Monday, June 12, 2006
badminton later after visting my grandmom in the hospital again. finally some needed exercise. i've been lacking alot of physical activity for quite a while now. about a week perhaps? haha.
oh yes. let's all bet on poland to win (hahaha siao!!). well the odds (meaning the money u get in return not the chances of them winning) are good.
anyway i was just thinking. how often do we trust what is printed in the newspapers or what we see on television. how often to we believe something that someone else tells us to. naturally, the ease of placing any degree of trust upon an article, a programme or a person comes with one has with it. by relationship, i mean the result of history that one has with the object (be it a daily newspaper or another person). no doubt, in most cases, children always trust their parents. their words and actions are usually taken to be possess an unquestionable sense of validity and accuracy, at least when we were still young. so we as kids will believe anything our parents told us, be it that tooth fairys came at night to exchange teeth for coins, or that if we misbehaved, the boogeyman rhat made our closets his home would surface when we were alseep to, i dont know, scare the heck out of us? but as we grow older, we develop a sense of doubt. we relaise that we never saw the toothfairy, and our closets did not contain some supernatural beasts whose only goal was the trivial task of exacting havok on poor defenseless kids. this plants the seeds of doubt in one's minds. our parents' words now never hold the same value of truthfulness as before, and we begin to systematically tear their sentences apart to decipher if there is any truth hidden within before we accept them as fact. the same goes for the media. the reputation of a newspaper or even a channel lies in the way information is passed on. accuracy is perhaps the most vital factor in determining one's reputation as a reliable source of information. this is the way trust works in normal circumstances.
but say for instance, right from the begining, someone or something provide you with information on things that one cannot discern the truth from. would one then develop an overwhelming sense of trust in that thing? or would it be the case that one automatically begins to doubt the reliability of such information. logically speaking, there is no reason to doubt something/someone if we have not been give reason to, especially if the it has the reputation amongst others to be a reliable source. but looking at it from the opposite side, we see that the only thing that could provide any reason for us to trust that source is it's reputation. and certainly it's reputation is made with the trust of many other people. so as one can see here, we develop a never ending chain of reliance in this case where one's trust in the source is based on another's trust and so on. so as one can see, when dealing with facts whose suthenticity cannot be determined, our belief is almost totally determined internally. that is, we simply choose whether to believe or not rather than rationally decide like an adult. we accept truths like that of a child, but will never ever have the chance to accertain the validity of these 'facts' and so we remain childlike in our trust. but the matter of the fact is that we do not remain as children. we grow up and our minds develop more complex means of dealing with such information. we move away from the simplistic "i believe becasue i am told so" scenario, to the "i believe because i know it to be true" or "i believe because it is a fact" scenarios and we tell oursleves that our judgement is more sophisticated than that of a mere child.
it is quite a task to question the things one holds to be true, and occasionally, we dont even see the need to question such beliefs. for instance, since a very young age, i have never cut my hair before sitting for examinations. i've always hastened my steps to make sure i cross a balck cats path rather than let it cross mine. i may say that i dont believe these things to be true, and that i do that because i'd rather be safe in case it were true, but internally i admit to myself that i do it because i am given no reason to doubt and at the same time no reason to believe.
i guess after thinking about this for quite a while, i've come to the conclusion that in my very own capacity, i should question the truth of everything that i am being told. such is the life of a mathematician. one learns never to simply assume that anything is necessarily true unless one it is proven to be. but more importantly, in cases where the truth is indeterminable, i seek to question the importance of the 'fact' in the first place. is it really important to me that cutting my hair my result in the loss of my knowledge. is it really important to me that a black cat crossing my path may bring bad fortune? i will not simply accpet something as being true, but at the same time, life's filled with greater challenges than to dwell upon the truth on something like that.
ok, mom's back which means i've got to go to the hospital. hope everyone has a good day!
{2:16 PM}
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