Truth is long-sighted

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. :smiley:

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? :wink: 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:

:sunglasses:

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.

This is their “advantage”: they cannot even be thought-of.

Somehow this works to their advantage, hahahaha… allows them to evade something that the rest of us must deal with… what? Oh yeah… “reality”.

Damn! Reality, who the fuck needs it?!? Stupid. Better to not-exist so no one can ever think you, then you get to “live forever” free inside some bureaucrat’s wet dream.

Slavery, anyone? Where is PKummiue when you need him?

This aint your mom, not every dick gets in

Ok, I’m gonna pretend the above x3 didn’t happen…

Seeing as I am not privileging either one direction or the other, I still agree that looking at the details holds value. However, I think abstraction is getting a bit of a bad rap in this thread. I don’t see any issue in putting “degree of abstraction (with regard to truth)” on an axis… it’s the same thing and it comes in degrees so why not? It doesn’t have SI units, but then this is philosophy not science. I think with higher degrees of abstraction, you can increasingly state things with more certainty at the expense of their direct applicability to reality, and with lower degrees of abstraction allow more attention to detail and utility but at the expense of the precision of indisputable truths. The fact that analytic truths require high levels of abstraction and synthetic truths don’t doesn’t mean I’m making an axis of synthetic to analytic truths, those terms just happen to have relevant applicability to the axis that I am examining - hence why I avoided using them in my primary choice of terminology.

By all means start with the details, make useful statements and observations. They will be much more open to dispute and subject to opinion and interpretation, but they won’t be without truth I’m sure - and you’ve made it very clear that this is the direction in which your values lie. Not to say you are averse to abstraction - you say you are open to careful and justified generalisation and averse to “over”-generalisation, and who wouldn’t be? But I don’t think over-generalisation is the same as abstracting towards much more watertight truths that involve higher degrees of generalisation. Generalisation can extend beyond truth to ridiculousness, but I am talking about truth - not what happens when you take abstraction past it.

I think the kind of abstraction that I’m talking about has value in its provision of context. Exploring things that are connected and pattern-finding can provide much insight into how you approach the details - in my opinion this is what philosophy is for. Sticking close to the details runs the risk of not seeing the bigger picture, or at least not seeing alternatives. It serves the same role as pure mathematics and theoretical physics, it doesn’t apply the maths/do the experiments, but it continually provides inspiration and opens new avenues. I agree that it is a mistake for philosophers to take this too far down a rabbit hole and to stay there.

As for Socrates, I’m just referring to that triple-filter test that lumps truth and usefulness (and goodness) together, but yes - the comparison breaks down when Plato does what I would call “over-generalisation”. I am far more aligned with existentialism than essentialism.

Exactly.

I think my only mention of predictability was in reference to the movements of celestial bodies. When you are too far removed from the details, it certainly seems much more true to say how something will behave in precise and predictable terms. That doesn’t mean that predictability and truth are equal, but I would certainly say they were related. I would expect that ancient peoples would have thought the same - the predictable, mysteriously distant and seemingly perfect heavens were their inspiration for their gods. The proposed existence of a god of truth has surely been fairly ubiquitous, whether alongside other gods or not. But corruptible second-hand information aside, noticing relative consistencies in the movements of the sun, moon and stars hardly requires a great need for detail, just general memory and the ability to match similar enough memories together. You could certainly break it down into innumerable details! But that requires a closer look, which opens up further uncertainties and “not exactly as true as we thought it was”-ness - and utility.

Alright Silhouette, to not repeat myself over and over, i’ll try to tackle it in another way.

Newton’s law was found to be lacking because it couldn’t account for all gravitational phenoma. What science does, is posit theories and test those with experiments (aka test the theory in different settings of the world). If under some conditions it doesn’t hold up, you try to come up with plausible explanations for why it doesn’t hold… and if that’s not possible you revise the theory or come up with a new one. Rince repeat… general relativity.

It’s also perfectly possible that no general unifying theorie can be found. I don’t think there is a general rule for the level of generalisation or abstraction at which a theories reaches their most… let’s call it refined form for now. It just depends on the subject matter it seems.

So what you are doing could be compared to formulating such a theory. You have a particular (movement of celestial bodies seem best described from a distance), and you abstract from that to your more general theory :

So I think, alright, let’s test if the theory hold… So i’ve been bringing up objections to the theory in past posts, for instance :

Analytics truths don’t have their origin in the same proces of abstraction a scientific theory does. To verify if they are true you don’t verify them with data, you just look if their are coherent within the system. They are abstract, but not abstracted from particulars. It’s a different proces. So i think it’s a mistake to even include them in a theory about abstraction.

But here’s a new and possibly more fundamental objection. You have taken the movement of celestial bodies as an example. But I think there are lots of examples where it doesn’t necessarily hold. If you want to explain the behaviour of atoms you don’t go all the way to the stars to arrive at the best theory. Or if you want to describe human behaviour, the most general theories like physics will not be the best perspective to describe that etc… It does just seem to depends on the subject matter that is being examined.

In short, I think there is no justification in this case for going from the particular (celestial bodies) to a general theory.

I can live with that. I understand your thinking now, the way your terms are intended. Thats always the tricky part with statements about metaphysics. And Id say “Truth” is the primary term of metaphysics.

However, I disagree with the idea that there isn’t a great need for detail in observing (establishing knowledge of) predictable motions. As evidence I can only refer to the people that did that very work.

Eg
amazon.de/Schriften-Briefe- … 3928127942

Ive been looking hard for an English translation of this. If you can find it I highly recommend it. You can read his pondering as he observes through his lens the minutest changes in the appearance of Jupiter, deriving from these observations an understanding that the planet apparently has satellites, and from there on, he goes on to suggest the heliocentric model of the solar system.

I would claim that science, i.e the establishment and study of predictable phenomena, does have its roots in some peoples keen eye for details, along with, of course, a capacity for integrating numerous observed details into a universalizing method of thought, a model.

Such a model /universalizing method I would claim is the “container” for the notion of “Truth”.

General relativity arose from the abstract notion of not assuming absolute time. It may have been special relativity that did the same with absolute space, correct me if I’m wrong.

Of course what experimental science does is what you explained - I am very familiar with the process. But just gathering the details just expands the number of things you know. How to make them fit together into theories, and changing the assumptions you made in the pattern finding process - that is how we ended up with e.g. general relativity. Such a theory doesn’t just “pop out” from more/better data, you have to rethink the more/better data first - you have to abstract. The name itself “general relativity” even uses the term general as in generalised to describe what it is and what it was intended to do: apply more generally. And in abstracting further, we improved the level of truth behind our science…

The process towards a GUT is just the same, it’s only taking so long because the experiments required are so difficult to do. It’s all about finding things in common with different details, so that you can generalise them and explain the nuanced differences in terms of a common ground. With more/better data this will just continue - and we’re generalising the behaviours of elementary particles more and more all the time. This is what science does.

And yes, this is what I’m doing too. Your appreciated attempt to not repeat yourself by tackling things in a different way is actually an excellent counter-example to your view, unfortunately.

Of course you don’t “zoom out” in order to “zoom in” to the level of atoms… I think you’re getting confused about “the possibility” of more truthful truths and the idea that distance “necessarily” gets you to a more truthful truth. And actually, human behaviour is actually increasingly being studied through neuroscience…

Philosophers like Quine disagree with you that analytic truths don’t depend on synthetic truths. Obviously they’re defined as distinct - that was the purpose of using the two terms - they are indeed intended to describe different processes. Not that I wanted to get into it, but in practice they are related. Whether or not the meanings of different terms align analytically relies on meanings having been synthetically associated with the world. Meanings themselves are just alternative sounds/visual symbols associated with an element of the world - they relate to the world by definition. And whether they relate to each other by themselves is related to whether they relate to each other in the world…

I absolutely agree that there is a great deal of utility in observing the detail of seemingly predictable motions - it disrupts clear indisputable truths and we get a more useful fidelity to reality from the new perspective. In doing so, truths become much more contingent and less necessary, more open to interpretation and doubt, and more useful.

That is an interesting criterion for truth, its usefulness. Of course we need to take a slightly less cynical perspective to this than Nietzsche, especially in this context.

Id say that detail in this case, and in general as I have experienced it, is instrumental in clueing us in about what we are looking at. Like the twitch of an eye can reveal to us the context in which we need to interpret a lengthy story. Eg as a lie, telling us much about the one who tells it.

Before GG observed the small details about Jupiter, mankind had no grasp of the concept of orbit. And in orbit, gravity is implied.
This insight that the minute details around Jupiter provided, coupled with the much earlier work of Archimedes, ultimately led to Newton.

I will note that Archimedes’ observation, which must stand as the very outset of physics, did not revolve around details, but still it required an eye for the unexplained behind the seemingly obvious.

"The secret history of philosophers, the psychology of their great names, was revealed to me. How much truth can a certain mind endure; how much truth can it dare?—these questions became for me ever more and more the actual test of values. Error (the belief in the ideal) is not blindness; error is cowardice… Every conquest, every step forward in knowledge, is the outcome of courage, of hardness towards one’s self, of cleanliness towards one’s self. I do not refute ideals; all I do is to draw on my gloves in their presence… Nitimur in vetitum; with this device my philosophy will one day be victorious; for that which has hitherto been most stringently forbidden is, without exception, Truth. "

-Nietzsche, Ecce Homo