Friday, November 13, 2009

Dream Weavers

Great chains of causation are milled into fine threads over time and woven into intangible tapestries of meaning by our minds.

While it is not always obvious that causation and correlation are not one and the same, it is even less obvious that correlation did not exist before the mind, and that it will it cease to exist after humans have been erased.

The relationships between the actual threads of causation are created only in our minds. Without the mind, correlation would not exist.

The predisposal of the individual mind to believe in correlation appears to be supported by data recorded by others in a collective society. We write, then repeat history because the misperception that we have sufficiently woven the threads of causation into tapestries of meaning allows us to think we can predict the future.

Acting on the fundamentally false perception that we have successfully woven a tapestry of meaning inevitably leads to what we will eventually claim to be unexpected outcomes, better known as mistakes. Often they are the same ones.

These tapestries of misperception also allow us to pursue that fatally futile activity known as planning. Not so pretentious as prognosticating, planning nevertheless presupposes the hubris necessary to ensure that the outcome of our endeavors will always vary from the prediction.

Even if the plan and the outcome are close enough to allow us to travel to the moon and back, we should never lose sight of the fact that even on our best days, we are just fooling ourselves when we think it all makes sense.

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