people........

cheers ;-)

ThePragmatic's picture
Your welcome. :)

Your welcome. :)

I was already in a train of thoughts that fit right into your post...

You're describing one of the few things that one can be absolutely sure of; our own thoughts, our own mind. Each 'porthole of thought' has its own unique interpretation of the world that we appear to exist within. It is our starting point, from which we try to discover the world around us.

It raises that question, how can we know anything? What is knowledge?
Everything we see, hear, touch, taste and smell has to be interpreted by our mind. We learn by experience, but also by selecting what is trustworthy among all the information we get.

But we also dream, hallucinate, forget, deny, dissociate, compartmentalize, project, compensate and rationalize. How can what we think that we know, be trusted in such a error-prone mental machinery?
Because our mind works this way, eye witness testimony is known to be unreliable.

If I say: "I believe that the earth is a spherical object."

Why would I believe this?
How sure am I about this?
Completely sure or just 50% sure?
On this specific question, I'd like to say somewhere around 99.98%, even though I haven't actually seen it with my own eyes.
But then how can I be so sure?

Because there is a vast amount of evidence and information that points to that conclusion as being objectively true.

However, I could exist as a consciousness within a simulation of some sort, or it could be that the entire scientific community is a conspiracy against the one true religion where the Earth really is flat and is held up by the world-bearing divine Turtle, or any of a thousand other wild hypothesis. Therefore I'm not 100% sure, but since I don't find these other hypothesis likely, they don't accumulate to any more than about 0.02%.

Apart from the vast amount of information that is available, images, video and so on, people can actually set about to travel around the world to verify this for themselves. And just to see a large boat that moves away from you at sea, where you can actually witness the boat partially obscured by the slight curvature of the sea, is a powerful indicator. (I'm sure there is a multitude of experiments that could be conducted that also verifies the same information.)
All this information corroborates each other, giving an extremely high level of confidence that it is objectively true.

Thus, I believe that the Earth is a spherical object.

If there is a book/books that contains information that claims there is a god and a billion people claim that this god is real and exists, there are a lot of people corroborating the same information. It must be true then?
But all their information comes from that same source. Can the source be proven? Can it be corroborated?
Even if they have had a personal experience that they say is proof of their god, it is still only personal information interpreted in the context of their belief in that book/books.
Non of that is verifiable, repeatable, measurable. This belief is not based on proof.

Even if 3 people witness a phenomenon, for example a bright light in the sky during daytime, these people can give 3 distinct separate accounts of the phenomenon, even when they have the same beliefs.
And of course, even more so if they don't have the same beliefs...

It may have been Yahweh, it may have been Jesus, it may have been Muhammed, it may have been Vishnu, it may have been the Rainbow Serpent, it may have been Legba, it may have been an alien vessel or it may have been swamp gas trapped in a thermal pocket that reflected the light from Venus. The sighting could be a good omen, a bad omen, neutral or just a fantastic experience.

Such information, even if some of the witnesses claim to be 100% certain, is still unreliable.

(People seem to forget that the most honest answer is sometimes "I don't know".)

So, how does one go about to sort out the truth?

Truett's picture
Well said. I think certainty

Well said. I think certainty exists in only two places: mathematical proofs and religious adherents' minds.

Donating = Loving

Heart Icon

Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.

Or make a one-time donation in any amount.