I just watched "Another Discourse on Method," a trailer for an apparently excellent movie. It reminded me of something I think about, often unsuccessfully: the foundation of fact. But tonight I remembered something I had concluded about it before: at the core of the issue is emotion. I can imagine someone arguing the contrary to the death, that emotions are explainable in terms of past experience, the collective memory, and possibly physics; unfortunately, I cannot argue against this standpoint, so if it's brought in we've found a circular (once I've set up my alternate reduction, of those other things to emotion) description. So assume it hasn't been brought up. I think you'll find my version palatable and (perhaps surprisingly) at least as solid.

The first thing you should notice (if you've watched the trailer; chances are you haven't) is that the interviewed do a lot of fumbling. They have presumably been asked a question along the lines of "what is the foundation of fact?" and (let me watch it again) they answer saying things like "It's just common..conception and..perception and..consensus that would..would determine what we think, are facts" and (to what makes karma a truth?) "Because it's..inev—it's..it's perv—it happens, it's—I mean, there's no way around it." They expect the answer to be right there for the interviewer: belief in fact probably being a foundation for much of what they do, they expect to be able to explain what it is well. As they fumble along, they continue to discount the possibility that they'd actually have to stop and think for a while before being able to adequately respond.

Catch me on a bad day, and I'd probably do the same. But what I concluded a while ago is that emotions are really the basis for facts. At this stage of the game, we continue to believe that computers can't tell fact from fiction, but why? Might it not have something to do with their lack of emotion? If we programmed a robot with a face to smugly assert, "Yes, Columbus got to America in 1492, I'm sure of it," nodding briefly, would it fool you into believing it could recognize a fact?

If we view mathematics as the study of true statements, which math teacher is more convincing: the one who mumbles articulately, gaze fixed on the board, deriving line from previous lines through standard rules of inference and some "obviously"'s, or the one who stares at you menacingly and asks, "Now do those two lemmas look like they're aching to be used together, or what?"

When Galileo drops a ball down a ramp for the second time with the aid of an orchestra playing presto with distinct thirty-second notes and locks his whole thought and being onto its position, he is preparing himself for an emotional release: Yes, as it reaches the finish line, yes, I do recognize that combination. That combination of that part of the song and the view of the ball right there, it has special meaning to me. I've linked it to success, meaning I set myself up to experience a positive reaction to it, at the same time linking all other combinations of parts of the song with that view to experimental failure. Ah, I recognize this linkage, too: this linkage I have performed, it is the linkage I set up when doing an experiment. I have come to associate the presence of an orchestra, a ramp, and a ball with experiments. I have also set up a pathway whereby recognizing all this impels me to further action. He walks over to his vellum and writes laurus, success. That's indeed how long it takes it to get there from that height; I'll debate it with you to the death on the basis of the particular emotional nature of the vivid memory of the second run: yes, every time I check, it's there. Positive. That was a successful measurement.

Ever seen something you don't know what it is? Like a crevice full of pulp in a tree, unexpected road garbage while driving, or one of those newly installed emergency lights? My obsessive nature is returning. Once every few minutes, while I'm not doing one of a very few things, like teaching, it comes back to me. Like a brushfire it sets in, runs its course, and lays its site to waste in a matter of seconds. I end up feeling like there's nothing I can do about it. But in retrospect I guess it's better than parched constancy. I wish I could figure out how to take it and extend its life, so as to turn it into something a little less ruinous, and mix it in with related emotions, or any other emotions at all, to such an extent that something's always happening there. Then it would be less like a brushfire and more like the glow of a summer day, along with beach balls and hawks and streamers and maybe a toolbox or a stolen neon sign. And for some reason, this hubbub of flux through the background would induce the opposite effect on that thing behind the background that currently spends most of its life trying to figure out what the hell keeps on gutting the background, namely, it could quiet down, and then I'd probably be able to focus on things (ideas, plans, puzzles) again. Not that I was ever that good at it. I just feel like there's a multitude of us around now who feel we've been denied the prospect of living a life not one hundred percent governed by a very limited set of specific bullshit ideas. Maybe the problem is that it's all a wash when you end up with six billion people able to communicate with each other in an instant: nothing can any longer be tried, experimented with, tested out without the whole freaking village knowing; nothing can be essentially different or unusual without the regular cabal of critics come to describe and consequently destroy it.

On another (related) note, it surprises me how many ideas are put on the back burner by scientists because they seem like they might be true but it's impossible to discover a medium for them. Like gaia theory; when's the last time you heard about that? I think it's a neat idea, but there are plenty more like it, about evolution, consciousness (empirical results of course), and language, to name a few. Aren't we a few millennia overdue for a new set of core sciences and areas of research? Of course, they have to be discovered and examined first. I just get the feeling that maybe it's never going to happen, not at all that we couldn't understand it but that our minds aren't capable of pursuing trains of thought that would result in its manifestation. I also feel like we lose something by centralizing the "historical" account of every investigation into our past. In the game of life, for instance, there are multiple possible pasts for most scenarios (all those scenarios that have a possible past, perhaps? Comment if you know!). A group of creatures in the game of life could devise a method of checking their surroundings and deducing past circumstances as a well-defined function (on a macroscopic scale, of course, the way we do), never knowing that there really is no past, only a future. This is clearly an analogy, not a defense, but it seems like the study of origins in terms of history is just as arbitrary. Wouldn't it be exciting to find out that those things we know for sure—for instance, like the fact that the first novel ever was written by a woman, or that there exist elephants—actually exist as data because they are incontrovertible properties of the makeup of any consciousness similar to ours? Okay, I feel a little better now.