INTERNALLY CONSISTENT "UNTRUTHS"

I started this train of thought with this idea: Buddhism claims that when you meditate, you should sit up straight. This helps the energy systems in your body flow more smoothly, which help you calm down and settles your mind. Now, science, having looked at meditation and its effect on the brain and body, has found that when you sit up straight, it settles the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps settle your mind. Both of these explanations have an action and a result, and they come up with different underlying explanations for how they work. It seems to me it could be possible to come up with two completely different systems for understanding the way the world works that would both be internally consistent but which may not be "true," if you believe in an objective truth.

Think about this, as an exercise: look at all the observable phenomena. Do you believe its possible to design a way of explaining all, or most, that goes on around you that's internally consistent and comes out with the correct effects for a given cause? I say this because any method of explaining the world, be it religion, science, a combination, or something I haven't thought it, is only going to be a useful delusion. It is an internally consistent (or sometimes, inconsistent) way of viewing the world that seems to jib with what's actually happening.

Obviously, the first thing that you have to understand is that we can never TRULY know what's actually happening. The amount of sense data our brains have to process every moment of our lives is overwhelming, and our brains throw out an unbelievably large amount of data in order to compress it all down to something we can understand. For starters, let's look at our eyes:

"Cells in the retina scrap 75 percent of the light which pours in through the lens of the eye... they fiddle with the contrast, tamper with the sense of space, and report not the location of what we're watching, but where the retinal cells calculate it soon will be... Adding insult to injury, the eye crushes the information it's already fuddled, compacting the landslide of data from 125 million neurons down to a code able to squeeze through a cable -- the optic nerve -- a mere 1 million neurons in size. On the way to the brain, the constricted stream stops briefly in the thalamus, where it is mixed, matched and modified with the flow of input from the ears, muscles, fingertips, and even sensors indicating the tilt and trajectory of the head, hands, legs, and torso." (Howard Bloom, The Global Brain, New York: Wiley (2000), p.66.)

What we think we're percieving is an illusion. It is only a small portion of "reality." Any claim to explain what is actually happening will be mediated by our bodies' ability to recieve that information and our minds' ability to process and understand that information. This is why I consider science a "useful delusion": it explains things, gives us ways of organizing and understanding information, but it is, like any other system of explanation, limited by our own inherent ability to actually understand. Buddhism claiming that it allows energy to pass easily down your spine vs. science's explanation of settling the parasympathetic nervous system are just ways of explaining our experience. It doesn't really matter why it happens because either explanation is useful for understanding. Some methods of understanding are more useful than others, but really, all I need to know is when I sit up straight, my mind feels more settled. If I believe anything more and claim its understanding, I'm just deluding myself.