we map out the universe for our own use but we sometimes mistake the map for the territory.

There is a belief system behind the process.  It didn’t drop from the sky out of thin air.  The belief system is the product of many human minds over a long period of time.  That doesn’t invalidate it.  But it starts out as a belief system.  When you are in the midst of a belief system, you don’t see it as a belief system.  You simply see it as true.

The belief in the efficacy of the process as indicative as Truth is a belief system.

+Brian Roper I have biases as we all do.  I will state some of mine.  I am skeptical.  Not Greek Skeptic; perhaps more akin to Carl Sagan style Skeptic, although he put his faith in the modern forms of the Aristotlean Logic and Reason, which is fine but not how I roll entirely. Still, as a role model, he’s the closest modern example I can find to my approach towards Truth.

I tend towards Embodied Cognition; we are a combination of minds, bodies, environments and the interplay of it all.  We are products of our Histories, Societies, Cultures.  We have the ability to reason but it is mitigated by the processes of the brain itself; part of reason and logic is powered strongly by emotion.  Without the Amygdala to “push” towards a true or false designation – an emotional push – we would not have effective reasoning powers.

This is why I do not believe in pure reason.  Nor do I believe we can fully discuss ideals without ending up in the environments within which those ideals were born from.

This isn’t negating; again, I don’t buy the “law of excluded middle” where there can be no contradiction.  Of course there can be, and is.  Contradiction is real.  Reality isn’t entirely logical, no matter how much we map it out.

It doesn’t make it not worth trying.. but I believe that context matters for honest discussion to take place.

+Brian Roper I am Kenneth Udut, 42 years old in Naples, Florida USA. I am sitting behind a computer, typing on G+ to a Youtube video comment section, in response to a man named Brian Roper, who wants me to clarify what I’m saying and believes that I am ignoring his definitions of science and religion and instead talking about something unrelated.

Is this accurate?

+Brian Roper And to be more direct, which is rare for me:
I am not ignoring your point.  I am countering with the assertion that the components of a process and their assumptions require a belief system that is used by humans and does not have an existence outside of the humans that use them.  These processes may happen to describe reality from our perspective quite well.  From a pragmatic standpoint, they work.

But I do not belief that effectiveness is necessarily entirely indicative of Truth.  Effective is effective, whatever belief system produces it.  I’m not saying that we “create reality” as it were.  Nothing that drastic.  But rather, we map out the Universe for our own use, but the map is not the territory.  It is a map of the territory.  There are many ways to produce maps.

Some maps are more effective at navigation.  Science provides a very effective map for navigation of the physical world.  Reason, however, I believe to be a less effective method for Truth discovery, as has historical limitations built into it from before we understood what we understand now about the physiology of the creatures that use those concepts.

There.  Nice and short. Thoughts?