![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
degringolade
Symbolism / Ivan Milev/ King Marko
The Truth™.
Love the fact that everyone seems to know it but no one can quite “nail it down”. We get our information third and fourth hand (minimum) and rarely if ever go out and look at the data sets. People wake up to their cell phone and check the weather. Never for a moment does it occur to them to open the door and look outside.
Local events are mediated by the local news. Portland according to most is a dystopian hellscape stalked by antifa and regularly invaded by marauding bands of proud boys, yet my favorite restaurant for Chinese dumplings (I am going there tonight with a friend) is pretty damn close to the action and even on the nights that I went to check out the “riots” I thought the whole issue overwrought. I actually remember walking over to a food cart to grab a burrito and then eating it while watching the show.
But even with direct observation, you have to filter through a set of your own physical and ideological filters. When checking the weather, I am likely to say just how nice a day it is while she complains bitterly about the return of the Cryogenian. Having wandered through the jungles of SE Asia, my definition of violence is different from that of a gated community princess.
The world that we live in is a compendium of around eight billion points of view. None quite see the same thing the same way. I just wish folks would stop talking about the Truth™.
I’M WITH STUPID
Date: 2021-12-08 06:20 pm (UTC)Since humans decide what is true, truth is a personal judgement; so, it is literally true that something is true if a person thinks it is.
The objection to this definition is to note a “crazy” person who believes something that nobody else does. But as you point out, the problem with this objection, is the non-crazy people are probably wrong too.
In any case, who can argue about this: the truth about what just happened is: what just happened.
The argument against this statement will be “misperception” – people can see things different. But this argument is BS.
Consider a mirage or any so-called misperception. People say they “misperceive” because they see a lake where there is no lake. So, it is not true if somebody says there is a lake.
But “misperception” is a figment of human imagination – a result that people invent because they fail to distinguish the truth from what they think about the truth. The truth is what happens – a person perceives patterns of light waves; thus, the truth about the world is the pattern of light waves. But people say they perceive a lake, which is not true – not because there is no lake, but because what they actually perceive, are patterns of light waves – which are the truth.
As it turns out, light waves from warm earth, look like the light waves from water. In this case, somebody perceives the truth, and then they make up an untruthful story about what they perceive. The truth is what just happened. But everybody has a different story, so somebody must have misperceived, which is not true.
Why did that ass Bob do what he did? In fact, to get the full truth, one would have to go back to the moment Bob was born and re-live all the experiences Bob has had – and then to explain that, keep going back to the beginning of the universe. Nobody can do this, even the first part, so nobody knows the full story about Bob.
So, just like with a search for a scientific explanation, some portion of Bob’s life must be abstracted from the universe for analysis. If somebody does not want to think so much, they can just conclude that Bob is an ass, and if others agree, the search for truth ends successfully there.
But the megachurch pastor is rich because everybody wants to know explanations that science and other tools cannot possibly address definitively. So, the explanation for the pastor’s riches, is the pastor has developed an explanation that nobody, including science, can prove is false.
Who has ever said that a certain scientist is a “true believer” in a result of a science experiment? Who ever said that Einstein was a true believer in relativity? The only reason to say such a thing, is if there is doubt about the validity of the experiment - which is a scenario that science is intended to prevent.
Who calls someone who believes everything the megachurch pastor says about God, a “true believer”? Interestingly, this is the common application for the description – which might bring into question what the true purpose of truth is.
The supreme value in a person knowing the truth, is that they do not have to think anymore. Once somebody gets to this point, they can get back to the project of entertaining themselves.
Not to criticize entertainment – why should life not be entertaining? Scientists are scientists either for the job/attention/money, or because their personal version of entertainment is science. Another option in life is the “ignorance is bliss” approach, and one of the arguments for this option, is that many scientists are full of shit because they do not stay within the bounds of science for various reasons including fame and fortune, not to mention paying the bills.
In addition to science and religion, somebody can choose to join a group like ANTIFA or the Proud Boys, where everybody, in essence, feels the same way about Bob. So, the scientist knows the truth and so does the megachurch pastor, and so does everybody in the various groups.
According to some historical accounts, ancient humans discovered this conundrum produced by human rationality and curiosity, and their solution, was to kill Bob before his hubris caused problems for the entire society. We have moved beyond such solutions, and so we have a lot more asses of the human variety now. (Exhibit A = a Homo hubris sapiens like Elon Musk).