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Do you believe in absolute truth?

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
I have this odd feeling that things can be "not wrong" without being "right". And I call them opinions/hypothesis. They are statements I can agree/disagree with and keep doing my things without digging any deeper (unless it's fun to wonder about, but, obviously, without arriving to any conclusions... my life is one big aporia)

I do believe in my own system to decide what things I want to live by, making them my personal truths, and I also believe that there are certain truths that are better than others because they have less cons (hence the "not wrongs" not being "rights"). I believe that everything we consider eternal it never was in the first place. Is killing bad? Yes, it is! But our ancestors, the apes with clubs that spread all over the world and are supposed to be "the fittest" didn't think that. In fact, they didn't even understand morals. The universe wasn't universe all the time, etc etc etc.

I'm not fond of absolute truths because I think the concept of "truth" as something artificial (as in "invented by humans"). I have a o̶b̶n̶o̶x̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ complicated way of understanding things, dividing it in Legos, as I like to call my information units. So here it is how I understand truth:

"The Sun rises in the east"

1. The Sun: a random name we gave to a close star
2. Rises: it looks like it rises, but it's not
3. East: again, a random name we gave a direction that we cannot know where it is without human-made products (compasses, maps, etc) or a deep understanding of stars. (The same happens with "Oriental cultures"... Oriental according to whom?

Even if one day we're facing an absolute truth, there will be people (including me, I guess) that will continue acting according to personal truths, so... I don't think there is one, and if there is, it's useless, so why caring!

The simple fact is there is no evidence for absolute truth. In fact when we have evidence, we can precisely define the statistical probability of it being true or false.

So evidence and reason gives us a statistical truth but not an absolute truth.

This has climaxed with Quantum Mechanics which is our most accurate physical fact. In fact Quantum Mechanics is accurate to ten decimal places and counting. And so far we have found no discrepancy in Quantum Mechanics.

It is extraordinary that statistics has given us our most accurate truth, while superstition and religion have failed to give us an absolute truth.

All this is due though to a change in our epistemology, we have changed from an intuitive way of seeing the world to a counter-intuitive way of seeing the world. Unfortunately a vast number of people cling to intuitive ways of seeing, because it makes them feel better.
 
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