[cryptome] Truth: What is it? All In Our Time
- From: doug <douglasrankine2001@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: cryptome@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 13:55:15 +0000
In Our Time: Truth.
see url: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player
This broadcast may not be available for download if your ISP registers
you in a country outside of the BBC license area. It might be available
legally on Pirate Bay, or some such peer to peer organisation...if it
isn't still closed down...or if you have a subscription to a private
network of some kind, which can bring you under the UK license area, you
may be able to get access that way.
What is funny about this broadcast...to me...at any rate...is the
stuttering of the guests as the host, Melvyn Bragg poses them questions
which they cannot answer. And I have never seen so many philosophers
get up to so many diversionary tactics and stratagems openly in such a
short time, in a long time. They tied themselves up in knots or is it
nots for a while, before they finally admitted that really, they hadn't
a clue. Was it a relational thing rather than absolute, was it an
objective rather than a subjective standard, was it better defined as
part of the "redundancy" theory i.e. Santas' reindeer no longer exist
because they have been declared redundant...:-) What if we changed truth
to true...would missing out the th and adding an e at the end make a
difference? And to think these guys get paid all that money on life long
tenure, and they cannot answer such simple questions as what is truth?
Why ponder it on this mailing list? Well, one of the crucial questions
in society and computing in particular is establishing peoples' identity
without any ambiguity. A second reason is in preventing fraud. Another
question is lie detection. At the moment, due to the Snowden
revelations, I understand that intelligence services staff in the USA
are getting a bit pissed because they are having to go through lie
detector tests every couple of months.
It is not only the plebs who have to go through these lie detector
tests, apparently. It applies to everyone in the organisation, right up
to the Director. Apparently, going through a lie detector test is a
very onerous and nerve wracking experience, as well as being very
expensive in time and resources; and causes a lot of stress and strain
in the participant; because if one fails, then one's classification
qualifications and all job security is removed, and people find it
difficult to accept the need to have their personal honour, trust and
truthfulness tested all the time, purely for national security
interests...especially when they look at reports such as that on
Torture. How do the Directors of the CIA pass these tests? It is it
because an inaccuracy is perhaps not a lie, and that a whole series of
them merely shows incompetence rather than a deliberate practice of
lying, and therefore this does not show up when they take these tests.
One also wonders, if the administer of the lie detection test discovered
that a Director was lying...what the procedures are for dealing with
it. Not that I am making any presumption that such people in high
office would lie...of course.
Now I know that they use some kind of machine to detect the lies, and
that they also use other secret methods to back up their perceptions.
But...the question remains, how does one tell if something is a lie, if
one doesn't know how to define truth? I also noticed the other day,
that a US firm which specialises in defeating the lie detector are being
prosecuted by the FBI, might have even been found guilty by now. How do
they and the FBI know what a lie is if they don't know the truth...or do
they know sumfink we don't know?
Food for thought.
Other related posts:
- » [cryptome] Truth: What is it? All In Our Time - doug
