Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Truth...or something like it (by anon)

I believe we are pragmatic creatures and if it works to call something "true", then we'll call it true. When that truth stops working for us, we'll stop calling it true. So, "truth" changes. It evolves. It comes and goes. We create it, control it, and use it. As far as one, absolute, undying, and unchanging truth that exists outside of ourselves, as we define it - well, we sure could come up with something, but are any of us really in a position to claim that absolute truth exists in the first place, let alone claim what that truth is?

One may say 1+1=2 is an absolute, undying truth, but the only reason this is considered “knowledge” is because we say it is so. We have constructed it mathematically and linguistically purposely to describe the world as we sense it. We created it out of experience and necessity for math, and we can destroy it if we want to.

My understanding is that we create and destroy truth/knowledge based on world experience and out of the desire to explain it for practical purposes (like to predict the weather, or simply satisfy our curiosity, for example) whether they be physical, mental, spiritual, or whatever. Questions like, "is X really true?" or, "does X really depict reality?" are only meaningful in so far as they are practically effective and possible to answer. It is pointless to question whether or not something is absolutely true (or to ask if I really exist, what a cloud really is, and other dumb questions), since we cannot know whether or not anything is absolutely true beyond what we have constructed to be true (such as 1+1=2), thus it is practically meaningless to think or talk about absolute truth at all. So I say we drop the idea and stay on this planet, working on practical truths (although speculating about impractical truths can be amusing).

To recap here - truth is made up out of practical necessity. We take the world and our experience of it, and we try to uncover the “truth”, but we don’t realize that we will always be the ones to decide what truth is in the first place, and in the long run, it really doesn’t matter, as long as it works. When we think a lot about questions like, “what is truth?”, we’re playing games with ourselves, and tricking ourselves into thinking truth is a thing that exists before us, when it’s just a description we made up in the first place for practical purposes (“if it is true that this is a rotting apple, I will not eat it”), but for whatever reason, people want to take it further than that. If you’re thinking of asking, “but how do you know?” regarding anything I’ve said here, then you don’t get it, because knowing involves truth and justification, and we just don’t have the means to objectively gauge either of those things, because they are subjectively manifested and dependent on us, the creators. The deciders. Truth is constructed and used in many different ways for many different purposes, and it is created and destroyed all of the time. This is where I decide to lay my blanket of truth, where you lay yours depends on your perspective, and whether or not it works for you. We cannot discover it - we can only create, allocate, and destroy it.

14 comments:

  1. What's this? A decent post. It's well thought out and leaves the reader to think about and question things. Thank you whoever you are for giving me a little more faith in this blog. I was about ready to condemn it as a troll cave and move on.

    Prof. Chaos

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  2. Prof Chaos, why don't you write a blog post? I don't see anything by you on here. You're being two-faced and sound like a troll yourself.

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  3. Anon 10:16 : Actually I have. I created the Wednesday, October 5, 2011 entry. Although I am not tagged as Prof.Chaos in it and simply as an anon.

    I do apologize if this came off as trolling. I sincerely do like this post. I have just read some recent entries before this post and the comments that follow and it enforces my cynicism.

    To kick off discussion about the actual post I will be the first to say I agree with the poster. Perception is indeed reality. Which equals truth.

    Of course someone could always ask about certain things that could be objective truth. What about gravity? Isn't that an objective truth, we would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't believe in gravity. Or is it a subjective truth of all people of their own volition choosing to believe in gravity?

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  4. Lol wait who's the troll, anon 10:16?
    Anyway - about gravity - gravity isn't a thing that can have the property of being true or false. It just exists as we define it abstractly. We make it into a thing, but the word "gravity" is just a concept we derived to vocalize and describe what we experience as the "force" (another made up concept) that makes things fall (or however else you want to describe it). Every thing we talk about involves a complex web of concepts and linguistic devices, and we treat something like gravity as a thing... gravity, as we define it abstractly, exists and we can say, "it is true that gravity exists and is the force that holds us down". This statement is inherent in the definition of gravity, but it's just our definition... our creation

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  5. hmmmmm calvert-minor??????

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  6. I think, therefore I am- Descartes there's an absolute truth. Since there is atleast one absolute truth there is probably more. Just because use a abuse the word truth doesn't mean it doesn't exsist. How do you know I'm wrong? You can't say... Well then, just shut up and keep your nontruth nonsense to yourself.

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  7. Hm anon 12:16 that's interesting.
    Descartes thought of himself as a "thinking thing". So since he believed he could think, he believed he must exist as something that thinks. I'll agree that "I exist" is a true statement, in so far as "I" am considered a "thinking thing". But it is no absolute truth.

    We can investigate this "truth" and consider the idea that Descartes really has no experience of an "I", and rather he only experiences "thinking". The "I" is just a linguistic device used to appeal to one's conception of one's own consciousness. Nietzsche would have said that due to language, we are tricked into thinking there really exists an "I", "ego", or "mind" that actually possesses thoughts and engages in thinking, when, for Nietzsche, there is just the process of thinking, and our language disguises concepts such as "thought" as an actual thing that must belong to something else, when this is not necessarily the case, and it's as though the statement "I think therefore I am" really doesn't mean anything absolute after all.

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  8. Maybe Nietzsche was trying to be too smart for his britches. Why does the "I" have to be some fancy, nebulous thing? If there is a "process" of thinking, there must be something doing the processing. There must be a place for the processing. To think otherwise would mean a very weird conception of thinking.

    So why not call that thing that does the processing of thinking the "I?" We can try to figure out all the other stuff about consciousness and and holding thoughts later. But it seems reasonable to agree with Descartes without something more compelling. After all, there can many different interpretations of "thinking thing," but that seems minimal enough to satisfy what is doing the process of thinking.

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  9. We can (and do) call that thing that does the processing of thinking the "I". But that's the point - we call it such for practical purposes... and that's all there is to it. Nothing absolute or outside of ourselves. It is not indubitable. But I'll say "I think therefore I am" and call it true. Doesn't mean it's absolute truth. It just means what we as humans created it to mean.

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  10. And so since that "truth" is something we basically made up, how can we attest to other "truths" that are supposedly outside of us, when the one absolute truth we could possibly say we have is founded in ourselves alone? What "truth" is in the universe? The universe just is... and it's full of what we call "processes" and "motions"... and all we can do is interpret them, describe them abstractly and explain them mathematically and so on and so forth... I don't know. Maybe I'm just wrong. But the point is - if it is practical for me to believe that "I think therefore I am" is a true statement, and it makes me feel all warm inside, then I'll call it truth! I don't care! I just can't say I believe it can't be doubted, as if it's an eternal absolute truth... which is the real nonsense here! (plus what happens when "I" no longer exist?)

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  11. Absolute, non-absolute....who really cares about that really? Well, I do know who cares about that but for our purposes here, talking about a thinking thing as the house for the process of thinking is solid enough. It is not a truth out of practical necessity, I think, for that seems to be required when one conceives of the process of thinking and its entailments. So is it absolute? I guess absolute enough from my "perspective" and from the requirements of the concepts. But I really hate talking about absolute truth because how would anyone really know if one has that? Do we have some kind of absolute criterion to ascertain that? Nope. We're stuck in our own little bubble of existence, never to get out. Human truth. Human criteria. I kind of like it that way. It's kind of, you know, human and real.

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  12. So our professors are just making shit up for us to swallow? My degree will be in made up shit? Fuck, why not just make up your own shit and give yourself a degree. I have a BA in made up shit. Hope I die before they destroy it and make up some mo shit.

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  13. 8 33 you're an idiot. Just because it's made up doesn't mean that it's shit. What we make up is very useful and necessary and we give it a lot of meaning. We just can't call anything absolute. Get it now?

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