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Welcome to TOV

Read from right to left, TOV (טוֹב) is a rich and deeply meaningful Hebrew word that translates simply as “good” in English. It carries a broad range of everyday and biblical meanings, referring to things that humans regard as life-giving, morally excellent, or fulfilling the purpose for which they were intended. 

 

TOV is real but people don’t always know what reality is.  There are several kinds of reality and people who learn to understand one kind of reality are often terrible at knowing other types. Scientists, who excel at knowing their own specialties, often lack empathy, failing to understand the way others see the world.

 

So what are the different kinds of reality and where did TOV come from?

טוֹב

TOV IS NOT A PART OF THIS REALITY

Physical Reality

Where did TOV come from?

TOV not a part of the Physical Reality we see when we look into space or into the depth of a living cell. It’s a word somebody pulled from their consciousness many millennia ago. Our TOV came to us from an early phonetic alphabet fashioned from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Ancient Phoneticians inscribed the consonant sounds to look more like letters than hieroglyphs.  It was the birth of a phonetic alphabet.

 

Their TOV probably sounded more like TWB, if you are able to imagine the vowels you need to say it in English.

 

Language by itself, as a written language,  is nothing without the physical ability to actually speak the words. If all we could do is bark like dogs, we would never have evolved to create the complex reality of human civilization. 

Reality Emerging from Consciousness

 Human Consciousness

Human consciousness, conveyed through language from person to person throughout the millennia, has given rise to skyscrapers, chemotherapy, universities, and AI, all of which objectively exist.  At the same time, human consciousness has created the subjective world of belief, religion, and ideologies, functioning as internal roadmaps through which humans construct meaning, establish values, and navigate objective reality. Call them Social Constructs.

 

Unlike the objective world governed by empirical data and physical laws, the realm of social constructs is driven by personal interpretation, cultural conditioning, and psychological needs. On balance, it results in an illogical world of benign cooperation cursed by malevolent conflict.

Social Constructs and Worldviews

George Santayana is famous for saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”