Thursday, June 7, 2018

The search for new truths

I know that I have two hands. With a bit of thought, I now know a number of truths that it seems no ordinary person has ever known before:

  • I have two hands or there is a palomino painted green and pink with someone in a Darth Vader costume on its back.

  • I have two hands or the number of pigs born in 1745 is odd.

  • I have two hands or Sir Patrick Stewart will consume a prime number of calories tomorrow.

  • I have two hands or Donald Trump issued a series of anti-Klingon tweets yesterday.

And so on, ad infinitum. The search for new truths is thus really easy. I just need to search for silly propositions that no one has thought about, and disjoin them with something I know.

3 comments:

Heath White said...

Moral: knowledge per se is not valuable.

Alexander R Pruss said...

I think it is valuable. But in some cases only slightly.

(I suspect there is nothing that has zero value: I suspect everything either has positive or negative value. But knowledge, as such, does not have negative value.)

Sean Killackey said...

The search for new knowledge is very easy or my cousin is drawing three dibasours eating a salad while at a fancy gala.