It does, or would seem to, include all that matters, but it includes many things besides that.
So I do not think it is given that if you start with asking what is true you will be perse likely to arrive at what maters, since the latter is a small subset of the former, generally speaking (does it matter whether gene x in bacterium y receives quantity q or p of radiation in this instance?) whereas if you start with asking what matters, you will immediately be confronted with certain truths, and with the need for knowledge of certain truths. (Such as described above in several examples, but for which you can identify many examples easily.)
Yes - so in this direction, the one necessarily compels the other whereas in the other, it does not seem necessarily likely that it does.
Say that truth is fundamentally what matters to someone, over anything else - what would happen?
Another question: if you start with what matters, will you arrive at the ‘highest’ truths (whatever that is - perhaps the truth that matters or applies most universally)? Or do you need to start with what is true for that?
Good point, maybe a truth-seeker can spend his entire life learning cool truths but never finding much that really ‘matters’. Although, as long as he is pursuing his truth-seeking freely and of his own volition, clearly that matters to him. So maybe whatever truths he is discovering, like about the bacterium for example, really do matter to him. Otherwise, I suspect and over time, truth-seeking that results in learning lots of truths that do not matter is going to tend to shift in directions that start to produce truths that do matter. Since we are talking about living conscious beings like humans who are doing the truth-seeking.
I also wonder if it is always apparent from the start ‘what matters’ or not. Perhaps certain things we learn do not matter to us yet, but will in the future; or perhaps we learn things that do not matter only to be capable of later realizing that they mattered all along; or, perhaps we learn certain truths that do not matter as prerequisites for learning other truths that do matter. There are a lot of possibilities and I think it would be a mistake to assume every truth-seeker or even generally every living being (human-like anyway) starts out in a condition of accurately knowing what matters to itself. That there is no room for being wrong, or for discovering new things that matter, or for changing one’s mind.
However I agree with you that if you start out with what matters, you are confronted with certain truths that by definition already matter (to you) and so you can effectively cut out a lot of the ‘busywork’ of needing to learn truths that don’t matter. In this way I see modern education as a failure, because instead of seeking what is meaningful (to the students, but even just generally to society, humans etc.) education focuses on learning a huge amount of truths that do not really matter to anyone. Granted there is pedagogical and process-learning value there, but the opportunity cost (and eventual damage to the psyche and curiosity of the student) is tremendous.
I would say, the first case necessarily compels the other whereas the second case only incidentally or very much more slowly compels the other. Even in the second case, eventually a truth-seeker is going to need to start separating meaningful truths from non-meaningful ones, simply to avoid boredom. Maybe? But yes generally I agree with you here.
Ha-- good question. I examine myself here. A lot of strange things happen. For one thing, I don’t think it is possible for truth to be the only thing that matters (I know that isn’t what you were saying) so there will always be other things that matter, even if truth is the most important thing. So there inevitably ends up being a constellation of values, competing in limited space and time (physically/socially and also psychologically).
Therefore even a prioritized value of truth as being that which matters most would get squeezed somewhat, and ends up squeezing the other things that matter. That is probably just life. Unless one is “lucky” (?) enough to be very single-minded and only care about one or two things. Maybe they care about truth, and the other thing they care about is baseball. So they might have enough free space and time in their life to fully pursue both in a way where one does not limit the other (also imagine they are born into wealth and do not need to spend a majority of most of their days working at a job).
But I think for most people, myself included, values even prioritized end up being warped by limitation and frustration. If truth is held as primarily important then one would experience the frustration and stress of its limitation the most deeply and painfully. This could end up corrupting or tainting their truth-love or at least dispiriting them.
But to your real point here: if truth is fundamentally what matters to a person over anything else, I suspect that over time that person will end up confusing and/or losing other things that matter to them. These other things will be (knowingly or unknowingly) sacrificed for the sake of pursuing truth. Eventually that person might realize that truth-as-such is not the rewarding value that they thought it was, at least if their truth-seeking this whole time has not been focused at least somewhat on learning things that matter.
The psychological impact could be tremendous. It might also lead to levels of self-limitation or self-dishonesty, if one cannot really cope with the fact of what they have sacrificed (meaningful things) in the pursuit of something that in the end turned out to be maybe less meaningful than they had first thought.
I am not sure. I suspect a combination of both is needed. Start with what matters, but make sure to pursue truth for its own sake as well. Ideally, we can have both values are core to who we are.
“I love the truth and I want to pursue it no matter what” ← core value
“There are many things that matter to me personally, and I am going to value and prioritize those in my life (e.g. love, freedom, art, nature, music, health, etc.)” ← core value
Maybe both of those can co-exist with each other very well. That would seem like the best outcome, and maybe most likely to lead to arriving at higher truths. (And yes, we should try to define what higher truths even means, but I am going to think about that some more for now even as I have my inclinations as to it-- interestingly it brings us right back to the original question of the OP).
I am not entirely sure what you refer to here. How would subjectivity be random?
Is it random where you are born, what you are exposed to in your life and ultimately what you end up believing about the world surrounding you? Yes, it has a factor of randomness to it.
Someone attending college has a different view of the world compared to someone i.e. never getting education or outright living in a rainforest with a tribe.
But that does not change anything about the fact that the world view is “subject” that your truth is “subject” to the original truth.
You can randomly place the mirror inside the room but it will be reflecting the room anyway.
We pry, test and observe. We know a lot more about the nature of the lightning and how and why it behaves the way it does. We have taken superstition mostly out of the picture.
Your subjectivity will depend regardless on what information you have access to.
They are entirely compatible.
Subjectivity is “subject” to a source, and that source would be reality itself.
That reality becomes “subjective” because it gets distorted by your individuality, but it’s source will remain reality regardless. Its not “drawn out of thin air”.
You dont. None of us do.
Who are you?
Of course it is. But what does “part” stand for? Association games? Like we used to call the stars in the night sky holes in a blanket through which the sun shines in?
Knowing a “part” means you are assuming the rest. Thats what i was referring to.
It is. But it is reality itself or just a subjective interpretation of it?
How would i know that and whats the metric for being real?
Cause you are asking questions.
How could the concept of a question exist when you know all?
You are you, i am me.
You do not know who i am, what i am, what my experiences in life are, what i know, what i think.
How are the perspectives of two separate mirrors disconnected?
Through the fact that they are physically disconnected.
Because we communicate and decide to agree upon things.
We mediate, we argue, we try to find common grounds.
What is language? What are words?
In and of itself nothing. They are meaningless scribbles and sounds. Until we assign a meaning to them. Until we all agree upon those meanings.
The fact that we all decided to agree upon things, does not mean that we are not disconnected.
Everything.
None of what you mentioned contradicts anything about the fact that we are seperate and individual.
Thats what the mirrors resemble.
Just because you add a penis to a mirror and the capacity to birth more mirrors, or the capacity to talk to other mirrors, what does any of that change about the fact that they are still individual objects interacting with reality on their own personal accord?
No. I have no idea how you arrived at the idea or conclusion that reality is disconnected from our subjective realities.
Thats not how any of these concepts work.
If you are disconnected from reality then you are not subject to it. Your view of the world is not subjective, its literally removed.
Correct, but i think you dont really appreciate what any of these words and concepts truly mean.
Subjective assessment means that the objective assessment that comes afterwards will also remain an assumption.
We can argue how much truth our assessments hold, but at no point can you ever claim that you know all there is to know. Not in terms of the whole and not in terms of the parts.
Do i need to point out all the things we constructed ourselves from units to concepts, and then top it off with the notion that all of these hold only true in this present moment because even the laws of physics are not a constant?
But fine. Lets try to play this game:
Name me one single thing that is a universally fix concept which remains constant regardless of space, time, reality, observer or even the universe itself.
Then we completely disagree.
You think truth is something perceived and informal. Something that needs to be broken down and established in a framework and hierarhy. Something that exists only once you made sense of it.
I fully disagree with that.
The literal truth is the net sum of all that exists. Every last bit of data and information. “All”. That is the truth.
Not only does it not make sense to talk about the truth when you do not know everything, its also a self contradiction because you can make any amount of informal connections you wish to, they will remain subject to factors yet uknown to you, thus in one single brush stroke you have also proven that they are not true, just assumptions of truth.
Quite despite myself, the more I tried to instareply to this, the more I had to admit the profoundity of it.
I would like to add something, though, inspired by the ghost thread.
There is no qualitative superiority of the “order v entropy” theogeny over any other theogeny. Indeed, when analyzed this way, it may come out as inferior to many or even most.
The question, I think, if I understand your objections to the old traditions, is how well can scientific (based on tracked predictions of postulated measurements) knowledge be applied to it?
I am not sure the answer to that question is that modern theogenies are more amenable than traditional ones. If I am right in my doubt, then the criteria for selection would have to be a different one.
Sure. Its just a descriptor for a problem. Pretty sure that other theogony excel at explaining other parts of existence.
Im not all that categorical or pedantic about the use of traditions, sciences or theogonies.
I like to mash together everything and see which views agree where. I think its quite beautiful when you can find common ground between science and religion, and the more you can add to that chain, the more profound it gets.
Ultimately we are just observers trying to depict something we are looking at from different angles.
Some go through religion for that, some invent objective systems which border absurdity in their efficiency like for example math, others go at it through the scientific method.
But it should be kept in mind that somewhere, even when ultimately turning out to be incorrect or misguided, everyone is trying to describe the same thing through their meager frameworks and philosophies.
Does it matter in the end? Especially in philosophy, you are not supposed to follow everything to the letter. You are supposed to let your point of view, imagination and understanding fly.
Read everything, comprehend as much as you can, and build your own view brick by brick.
For me, all of the following mean the same thing: truth, existence, reality, is the case.
Then things like information, facts, awareness, these are secondary and very closely related to truth however are capturing somewhat different aspects of it. Yet these things (information, facts, awareness) are always-already part of truth anyway, because truth is already by definition ‘everything’.
To me your position is superstition, for lack of a better word; I think the term truth implies the faculty of judgment, thus that it is a property of consciousness. In a world absent subjectivity I do not believe there would be a distinction between truth and untruth; there would just be chaos, the absence of relation. As relation is per definition reliant on subjectivity, on Relativity.
So I do not even believe that there can be facts, absent subjectivity(*), and I do not believe that we are free to posit a non-subjective totality, which simply exists, if all we know is subjectivity and Relativity.
A thing we can know objectively is Relativity as a law/regularity governing our known portions of cosmos - so this is what I would consider to be a part of ‘the truth’ in as far as it is meaningful to posit any; but this does not amount in the logical necessity a cosmic whole. In fact, it kind of challenges the idea. I am not so sure that there even can be a discrete totality.
(*)
Consider here that an electron generates, from its perspective on the protonic mass, a magnetic field that is not perceptible from an outside reference frame - ‘objectively’ it does not exist - and yet this field has an objective, consequential influence on the structure of the atom the electron is part of. We see here, as in the example of the muon, an indication that perspective dominates totality in it’s ontological weight.
What this in turn indicates is that ‘from the perspective of a totality’ (which is an absurdity), there can not be a ‘the’ truth about everything, as perspectives within the totality generate contradictory assessments about each other. If there were anything like a ‘the’ truth in the accumulative sense, it might be something that cancels itself out.
It is likely for this reason that there is superposition, and the fundamentality of the uncertainty principle - which is another thing I would include in what I see as ‘the’ truth, because it’s true from every given perspective.
So that’s my criterion for ‘the’ truth: not an accumulation of what would come to be known in terms of situational assessments, but that which a) is true under all circumstances and b) applies to everything. Considering that any circumstance conductive of ‘truth’ having any meaning involves the possibility of ‘untruth’; i.e. a consciousness.
So in the factual sense you mean it, where the truth is a collection of facts, I would see superposition as the suspension of truth; uncertainty as awaiting opportunity to collapse into truth; to fall into context.
This can never be accomplished for all energy at once.
Now if this is true, of course this is part of the truth. But it does not mean that the totality of truth-states, of factual situations, is self-coherent, so that it is justified to posit a ‘the’.
How is the simple fact that you do not know everything a question of “superstition”?
Superstition implies lack of logic and irrationality. Pure belief.
What i told you was the opposite. Purely logical and rational.
You do not know everything → You assume that what you know is true → Your idea of reality is an assumption due to any number of factors yet unknown to you
Your conclusion is running completely counter to your deduction.
Lack of unknown → lack of subjectivity → lack of chaos, falsehoods, lies, misunderstandings, mistakes, etc.
In simpler terms: you stated that not knowing whats in your bag means its in perfect order, and knowing whats in your bag means its in utter disarray and chaos.
Are you playing schrödinger’s “i have to organize my bag”?
Your bag is not a complete mess until you have taken a look and you realized that it is in fact a mess?
Absent subjectivity (assuming omniscience was achieved), there are only facts.
Im not entirely sure where you understanding of the concept breaks down, but “knowing all there is” or “omniscience” means that you know everything for a fact. As is. The complete truth.
Your interpretation is that “because i know the truth its no longer true”
I fail to see your reasoning.
You imply that something gets erased by knowing and understanding, and that is absolutely not the case even in this scenario.
Knowing all just means the observer understands the complete geometric truth of the universe.
Its to know both the outside and the inside perspective.
Or in a nutshell:
When applying an omniscient observer to this effect, the effect does not ceases to exist. Neither the observer nor the subjectivity of the concept is required for it to exist.
The fact that you can describe the perceived contradiction is the very thing that debunks this issue.
You know that perspective exists. If i sit in a car going with 100mph the box in the seat next to me is stationary. My friend looking at the box from the side of the road, sees the box moving at 100mph.
The fact that you can accurately describe this effect without creating a contradiction in the process shows that relativity does not destroy absolute truth, nor does it create contradictions.
An omniscient observer would see a single, unchanging, objective reality. That objective reality is made of relationships, not static things
Or would you like to abandon normal physics and reality in its entirety for the purpose of this argument and go straight for quantum physics and the issue with waveforms?
Let’s keep it exact.
I say it’s a superstition for you to presume two things at once:
a) what we know, our truth, is subjective
b) there exists a ‘the’ (not-subjective) truth.
So Im pointing out that it is you who presumes to know more than you can actually know. It is me/(I?) who sticks with what follows directly from what I do know certainly.
No. The logic breaks by your attempt to infer an objective reality.
As for my idea of reality – well first of all, are you now conflating truth and reality? I cant work with that, the terms have distinct meanings. What I said about truth does not totally apply to reality. Truth is a function of judgment (thats just implicit in the word, there can exist untruths after all - for example either what I say or what you say - but there can not be un-reality. Just an idea of it, which is an untruth, which is part of reality. So do you mean truth or reality here?
If you mean reality instead of truth, I think we can finish this, as that was never the object of the OP’s questions.
What is true? Means: what can be validly said about reality?
I said that if there is to be a the truth, it has to satisfy such and such conditions (such as being self-coherent) and it is not given by what I do know for certain that such a the truth can be both universally valid as well as comprehensive.
This is why in philosophy as well as in science, and in military strategy as well as in most consequential disciplines of the mind, principles count higher than collections of facts.
Which lack of unknown?
I did not posit that.
Lack of subjectivity means actually, lack of known. As knowing is a subjective activity.
You are really making a big mess!! Oh oh oh.
Chaos is not the same falsehood. Chaos is the total absence of relation, thus also of truth, which I think we previously agreed on can not constitute a lie, or a falsehood.
You are throwing around terms way too loosely!
Terms have quite discrete meanings!
‘Truth’ does not equal ‘reality’. Though that is difficult for a lot of folks to comprehend, there is a profound difference. They do not contradict, they just refer to a different… ‘layer’, if you will.
Lack of unknown definitely does not equal lack of subjectivity.
In many ways not-equals it!
Try to conceive of knowledge without someone knowing it!
Knowing requires a knower, a knower is a subject. Not just an object. Even if we hypothesize an omniscient knower, this knower must be a subject by the virtue of knowing. So absent subjectivity, there can not be knowledge.
If the omniscient knower is simply an object, and not a subject, can he really be a knower?
I like precision.
I think the most comprehensive we can hypothesize based on actual knowledge, is pan-subjective truth.
I might as well stare that you said that the moon is purple and you had it for breakfast.
If you paraphrase please, don’t go too wild.
Oh no
God you are making such a messy mess.
Oh god.
How can we even discern the first bit of truth in what you say here?
No. Chaos is the absence of relation, as any relation is an order.
knowing requires order. Knowing is subjective activity as it requires a knower. So knowing precludes a state of chaos and a state of chaos precludes knowing.
Okay. I managed to clean up a part of it.
Lets get to the next mess! I feel like Im working at Mac Donalds.
Omniscience is knowing. So subjectivity must still apply.
It must be pan-subjective, and it begs the question if that can apply to an actual singular knower.
If everything is known, it is still known by a subject.
So it is still all being known from one perspective.
If all is known by all perspectives at once, given what we actually know from physics, we can not know is this knowledge is self-coherent, i.e. if it satisfies the requirements of truth.
Just as ‘reality’ does not equal ‘truth’, so
‘fact’ does not equal ‘truth’.
Neither of these do equal each other.
Now that is an absolute untruth.
Which means that what you referred to is not a fact, but an imagination.
That imagination is part of reality, but it is not a truth. Its existence is factual, and it is true that it exists, but its content does not correspond with facts, or with truth.
I imply nothing of the sort. How can you manage to imagine that I have implied this?
I think you are actually working down from the hypothesis of an omniscience, thereby messing up the argument which can only be based on what you know, and not based om what you imagine a God might know.
When I say that one truth may cancel out another truth, it does not follow that one truth cancels out itself, or cancels out truth itself.
Now you invoke understanding, which brings truth to a higher level from knowledge, to the level of principle.
One can understand a thing without knowing it fully. This is the level I was referring to early on, with the seed and the tree.
Still here too, a knower is by definition a subject. So is an understander.
But an understander can fully understand himself without fully knowing every detail about himself.
As many details will fit into understood patterns.
Knowing what we know of kowledge and ot stepping outside of that ,knowing the entire geometry of spacetime would place you outside of that spacetime and create a new, larger whole of which you are then part - a fifth dimension for all I care - and which you have yet then to know, by placing yourself outside of it again, creating yet another larger whole. And so on. Thats just the nature of knowing. But understanding the entire geometry does not necessarily place you outside of it - as understanding is a deeper level of abstraction.
So by now you know we do not agree that we can just simply hypothesize an omniscient knower, if we respect reality as we factually know it, that is to say, if we are staying connected to the truths that we as humans have established intersubjectively, aspiring to pan-subjectivity.
What you say applies if we are talking about reality rather than about truth.
But truth is not equal to reality, but a valid assessment of (a) reality, a conceptual representation. At once part of it and above it. Why you get the infinite regress when you try to totalize it.
It is not given that there can be a coherent conceptually valid representation of all of reality that includes everything inside of it. It seems logical that there should be but it doesn’t logically follow from what we know. I care about that.
You did not include mathematical Relativity, where reference frames do not compute.
Here is a thread by a departed poster who tried very hard to arrive at the conclusion that, given two reference frames, there must be a third, objective one in which they can be unified in one frame that holds true for both of them. An immense struggle ensued.
What we deal with is that the mathematics (principle, understanding) are valid for both reference frames but the concrete facts (information, knowledge) differ in each frame, do not compute from frame to frame. That’s ‘normal physics’ for you.
So, a distinction of two modes, or levels of truth: one is on the level of facts, pertaining to knowledge, the other on the level of principle, pertaining to understanding.
On that second level, there is not, that we know of, contradiction, and there is also no direct relation to a comprehensive accumulation of facts. Facts are extracted in context, and need only apply there. Understanding bridges contexts and distances itself from particular facts.
So lets move on.
Do you agree that, and see how, knowledge and understanding are different?
Of course we can say that Relativity logic represents a knowledge, or a factuality, but we can not say that ‘a red stone is red’ represents an understanding. It is more an obedience than an action. Knowing is a lesser activity than understanding. And the universe is tremendously active.
There are certain facts that apply pan-subjectively throughout contexts; one of them is the consistency of the speed of light, a consistency around which time-space bends, and which splits contexts (reference frames) from each other.
In the hypothetical subjectivity of a photon, there is no time. It is in the place it was generated at the same moment as it is in the place a million lightyears further it disintegrates to become ‘seen’.
So from a ‘normal’ earthly perspective the photon travels a million years, but from its own perspective it does not travel at all, its existence at c simply ties these two places together. Which means it merges all reference frames into itself. Its perspective negates the existence of reference frames. It demands objectivity. As it does, it annihilates all ‘lesser’ levels of truth. Which is tied to why light isn’t actually a subject, carries no reference frame, can not be used as a coordinate to measure.
The counter statement to each point would be as follows:
a.) Our knowledge is not subjective to us.
Essentially you just stated that your knowledge is not subject to you, so essentially: YOU do not know anything. → If so i would like you to explain where the knowledge you are accessing is coming from
And since you are arguing that we do not know anything just access knowledge, please also explain how its possible that we disagree on things. Are we accessing separate aetherial libraries?
b.) There is no “the truth”
And due to a.) 2. → now you find yourself in a situation where you are arguing that truth is neither subjective to you but also does not exist outside of you, having essentially erased the concept as a whole.
The notion that “knowing that i dont know everything” is “knowing more than you actually can know” is nonsensical.
I cant even begin to unwrap what on earth this idea is based on.
Are you born with the knowledge of all languages? Of driving a car? Of cooking? Of operating an Apache?
No. You acquire knowledge through the process of learning, observing, experimenting.
Meaning: you did not know beforehand.
So no.
Me stating that you do not know everything, is in no shape or form “more than i can actually know”.
And your logic breaks at least at 4 different points.
That “YOU” do not know anything because “your” knowledge is not subjective to you
Because of this you imply that you are accessing knowledge from somewhere else, but then:
You also state that there is no objective reality either from which it could originate from, so we are apparently “not” learning from anywhere
Yet also very apparently we disagree so somehow the “non-knowledge” which is “not personal to us” differs between us
In essence you completely destroyed the very concept of both knowledge and individuality, also contradicting yourself in the process.
If you need judgement, you have already introduced your own subjective opinion into the equation.
What is your judgement based on? Also:
Both. Because whats real is also true.
This directly means that if your “judgement” is not true its also not real and vice versa.
And this fact directly ties into the idea that your knowledge and judgement is subjective to you.
The problem is that principles are based on facts. There are no principles without facts.
So trying to set up a superior/inferior relationship between the two will only lead to a “which was first, the chicken or the egg” scenario.
We are essentially arguing realism vs constructivism.
Well. There you go. “You do not know”.
Precisely.
You dont.
What i do not understand is, how you concluded from your own lack of knowledge, that the possibility of an objective reality and truth stands to question.
If i wanted to comically over simplify what you wrote, it would be something like this:
“I do not understand this math problem so this means math is wrong and does not work”
Several times now, im getting the sense that you do not really connect the greater implications of what you write.
What you wrote here also completely negates what you wrote at the start of this reply because you very much understand that your knowledge is separate from reality, and if it is, then it is subjective to you because its you who does not know.
PRECISELY. Now go back to the start of this reply and superpose this over what you wrote.
You can infer that “truth” would be an informal depiction of “reality” but this is hair splitting.
Pointing this out does not contradict that “what is true is real” and “what is real is true”.
I disagree. Where is the subjectivity when reality and subjectivity are one and the same?
It would be more accurate to state that in this game of dodgeball, the first dropout would be your individuality. You would stop being you.
And with that, subjectivity would be erased as well.
Refer to 2 paragraphs above.
Im stopping the line by line reply here because im going to write 5 more pages for no particular point.
The core issues of truth, subjectivity, reality and objective reality are already discussed above.
Which reasoning i refuse because you can easily defer to the fact that you learn and discover things as you grow up, or in other words there are clearly things which are outside of your knowledge, understanding, framework, perception and on and on the list goes.
I can only reiterate my question: Why would you imply that we cant know the fact of our ignorance? Where does your reasoning come from?
Meno’s paradox? That you cant look at something unless you know what it is?
Or are you arguing solipsism? That only your own mind exists?
-
As i said: Pointing this out does not contradict that “what is true is real” and “what is real is true”.
There is a photo of someone and i asked you who that is.
And as a response you tell me “dont be ridiculous, this is not a who, its a piece of paper”.
Yes. Technically correct, but also clearly sophism.
You know Socrates didn’t think his Topus Uranus was a lie, because you are Socrates, right? You call yourself Socrates, after all. I guess you weren’t mortal after all, then! And apparently you’ve adopted Caesar’s custom of referring to yourself in the third person…