Month: October 2020

Is There Objective Truth?

Here’s something I wrote around 20 (at least 18) years ago and the question it was in response to. I tweaked it somewhat for posting here.

Yoknapatawpha wrote:
How often it is stated: THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE TRUTH.

The American Bar Association, in their journal of Litigation offers this advice to attorneys and philosophers alike:

Perhaps the speaker has confused the easy rhetoric of radical relativism with their own commitment to egalitarian tolerance, young college students these days are apt to utter such comments, when not otherwise fiercely defending their rights-even if only the “right” to listen to Eminem. Capable teachers can lead the students from these lesser truths to certain higher principles, such as the self-evident truths embodied in our [American] Constitution. The relativist rhetoric, meanwhile, is exposed for what it is: a convenient dodge around the need to defend opinion in the face of intellectual challenge: a kind of intellectual laziness rather than a way of life.

Is denial of the self-evident truths no more than rhetorical, intellectual dishonesty? Is the idea of truth being self-evident antithetical to propositional logic which, in selfless syllogistic form, begins with an assumption rather than an impression? Objective truths even though science might not fully describe reality?

The reasons lawyers might appear persuaded by these odd forms of relativism is clear: they are the advocates for individuals and entities other than themselves, excepting monetary gain and recognition – none contingent on the truth or falsity of advocacy.

The reasons, on the other hand, for philosophers and thinkers alike taking such an extreme position, given that the ones stating the propositions have a direct interest in the truth or validity of proposition over and above a potential economic gain, whatever that reason may be, are unclear, seemingly unexamined, and disoriented.

Could there really be any sincerity to the claims of these arbiters of fashion? Reading Popper, Kierkegaard, or Rorty are not a prerequisites. Just intellectual honesty. Come forward. Please.

I don’t think relativism is a result of intellectual dishonesty.

First, we’ll start with the provenience of the question.

I think the cause of truly philosophical relativism stems from the fact of a fuzzy line between those things which are obviously “objectively” true and those things which are arguable. I.e., since there is no clear line, perhaps everything is ultimately arguable. I guess that raises a question of the relationship between arguability and objective truth. Clearly, things that may be clearly resolved at some future time could be arguable at present. Do they have a present objective truth? We seem to discover truth, so the apparent answer would be yes. So what draws the line between an endlessly arguable truth and a discoverable truth? Maybe empiricism. (This razor preserves moral relativism, which is “self-evident” anyway because morality is based on values, which are personal.) An empirical truth is hard to argue with.

So, what can we do to preserve relativism? I guess we could extrapolate arguability into empirical matters and just say that empirical matters are less arguable, but still ultimately arguable. But then, it is still discovered, so it seems to fall to the “realistic” idea that there is an objective reality and we simply have limited capacity to find it and we can never be 100% certain. So, maybe I can attack the idea of discovery. First of all, the impossibility of certainty makes it questionable, to me, how valid it is to say that we are discovering truth. I say certainty is impossible because we can never be sure our sense perceptions aren’t faulty, our reasoning isn’t faulty, we’re not in Plato’s cave, we’re not subject to Descartes’ evil demon, we’re not a brain in a vat, etc. If you don’t really know for certain, then you aren’t really discovering anything; rather you are endlessly conjecturing. This kind of realism seems to comprise a wild goose chase where no matter how close we get to objective truth, we are always automatically a certain distance away from it, yet one would make the leap of faith to believe that this objective truth exists. (I know, this argument is flimsy. :P)

Alright, that’s it for the provenience of the matter.

Apparently, we know nothing of reality except through sense perceptions. These sense perceptions do not come to us in truth structures, they come to us in the form of images, sounds, etc. (even including for the possibility of hallucinations). You can make “true” statements based on your interpretation of the data, but the data itself is neither true nor false, or at least, it is all necessarily true, or at least it Just Is.

After these sense perceptions, we apply our semiotic system to synthesize notions about this external world that can have truth values. Note that you cannot think of anything that is either true or false that is not a proposition. (You could reason that a thing itself is true in the sense that it exists, but in a context in which everything is necessarily true, true has no meaning. Also, note that i had to construct a proposition, “a thing itself is true in the sense that it exists,” about that which (presumably) doesn’t exist propositionally, and say that that is what is true.)

Also, this semiotical system itself does not exist prior to sense perceptions. A baby knows nothing of truth or logic, and eventually develops these faculties, presumably with no cosmic, Platonic input. Or even if you say evolution designed these capabilities into our brain, we can still say it’s ultimately utilitarian: what else could it be, being a product of natural selection of efficacy in manipulating one’s environment over random mutations of brains and bodies? And thus, truth is ultimately utilitarian. I wrote more about that here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2024/08/13/on-pragmatism/.

Since a truth-model can be “wrong” and still be effective and useful, and because what works for one person may not work for another, utilitarian truth is no basis for truth being objective.

It would seem that for objective truth to exist, the correspondence theory of truth would have to be true. And it cannot be.

Anything we can know or say about reality is ideas in our minds. Knowledge is semiotic, which is why it’s so easily translated into linguistic propositions, while “external reality,” or reality at large, is, presumably, non-ideational. Anything two things we can compare to each other are ideas, or we wouldn’t be able to comprehend or mentally process/think about them in order to compare them. So, the difference between our thoughts, or our truths, and “objective reality,” if it exists, is of a higher order than any difference we can comprehend; there is no greater dichotomy.

So, obviously, the truth as we know it is a synthesis of our minds to apply to a reality that simply exists. I believe the realist stance is that the truth exists in the correspondence between the proposition/idea and reality. But let’s think about this. First of all, any idea corresponds 100% with reality in that the mindstate that comprises the idea is a part of reality. It is not inherently any more or less “connected” with reality depending on whether it’s “true” or “false.” It is inevitably a reflection of reality, existing within reality. Furthermore, even if it’s obviously/undeniably “false”, it’s still 99.9999% true and the .00001% that’s not true is still ultimately relative. 

An idea itself is very complex and fits into a mental metastructure that’s fully or mostly based in reality, or basically “true.” Just the fact that someone else can understand the idea enough to say it’s false means that they had most of the idea in common. The contrast between the two people’s complex ideas might even boil down to a single bit inversion, as is suggested by the fact that you can make a “false” statement “true” just by adding a “not” to it. (Take the example of two people talking about the same TV set. One says it’s off, and one says it’s on. They both have the same idea of the TV and probably the same ideas of what “off” and “on” are; the only difference is in their linkage between the two concepts vis a vis the conjectured current state of the ”actual TV”. (They may also be looking at the TV, in which case they may both be seeing and understanding the same thing but just have a semantical difference in the understanding of “off” versus “on.” Or maybe they differ in opinion because one thinks it’s on but with a blank screen, perhaps because it’s not dark enough or perhaps because he remembers it was on earlier and doesn’t think anyone turned it off.)).

We have plenty of obvious tests to determine whether a proposition “corresponds” to reality, but one can theoretically always argue over what really happened with the test (and not to mention the interpretation of the results and the underlying premises). For example, if we’re both looking at a figure and you say it’s a circle and I say it’s a square, you can devise a test as follows: Measure the circumference of the figure and divide by its diameter and get pi. I can say that you’d read the number incorrectly or that you traced the shape of a circle when you measured it instead of tracing the actual square.

Why does it matter that I can incessantly argue ridiculous objections in this scenario? Because, hypothetically speaking, if I actually believe what I’m saying, then for there to be an objective difference between the correspondences of our two ideas to reality, there must theoretically be a possible, objective framework for analytically arbitrating over which person’s mutually contradictory correspondence to reality is “more true.” (This may be regarded as strictly a thought experiment to make it independent of the real-world problem of not being able to empirically observe which framework is correct with 100% certainty.)

In order to say that one is true and one is false, you need a framework of arbitration by which to compare the two frameworks of arbitration. A contender to this framework, too, could be introduced by anyone believing and stating something contradictory to that framework. Which takes it to the next level, and the next level, and so on (obviously, to infinite regress).

Therefore, “truth” in any sense is ultimately relative.

Another argument against correspondence theory is this. If you have A and B and a relationship between A and B, but you can only know A and not B (except through A’s relationship to B per an arbitrary modality, like sense perception), then neither can you analyze/know the relationship between A and B; you can only know that there is one. You may know the relationship partway, for example, by empirically analyzing our sense perceptions, but you can’t know the relationship between that partway knowledge and B without knowing B. No matter how far you take your knowledge of the relationship between A and B or the knowledge of the relationship between that relationship and B, etc., you can never fully close the gap, because that would require knowing B in order to know the relationship between such-and-such and B. Now consider A is our ideas and B is external reality. If truth is the correspondence between A and B then we have no way of ascertaining truth. 

And what would it mean to say a statement is false? That it does not correspond to reality? (again, everything corresponds to reality, so..) That it corresponds to reality in a bad way? Well, I guess the only meaning of that could be that the idea is not very effective/useful in manipulating reality (or that it doesn’t cohere well with other ideas). Because what else could we know about the correspondence, the external part of the correspondence being unknowable? So, we’re left with pragmatic truth (and the coherence theory of truth). And the effectiveness of an idea could be multidimensional, and not binary, and dependent on how the person applies the idea (which could be a way of saying, depending on what the idea really means to him.. and heck, this could be anything).

One might appeal to mathematical truth. Well, first of all, as Albert Einstein said in ‘Geometry and Experience,’ “… Is human reason, then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things? In my opinion the answer to this question is, briefly, this: as far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” But what if we’re merely talking about “objective truth”, not “objective truth about reality”. So, is a mathematical statement really objectively “true” or “false,” or is it just consistent or inconsistent with its axioms? I think it’s only the former insofar as that’s considered synonymous with the latter. I wrote more about that here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/why-mathematical-platonism-is-silly/.

Also, if you can create another math with different axioms in which a mathematical statement is true (that was false in normal math), does that mean the mathematical statement isn’t objectively true, or does it mean that they’re necessarily really not the same statement, just reuse of the same symbols? If it isn’t the same statement, does that mean that, in natural language, you can’t really know whether a statement is wrong or just a different statement from what you think it is? If it can be the latter, wouldn’t you have to determine whether it’s right or wrong by knowing what the person actually means by the statement? If you get into whether the actual meaning is right or wrong then you can only determine whether it’s consistent with their own system of thinking, and that is something that’s certainly unique. Incidentally, a belief is always consistent with one’s own system of thinking (well, that’s at least more-or-less true).

Although you could appeal to whether their relative belief will be effective in their manipulation and prediction of reality or not, which of course would go back to truth being utilitarian/pragmatic. (And, not to mention, one could apply the above problem of thinking-frameworks not being provable to whether an idea is even effective/useful or not.) Is utilitarian/pragmatic truth objective in its utilitarianness/pragmaticalness? I don’t think so, since nobody can really have the same idea as someone else. Also, the utility of an idea can only be measured in degrees. And it’s also dependent on specific circumstance. And also the above problems, such as the one regarding frameworks, apply to determining whether an idea is usefully applied or not.

That’s a big part of the argument against objective truth right there: the fact that nobody can really have the same idea as anyone else (given already that objective reality is external and external reality is non-ideational and “truth” qualifies propositions, or at the relationship between the propositions and reality, and therefore truth exists only in relationship to the minds of individual people, and everyone’s brain configuration is necessarily unique due to its extreme complexity, subjective life experience, etc.).

So here is a summary of all of the above:

  1. Nobody really thinks exactly the same as anyone else, although they may use the same symbols for expression, and truth qualifies concepts (assuming the universe is not made up of propositions), therefore truth is relative.
  2. If truth is correspondence to reality, then you need a way of weighing one correspondence to reality over another, and if truth is objective then you also need a way of weighing one way of weighing a correspondence to reality over another over another way of weighing correspondence to reality over another, and a way of weighing ways of weighing ways of weighing, and so on; and at each step of the way the selection of which way of weighing to use is arbitrary.
  3. If truth is correspondence to reality, we can’t know whether anything is true or not because without knowing directly the external reality that it corresponds to we cannot know the nature of the correspondence. And if we cannot know anything about truth, then this is not the truth that we talk about when we conjecture that a thing is true or false, which means “objective truth” might as well be in a parallel universe and should be called something else as well. Unless truth is conceded to be merely pragmatic, in which case it’s questionable whether it’s objective.
  4. Using mathematical truth as an example of objective truth may be dubious.
  5. No greater discrepancy can be contemplated than that of the ideational vs. the non-ideational.
  6. Objective truth is clearly possible only if external reality is mental in nature (and even then, it’s not necessarily extant).

Here’s something related I wrote around 1996—a couple of paragraphs, plus a brief IRC conversation I had in IRC: https://pastebin.com/wv9JyL73

Here’s something else I wrote on whether we can know anything objectively: https://exalumen.blog/2017/03/29/is-true-objectivity-possible/

Here’s another essay I wrote on the objectivity of truth: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2022/01/19/the-truth-is-not-out-there/

Dangerous Equivocation

One thing that makes me angry is when people take a positive concept or example, label it according to a word that’s associated with it via its positive traits, and then demonize the concept by virtue of negative attributes of that label. One example is the people who complain that The Smurfs was underhandedly promulgating communist ideology. The Smurfs simply portrayed an ideal life where money isn’t necessary because everyone helps out the community voluntarily, and each smurf had its own function in society. What is bad about that? Is sharing evil? Or is it only evil when adults share? Or is it only evil when we share too much, including things that are vital to our existence? If money weren’t necessary in some society, such as in The Smurfs’, then why would it be bad not to have it?

And is there something wrong with each Smurf having his own function in society? I believe Henry Ford revolutionized industry with the assembly line, based on purely capitalistic principles.  And having a job itself implies person-specialization. So obviously, each person having their own function or proficiency in a society makes things more efficient; the Smurfs simply did the same without money, which brings us back to the first point.

And yes, the Smurfs had a leader, whom everyone went to for advice. Is that so bad? In capitalistic society we all have a boss or supervisor­­—several echelons of them, in fact. And instead of you going to them for advice, they tell you what to do and you do it or they can your ass, which seems less than utopic. So some sort of organization is apparently a good thing to capitalists. And not to mention that the Native Americans had chiefs too, and during the colonization of America the authorities found it a problem that anyone who had a taste of the Native American way of life found it so much better that they never wanted to come back, and they often didn’t.

The negative attributes of “communism” are basically fascism and totalitarianism. Or, we could say, poverty. It’s conceivable that The Smurfs was idealized and unrealistic in that they didn’t live in poverty, but where is the totalitarianism in The Smurfs? Poverty without totalitarianism isn’t oppressive. And as for the idealization, perhaps it’s an example of the future, and it’s only idealized because we haven’t done it yet. I don’t really believe that a society sharing all their goods would necessarily leave to poverty, because if we shared everything, it’s estimated that things would be 10 times more efficient. So, none of the negative attributes of communism exist in The Smurfs, yet some people feel obligated to cry foul. This kind of equivocation of the word “communism” just exemplifies one of the many, serious pitfalls of language-based thinking.

To stray from the original point a bit…to be fair, Gargamel apparently wanted to capture the Smurfs and boil them to turn them into gold. This could very well indicate some sort of symbolism or calculated proffering of an ideology. It wouldn’t be the first time: the author of The Wizard of Oz openly admitted that the script was political, as some people had theorized. So, perhaps The Smurfs was about communism, in that the influence was calculated, but it still didn’t proffer the attributes that make communism a negative thing. Maybe it deliberately vilified capitalism in its symbolism, for contrast, but if you could have the Smurfs’ way of life, then would you want to have capitalism instead? Thus, the juxtaposition seems fair…capitalism is merely a Nash equilibrium over selfism–it’s only necessary when selfism is the norm.

Another example of this kind of dangerous equivocation is the vilifying of open-source software because it’s supposedly communistic. It’s basically humans programming things for free for the good of everyone. This is analogous to someone buying you an ice cream out of the goodness of their heart. Should we slap them in the face because we should have paid for that? To think that such a selfless and humanitarian effort is somehow evil because it smacks of “communism” only shows the quasi-mythical status that the concept of communism takes in our minds, making us think about it so superstitiously. I suspect this could only have been done by years of programming by our own government. You can’t deny that when it comes to war and competition with other countries, the US government, like many other governments if not all of them, has utilized and does utilize some form of propaganda. Maybe the propaganda in The Smurfs, if it exists, just balances things out a bit. 

Here’s another example: calling someone a “hippy” because they espouse ideas or virtues you don’t like, like those of openness, freedom, or caring. The hippies may not have been perfect, but calling someone whose ideas you don’t like a hippy is either an attempt to associate them with traits that aren’t necessarily theirs (such as being high all the time on drugs or refusing to work), or a tautological reflection of what they’ve just said or what they are. Either way, it’s attempting to conveniently disparage something or someone by the use of labels, when a thing merely is what it is; it isn’t a word.

On a related but completely different topic, it’s ironic when someone calls somebody a “tree hugger” or says accusingly that they have a “bleeding heart.” I can’t even say that this is an instance of equivocation, because I can’t think of a negative attribute of being a tree hugger or having a bleeding heart. What makes it ironic is that the fact that such terms are the best derogations the antagonist can come up with only demonstrates the fundamental weakness of the antagonist’s own position.

It’s not very far off from derogatively accusing someone of having compassion, being a proponent of unity, or loving the world outside the sphere of anthropocentrism. I think the only difference, other than using shorter terms, is that saying someone has a “bleeding heart” associates their compassionate characteristic with weakness or illness (bleeding is usually indicative of a medical condition), thus simultaneously shunning weakness, attempting to trigger the protagonist’s ego, and degrading compassion/glorifying selfism. It’s a pathological shame when strength is held in higher regard than compassion in a society—not that compassion and strength have to be at odds with each other.

An Aspect of of Postmodern Society

Ever notice how many computer messages leave out important grammatical parts like subjects and definite articles? And yet we forgive them because they’re just computers, right? How could a mere computer be expected to master such subtleties in language? But the odd thing is, these messages are, and always have been, typed in verbatim by computer programmers.  So, awkward as this style of message is, it must be used because we feel most comfortable if the awkward, clumsy, refractory nature of a computer is reflected in the diction it emits. Maybe the perception of authority is a factor in this too. (Why do we see machines as authoritative?)

But computers aren’t the only context in which we use this style of message. Corporations are another. Ever read instructions printed on the box of an item? They, too, leave out a subject, definite articles, etc. If it were merely convenient, we would do the same in our everyday, non-corporate-related lives. Instead, the corporations’ use of this syntax is aesthetically preferable, on an unconscious level, because it reflects the clumsy, animatronic, fascist quality of a modern corporation. I.e., it yells out at you boldly and forcibly, in clear robotese. 

This effect can also be noticed in automated customer service phone calls, in which the person, who is clearly a person, records the automated responses in a deliberately lifeless, mechanical manner. God forbid we have some intonation or personality in a computer-governed service. I use the term “service” loosely here, of course. I’m not sure it’s lost on anyone the scarily postmodernistic bent there is to calling a corporation or government agency you get a vital service from, only to be given the run-around by a computer system directing your interaction, because employing actual people would have cost them extra.

I once actually heard the automated system for Virgin Mobile give sass back about the user trying their damnedest to get ahold of a real person, superciliously suggesting that they give the automated service another chance, the subtext being that there’s no chance in hell that they’re ever going to speak to a human operator. (I had originally appreciated Virgin Mobile for having an automated service that actually had some personality, but I guess I found out that such an oddity is a double-edged sword in today’s world.)

The same effect, where real, breathing people with heartbeats speak in a manner excavated of all signs of real life, can be seen in the phenomenon of newscasting. Would it be so disastrous if we associated the thirteenth shooting of an innocent child we’ve heard about this week with some form of emotion? Apparently, they think so. 

But now we’re edging toward another effect altogether: the need to appear perfect. And not perfect in the positive sense, where you have an overwhelming amount of genuinely uplifting virtue, but perfect in the negative sense, where you subtract all that may appear flawed. This is sometimes demonstrated even more so, or at least more awkwardly, in the intonation given by people speaking for commercials and infomercials. On the face if it, it may sound as if they’re merely the connoisseurs of diction, but if you really look deeply into it, they use intonations that no real human would ever use for any natural reason. This must mean that, rather than being the epitome of any real perfection, they are the epitome of some particular trait that we very highly esteem, which is likely for some ultimately pathological reason.

A little more generally, personas that are caricatures of certain human traits (such as evil or avarice in its various forms, or acting toward likability), which are totally absurd in their totalities, seem to pass under our anomaly-detecting radar. This was much more true in past decades, as can be witnessed via the cringe factor of old movies. I don’t think this effect is totally relative, in that I don’t think it will or can always be the case that people in future decades will see movies made in previous decades as cringy. I think our society is moving more and more toward authenticity, which is why the affectation, putting on airs, and general unrealism of past movies seem cringy to us. This pattern can only perpetuate so far into the future before we approach 100% authenticity. But I guess we’re talking about a totally separate subject now, because this essay is about things that progress toward postmodernism, and this is about something that decreases over time. But, to be honest, I think all of the effects I’ve touched on above will eventually be seen as hokey by future generations.

Getting back to the subject, though, what reminded me of the whole thing is this: in a list of ’15 Deadly But Often-Made Resume Blunders to Avoid’, number 5 is “Use of personal pronouns.”  Now, if that doesn’t portray the silliness of the whole situation, I don’t know what does. Whom is your resume about, anyway? Presumably you, right? Yet you’re not allowed to talk overtly about yourself—only indirectly? It’s like, “let’s just make life as impersonal as possible, because, after all, this is business.”

♫
But I won’t cry for yesterday,
There’s an ordinary world
Somehow I have to find,
And as I try to make my way
To the ordinary world
I will learn to survive.
♫  

Through the Looking Glass

For any perceptual entity A and his contextual reality B, there exists some relationship C which maps circumstances of reality B to qualia in entity A. There also exists a modality D by which entity A assimilates qualia into a coherent framework. Given that A is not omniscient, there must be some mapping between reality and his perceptions that affords him contextuality/limitation in perception. This same mapping must determine what reality “looks like” for A. It stands to reason that another being, perhaps a larger one, may see the “same” information that we see, from a not only expanded, but wholly different in modality, point of view.

Analogously, consider a human watching a caterpillar makes its way across the ground. The caterpillar has no overall sense of the landscape he’s traversing. He doesn’t even have a sense of what such a sense would “be like.” He doesn’t necessarily know the bladiness of blades of grass. At least he necessarily doesn’t know it in the same way we do. He doesn’t know the blackness of dirt or doesn’t in the way we do. The same for the greenness of grass or the blueness of the sky or the wetness of water. He doesn’t even know what he himself looks like, nor that he hatched from an egg. If we toss him through the air, we may synoptically understand, or at least recognize, the elliptical arc that he follows due to the principles of physics and gravity, but he has no such experience.

It stands to reason then, that if we were to sufficiently expand our own consciousness, we may experience the same events in a completely different manner. Our whole way of perceiving reality is therefore seemingly arbitrary. This is no surprise, of course, given a little bit of study into our own sense organs. Perhaps there is a punctuated equilibrium of subjective experience, whereby when your consciousness’ perception expands beyond a certain point, it completely changes modes. Or would it be gradual? Is it one way or another according to the type of subject? I suppose this this “punctuated equilibrium” of evolution of perception actually directly reflects the punctuated equilibrium of biological evolution itself in the tree of life.

For those who believe in group consciousness: does a species itself have a point of view? Does graduating from one perspectival mode to another mean disbanding with one group consciousness and banding with another?

Is the mode of perception that a disembodied conscious observer—or a species—settles on determined by “lowest energy” (within the context of factors of natural selection), similarly to the end state of a folding protein or the direction of a river?

Does this all mean that in one way or another, Plato’s cave analogy always applies? 

Additionally, if you believe in such things, perhaps this is the reason avatar Meher Baba worshipped the “masts” (pronounced “musts”), whom he said are like his eyes and his ears, and whom, by his own admission, he has lived for. Perhaps, all possible modalities of perception being on equal footing, without using individual consciousnesses as frames of reference, God really can’t experience “what’s going on in the universe.” Maybe we are all God’s eyes and ears.