Metapost

Dear diary,

I've wondered about my willful choosing of ignorance over research, the choice to contemplate ridiculous ideas about junk rather than trying to understand what science has already determined about said junk. Part of this is a fear that any idea I have will have already been thought of and disproved, thus robbing me of any feeling of creativity unless I ignore what's out there. Part is a fear that I won't understand what I read about, and I'd rather feel smart than struggle to actually be so. I've also recently heard of the belief that creativity requires that you don't know too much about a topic, basically because you will be lead far down the path of existing knowledge, and miss some possible new and hidden branch somewhere way back on the path.

At best thinking and figuring stuff out yourself might be good practice. Also, you can think of something until you get stuck, and then look it up for enlightenment, and your brain should be more willing to accept new knowledge than it would be if you just tried to force-feed it all in without the puzzling curiosity. However, this approach can be futile; Imagine trying to figure out the cosmos by watching the night sky and ignoring all of humanity's existing astronomical knowledge. You might not get past something like,"the stars appear to be fixed on a sphere that rotates around the earth".

But this is a blog, not a textbook. So it will be stupid at times (hopefully about average as far as blogs go), and incorrect too. It is about my exploration of the realms of metaphysics, and as much about the struggle to understand, or about bad ideas, or good, as my experiences with each warrant.

One of the basic tenets of science goes something like this: an idea, no matter how good it is, must be abandoned if it is proven to be wrong. Trying to fit all ideas to one central idea or belief = timecube.com. And so stupid ideas will come and go, and be revisited now and then, and conflicting ideas will get mixed up and others resolved, until I either get that nobel prize on my shelf, or give up, or go mad.