Interlude 5: Research

For ten years now, I've been accumulating data about the place in which I work. I have watched and counted and drawn inferences and listened to people and watched the fabric of history unravel and the palimpsest rewritten. I have seen facts interpreted and misinterpreted, recorded so that they become more artifact than fact. And in the end, who is to say what the truth is, or what it ought to be?

The fact of human existence is that it is malleable. Eternity is something we apprehend but cannot comprehend, and that ruins us for the big picture. So for those who cannot stand to look out into the infinite unknown - and yet know what infinity is about - there is nothing but the small (and ever-decreasing) circles of perception and detail.

We know now that the brain creates its own pictures of reality. The simplest case which can carry this image is this: the human eye does not see anything if it is moving. But we seem to see seamlessly. This is because the brain sees a start picture and an end picture, and interpolates everything else. The brain, we now know, is selective in what it records, and it ceaselessly re-edits memories. The more we emphasize or reiterate or dwell on memories, the more true they become, the more reality we build into them - even if they were never true.

This is the problem of human research. It is based on consensus, and where it is based on fiat, it must fail.