What is Truth?
I was inspired to write this by reading the article, In Search of Truth, after I had a question pop into my head: what is the difference between personal reality and collective reality? I suppose in order to answer that question, I have to first look at what Truth means. The answer I ultimately came to is that the Truth (yes, with a capital T) is unknowable to us in this flesh and blood form. This is because there are no words to express what Truth is. The author of the above article said that a stone may mean something to one person but mean something slightly different to another. In this way, our personal truth is also relative or, at least, subjective. What I write now is kind of a reflection/summary/example of what I learned through reading his article.
After having read the article, I summarized the process of filtering our perceptions in the following way:
First, consciousness perceives countless things but is limited to focusing on only a few at a time.
Next, we must decide what perceptions are important by attaching emotional significance.
Finally, we attempt to understand what we perceive by add meaning.
These three steps facilitate what it means to survive in the physical world.
Let’s say that you live in a desert, and you want for nothing; you’re mostly happy but alone. As you make your journey on Earth, you pick up things that ring as “true” for you. To appease the analogy, let’s say that these personal truths, in this example, are evidenced by materialistic objects, like a leaf or a twig. So as you go along in your desert-life journey, you pick up a cactus. This idea of a cactus or the object itself means something to you. Perhaps the cactus makes you happy because it reminds you of someone you loved who is gone and who hated them. Perhaps this cactus represents a virtue, such as striving for perfection. Whatever it is, this cactus represents a truth for you because you recognize it as important and you attach principles or emotions to it. This helps you survive in the world because it assists you in managing the multitudinous things we perceive. Whatever truth you associate to your perceptions, you carry it with you. These become your personal belief systems.
One day, you come to a beach, and you encounter another person on their journey. They also carry objects, their truths, but they are much different than your truths. That person carries a fossilized starfish, a piece of driftwood, and a crab shell. However, after talking with them, you realize the truths are very similar if not the same, you just chose different ways to define them. What he believes to represent the idea of “loyalty,” you mostly agree with, but there are slight differences. You find getting along with this person is quite easy.
The second day, you encounter a forest in which lives another person. The objects they carry and the truths they represent do not match your truths at all. What he defines as evil, you define as good, and then his good is your evil. You might then decide this person is not compatible with you and that you might quarrel. These truths are still true to him, and your truths are true to you. So which truth is “correct”?
Finally, there is the Truth. There is that which governs many things but that which remains undetectable to humans and other creatures. These things may be something like how gravity works, how the planets got started, what is good and evil, how many universes are there, the afterlife, etc. These things are usually things that humans don’t fully understand and are trying desperately to grasp. Wittingly or not, in our little scenario, you and the forest dweller and the beach dweller all agree on the Truth that there is gravity, 1 out of 3 believe in an afterlife, and 2 out of 3 believe that we are all connected to each other in some way. These Truths cannot be proven scientifically (yet) or are in the very early stages of discovery. More importantly, the fundamentality of these Truths are not capable of being expressed through words. Thus, until we reach a state where our language goes beyond words, we can never fully understand the Truth.
Trying to understand the experiment of life is impossible because we are a part of the experiment.
I was inspired to write this by reading the article, In Search of Truth, after I had a question pop into my head: what is the difference between personal reality and collective reality? I suppose in order to answer that question, I have to first look at what Truth means. The answer I ultimately came to is that the Truth (yes, with a capital T) is unknowable to us in this flesh and blood form. This is because there are no words to express what Truth is. The author of the above article said that a stone may mean something to one person but mean something slightly different to another. In this way, our personal truth is also relative or, at least, subjective. What I write now is kind of a reflection/summary/example of what I learned through reading his article.
After having read the article, I summarized the process of filtering our perceptions in the following way:
First, consciousness perceives countless things but is limited to focusing on only a few at a time.
Next, we must decide what perceptions are important by attaching emotional significance.
Finally, we attempt to understand what we perceive by add meaning.
These three steps facilitate what it means to survive in the physical world.
Let’s say that you live in a desert, and you want for nothing; you’re mostly happy but alone. As you make your journey on Earth, you pick up things that ring as “true” for you. To appease the analogy, let’s say that these personal truths, in this example, are evidenced by materialistic objects, like a leaf or a twig. So as you go along in your desert-life journey, you pick up a cactus. This idea of a cactus or the object itself means something to you. Perhaps the cactus makes you happy because it reminds you of someone you loved who is gone and who hated them. Perhaps this cactus represents a virtue, such as striving for perfection. Whatever it is, this cactus represents a truth for you because you recognize it as important and you attach principles or emotions to it. This helps you survive in the world because it assists you in managing the multitudinous things we perceive. Whatever truth you associate to your perceptions, you carry it with you. These become your personal belief systems.
One day, you come to a beach, and you encounter another person on their journey. They also carry objects, their truths, but they are much different than your truths. That person carries a fossilized starfish, a piece of driftwood, and a crab shell. However, after talking with them, you realize the truths are very similar if not the same, you just chose different ways to define them. What he believes to represent the idea of “loyalty,” you mostly agree with, but there are slight differences. You find getting along with this person is quite easy.
The second day, you encounter a forest in which lives another person. The objects they carry and the truths they represent do not match your truths at all. What he defines as evil, you define as good, and then his good is your evil. You might then decide this person is not compatible with you and that you might quarrel. These truths are still true to him, and your truths are true to you. So which truth is “correct”?
Finally, there is the Truth. There is that which governs many things but that which remains undetectable to humans and other creatures. These things may be something like how gravity works, how the planets got started, what is good and evil, how many universes are there, the afterlife, etc. These things are usually things that humans don’t fully understand and are trying desperately to grasp. Wittingly or not, in our little scenario, you and the forest dweller and the beach dweller all agree on the Truth that there is gravity, 1 out of 3 believe in an afterlife, and 2 out of 3 believe that we are all connected to each other in some way. These Truths cannot be proven scientifically (yet) or are in the very early stages of discovery. More importantly, the fundamentality of these Truths are not capable of being expressed through words. Thus, until we reach a state where our language goes beyond words, we can never fully understand the Truth.
Trying to understand the experiment of life is impossible because we are a part of the experiment.
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