Truth is long-sighted

Diekon … I’m increasingly convinced our biological being is hard wired to act as though God exists … though

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Happily, JSS and others here at ILP are slowly recognizing their ‘blindness’ … though a long road still stretches out in front of them.

Diekon … I’m increasingly convinced our biological being is hard wired to act as though God exists … though

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Happily, JSS and others here at ILP are slowly recognizing their ‘blindness’ … though a long road still stretches out in front of them.

God is a bit to specific for the kind of thing that is biological hardwired, i think (though God is notorious for being undefinable, so it hard to say i guess. It depends on what you mean with God).

Hardwired to venerate something, sure. And also hardwired to see causality in the world… which may lead us down a path to God, as an ultimate cause.

Yeah … naming conventions create mental blocks and myopia.

Perhaps we should reexamine some old Greek words like “nous”

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… and “noetic”

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… and more recent derivatives like noosphere

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… and noetic science

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Note that long-sighted people cannot only see things far away, but also things close to them - just with less focus. In fact their field of vision is just the same as anyone’s, only clarity increases with distance and decreases with proximity - a sliding scale.

Thereby, I am not at all making truth into a “distanced unchanging thing, divorced from the reality”, I am instead saying that truth increases with distance away from reality - it is present throughout to a variable extent, but never separated from it: fields of vision are all of reality, and far-away reality is still reality. I am exactly saying that “senses” don’t lie, and yes, when we want to “make sense” - that is what distorts.
In line with the sliding scale of truth, I am also not at all proposing some kind of higher “Truth” with a capital T. I am instead being modest, just as you suggested one ought to be.

You appear to have got a completely wrong impression of what I was trying to say, I can only apologise if I explained it so badly that you interpreted my words in the way you did. So I’m sorry pilgrim-seeker_tom, I think you’ve been wowed by a strawman, but at least his words make a reasonable point in themselves, even if they don’t apply to what I’m saying. The only thing I can find to respond to in other things you’ve said is:

Commonly suggested as supporting evidence for God-belief, that “it’s natural” - many natural things are accidental results of other natural things that serve obvious purpose. One thing that emerged as a “play-it-safe” approach has been “abductive reasoning”: is it a sufficient explanation that a dangerous thing caused what I just experienced? Those who stick around to deductively find out fall foul to the dangerous thing if that’s what it was afterall, and those who assume and evade what might have just been nothing stay healthy. This has been slowly undoing itself as we consolidate and expand our position on top of the food chain and in charge of our surroundings, and deductive reasoning is slowly phasing out abductive reasoning as the more useful and now anti-dangerous approach - and unsurprisingly, God-belief is weakening in line with this. However, the reason it is slow is that abductive reasoning is still relatively useful, and it has accidentally resulted in some other useful behaviours. It is evidently proven over and over again that co-operative strategies win versus individualist strategies, and this is selected for naturally by the advantages of looking out for your closest relations. If you support or even save a sibling, your genetic make-up gets passed down more and eclipses those only out for themselves - this will naturally emerge as a dominant behaviour. But how to get this kinship to extend to wider society who shares less genetic material for even more co-operative gains? Abductive reasoning posits that it didn’t initially know how the world could have come to be and why it would behave in the way it did. Since individual people don’t appear to have the power to cause many larger scale things, even though people are experienced as the most powerful causers around, it is sufficient to posit a greater kind of person that is powerful enough to cause these bigger things - ergo God. God belief brings people together in a way that transcends normal selection by co-operating only with those most related to you. Pseudo-kinship arises and co-operative behaviours spread much more effectively throughout a society - these behaviours out-perform others and effectively religious peoples come out on top. The fact that they rationally do so through the means of irrationally is irrelevant. This kind of success sadly still works very well, hence the slow emergence of more rational approaches. So we aren’t necessarily “hard wired” to act as though God exists, but people who are prone to do so under the right conditions still proliferate in modern society, even though they’re rationally more limited.

It took me a while to suss out such statements as “the truth is that there is no truth” and “that truth is relative is absolutely true”, but I believe my OP proposition encapsulates both. Absolute truth is in fact just the most true possible - it is another relative term like all others: “it is the most relatively true that all truth is relative” is perfectly fine. It’s binary thinkers who can’t cope with this, only able to think of absolutes as the binary opposite of relative - with the two incompatible. And of course with statements such as “the truth is that there is no truth”, they identify this as having the form of an absolute truth and being about absolute truths - either you can have absolute truths, or it’s not true and therefore false - and so it looks like a contradiction when one attempts to insert the obvious observation that some truths are more true than others, and no synthetic truths can ever be known to be absolutely true. If one doesn’t think analytic truths necessarily depend on synthetic truths (thus making them never absolutely knowable too), their clear and absolute rationalist world falls apart as soon as it is applied to anything at all. Just because something can be presented as absolute, and have internal consistency, doesn’t mean it can apply to the world - it is just another example of my OP proposition that truth is most clear the more distanced it is from reality.

The problem you’re encountering here is your conception of consciousness as “within oneself”. Commonly this is where it is assumed to be because a lot of the major sensory organs triangulate to some vague area inside the head… and yet nobody has ever “found it” inside a head. But regardless of “where” consciousness is, it is “of” much more than just that which is “within oneself” - and of course with this clarification, distance becomes perfectly possible.

With regard to how knowledge and truth are determined/established, it seems to me that the brain mylinates neural pathways more commonly when they are experienced in conjunction and it all becomes a relative issue of association. “This word” is known to denote “this experience”, because they come together so often, “this experience” is known to cause “that experience” because one follows the other all the time. Truth and knowledge are just this process but tested much more rigorously and exhaustively. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.

I have for a while now regarded truths as more similar to lies - but useful lies. Seeing as truths require distance from reality, they are necessarily not true to reality by at least some measures. Some truths are more true than others, but they are all forms of lies since they are distanced distortions of truth, and they are communicated by words, and words in themselves are not the things they denote. For various reasons, the intertwined nature of truth and deception ought to be the expectation, not a mysterious problem that binary thinkers cannot shake. My depiction of truth as long-sighted takes all of this into account.

Seems the difference between me and many of the frequent posters in this forum is that I have no substantial investment in my opinions.

I’m content to float on the surface of the ocean as the tide ebbs and flows … crashing on the shores of human consciousness.

You say i made a strawman out of your post. But I don’t think i did. I did make a more general point about philosophy in the first place, but i still think it also applies to what you wrote, at least to some extend.

These were your first two lines :

In your reply you left out the mental abstraction and generalisation part, and only went on talking about (physical) distance… which i have less of a problem with, though i don’t quite see why distance would increase truth, as a general rule. But statements being more truthful the more they are abstracted and generalised, that is what i was talking about… where philosophy historical went astray.

Only particulars exist. First order abstractions typically contain some information about a particular, but are necessarily limited in scope. You can widen that scope, generalise, by abstracting further away from that. But you do not get closer to the Truth or more truthful statements, you lose information (about particulars) in that proces… until you end up with something empthy, divorced from the world. The immodesty of philosphers was in wanting to widen the scope to much. It’s hard not to see what you are saying in the same light when you equate the most general with ‘the most truthful’.

Truth = Abstract

… that feels like familiar territory … it punctuates an argument presented by Moreno a year or so ago.

Paraphrasing Moreno’s statement … “moving from the abstract to the concrete”.

If I understood his suggestion correctly, he was emphasizing the prudence in moving from contemplation of the abstract (Truth) to reflection on personal experience … daily personal experience.

The planet has traveled 2,592,000 kms in its’ orbit around the sun in the last 24 hours … not to mention the travel resulting from its’ spin on its’ own axis.

People who cling to the status quo get sick … people who smoke too much abstract get sick.

I agree with what you say about first order abstractions, and proceeding to widen the scope.

What I am trying to say is that it becomes more possible for truths to be truer, the further away they are in abstraction - just the same as if it were physical distance. You have noticed that this is at direct odds to what such truths “are true to” (i.e. reality). This is the issue that I am trying to explain: the most true things that can be said are the furthest away from the reality that they are supposed to be true to. In allowing more true things to be said, one compromises on the usefulness of truth - i.e. its applicability to reality. I think you in fact agree with this, from what I understand from what you’ve said.

The distinction that I started developing a few years ago is that between truth and utility - that they are inversely proportional. It may not be clear from what I’ve said so far that I am replacing truthfulness to reality with utility so as to make a distinction between this kind of “truth” and increasingly syntactically true statements such as those of maths and logic. In more familiar philosophical terminology, I am proposing an inverse proportionality between synthetic and analytic truths. The analytic truths are the more distant sounding and they are more able to be true. The synthetic truths are closer to reality and more useful, but more and more flawed and untrue.

My issue is with referring to both truthfulness to reality and internally consistent truths is that they are both referred to as truth. That they both increase in opposition to one another can only be confusing, so I decided to only call one direction truth and the other utility. Since the closer and closer one gets to reality, the more dependent one is on interpretation, and the further and further one gets into abstraction the more clearly true statements can become, I decided to reserve the term “truth” for the latter. The further back towards reality you bring these truths the more useful they are, hence the naming of its opposite as “utility”.

It can seem a little anti-intuitive according to the contemporary usage of the two terms - and things like Socratic reasoning tended to align truth and utility - but I find it more valuable to distinguish the two for the purposes of solving philosophical disputes about the nature of truth.

Hopefully that helps explain my position a little better - I did suspect it might have been my fault for explaining things insufficiently. Feel free to continue to disagree though, if you still do.

As a tangent, I do enjoy correcting heliocentrism (and obviously geocentrism too) in light of relativity. Since there is no absolute space (or time), there are no points in space from which to definitively state speeds up until the speed of light: relative to a particular perspective, the planet hasn’t moved at all. So according to your analogy, I am not insane - neither clinging to the status quo like a geocentrist nor smoking too much like the heliocentrists… that’s my proof and I’m sticking to it :-"

You’re in good company … 7 billion + people and counting. Can’t imagine what would happen if the bubble ever bursts.

I might follow you to some extend in that i do think more general statements retain less information and so are likely to become less usefull for us. But even if you are using an odd definition of truth , it’s hard to see how (with what notion of truth) something would become more true the more it is abstracted. Something is either true, not true, or indetermined. There’s no scale there. And to determine whether something is true you verify the proposition with the world. To compare your statement ‘there is existence’, and a random first order abstraction like ‘there is a cat on the mat’… there is no difference in truth value. They are both just true, assuming there is in fact a cat on the mat. What you call ‘more true’ i would just call ‘more general’ i think.

Analytic truths are a different matter alltoghether. I was never talking about that here. I don’t think the metaphor of ‘distance’ even applies to those, because they don’t have that kind of relation to the world. They are not supposed to contain information about the world. They are true by definition (convention), not because you verify them. I’d think putting them on that same axis will muddle and confuse things more, as i don’t think they are of the same kind.

It’s not that i disagree per se, but i also don’t see a good reason to make these non-conventional distinctions and definitions. I haven’t looked at the ramifications, but i suspect you will run into some issues… aside from the difficulties in communicating your ideas.

It doesn’t automatically gain more truth the more abstracted it is, it’s just able to be more true with more abstraction.

Consider the history of science, e.g. Newtonian physics has a great deal of truth to it, but relativity is more true. Truth is a scale. Only at the highest level of abstraction does truth become the most absolute it can be: binary True (or False/indetermined). But as you bring that level of abstraction back down to reality the lines begin to blur, it gets closer to reality and actual useful applicability but of course you can’t be as precise and definite.

“There is existence” is implied in every possible truth - even the attempted denial of existence is predicated on existence in order for such a denial to exist, be made, and apply. “There is a cat on the mat” depends a great deal on definitions: “cat” presupposes a classification that doesn’t have exact bounds - there is no exact archetype of “cat”, just a set of particulars that all vary - despite being grouped together under a single term. How much of a cat is bacteria? What about oxygen that goes in and out of the cat’s blood stream, and hormones that it gives off and receives? Since a cat is never the exact same cat twice, is it so precisely always a cat - or does this also rely on the definition of cat being very loose and imprecise? Maybe the mat is more of a rug? The electromagnetic forces in both the cat and mat repel the two meaning that at different levels of magnification, it becomes more or less the case that the cat is on space and space is on the mat…

You see how there is far more reliance on vagueness in a more concrete and useful observation such as “there is a cat on the mat”? It is this abstraction of “cat” that allows something so distinctly truthful sounding, but just because such an abstraction can be made, doesn’t mean it is necessary or it has to be one way rather than another. Do we assume the senses are available to us bring more truth than perhaps another set? Does our expected level of magnification yield a more true view? At a smaller level, a cat wouldn’t even be distinguishable, just atoms and molecules, and at a higher level, any cat would likewise be too small to be distinguishable as being on any mat. Which is more true, and is there a different perspective that sufficiently falsifies altogether what seems to be so clearly true from our perspective - there is no cat on the mat after all?

I’m sure you get the point. I think you can therefore safely say that “there is existence” is more true than “there is a cat on the mat”. You could also call the former more general, but I am aiming to confront the notion of truth rather than avoid and step around it.

As mentioned in my previous post, it is for this reason that I am resorting to unconventionally distinguishing in the way that I am. Otherwise the nature of truth runs into problems and continues to present itself as philosophically problematic. It’s only because of the fact that it’s not an easy task to get to the bottom of problems with truth, and people are used to thinking of truth differently to how I am proposing that there is any difficulty in communicating my solution. I was primarily steering clear of conventional terminology e.g. “analytic” because it already carries with it an established set of associations and understandings. I am fine not using such terms at all, though I do think analytic truths do serve as a good example of truths that have been abstracted so far from reality that they can be formed without verification with the world. They are able to have this binary absolute truth/falsity to them because of this extreme distance.

Your OP implied the greater the distance the more complex the truth. Example finding the truth of things billions of light years away would be more complex than the moon or near the tree within touch.
It is true human consciousness is link to one’s own brain which is the nearest possible but it is a very complex subject.
Thus your OP is not valid.

I did not state the human consciousness in confined solely within oneself. No human is an island. Human consciousness emerged interdependently with the universe. So in that sense, human consciousness is more than merely within oneself.

However being-conscious is confined to the human individuals. Humans are not like robots which are controlled by some agency that is external [near or from billion light years away] to the robot.

There are more efficient philosophical deliberations on the topic of ‘Truth’.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth

But this point from the link re Kant is misleading.
“Immanuel Kant endorses a definition of truth along the lines of the Correspondence Theory of Truth.”
Kant did not agree with the general “Correspondence Theory of Truth” but offered his own explanation of ‘what is truth’ within a continuum which I agree is the best explanation of ‘what is truth.’

Silhouette, I don’t think there is anything especially vague about ‘there is a cat on the mat’. It doesn’t matter if the distinction between a cat and say a tiger isn’t entirely clear, or maybe it is more of a rug than a mat. I’m pointing to a particular. It suffices to communicate certain information about that particular to someone in my vicinity.

That is what you seem to be glossing over, that there is a point to all of this. Maybe you don’t gloss over it exactly, since you are splitting up utility and truth intentionally… But I just don’t see how that can work.

Again back to those mistakes of philosophers, the ideas that there is some pure truth out there, and that truth for truth sake should be a goal. We split up the world the way we do because of the kind of beings we are, and at what scale we tend to interact with cats.

Under a microscope cats may consist of molecules and atoms, and viewed from afar they seem only a speck of fur… But that doesn’t matter to us, we only care that they may bite, or that they make good pets.

Seperating truth from utility, or some other values we may hold, to have a more ‘pure’ notion of truth, is the path to becoming unhinged it seems to me. I’m taking the other way.

Although I applaud giving recognition to the elusive third option, in this case, it doesn’t apply:

Rather truth is only in the details.
A fact the pompous Einstein didn’t wish to accept, but which every nurturing person knows.

Value ontology aka the self valuing logic of being is the system whereby details are recognized as basic realities, and truth-models are built from details.

Hence, why progress is slow and steady and will never stop. There is never a shortage of details. I turned Truth into a goldmine.

I think we both agree that there is a different kind of value to staying close to reality as opposed to abstracting to various degrees - even though both are treated as paths to greater truth depending on who you ask - and you obviously privilege the former. I also think that you are mistaking me as privileging the latter and therefore attributing to me what you identify as a major mistake of philosophers. I do not in fact privilege either, I think either direction has value - I am simply pointing out that the distinction exists and as long as some people call one the path to truth and others say it’s the other path, the nature of truth is going to continue to be confused and unresolved.

I think you accept my distinction, but would “take the other way” as truth - and you would oppose it to “generalisation”. I would point out that you are arguing in favour of “sufficient” and practical information - we only care/value whether cats bite or make good pets - this is the most immediately useful information to our everyday physiological concerns. In privileging this path of utility in terms of “truth”, you align these concepts like Socrates et al. I agree that short-sighted utility is highly valuable, and not at all “untrue” - but I would say that it is possible to make more absolutely true statements the more you abstract away from the mundane and concrete. Surely you agree that “1+1=2” is more true than “cats say meow”? Whether you do or don’t - since identifying cats by their sounds can establish what can be referred to as a truth - you must surely see why I am using the term “truth” for things like maths and logic more than I am for where cats are sitting? Again, I’m not saying that what I term as truth is “better” (or worse), or that useful information has no truth. I think there’s a reason why the truth of useful theories is enhanced or even confirmed after having been mathematically/logically proven.

So you agree that truth is enhanced from the details of reality upward?

I’m not opposed to all generalisation, It’s fine if it’s done with care and for good reasons. I’m opposed to overgeneralisation and overvaluing of generalisation… to the point where the most abstracted is deemed more true and even more real than the source they were abstracted from. And I don’t allign with Socrates, he’s the one that got it all started by insisting on extracting essences from particulars using his dialectic method. Which Plato then turned into the Forms as the only truly true thing, while relegating the sensed world to the cave.

I’ve stated in previous posts why I don’t follow your distinction. I think it’s confusing because you are putting things that don’t belong together on the same axis (synthetic and analytic truths), and applying a metaphor (distance) where it’s doesn’t make sense. It’s actually an example of why to much generalisation can be problematic. To see clear in this, i think one needs to really look at some of the details, and start from there.

I do not agree with the OPs suggested equation of predictability and truth.
The orbit of our sun around the galactic center is only discernible through intense focus on innumerable details.
Science comes to be as the study of details. All scientists are experts at discerning nuance.

Truth is always nuanced.

Quantum Physics, thereby, is entirely truth-less, as it seeks to generalize away the very details its only task it is to observe.
Quantum Mechanics, as the gathering of information about things so small it is impossible to be nuanced enough about them in the language we have, is a form of diligent truthfulness.

Accuracy is easier to claim on behalf of great generalities than about quickly changing situations on the ground.
A successful military commander always has an eye for detail. And Id say the establishment of truth is always a hard-fought victory.
Thus, truth and power are quite akin.

People are so stupid it is just impossible to even think about. Really. It is. Impossible.