pardon me, sir

Oct 25, 2004 19:43

I was doing my vocabulary homework and this is what I came upon:

Surrealistic - stressing imagery and the subconscious and sometimes distorting ordinary ideas in order to arrive at artistic truths I'm sorry, but can someone please tell me what the HELL an artistic truth is? Are the personal belief conclusions of artists somehow different from ( Read more... )

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The following is a waste of your time: nltl119 October 26 2004, 01:16:07 UTC
Jeez, Justine, sometimes I think you actually look forward to TOK

Because that essay I had to write last week that I complained about a million billion times was partially about how truth is subjective, and that there is no such thing as absolute truth. One experiment I cited actually proved, using light transmission, that until something is measured, every possible variation of its existence is true at once, even though they all contradict each other. Which one of these possibilities ends up being observed by the measurer is determined by whatever he or she measures for.

This doesn't mean that the truth is dictated by whatever people are looking for, or that we see necessarily what we want to see. But it is, according to the physicists who conducted the experiment, dictated by a usually-inflexible system of rules that the mind of the observer is fundamentally organized on. This has a lot to do with cognitive psychology, which I hate. But the gist of it is that the universe exists the way we see it through our perceptual "windshield"; we control it, not the other way around.

People used to argue that the absolute universe is defined as what God perceives. But what if God doesn't exist?

Plus, how do you know that anything exists beyond what you can immediately sense? A person could cease to be the moment he steps out of your line of vision, or the moment you stop hearing his footsteps - and you wouldn't be able to prove otherwise without detecting his presence, which would prove absolutely nothing.

An abstract artist might see the universe from a different perspective than that of a spectator. What the artist paints is a different painting from what the spectator sees, even though they share the same canvas and pastels. The artist isn't "right" because he created the painting with a certain intention, and the spectator isn't "wrong" because he is in disagreement with the artist. The "artistic truth" of the painter's universe is different from and even contradicts the "ordinary truth" of the layman, yet both are "truths". This is why we categorize them.

The punchline to this joke is that every word of what I just wrote was meaningless BS, which is precisely the reason why I would get an "A" for it in TOK. Theory of Knowledge, much like Livejournal in general, is akin to what sexually frustrated teenage boys do alone with their computers after midnight

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