Ionia. Ancient Greek settlement. Philosophy. The rise of Western Thought. And, believe it or not, a root of a problem even for you more than two thousand years later.
Almost daily you enter a battle between observation and inculcation. You face on a personal level the problem that ancient Greeks faced: Being the product of a culture that influences how you perceive the world while simultaneously living and observing. It’s a battle for “truth” (or should I say, “Truth”?). From the time of the Ionian philosophers, Western Thought has used the intellectual weapons they provided.
You aren’t the first one engaged in such a battle; practically every thinking person has entered the same battlefield. Initially armed only with the weapons of the past, you—and all others—want to, or wanted to, make sense of the world you experience. In the battle, you think you dodge a bullet while you simultaneously shoot the gun. You impose meaning, accounting for your observations in a manner consistent with the method of thinking you learned.
Look at the history of science. After Apollonius, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy devised a scheme to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies, just about everyone accepted their “science” until Copernicus and Kepler not only questioned their geocentric worldview, but also used some math to overturn a thousand years of belief.
So, here’s a battle plan. Question the Mind’s Eye that sees through the Body’s Eye. If you have an explanation that works, you might be no different from those followers of geocentric thought. The Ptolemaic system accounted for most of what people observed. Eclipses of the moon were accurately predictable, but the cost of that prediction was the absence of an underlying truth and faulty predictions of solar eclipses. The ancients assumed that the planets ran in circles. The Ptolemaic system accounted for “strange” movements by imposing circles on circles, the epicycles as they imagined them: Think of the carnival teacup ride. Each teacup makes its own circle on an orbit about a central axis. And from the adjacent or opposite teacups, the movements seem at times to go backwards, contrary to what you believe is intuitive thought. In reality, the intuition is the product of inculcation. Will you realize, as Kepler did, “Hey, the planets aren’t moving in circular paths at constant speeds as everyone believed and taught. They move on ellipses with speeds that vary with distance from the sun”?
You observe all those about you and apply an inculcated science to explain their behavior. For the most part, the system seems to supply the truth; you judge and predict on the basis of a method you learned. You essentially “shoot an idea gun,” using the bullets you were given by your culture. You hit most of the targets, but then you run into that exception, an eclipse you couldn’t predict. The reason? You follow a system that describes the movements on the basis of an idea. But what to do with that person or group that eclipses your beliefs? How do you explain that person who just doesn’t act as you might predict.
It’s that Ionian problem of trying to explain your observations. Do you rely on what you learned? Do you impose meaning on the world you observe? Or do you find a new way to interpret your observations? You’re constantly taking aim at truth and meaning with an idea gun someone else loaded. Want to win on the battlefield of truth? Empty the chamber of your weapon and reload on the basis of your actual observations. You already know that the inculcated system of belief you inherited can’t account for human variability, for the exceptions, for the “eclipses” that seem unpredictable. You’re not bound to shoot for the truth with only the ideas others have given you.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPiFIejACyg