Thread:H950sm/@comment-26318250-20180823072152/@comment-30319843-20180824085726

TheMysteriousHood wrote: H950sm wrote: 2 + 2 is not 5. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then? Perhaps everything we make is just for the sake of our comprehension and convenience only. The SI units help us measure capacity, weight, mass, etc. only so that we can get an idea about. Calendars help us know where are we on the “year”. Perhaps there may not be something called a year, or a month, or a second, and maybe there may not be anything called atoms and molecules. They are only a part of a particular theory and their existence may be indicated through various scientific explanations.

But we cannot deny some basic and universal truths. The sun rises in the east as the Earth rotates from west to east. If the Earth rotates anti-clockwise, the sun will rise in the west. You can’t deny the existence of the building blocks of life, which have been termed as “cells” by Robert Hooke.