What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves🧠
The human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts: the Thinker and the Prover. The Thinker can think just about anything, but the Prover is a much simpler mechanism and operates on one law only: what ever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. If the Thinker thinks that the sun revolves around the earth, the Prover will obligingly organize all perceptions to fit that thought; if the Thinker changes its mind and decides that the earth revolves around the sun, the Prover will reorganize the evidence. If the Thinker thinks that “holy water” from Lourdes will cure its lumbago, the Prover will skillfully orchestrate the signals from the glands, muscles, organs, etc. until they have organized themselves into good health again. Of course, it is fairly easy to see that other minds behave this way; it is comparatively much harder to become aware that ones own mind is working in that way also.
Scientists, however, are still believed to be “objective.” No study in the lives of great scientists will confirm this. They are as passionate, and hence as prejudiced, as any assembly of great painters and great musicians. It was not just the Church but the established astronomers of the time that condemned Galileo. The majority of physicists rejected Einstein’s special relativety theory in 1905. Einstein himself would not except anything in quantumn theory after 1920 no matter how many experiments supported it. Thomas Edison’s commitment to Direct Current (DC) electrical generators led him to insist that alternating current (AC) generators were unsafe for years after their safey had been proven exstensively.
Scientists achieve, or approximate, objectivity not because the individual scientist is immune to the psychological laws that govern the rest of us, but because of the scientific method—a group creation—eventually overides individual prejudices in the long run. To take an example from the 1960s, there was a point when three research groups had “proven” that LSD causes chromosome damage, while three other groups had “proven” that LSD had no effect on chromosomes. In each case, the Prover proved what the Thinker thought. “Truth,” or relative truth, only emerges after decades of experiments by thousands of groups from around the world. In the long run, we are hopefully approximanting closer and closer to “objective truth” over the centuries. In the short run, what the thinker thinks, the prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief.
References
- Wilson, A., Robert. (1983). Prometheus Rising Chapter 1 The Thinker & The Prover (Location 243). Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychology / Philosophy / Epistemology Status:☀️