What is Going On?
Who Knows?
I'm a confessed news junkie but I don't trust the information I get from the news much. The war in Ukraine is generating stories about Russian atrocities. Is it really credible that the Russians are killing those who refuse to be cannon fodder with sledgehammers?
I'd like to think of the news as being a source of objective facts. My view of cognition in general shows that that is impossible. The objective facts of (say) our sense data is meaningless unless fed through our neo-context that interprets it.
The same with the news - it is interpreted data.
Reality presents a basically infinite amount of data. One level of interpretation is to edit - that is - throw away all the data that isn't relevant (that is - throw away almost all the data). You can see this pretty clearly on the internet. The news sites in Canada have little to say about India and those in India have less to say about Canada.
Gathering news and presenting it is expensive. Reporters and editors and techs all need to live in an expensive world. Paradoxically the internet seems to have had the effect of killing local news. When I was a kid every place had a newspaper that was financed by advertising. Saint John is a small city of 100000 but we had two daily newspapers. A very high percentage of people subscribed. I delivered newspapers then. What has happened is that now one rarely subscribes. (mea culpa though I do pay for a couple).
So I see lots of stuff in my neighborhood that I look at and wonder "What's going on?"
For instance; a city crew did roadwork on the street - stuff like dig a hole and then fill it back up then later dig it up again. This was all guarded by a cop. I'd never seen a cop guarding a crew doing roadwork. I couldn't resist and approached one of the cops and enquired and he was friendly and told me that it was to keep people from stealing stuff - that they'd already caught somebody that day. I smiled thanks and left. I had a datapoint but had no way of interpreting it.
A block of another street nearby got the pavement removed from half the road and a fence put around it and it's been sitting like that for almost a year now. Every time I pass I wonder; what's going on?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.