Fork in the thought

Contributed by

Mr Anees Hamid

Author can be emailed at aneeshamid67@gmail.com

Thought, a name so simple yet so complex. A thought being rendered is so simple yet to choose, when fork in the road, between sensical and non-sensical or truth and false or fiction and non-fiction is an uphill task.

We human beings having reached the pinnacle of intelligence in somewhere a deterministic as well as stochastic evolution are very susceptible to raw ‘opinions’, not facts or winnowed opinions. Having consciousness comes with a great responsibility of sifting the wheat from chaff, but we seem to fail this task.

Our own world, the way it actually is, is so beautiful and wonderful in its intricacies and nuances still some choose to tamper the story and create fairy tales of the way it should be for a penny and some out of a fear of having so small importance or being inconspicuous in this immense universe.

They do not like the fact that we are not central to this universe, that this universe has no obligation to be in accordance with our way of thinking. We have to accept the truth which is full of joy in observing and understanding.

We have to evaporate the non-sensical stories or fairytale worlds we think we are the inhabitants of in our stories. I wonder, why even an unarmed idea to stand against the criticism gets so much credibility? How such an idea could get past the human intelligence? Have we lost the weapons? No, we have the best of weapons but we fail to employ them. If we have to detect the baloney we have to be skeptical. The idea has to pass the skeptic bullets for surviving. That’s how science has developed, incorporating the curiosity with skeptical scrutiny. It’s a self-correcting mechanism.

Every claim carries a burden of proof with itself. And it should be upon the proponent to provide the evidence and a proponent must always have an opponent to criticize his idea. It’s in the history of mankind of being so gullible to lame ideas from monger the oracle of Greek to us giving so much credibility to astrology, alchemy, pyramidology and contentions claiming the contact with the aliens and abduction by some advanced species without fulfilling the void of proof. The wonders of the world necessitate the best of minds to throw their best curve balls to understand the world. Our way of thinking must embrace the skepticism instead of keeping it at just arms length. It is the scientific way of thinking. And it is very important to remain unbiased while thinking because in our lives we have been so unbiddenly taken up by our social norms of thinking, settling down as beliefs, that have become the bedrock in our thoughts. Pushing against such boundaries and carrying a clarity,though a cumbersome task ,is what every scientific mind, every great mind does. The incommensurabilities in our thinking and imagination would be galling to a culture that is thriving to understand the universe. A winnowed thought should never feel pall in comparison with the belief of masses. It’s the marriage between curiosity and skepticism that produces fruitful thoughts.