Who's right? Or is it everyone?

Last night as I made my usual trip to the library (my new second home) I was caught away in thought like normal. I was late to my normal study time which usually begins about 4:00 but because of some errands I had to run I didn't get to the library until about 6:00 or so. More people were walking campus than normal, I assume because they were heading back home where they would go to FHE (which I know I should have been going to but we don't happen to have a working FHE group at the moment so its kind of lame). As I passed by all of these people I couldnt help but listen in on some of the conversations going on. I found it interesting and worth pondering the frequent times I heard one person giving counsel to another or simply expressing their view on a topic. In other words, opinions were flying everywhere. What an opinionated world we live in! Opinions are great I believe, kind of funny at times in fact. For some reason though as I passed by the last group of opinionated persons this thought and/or question came into my head. "I wonder if all the opinions in the world were compiled and combined into one archival record, truth would be established." Yeah it's kind of a long shot but this is how I substantiated that in my head. For every persons opinion there is (allowing the benefit of the doubt for some of those that are quite "off" we might say) some degree, even if slight, of truth about the view expressed. Truth I guess in this sense would be defined as something that could be established as a fact of an actual occurance, reason, knowledge, etc. So the theory in my head is, if all parts of those truths are combined, do they make a whole? Or do they simply find themselves still drowned out in the non-truths? My mind kind of exploded when I tried to imagine how many opinions must be given in a single day. One of these days I want to see if I can keep track of how many times I offer my opinion in a day. It may not be highly accurate of a recording though I assume because I wouldnt consider myself a highly opinionated person. I may have my opinions but I guess I mean that I don't regularly share them freely. Anyway, I think that would be interesting to find that # and then multiply it by the 6.5 Billion people that live on this earth. That would just be one days worth! So with all of this opinion and wise advice/counsel from our friends and acquaintances, wouldn't it be great if we could take the truth out of it all and place it into one great whole? This is obviously the reality of a supreme being. This is the evidence of the wisdom of the Godhead and the use of the Holy Ghost who is a container of all that wisdom and imparts that to mankind.

Though it seems libraries do a great job of containing all of that knowledge and information that we as human beings seem to stumble upon and record, it's really hard to even call it a fraction of what knowledge has passed from the entirety of the lips of mankind. And then we must even realize and consider the evolution of the knowledge contained in these libraries. They are a storage of a knowledge that is still passing through the filter. Opinion and human interjections are being sifted out and truth and knowledge are being pulled together into bound covers. I can only imagine the feeling that we will all have when we reach the Kingdom of God and compare the knowledge that we had here and the knowledge of God. It may be slightly depressing for a moment for how far we still were in comparison and yet that depression would simply be replaced with relief I think, at least in my heart it would. Finally truth could be held and not tainted.

I tried imagining this thought in a pictorial and visual form before writing this blog but I realized how complex that picture would become as well. I imagined at first a number, say 15-20 circles that all form a circle themselves by their positioning. Each of them overlap the circles next to them since opinions always seem to contain many of the same elements as other opinions and thus overlap. Then I saw overlap in the very center by all of the circles creating a sort of "truth" zone where it all comes down to a point of reality. It all made sense in my head until I realized how variable those outer circles really were. Each circle will have a variable amount of truth to it, a variable amount of information contained, etc. In reality its almost as if each circle should be drawn in different sizes and colors and so on. There is no generalized form of opinion that can be dissected to see just the opinion and the truth in the same amounts every time. So, that visual was quickly destroyed haha. Nonetheless, there must be some sort of central circle that we all wish we could drink from so to speak. That central circle is the container of some of the greatest possessions known to man. Those possessions are known as knowledge. Ah to drink from pure knowledge.... that must be why listening and following the Holy Ghost must feel so good. It is pure knowledge flowing.

And this kids has been yet another trip into the mind of the Duck

Update 3/27/10

Yesterday I began to have a bit of a further exploration and realization of more thoughts concerning this topic. I think this is the best sort of thing when you are able to recognize your own flaws and build off of them. This would be one of those cases. Although the general thought of the central entry is interesting to ponder about, I realized that I had made an important oversight. It is quite interesting to see how any and all opinions overlap and where we can cross them to come to truth, but I realized that I had made a very silly assumption that opinions and thoughts are stable and/or unchanging. For the reader, this now seems quite obvious I'd hope about how stupid I was to walk right past that observation. For the main entry to be legitimate, every person would have to maintain their opinions and simply acquire them in one instance. In other words, you would either have one opinion or none at all. But that is not how things really are obviously. All of us experience opinion changes and truth findings every single day. Being in college at the moment, I most definitely experience it on a regular basis. I just heard a statement yesterday about an effect the government has had on BYU and some policies and therefore my opinion on the government has been altered to a degree, therefore changing what amount of truth per-say I first obtained.

To make this once again visual I compared it in thoughts yesterday to something we'd been learning in Chemistry lately with gas properties. Gases are made up of many tiny tiny particles all moving at various speeds and directions. Out of random order certain particles pump into others and therefore transfer kinetic energy or lose kinetic energy. In essence, due to the large number of particles, there are transfers in energy on a regular basis. We can conclude that with great probability, not one particle will remain in its exact same conditions for very long if it is contained in a certain limited volume. Just the same with our opinions, with all the other ideas and thoughts floating around, its extremely probably that our own opinions and thoughts will bounce off others and therefore transfer energy and change the properties of our opinions. In the chemistry scenario however, there is still a general and regular graph of the amount of interactions that is quite predictable. The wonder then becomes that if this is what happens with gas particles, can our ratios of opinions vs truths also be "graphed" or summed up in a sense? This is what I have recently been pondering over and I'm not sure if an answer could be gathered for that question due to its magnitude of necessary information.

Im sure there will be more things that I will realize that I am missing that alter the ratio of opinions to truth, but this is what I have for the moment. I can't quite decide if this new thought adds complication to the understanding of truth versus opinion, or if it actually refines it farther. More pondering shall continue.