Pravda

[degringolade]

Impressionism / Nicolae Darascu/ Boats at Saint Tropez

I’m having a lot of trouble recently trying to keep up with the tides of truthiness running around.  I am also having trouble dealing with the use of the word truth to denote what that person wants to do.  

Most everyone (your humble correspondent included) wants fervently to believe in the world inside of their head.  Oddly enough, this kind of weltanschauung/weltschmerz has a fairly distinguished philosophical bloodline.  I am arguing that maybe this is an unexpected consequence of Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung coupled with new age self-centric bullshit has a bunch of bad magicians trying to pawn off their half-baked ideas as truth and making an attempt to will their partially researched and poorly thought out bigotries into being.

Well, the problem is, with the advent of the internet and pervasive dissemination of any and all ideas, this “willing” of ideas and beliefs is partially successful.  Thus what you have is a completely fragmented populace that believes fervently in their version of the truth and takes offense at any truth-flavor that contradicts their willed distillation of desires.

I do try to figure out where the “truth” is.  I fail pretty miserably.  Doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying, but I don’t really hold out much hope of success. 

Comments

THE ENEMY OF TRUTH, IS WORDS. EXCEPT THESE WORDS AND MAYBE A FEW OTHERS

[mschmidt]

Can a non-human animal know that something is true? Only if they consider the possibility that it might not be.

True requires knowing what false means. Knowing what false means comes from knowing what words mean. If words do not exist, what can be false?

Without words, the two possibilities are accepting or not accepting risk – which equates to being certain (enough) or being uncertain.

To know what is true, words have to go. Humans are so proud of their ability to use words, that they seem to think the opposite. Human pride says that more words will bring the truth closer. This is how humans created gods, human sacrifices, Mutually Assured Destruction, and all the other rational explanations humans have created over the years.

*****

To understand what true means, a person needs to negate from their imagination everything made of words, as though words do not exist.

If this an impossible feat, a person might think about a phenomenon that humans cannot explain no matter what words they use. What about gravity or pain or hunger?

1. What if an animal is told that they are not hungry, when they are hungry?
2. What if an animal is told that they can walk off the cliff and keep going without falling?
3. What if an animal is told that they are not feeling pain, when they are feeling pain?

If the animal is a human, they will think that words have nothing to do with reality.

If the animal is a non-human, they will think that words have nothing to do with reality.

What the animal can do, is figure out the relationship between the second and third cases. So, unless they are certain there is no relationship, they will avoid the cliff.

The supreme advantage that animals have over humans when it comes to living in a rational manner within Nature, is that animals do not need words to explain what they understand, because what they understand is true.

PART 2

[mschmidt]

With regard to understanding what is happening in the world, humans understand more than animals, but humans also misunderstand more. With regard to surviving indefinitely on earth, it could be that less misunderstanding is better.

PART 3

[mschmidt]

Something is true if it is self-evident.

If something requires a proof, it is not self-evident. Thus, a proof is an insufficient replacement for truth – not a substitute, but a resignation that the concept of truth does not apply.

What about the idea that words might be used to make something become self-evident?

But reality is what makes something self-evident, not words; so, if a set of words makes something become self-evident, it must be because a different set of words prevented it from being self-evident.

[mschmidt]

To clarify this: a proof is a resignation – that the concept of truth does not apply at all.

The reason is that every proof is based on presuppositions, and to get picky about it, an infinite collection of presuppositions.
In physics, if the variable mass “m” has no other properties that make a difference in a calculation, then this is a presupposition. Whether an equation containing “m” is “true” depends on how certain you need to be. At some point in the process of proofing the ‘truth” of the equation in the early 1900s, the presupposition became false.