There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “Maybe,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Maybe,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Maybe,” said the farmer.
That only shows how wily the Chinese are about IP theft, building time-viewing technology 2,000 years ago so that they could rip off American pop culture. Especially clever of them to steal things that sound like ancient parables and plant them in ancient times.
That Wikipedia page was created in 2020. Northern Exposure predates that.
Going with the OP's theme: if we repeat the GP's comment enough times, over a long enough period, we can change history and then history would really show it to have originated from the "story "Ed" told in the TV show 'Northern Exposure.'"
Maybe you shouldn't have used "rip off" unless you were absolutely sure that you had the relationship the right way around. And it seems you didn't. There's a lesson to be learned there.
Taoism has its root run back to at least the 4th century BCE, and quite possibly earlier. Even though this specific telling is probably considerably newer, it carries motives that are very common in Taoism in general. Claiming that the story is then a rip-off from a TV show from the 90s is... Well, it's possible, but not very likely.
It reads more like someone wrote it at 17 imagining what it'd be like to cripple someone and have this elaborate 'moment' where all is forgiven because nothing is real.
I think this story is meant to be uplifting to those who are troubled by their past, but to me, I just see all the politicians and grifters looking on hungrily like "Yeaaaaaah?"
Yeah, many corrupt politicians, fascists, murderers and other criminals would love the idea that "the past is not true". I'd bet that the story is fake because of the conclusion "you can change history". Both of them didn't change the history, they have changed their knowledge about history, which was given to them by third parties.
It's not that the past is not true. The past is true, what was reported is not. We know very clearly where the problem lies. The media is a lie. Headlines like "she'll never walk again" sells more than "she'll be fine".
Your statement is only partly true. The article just says "I found out that I broke the other driver’s spine, and she’ll never walk again" - so you're reading into it that he read it in a newspaper, but maybe it was just hearsay from someone who talked to someone who worked at the hospital who had talked to the doctor who may have treated her (or maybe someone else who also had a car accident that day)? I think the vague formulation is intentional to make it apply more widely.
But I agree with the point that it's not "the past" that's at fault here, it's unreliable sources of information.
> It's not that the past is not true. The past is true, what was reported is not.
How do you know the past even exists? All you have is memory and reports, which are unreliable. You can only make the assumption that "the past is true."
> We know very clearly where the problem lies. The media is a lie.
You're understating that. It's not just "the media" boogeyman, it's memory and records that are the problem. They're never complete and always get stuff wrong.
"History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation."
OK, you've discovered post-modernism.
Next step is to avoid its pitfalls.
The actual factual events are infinite and one is exposed to a small subset to interpret. That does not mean you're allowed to make up, distort, and selectively ignore facts to suit whatever narrative you'd like to push. You need to construct the narrative in good faith, based on the best possible set of facts you're exposed to, and adjusting it when you're exposed to new facts.
Unless you want to organize a cult or a totalitarian regime, in which case go as crazy as possible with the narrative. People love it.
History is absolutely true, factually true at that. Facts are sometimes hard to come by, heck some facks of modern history are still classified, but that does not give people carte blanche to make up stuff as they go...
Like yeah, he was in an accident, media misreported it. Thing is so, how comes he, and the women, never knew who was at fault? Insuramce sure did some investigation as did police. Not knowing the facts, and coming to conclusions based on feelings, is the problem. But it doesn't mean history is wrong...
And if he was driving recklessly that fact doesn’t change simply because the other driver also wasn’t paying attention and didn’t blame him for it. Past mistakes are also painful to remember but the best way to deal with them is to acknowledge the reality and then change what you need to in your character to make sure we don’t repeat them.
Is "the reality anyone knows" not also part of greater aggregate reality though (conflicting with reality is true), or is it an ontological component of something else?
To some extent what you’re disagreeing about is linguistics. Is history the actual events that took place or our knowledge of events that took place. And to be honest, there’s also a question of whether there’sa difference because what we don’t know about the past might as will not have happened.
The past is not true . . . but self-help author Derek Sivers is?
Somehow I'm not as convinced as he is that it was a really good thing to break someone's spine years ago because he was a teenager who didn't follow road signs.
I am not a fan of self help stuff, but I think that’s a somewhat uncharitable reading of the article; I don’t think he was implying that it was “good” to break someone’s spine.
I think it was saying that it’s very easy to convince yourself of something much worse than reality. He felt guilty because he thought he ruined a woman’s life forever, he felt immense guilt over that, when in reality the woman mostly recovered, not that it was good the accident happened.
I thought The idea is that a slight misunderstanding of the can have a severe “compound interest rate”.
Manslaughter charges only happen if the driver is drunk or flees. Otherwise it's a traffic ticket AT MOST.
My friend's teenaged son, while biking, was run over by a driver who did it completely intentionally. Zero charges or tickets.
From my link above
>Leah Shahum from the San Francisco Bike Coalition told the New York Times last year that her organization does “not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for DUI or hit-and-run.” Kristin Smith, also of the SF Coalition, says that “Last year, four people were hit and killed in San Francisco and no charges were ever brought,” including for a collision captured on video that showed the driver was at fault.
>But if the public is at a loss, so are prosecutors. Portland, Oregon, attorney Ray Thomas explains that DAs don’t like to go after “some soccer dad who made a mistake… The police, prosecutors, and courts don’t feel it’s a mistake that should net someone jail time… There are criminally negligent homicide laws. But [a crash] has got to be really, really bad.”
Well, accidents do happen, don't they? Thing is so, if one party was reckless it amounts, usually, to some charges of hurting / injuring someone.
But you show nicely the differemce between history / facts (number of accidents from official statistics matched against charges and results of analysis of each accident) and feelings / story / narrative (someone says something to a journalists who then reports on it).
Ok, this article shocked me more than the post this thread is about. What has manslaughter have to do with whether you are drunk or not? Does that make the person you killed any less dead? Is this a consequence of DAs being elected officials in most of the US? So, as long as there are more drivers who could see themselves in this situation than cyclists who could get mad about this in the electorate, drivers killing cyclists will be off the hook?
The definition of vehicular manslaughter is unlawful or negligent operation of a vehicle resulting in a death. If the driver was not driving unlawfully, such as DUI, then it is not manslaughter. Fleeing the scene of an accident is unlawful so that also makes it meet the definition. Other reasons could include speeding or running a red light.
That still leaves us with the second part - "...or negligent". I find it a bit hard to believe that in all those cases the cyclists were at fault? Unless you consider that they were already acting recklessly because they tried to use a bicycle on a public street (I know a lot of people subscribe to this opinion, but I don't).
I don't want to be too insistent, but: if you get hit by lightning or a falling rock while cycling or driving along, that's no-ones fault. But as long as two vehicles are involved, there is a set of well-defined rules that are designed to make sure that these vehicles don't collide, and if they do collide, in the overwhelming majority of cases one (or both) of the parties involved has failed to follow these rules, i.e. negligence.
> What makes Cann’s story notable among the 700 or so bicyclists who are hit and killed in America each year is that San Hamel faces charges in Cann’s death.
In the end he got 10 days in jail, 4 years probation, and had to pay the cyclist's funeral expenses - for plowing him over from behind while driving home drunk from a bar.
So apparently even if you hit someone while DUI nothing really happens.
Look at it this way, officers see car accidents every day. The majority are cases where someone ran directly into the car in front of them due to inattention.
Humans make a lot of mistakes and unless there were extenuating factors (DUI, for example), they are very unlikely to become criminal. In many cases, they wouldn't even be ticketed.
Given that there was a yield sign involved, it also may be a known problematic intersection. Sadly, we have a lot of those in the US too. Yield signs in places with low traffic and poor visibility are way more common than they should be.
That's very surprising to me. Here in the UK, a serious accident where someone broke their spine would be investigated without a shadow of a doubt. They would want to rule out any criminal culpability.
Yeah, the US in general is extremely cavalier with our car culture. Usually the only police involvement when an accident occurs is when they're called to the scene to take a report of the incident. Afterwards, the parties usually just deal with the aftermath themselves and through insurance companies.
Even if you have to show up to court, people almost always walk away after pleading "not guilty," because again, the officer who reported the incident can rarely be bothered to show up on the court date.
It's really just another example of cops in the US choosing to not do their job. We have plenty of laws on the books that could punish inattentive or reckless driving especially when it results in a severe outcome, but that would require a cop to open an investigation and all that noise so they just write up a report for your insurance and try to get you to believe there's nothing else they can do.
The complete inefficacy and refusal to do any work of most american police departments is absurd. It's like they still believe their primary mission to be slave retrieval and violently suppressing strikes, as if it's still 1890.
In some states in the US, if one party was even 1% at fault (like, for example, being distracted like in the story), they may not even be able to collect damages from the other party.
Then he should be more careful in public spaces and around other people, shouldn't he? Assuming it is true, that is, otherwise he should switch to fiction books.
Backing up your point by making up a bullshit story is called "lying" and "disinformation" and should be rejected outright by anyone who wants a high trust society. We should not build policy, intentions, or any ideologies based on a single lie from some dude trying to push a "nobody is ever guilty of anything" agenda.
This post adds nothing to the world, especially with the horrific conclusion it is encouraging you to accept. "The past is not real" is utter horseshit, and does not follow from "I did something I thought was really bad but was only kinda bad actually" in the first place.
Had the same feeling. The man is a writer after all and he has just way too many stories at this point that I'm wondering if they're all true or if he's just using made up stories as a tool to convey messages.
What point? That this person is saying "I believed I did a bad thing and it turned out to be wrong so I exclaim that there is no objective reality and you shouldn't beat yourself up over bad things you think you did because maybe they weren't really that bad"?
Come on, this fails even basic logic. One event being misremembered is not valid proof that all or even many events are misremembered to your advantage.
Thanks for sharing what you found there! I don't know, I get if you take that from it, but it just seems a narrow interpretation. And there's a wider view, that's a very useful one, that I think you've missed too.
> , but it just seems a narrow interpretation. And there's a wider view, that's a very useful one, that I think you've missed too.
This is why I didn’t elaborate in a follow-up reply. I knew I was going to get a reiteration of the first reply (“wider view”, who the hell knows what that means).
So the reason you didn't reply is because you knew what other people were going to say if you did? Why would that stop you? Because you felt misunderstood?
What if people understand you, but just think there's more than one way to read it? Do you really think the only way to read that story is the way you did?
Do you know the concept of space-time, block universe, B-theory of time, etc? How physics assumes that the laws of physics don't know the notion of "now"? And how physicists usually start every calculation with "let X denote the set of events", all the past and future events?
Isn't that depressing? The future is true, even if we can't know it. (Even in a finite, discrete and deterministic universe, which we can compute on computers, habitants of the universe can't know the future. A software can't compute its future. A similar reasoning to the halting problem can show this.)
May I interest you in an other view? Slice Universe to the rescue! There is only now, and the now is true. There is matter, in a particular, ever changing spatial configuration. In 3d. The now is true, also it changes. Only the real people, made out of matter can experience things, simulated people, or the people that are not even simulated don't have real experiences. The past is not true, but we have some information about it, what the past can possibly be. So is the future, it is not true, but we have some information about it. There is no ontological or qualitative difference between the past and the future, only quantitative (which comes from the ridiculous amount of negentropy at the beginning of our universe).
It sounds similar to (but possibly different from since I never heard the term "slice universe") the theory of presentism in the philosophy of time.
That's the view that all that exists is the present. What we call the past is what used to be present and what we call the future is what one day will be present, but neither the past or future exist so long as they are not the present.
Nah, if we allow virtual experiences, than any model naturally becomes the block universe.
I believe, that question of experience is still unsolved. Why do we seem to live in a world made of matter and governed by physics? Is it the same for people that are simulated in a computer? Is it the same for people that are not simulated by a computer (because it is plugged out)? How do they perceive if the data is mangled? Etc. BTW the block universe also needs to solve this problem. But in order to not to be in a block universe, we need the answer that being material based is different than being simulated on a material based simulator, or not even being simulated, just the possibility of it.
@sobellian: relativity doesn't need the block universe. It works perfectly fine if people just get shorter when they speed up. Then the simultaneity of events in a frame is not the same as being in a slice.
I mean, relativity already means everything depends on location, so this should just fit right in, right? The contents of your “slice” are from right now at your location, from 20 years ago at locations 20ly from you, 30 years ago at 30ly, etc. We literally can’t know what’s happening at any time other than 20 years ago at locations 20ly from us, after all. So I’d say this jives well with the various “curves” relativity implies exist in spacetime. (Note: I am not a physicist so I’m happy to learn why/if I’m wrong here!)
How do you think this conceptual model fits at the subatomic scale; everything being a warping of fields? At first glance I can't tell if it works because there is no such thing as a slice at the quantum level. Well, depending on which theoretical model you're looking at. I suppose either way it's might be considered true if mathematically we're talking about the properties of a particle. But even then no one alive today can say for certain why those properties exist, conclusively I mean, outside of theory. We barely have a grasp on the manor in which they exist, which is the theory. For example, based on what we know about the proposed axion particle, how does this slicing concept affect the nature of it warping spacetime? Bringing something new to the table there would be quite the accomplishment here!
This is interesting! What do you make of retrocausal effects in "image exposure" experiments, and other psi related phenomena. I'm curious if you have ideas for a physical theory that speaks to precognition and remove viewing?
We live in a set of time slices that we are able to control through the choices that we make as we slide through the deck. The past is done and locked up, carved in stone and can be recalled with high fidelity if we choose to dwell there. The future is always in your face - another decision to make, lives to influence, bullets to dodge - all presented as you color the current time slice with the events your choices allow. Choices are filters on possible paths for your future, some can be looped many times while others permanently exclude specific outcomes. As we color the time slice we can know parts of the future by understanding consequences of the choices we are making though we can't know it will all fit far into the future. The past is left as an exercise in recollection to serve up reminders of all the unpleasant loops we threw in our life path and most importantly, to help us choose a better, more productive path when we find ourselves at a similar node in the future.
"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins." - Nietzsche
I think the article is sending a pretty problematic overall message.
The underlying story is somewhat interesting. The author went through life with a lot of unnecessary guilt and suffering because he was carrying around a false narrative, and it is true that false narratives happen. But the larger conclusion he tries to draw from it seems really problematic:
>History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation.
But this is NOT the moral of the story in my view. The moral is that one can have an erroneous belief about what happened, and THAT can cause a lot of problems. The author even experienced feeling better when he learned what ACTUALLY happened, not when he decided on a new interpretation of events. Because his original belief about the event was NOT an interpretation of events, it was an erroneous belief about what the events were.
And in fact, in the anecdote, learning the "factual events" was everything.
In general, I struggle with the idea that calling something that's just factually wrong "an interpretation". That seems to stretch the word "interpretation" to the point where it stops being useful. If I am convinced that Napoleon was, in fact, a black man, do we really want to call that an "interpretation of events". What events am I interpreting? None, I would argue. I'm just making things up. Just like someone made up that the woman in the story broke her spine. It just never happened. It's not an interpretation of anything.
I think the point is that interpretation is all we really have. We believe that memories are these absolute things, but rigorous studies show that no human being remembers things perfectly, even when they believe they do.
For many years as a kid, I knew Santa Claus was real because I had seen him come to my house. My faith was unshakable, because I had observed it with my own eyes. Years later, I found out that on Christmas morning. My dad had left the room changed into the Santa outfit, snuck outside and came to the back door to surprise me with my mom. I was too young to realize that my dad had snuck away and wasn’t there at the same time as Santa.
If we could look back in time and see things just as they were I think it would be disconcerting how many little details we remember wrong that our mind fills in, without us realizing it.
Yes, I agree that “interpretation is all we have” is the point they are trying to make. I also agree that there is an important point there. Memories are often not what we think they are.
However, in the story, the author did NOT have a memory of breaking a woman’s back. He had a memory of getting in an accident. He interpreted it as his fault. He was told that he broke her back. Not his interpretation. It was a belief about events that he wasn’t present to (what happened in the woman’s car and inside the woman’s body) not really any different than anything else we’re told but don’t witness firsthand. It sounds like it may even have been a lie the police told him to scare him.
Your story is different because you did have an actual experience and misinterpreted it’s meaning (man in red suit = real Santa Claus).
I am not sure that differentiating between "that which I physically sensed with my own body" and "information I received from others" leads to particularly good place. Yes, we should probably put a little more weight on things we experienced, but even they are subject to massive differences of interpretation based on prior experience and knowledge. Humanity has made enormous strides by being able to believe in information we obtained from others, and discarding that is something I am convinced does not lead to positive outcomes.
I acknowledge that not discarding it can also lead to negative outcomes, as in TFA.
I agree with this point. I hadn't meant to suggest that we should discard information received from others.
But I think it would be crazy to not to differentiate between immediate experience and what we've been told. Not even because immediate experience is always more accurate. Sometimes it is NOT, but it's a different source of information subject to different problems. Often more trustworthy but not always, though the "not always" can be ameliorated a bit by understanding some of the limits of personal experience.
I was really only taking issue with "interpretation is all we have" applying in the original story - that there is a difference between "my interpretation about something I experienced" and "my beliefs about a thing I did not experience".
Yes the author's story changed, but it changed because he found out that he was lied to by the police (or perhaps, if we want to be generous, "unintentionally misled") not because his memory was fallible.
To get back to the point I took issue with, in the story "the facts" mattered an awful lot. It was a lack of access to the facts that caused the problem not "an incorrect interpretation" of what the author experienced. The latter happens all the time, but interpreting our experience differently (e.g., reprocessing a traumatic memory with self-compassion and seeing it as unfortunate and something to learn from) is a different thing than finding out what we were told was a lie. Both change our story, but one is indeed a reinterpretation and the other is a change in belief or knowledge.
I think it's important to separate those two things. I think some want to treat them as the same. I think that can cause problems.
I am impressed with the clarity of your thinking on this. Since you value epistemological hygiene, you might like Ayn Rand's work in metaphysics and epistemology.
As a parent-governor, the headmaster shanghai'ed me into performing as Father Christmas; I had to put on the costume, and go round all the classrooms going "ho ho ho".
When I got to my daughter's classroom, she didn't recognize me. But some other kids did; they told her "That's your Dad!". She was mortified, and burst into tears.
I always despised the Father Christmas lie, and I should have refused; but the headmaster was very dominant and manipulative.
This story made me realize a common pattern. A story in your life may lead to an insight. This does not mean the series of events make a good argument, like the conclusion is supported by the events that lead up to it.
I think that’s what happened here. Author carries guilt about an event. Finds out the guilt was unfounded. This makes them realize a story can change at any moment. So you can change a story at any moment, change the narrative around a situation.
Is this conclusion supported by the story? To your point, no, not really. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong or absurd, either. There may have been a ton of other information in the author’s head and this event unlocked it. Maybe it will for some readers, to. But it’s not something that will stand up to scrutiny.
He's saying what happened, happened. What you make it mean, is up to you. The story you tell yourself, is a story you can rewrite.
This beautiful story is one of the truest things I've read on HN in 8 years.
This guy lived crippled by what the story he told himself about what happened for half his life. Then with a new story, a new encounter, he set himself free. Incredibly brave to tell this tale. Some people live in their story about something for their whole lives. They never do rewrite what they make it mean into one that works better for them. People live imprisoned by things that happened 40 years in the past. It's so sad to see, but so common.
It's true that you can revisit the trauma of the past, and transform it and yourself. It will probably sound like woo, but it's not. Lots of protocols now being tested in studies that combine guided traumatic memory replay, with an adjuvant, like inderol (to create emotional distance), or psylocybin (to help shift perspective), all with the goal of producing a transformative reorientation of your relationship to the past trauma. Powerful stuff. "Plant medicine" retreats run in the Caribbean, the Netherlands, and Central America (iboga, ayahuasca) have similar aims: re-experiencing the traumatic memory through an altered state aids you in rewriting your story about it, and helps you get new liberating perspective and transform what you make what happened mean for you.
If you think you suffer from that kind of traumatic memory, you probably already know what I'm talking about. If not, I encourage you to investigate it for yourself. :)
Just wanted to add that you don't need external chemicals to do this sort of thing. It's pretty easy to learn to enter trance at will and then do things like, e.g. "Parental Timeline Re-imprinting" where you go back in time, give your parents resources to be better, then live forward a whole new life with the new, resourceful parents. Afterward your nervous system will respond as if the fictional, imaginary life was real. (The brain is an evolved organ, it always chooses the best available options. There isn't really any free will, because evolution.) Of course, this only really helps if lousy parenting was a source of your current problems.
But external chemicals may help some people (some people may be in a state where it's really hard for them to learn what may come a lot easier to folks like me and you~~not everyone is good at navigating their own internal terrain).
Just like you don't need a therapist to guide you, but everyone has different capabilities to do so themselves, and therapist can benefit. I know how to do this, sounds like you know too, even folks like us who know how to do it themselves, I think should be open to the experience of being guided by someone else to see what it's like.
This re-timelining can be used for many things. And it's not fiction. Your body makes it real, and it's more real than that, too.
I think chemistry helps, it's not strictly necessary, but there's a whole lot of psych (placebo etc), and structural (makes more sense as a therapy / economic activity in that industry to combine with an agent, probably lead to that therapy getting more traction and helping more people), and real (chemistry clearly helps, ancients have been using it) reasons that make the combination therapy of chemistry plus therapist a really good option to be generally available! :)
I am not with you on there's no free will. There's definitely free will. (and it can be a cope to pretend there's not, I think, because it gets you out of personal responsibility, a thing lots of folks have an issue with!). Because it's a choice. I mean, there's even a choice to rewrite your story in the ways we're talking about. That's clearly free will, to you, right?
> The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation.
This is why it is important to forgive your parents. They interpret events differently and it usually isn’t until you become a parent yourself do you develop enough empathy to see how those interpretations came to be.
Oof, as a psychologist that deals a lot with people who were abused and mistreated, this is a pretty big generalization.
Yes, as we age we come to see things from a more experienced perspective and the perspectives of the adults we grew up with and change, but going all the way to "that is why it is important to forgive your parents" is a big big step.
It is typically a good idea to try to get to forgiveness, you're right, but there's a lot of very indefensible behavior out there.
You may have a skewed view of the frequency of that level of abuse, due to the (very important) work you do. When it comes to humans there are exceptions to every rule, but not every single exception needs be called out. Not everything is “problematic” nor worth an “oof”.
It’s simply an example, though a somewhat extreme one, of the problem with the GP’s generalization.
I think it actually relates to the original article. There’s a difference between mere interpretation and what actually happened.
“You should forgive your parents, because one day you’ll be older and see their perspective” collapses “interpretations develop and mature” with “some events are a problem”.
Both can be forgiven and it’s probably a good idea to do so. I think it’s not helpful to generalize in that way.
Also abuse happens a lot. It may not be the majority but it is NOT rare.
Thank you. This is important to say, seriously. This kind of "pop psych" notion that you should just "forgive your parents" even if they abused you, definitely is retraumatizing and works to try diminish the impact of the abuse and your feelings about it. Which shouldn't be minimized, but processed, I think. Especially because, it seems a lot of times, people coming from that situation don't see how fucked up it was, because it was their only experience, and until they see how good parents behave they don't realize how poorly they were mistreated. I think this is why it's important to face it, and process it, rather than never understand or just "forgive".
BTW~~what kind of psychological process, thought do people you treat go through when they forgive really abusive people or behavior, people that meant to hurt them, with malice? How does forgiveness look like for the person going choosing it and what are the effects? Sorry, it's a big question! No probs if you don't want to or can't answer it! :)
Thanks for saying this. It's really heartening to see people with this understanding.
So typically there's a lot of exposure, facilitation, and processing work FIRST. There's not really a route to forgiveness in my opinion until someone is pretty deeply in touch with all the feelings associated with how they were treated. I take a mindful self-compassion approach to experiencing and reprocessing memories and emotions drawing a lot from Paul Gilbert, a self-compassion researcher and advocate in the UK.
Once a lot of the feelings have been processed, including anger and resentment, we often get to a point where the anger doesn't seem to serve much purpose for the person anymore. It's not covering up something they didn't want to feel (guilt, shame, sadness, fear, etc) and it's not "punishing their parents" in a way that many people hold on to. More often than not, the client just spontaneously forgives at that point, and forgiveness looks like seeing the situation as a bad one that everyone involved was stuck in and no longer having a need for the perpetrator to suffer or take responsibility.
So acceptance and compassion then processing and reprocessing with self-compassion. Sometimes a discussion of blame and forgiveness and what they do and don't mean.
We have statistics and they are not pretty. The CDC reports that 1 out of every 7 children have experienced child abuse or neglect in the last year. That doesn't even include stuff that technically isn't abuse or neglect but rather just damaging parenting: Plenty of kids had their parents impress upon them some personal neurosis out of their own traumatized problems, and now you start another cycle of that person causing issues in their kids unless they get help for that or find ways to avoid it.
I would consider one out of seven to be "problematic" and "oof" worthy
Yep, flaws I saw in how my parents brought me up definitely informed the way I approached bringing up my kids. But then I look at the childhoods my parents had, and honestly they did a heck of a lot better job than I could have had any right to expect. So I think overall I did pretty well, with lessons to learn for sure, but it's only fair to think of it as an iterative process.
I've had the opposite experience where as I've grown older and had kids of my own, I've began to judge my parent's even more harshly than I had when I was younger.
That sounds as understanding, not forgiving. I think that when it comes to parents, understanding makes forgiving unnecessary, as there is actually nothing to forgive. Except for the cases of actual, malicious abuse, of course.
The conclusion to this article should have been: it's important to study the past, and find out what the truth is. Memory is fallible, and people often misunderstand or lie. But by investigating -- going to more people, consulting more sources, you can get closer to knowing what really happened.
Finding and preserving the truth about the past is more important than ever. Truth is under attack from all sides, with politicians moving the Overton window on lying, LLMs, the decline of centralized news, fake reviews and comment farms.
If the author meant to say "History is often wrong and surprisingly easy to set right with a bit of investigation," great, but "The past is not true" is an absurd and harmful statement. How would you feel if I hit you with my car and ran, or tried to overturn an election and then said "I'm not guilty because the past is not true"?
The question is what you really believe to be true. If your car hit me and you truly didn’t remember it that way then you are proving the author’s point.
Maybe you do remember hitting me. There will still be innumerable questions that you couldn’t answer because they were out of your perception in the moment. What if it turns out that in hitting me you stopped me from running over an old lady.
Whether or not you learn of that detail will have a big effect on how you remember the accident.
Right. The past is true, but your memories are flawed, and your experience is incomplete. You have to make an effort to get the facts right. To get a full understanding of any situation, a good start is to talk to anyone you can who was there when it happened.
The tricky part is: that's also often a good way to get a misunderstanding.
Above you say "tried to overturn an election" - I'm not sure who it is you are referring to here, but that charge was laid at the feet of thousands of January 6th protesters by thousands of journalists and armchair experts, few of whom even ever considered if that was the actual intent of the people.
People often don't wonder what is true, because they are not able to even try.
I love HN but, let's be honest, we are often tone-deaf. Very much.
When the author writes "the past is not true", he's not trying to make a Physics or Epistemology point of any kind.
He's just telling that we torture and limit ourselves with things that no longer matter or, in this case, never happened. The anecdote might not be what you wanted to read or what would have fit the "message" best, but real world stories seldom do.
Let me ask you something: do you have something in your past that's holding you back?
Then his example is so garbage as to be worthless. He DID DO SOMETHING OBJECTIVELY BAD by driving recklessly and harming someone else. It doesn't matter after that point what narrative is spun by who, that reality happened. You don't get to absolve yourself of guilt by pretending actually it usually ends up better than you remember"
There's certainly a lot of baggage carried by almost everyone almost all the time. We spend a big chunk of our lives worrying that X thing will happen, and another big chunk of our lives worrying that Y thing did happen.
And yet we only ever live in now, so the baggage that we carry can be adapted. For some of this - eg in the case of trauma - it's severe, and difficult, and requires lots of working through with therapy and drugs etc, and sometimes you just can't escape the fear or the past. But sometimes if you spend time examining what the fear or regret or guilt or whatever actually is, what it actually feels like, you can come to understand it much better - and it is possible to make peace with these feelings.
MBSR / meditation / psychedelics / etc are all about providing new forms of perspective to help manage and come to understand these different angles.
Anytime some even vaguely anti-realist claim shows up in a HN headline, such as "the past is not true", a bunch of predictable and dull comments inevitably show up to perform some table thumping about reality being factual and objective, likely paired with some sanctimonious moral panic about the dangers of relativism (normally with a political slant one way or another).
I think these comments are sincere and well-intentioned in their concern for the truth, but I also think that they speak to the impoverished state of anything like public philosophical discourse today. Lest I waste too much time and emotional energy on an internet comment, I'll wrap up by stating my endorsement of the seemingly forgotten, and distinctly American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. It is a picture in which truth and falsity exists, but being products of inquiry, experience, adversarial disagreement, and experiment, remain permanently open to revision. The pragmatist statement of the author's (fine) thesis might be "the past is never finished", since the past exists and is real, but our discoveries, experiences, interests, etc. in the future might demand a revision or reinterpretation of it.
This touches on Narrative Therapy. Events happened, yes. Facts are immutable and can't be changed or wished away simply because they are inconvenient.
Rather, how we make sense of them—and internalize them—affects our lives in significant ways, especially if the prevaling narrative we believe about ourselves prevents us from thriving.
Similar message, among many other valuable bits, in the book The Courage to be Disliked. Very good read, no fluff like a lot of psychology books. The title is misleading, there’s a strong element of being helpful to others rather than being disliked. I’d recommend it to anyone.
I've read this book and many others like it. I completely agree with your assessment. I felt really good when I read this book and others. But afterwards I go back to feeling bad about myself as always
This is quite profound. Consider a sentence. Every additional word has the ability to completely change the meaning of the whole sentence. In the same way, every passing moment is an opportunity to completely change the preceding moments. Sure facts are “real” in the sense that atoms are real. Atoms might be the building blocks of “reality” but it is up to the individual how clusters of atoms are interpreted, used, etc. Facts in the same way are surely the building blocks for the universe of emotion and dynamic interaction, but when you zoom in on them, as with atoms, they vanish. Even if this woman had answered the door in a wheelchair, an interaction filled with love and forgiveness would’ve left the author with the same feeling.
360 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadSo, the past isn’t true until it is and then, maybe, it’s even worse.
Not sure what to make of this story.
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “Maybe,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Maybe,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Maybe,” said the farmer.
It features a panda named Stillwater who tells this story (among others) in it.
It's a retelling of the Tao Te Ching into plain English, using parent/child relationships to make the points.
I recommend this both to parents, and to children. Which is all of us. We never stop being children of our parents.
I don't have children, nor do I plan to, yet this is one of the most powerful books I've read.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse
> [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse
That Wikipedia page was created in 2020. Northern Exposure predates that.
Going with the OP's theme: if we repeat the GP's comment enough times, over a long enough period, we can change history and then history would really show it to have originated from the "story "Ed" told in the TV show 'Northern Exposure.'"
But I agree with the point that it's not "the past" that's at fault here, it's unreliable sources of information.
How do you know the past even exists? All you have is memory and reports, which are unreliable. You can only make the assumption that "the past is true."
> We know very clearly where the problem lies. The media is a lie.
You're understating that. It's not just "the media" boogeyman, it's memory and records that are the problem. They're never complete and always get stuff wrong.
OK, you've discovered post-modernism.
Next step is to avoid its pitfalls.
The actual factual events are infinite and one is exposed to a small subset to interpret. That does not mean you're allowed to make up, distort, and selectively ignore facts to suit whatever narrative you'd like to push. You need to construct the narrative in good faith, based on the best possible set of facts you're exposed to, and adjusting it when you're exposed to new facts.
Unless you want to organize a cult or a totalitarian regime, in which case go as crazy as possible with the narrative. People love it.
Like yeah, he was in an accident, media misreported it. Thing is so, how comes he, and the women, never knew who was at fault? Insuramce sure did some investigation as did police. Not knowing the facts, and coming to conclusions based on feelings, is the problem. But it doesn't mean history is wrong...
Somehow I'm not as convinced as he is that it was a really good thing to break someone's spine years ago because he was a teenager who didn't follow road signs.
I think it was saying that it’s very easy to convince yourself of something much worse than reality. He felt guilty because he thought he ruined a woman’s life forever, he felt immense guilt over that, when in reality the woman mostly recovered, not that it was good the accident happened.
I thought The idea is that a slight misunderstanding of the can have a severe “compound interest rate”.
I’m not sure how this misunderstanding could occur for so many years.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/9bzdpv/you-can-kill-anyone-y...
My friend's teenaged son, while biking, was run over by a driver who did it completely intentionally. Zero charges or tickets.
From my link above
>Leah Shahum from the San Francisco Bike Coalition told the New York Times last year that her organization does “not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for DUI or hit-and-run.” Kristin Smith, also of the SF Coalition, says that “Last year, four people were hit and killed in San Francisco and no charges were ever brought,” including for a collision captured on video that showed the driver was at fault.
>But if the public is at a loss, so are prosecutors. Portland, Oregon, attorney Ray Thomas explains that DAs don’t like to go after “some soccer dad who made a mistake… The police, prosecutors, and courts don’t feel it’s a mistake that should net someone jail time… There are criminally negligent homicide laws. But [a crash] has got to be really, really bad.”
But you show nicely the differemce between history / facts (number of accidents from official statistics matched against charges and results of analysis of each accident) and feelings / story / narrative (someone says something to a journalists who then reports on it).
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/vehicular_manslaughter
In the end he got 10 days in jail, 4 years probation, and had to pay the cyclist's funeral expenses - for plowing him over from behind while driving home drunk from a bar.
So apparently even if you hit someone while DUI nothing really happens.
It's appalling.
Humans make a lot of mistakes and unless there were extenuating factors (DUI, for example), they are very unlikely to become criminal. In many cases, they wouldn't even be ticketed.
Given that there was a yield sign involved, it also may be a known problematic intersection. Sadly, we have a lot of those in the US too. Yield signs in places with low traffic and poor visibility are way more common than they should be.
Even if you have to show up to court, people almost always walk away after pleading "not guilty," because again, the officer who reported the incident can rarely be bothered to show up on the court date.
It's a huge contrast between the US and European approach though.
The complete inefficacy and refusal to do any work of most american police departments is absurd. It's like they still believe their primary mission to be slave retrieval and violently suppressing strikes, as if it's still 1890.
Our system is really weird.
This post adds nothing to the world, especially with the horrific conclusion it is encouraging you to accept. "The past is not real" is utter horseshit, and does not follow from "I did something I thought was really bad but was only kinda bad actually" in the first place.
But, maybe I'm the one missing your view here--could you explain more what you mean specifically?
What method did you use to determine this is comprehensively true, in fact, rather than simply intuition?
Come on, this fails even basic logic. One event being misremembered is not valid proof that all or even many events are misremembered to your advantage.
This is why I didn’t elaborate in a follow-up reply. I knew I was going to get a reiteration of the first reply (“wider view”, who the hell knows what that means).
What if people understand you, but just think there's more than one way to read it? Do you really think the only way to read that story is the way you did?
Isn't that depressing? The future is true, even if we can't know it. (Even in a finite, discrete and deterministic universe, which we can compute on computers, habitants of the universe can't know the future. A software can't compute its future. A similar reasoning to the halting problem can show this.)
May I interest you in an other view? Slice Universe to the rescue! There is only now, and the now is true. There is matter, in a particular, ever changing spatial configuration. In 3d. The now is true, also it changes. Only the real people, made out of matter can experience things, simulated people, or the people that are not even simulated don't have real experiences. The past is not true, but we have some information about it, what the past can possibly be. So is the future, it is not true, but we have some information about it. There is no ontological or qualitative difference between the past and the future, only quantitative (which comes from the ridiculous amount of negentropy at the beginning of our universe).
That's the view that all that exists is the present. What we call the past is what used to be present and what we call the future is what one day will be present, but neither the past or future exist so long as they are not the present.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presentism/
No? Why would it be?
Nah, if we allow virtual experiences, than any model naturally becomes the block universe.
I believe, that question of experience is still unsolved. Why do we seem to live in a world made of matter and governed by physics? Is it the same for people that are simulated in a computer? Is it the same for people that are not simulated by a computer (because it is plugged out)? How do they perceive if the data is mangled? Etc. BTW the block universe also needs to solve this problem. But in order to not to be in a block universe, we need the answer that being material based is different than being simulated on a material based simulator, or not even being simulated, just the possibility of it.
@sobellian: relativity doesn't need the block universe. It works perfectly fine if people just get shorter when they speed up. Then the simultaneity of events in a frame is not the same as being in a slice.
edit: typo
- https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/psp-a0021524.pdf (original experiments)
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4706048/ (replications review)
- https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... (review of related evidence)
Here's something more far out I just found trying to connect physical theories to some of this: https://old.hessdalen.org/sse/program/Antonella.pdf
Some related light discussion of similar issues and intersection of physics and consciousness: https://quantumphysics-consciousness.eu/index.php/en/2022/06...
And a few other ones:
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4141237/ (review of many experiments)
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.6584.pdf (discussion of possibly physics)
The underlying story is somewhat interesting. The author went through life with a lot of unnecessary guilt and suffering because he was carrying around a false narrative, and it is true that false narratives happen. But the larger conclusion he tries to draw from it seems really problematic:
>History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation.
But this is NOT the moral of the story in my view. The moral is that one can have an erroneous belief about what happened, and THAT can cause a lot of problems. The author even experienced feeling better when he learned what ACTUALLY happened, not when he decided on a new interpretation of events. Because his original belief about the event was NOT an interpretation of events, it was an erroneous belief about what the events were.
And in fact, in the anecdote, learning the "factual events" was everything.
In general, I struggle with the idea that calling something that's just factually wrong "an interpretation". That seems to stretch the word "interpretation" to the point where it stops being useful. If I am convinced that Napoleon was, in fact, a black man, do we really want to call that an "interpretation of events". What events am I interpreting? None, I would argue. I'm just making things up. Just like someone made up that the woman in the story broke her spine. It just never happened. It's not an interpretation of anything.
For many years as a kid, I knew Santa Claus was real because I had seen him come to my house. My faith was unshakable, because I had observed it with my own eyes. Years later, I found out that on Christmas morning. My dad had left the room changed into the Santa outfit, snuck outside and came to the back door to surprise me with my mom. I was too young to realize that my dad had snuck away and wasn’t there at the same time as Santa.
If we could look back in time and see things just as they were I think it would be disconcerting how many little details we remember wrong that our mind fills in, without us realizing it.
However, in the story, the author did NOT have a memory of breaking a woman’s back. He had a memory of getting in an accident. He interpreted it as his fault. He was told that he broke her back. Not his interpretation. It was a belief about events that he wasn’t present to (what happened in the woman’s car and inside the woman’s body) not really any different than anything else we’re told but don’t witness firsthand. It sounds like it may even have been a lie the police told him to scare him.
Your story is different because you did have an actual experience and misinterpreted it’s meaning (man in red suit = real Santa Claus).
I acknowledge that not discarding it can also lead to negative outcomes, as in TFA.
But I think it would be crazy to not to differentiate between immediate experience and what we've been told. Not even because immediate experience is always more accurate. Sometimes it is NOT, but it's a different source of information subject to different problems. Often more trustworthy but not always, though the "not always" can be ameliorated a bit by understanding some of the limits of personal experience.
I was really only taking issue with "interpretation is all we have" applying in the original story - that there is a difference between "my interpretation about something I experienced" and "my beliefs about a thing I did not experience".
Yes the author's story changed, but it changed because he found out that he was lied to by the police (or perhaps, if we want to be generous, "unintentionally misled") not because his memory was fallible.
To get back to the point I took issue with, in the story "the facts" mattered an awful lot. It was a lack of access to the facts that caused the problem not "an incorrect interpretation" of what the author experienced. The latter happens all the time, but interpreting our experience differently (e.g., reprocessing a traumatic memory with self-compassion and seeing it as unfortunate and something to learn from) is a different thing than finding out what we were told was a lie. Both change our story, but one is indeed a reinterpretation and the other is a change in belief or knowledge.
I think it's important to separate those two things. I think some want to treat them as the same. I think that can cause problems.
When I got to my daughter's classroom, she didn't recognize me. But some other kids did; they told her "That's your Dad!". She was mortified, and burst into tears.
I always despised the Father Christmas lie, and I should have refused; but the headmaster was very dominant and manipulative.
I think that’s what happened here. Author carries guilt about an event. Finds out the guilt was unfounded. This makes them realize a story can change at any moment. So you can change a story at any moment, change the narrative around a situation.
Is this conclusion supported by the story? To your point, no, not really. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong or absurd, either. There may have been a ton of other information in the author’s head and this event unlocked it. Maybe it will for some readers, to. But it’s not something that will stand up to scrutiny.
This beautiful story is one of the truest things I've read on HN in 8 years.
This guy lived crippled by what the story he told himself about what happened for half his life. Then with a new story, a new encounter, he set himself free. Incredibly brave to tell this tale. Some people live in their story about something for their whole lives. They never do rewrite what they make it mean into one that works better for them. People live imprisoned by things that happened 40 years in the past. It's so sad to see, but so common.
It's true that you can revisit the trauma of the past, and transform it and yourself. It will probably sound like woo, but it's not. Lots of protocols now being tested in studies that combine guided traumatic memory replay, with an adjuvant, like inderol (to create emotional distance), or psylocybin (to help shift perspective), all with the goal of producing a transformative reorientation of your relationship to the past trauma. Powerful stuff. "Plant medicine" retreats run in the Caribbean, the Netherlands, and Central America (iboga, ayahuasca) have similar aims: re-experiencing the traumatic memory through an altered state aids you in rewriting your story about it, and helps you get new liberating perspective and transform what you make what happened mean for you.
If you think you suffer from that kind of traumatic memory, you probably already know what I'm talking about. If not, I encourage you to investigate it for yourself. :)
But external chemicals may help some people (some people may be in a state where it's really hard for them to learn what may come a lot easier to folks like me and you~~not everyone is good at navigating their own internal terrain).
Just like you don't need a therapist to guide you, but everyone has different capabilities to do so themselves, and therapist can benefit. I know how to do this, sounds like you know too, even folks like us who know how to do it themselves, I think should be open to the experience of being guided by someone else to see what it's like.
This re-timelining can be used for many things. And it's not fiction. Your body makes it real, and it's more real than that, too.
I think chemistry helps, it's not strictly necessary, but there's a whole lot of psych (placebo etc), and structural (makes more sense as a therapy / economic activity in that industry to combine with an agent, probably lead to that therapy getting more traction and helping more people), and real (chemistry clearly helps, ancients have been using it) reasons that make the combination therapy of chemistry plus therapist a really good option to be generally available! :)
I am not with you on there's no free will. There's definitely free will. (and it can be a cope to pretend there's not, I think, because it gets you out of personal responsibility, a thing lots of folks have an issue with!). Because it's a choice. I mean, there's even a choice to rewrite your story in the ways we're talking about. That's clearly free will, to you, right?
This is why it is important to forgive your parents. They interpret events differently and it usually isn’t until you become a parent yourself do you develop enough empathy to see how those interpretations came to be.
Yes, as we age we come to see things from a more experienced perspective and the perspectives of the adults we grew up with and change, but going all the way to "that is why it is important to forgive your parents" is a big big step.
It is typically a good idea to try to get to forgiveness, you're right, but there's a lot of very indefensible behavior out there.
I think it actually relates to the original article. There’s a difference between mere interpretation and what actually happened.
“You should forgive your parents, because one day you’ll be older and see their perspective” collapses “interpretations develop and mature” with “some events are a problem”.
Both can be forgiven and it’s probably a good idea to do so. I think it’s not helpful to generalize in that way.
Also abuse happens a lot. It may not be the majority but it is NOT rare.
I stand by my objection in this case
BTW~~what kind of psychological process, thought do people you treat go through when they forgive really abusive people or behavior, people that meant to hurt them, with malice? How does forgiveness look like for the person going choosing it and what are the effects? Sorry, it's a big question! No probs if you don't want to or can't answer it! :)
So typically there's a lot of exposure, facilitation, and processing work FIRST. There's not really a route to forgiveness in my opinion until someone is pretty deeply in touch with all the feelings associated with how they were treated. I take a mindful self-compassion approach to experiencing and reprocessing memories and emotions drawing a lot from Paul Gilbert, a self-compassion researcher and advocate in the UK.
Once a lot of the feelings have been processed, including anger and resentment, we often get to a point where the anger doesn't seem to serve much purpose for the person anymore. It's not covering up something they didn't want to feel (guilt, shame, sadness, fear, etc) and it's not "punishing their parents" in a way that many people hold on to. More often than not, the client just spontaneously forgives at that point, and forgiveness looks like seeing the situation as a bad one that everyone involved was stuck in and no longer having a need for the perpetrator to suffer or take responsibility.
So acceptance and compassion then processing and reprocessing with self-compassion. Sometimes a discussion of blame and forgiveness and what they do and don't mean.
I would consider one out of seven to be "problematic" and "oof" worthy
I am not talking about forgiveness as an act, but as an attitude here. You probably know better than most of us what that means.
The attitude can be generalized as you just did in even your response. The act however, shouldn't.
Finding and preserving the truth about the past is more important than ever. Truth is under attack from all sides, with politicians moving the Overton window on lying, LLMs, the decline of centralized news, fake reviews and comment farms.
If the author meant to say "History is often wrong and surprisingly easy to set right with a bit of investigation," great, but "The past is not true" is an absurd and harmful statement. How would you feel if I hit you with my car and ran, or tried to overturn an election and then said "I'm not guilty because the past is not true"?
Maybe you do remember hitting me. There will still be innumerable questions that you couldn’t answer because they were out of your perception in the moment. What if it turns out that in hitting me you stopped me from running over an old lady.
Whether or not you learn of that detail will have a big effect on how you remember the accident.
Above you say "tried to overturn an election" - I'm not sure who it is you are referring to here, but that charge was laid at the feet of thousands of January 6th protesters by thousands of journalists and armchair experts, few of whom even ever considered if that was the actual intent of the people.
People often don't wonder what is true, because they are not able to even try.
When the author writes "the past is not true", he's not trying to make a Physics or Epistemology point of any kind.
He's just telling that we torture and limit ourselves with things that no longer matter or, in this case, never happened. The anecdote might not be what you wanted to read or what would have fit the "message" best, but real world stories seldom do.
Let me ask you something: do you have something in your past that's holding you back?
And yet we only ever live in now, so the baggage that we carry can be adapted. For some of this - eg in the case of trauma - it's severe, and difficult, and requires lots of working through with therapy and drugs etc, and sometimes you just can't escape the fear or the past. But sometimes if you spend time examining what the fear or regret or guilt or whatever actually is, what it actually feels like, you can come to understand it much better - and it is possible to make peace with these feelings.
MBSR / meditation / psychedelics / etc are all about providing new forms of perspective to help manage and come to understand these different angles.
― George Orwell
I think these comments are sincere and well-intentioned in their concern for the truth, but I also think that they speak to the impoverished state of anything like public philosophical discourse today. Lest I waste too much time and emotional energy on an internet comment, I'll wrap up by stating my endorsement of the seemingly forgotten, and distinctly American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. It is a picture in which truth and falsity exists, but being products of inquiry, experience, adversarial disagreement, and experiment, remain permanently open to revision. The pragmatist statement of the author's (fine) thesis might be "the past is never finished", since the past exists and is real, but our discoveries, experiences, interests, etc. in the future might demand a revision or reinterpretation of it.
Very well said.
1: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Sowa-2/publication...
Rather, how we make sense of them—and internalize them—affects our lives in significant ways, especially if the prevaling narrative we believe about ourselves prevents us from thriving.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/narrative-t...