Comments on: The Nature of Truth http://www.stormtiger.com/collie/bestiary/2008/10/the-nature-of-truth/ Another mythologizing animal sharing a spark of intellectual passion! Sun, 12 May 2013 01:48:55 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Wihtgar http://www.stormtiger.com/collie/bestiary/2008/10/the-nature-of-truth/comment-page-1/#comment-16956 Wihtgar Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:15:06 +0000 http://www.stormtiger.com/collie/bestiary/?p=83#comment-16956 Amongst my many bizarre experiences were a few 'experiments' with hallucinogens. One particularly potent, and quintessentially trippy evening, a Halloween party actually, I had the experience I had been searching for. Every bit of my visual and auditory perceptions were skewed, bent, twisted, and altered. And not in a 'gosh, things are kinda blurry but if I squint hard enough it goes away' way. No, this was a 'holy crap, those Palmetto bushes have demon faces in them' sort of experience. I saw some really weird things that night, and while at no time did I for a minute believe they were real, my brain continued to assure me that they were. I came away from that night with a profound understanding of how easily our perceptions can be altered, either by a few micrograms of LSD, or by the effects of poorly understood memory encoding. Truth, with a capital T, is ultimately a very personal thing, and I sometimes marvel that we humans ever agree on anything.

Oh, and just for the record, my wife wrote our vows, and the word 'obey' was nowhere to be found. :-)

]]> By: Jonathan http://www.stormtiger.com/collie/bestiary/2008/10/the-nature-of-truth/comment-page-1/#comment-16950 Jonathan Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:54:31 +0000 http://www.stormtiger.com/collie/bestiary/?p=83#comment-16950 I remember you writing about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. That was such a volatile situation that the people who formed the commission knew that a veneer of 'true enough' over the events of apartheid would be the only thing that kept the country from slipping into more racial violence.

Fortunately, most of us don't have to accept a value of 'true enough' else violence will explode around us. But is there a line between 'accepting' a 'true enough' answer and being irritated, annoyed, or outright angry about it?

I actually had the opposite experience regarding things my parents remembered. (What else is new?) They, my mom in particular, remembered things that I didn't, couldn't, or wouldn't. It was seriously disconcerting!

About the only other thing I can think of is to say that 'What I told you was true… from a certain point of view,' should nominally result in an explosion of on-screen violence and a revocation of the writer's license to write anything at all. =)

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