Do you believe in god or math?

[Categories+Sheaves]

Understanding comes not just from our own crippled viewing point, but also from many others, so that a greater, clearer picture may emerge. I guess this is the essence of the scientific method.

Unfortunately, "understanding" can come from group manipulations, where under pressure, sometimes minor pressure, people will agree they saw something just to "go along".

So our "understanding" will be potentially far better, or worse than our own individual view.

If I drive a tank for the army and I get shot while I'm out taking a piss, does this mean the tank's armor can't stop a bullet?
I mean, when my neighbor says something that I think is false, I should be able to say "no, that's wrong for these reasons" or at least "I disagree, but the reasons for my disagreement aren't immediately relevant right now." The compromises we make concerning our knowledge aren't properties of the knowledge itself, right? If I have an unpopular idea that would really advance the current scientific paradigm... my spinelessness in choosing to withhold the information doesn't have anything to do with the fecundity of my idea, right?

However, you did agree that understanding itself is subjective, and capable of being wrong. Even if we have corrected this viewpoint with as many observation aspects as we can currently find, there is always the chance that the understanding can be invalidated with new observational points. (also the scientific method)

The gaps between what we understand, to what we do not understand are huge, and the greasy little uncertainly in our own subjective position makes it suck a bit more.

Okay. But I was arguing that subjectivity alone doesn't create these gaps. We can have gaps in our understanding because we're unreliable observers, reality seems to be much much more complicated than our descriptions of it, et cetera et cetera.

Hence that thing about subjectively stumbling across some gapless understanding of the world. Or alternatively, if our perception of the world was in some sense objective and completely accurate, we could still fail horribly at understanding what is going on. Even if one exacerbates the other, these two issues are not the same things. None of these teeth are coming from subjectivity. These conclusions are coming from the other things you're throwing into the pot.