Divide By Zero said:
(...) Yes, that makes total sense, but you know these people are freaking crazy. They start to invent new reasons how sunlight changes. It's like beyond schizophrenia, because at least a schizophrenic can question the voice in their head. These people are pretty much like the christians who believe the earth is 5000 years old. They are like the perfect example of how belief can override your own senses and logic. They are like mass produced hypnotic subjects... Sorry for the rant, but stupidity on this level- that rationalizes itself gets on my nerves. A lot of times when I see the world turning for the worse, I feel like without these blind followers (authoritarian followers) who rewrite reality in their heads- the psychopaths would not have been able to do the horrors that they do. They are the enablers of the psychopaths/schizoids.
Yeah DBZ, isn't it amazing that they can create elaborate and relatively complex explanations to 'prove' their theories, yet they cannot grasp the concept of the Earth being round?
Initially I thought that it's some kind of twisted form of Conversive Thinking, where selection or substitution of uncomfortable data takes place to prevent personality disintegration. But it couldn't be that. Surely ones personality doesn't disintegrate because the Earth is round?
As I was reading through the thread I realised that I have in fact come across less severe but quite curious instances of inability to grasp more complex issues. Shortly after this thread started there was a completely random conversation in my office about time and the fact that it doesn't really exist the way we experience it. It actually started as a conversation about the quality of excuses for being late ;)
Now, I'm not much of a genius myself, I was rather poor at maths at school and numbers have never been my strength. But there are plenty of sources that describe this phenomenon (for lack of a better word) in really simplistic terms. So me and another guy did a demonstration of how we understood it - and we both understood it pretty much the same way. There were plenty of hand gestures involved, a whole packet of handkerchiefs and lots of whiteboard drawings. Some people were like, "oh wow, that's pretty cool" and yet there were people who just could not get it no matter how we tried. And boy we tried hard!
I'm not sure if the same limitation is responsible for the flat Earth crowd but I wonder whether some people have the ability to imagine abstract concepts and therefore understand the theory behind them, whilst others need physical experience in order to 'get it'?
Due to the limitations of our reality measuring equipment (our senses) we have no other option but to experience the passage of time the way we do and the actual nature of time will never be experienced with our senses. Maybe this difficulty comes in degrees and there are people who struggle to a much greater extent so when they look around and cannot see any curves they conclude the vast, flat space ahead of them is all there is?
I dunno really. But I may be completely off here: I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these people were religious and they've never experienced Jesus either
