Science, religion and the truth

[dfnj]

No. I do not start with any presumption.

An excellent assumption on your part!

 

[Jim]

Well, yes, you have a point, but I am trying to avoid the truth, because the truth is a way to claim power over people. I try to make us equal in that there is no THE TRUTH for any of us as all of us apparently.

Many moons ago I thought you understood something that I think is very good for people to understand. I’m still hoping that you really did understand it, and that I can help you somehow to remember it. I might have said enough now, or maybe even too much.

If you want to try to help Internet discussions do more good and less harm, I might have some ideas for you.

 

[Jim]

No, I know it still. But I don't react well to stress. That is not an excuse of anything. That is how it is with me now.

Don’t feel bad. It’s been happening to me a lot too.

 

[osgart]

Actuality, and reality are better substitutes for the word truth.

Truth means something that is of good character and has many spiritual connotations.

Most people when saying the word truth want to know actuality. Or they want to know a reality of something.

 

[Nakosis]

No, I am a skeptic. I use the word truth, because it is, how other humans in the culture, I am a part of, talk. I don't believe in truth, just as some people don't believe in God, but still talk about gods.

I believe in what works good and useful.

Regards
Mikkel

Some folks are very picky about what folks call the truth. I suppose for them it is important.

I've stopped worrying much about what people claim as truth. Like you, I worry about what works. Working in that it allows us to achieve the goals that we set.

Since we all can have different goals, what works for us can be different.

People want to insist on a "truth" a "reality". I won't say reality doesn't exist, but I accept this truth/reality is something we can never consciously directly experience. What we consciously experience is a "virtual" reality created for us by the unconscious mind.

This virtual reality that we consciously experience is a lot more flexible than actuality. The unconscious mind tries to approximate actuality but doesn't always get it right.

IMO, the truth of conscious experience really is not the truth of reality but it is just as important.

 

[Polymath257]

[QUOTE="Aupmanyav, post: 6577783, member: 11823]"Yeah, THE TRUTH does not depend on what we think. It remains the same. For me, only the first.
...

So it is subjectively true for you that there is only one truth: THE TRUTH. Well, I do it different and that is also true, otherwise I couldn't do it.
[/QUOTE]

No, it means we have different definitions, which causes confusion.

Can we settle on some definitions for the sake of clarity?

 

[Aupmanyav]

So are you saying there exists a subjective truth as well as an objective truth?

That is true. Subjective truths held by two people differ, but that does not affect objective truth.

At which point the Zen master replies, "Then it must be pretty heavy all day walking around with that rock in your head!"

That is a good joke.

.. until I can get back to not fighting.

Were you and I (fighting)? I thought you and I were discussing something (since you have outlawed 'we').

An excellent assumption on your part!

Well, I have tried not to start with presumptions. So I go by what science says:

"The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological description of the development of the Universe. Under this theory, space and time emerged together 13.799±0.021 billion years ago and the energy and matter initially present have become less dense as the Universe expanded."
Universe - Wikipedia

Any better theory?

.. but I accept this truth/reality is something we can never consciously directly experience. What we consciously experience is a "virtual" reality created for us by the unconscious mind.

What we experience does not have an iota of truth. That is why the recourse to science and experiments and not philosophy or religion.

 

[Mock Turtle]

So you subjectively say. So the reality of truth equals reality in that you wrote it. And you then asked me to try it out. That requires that it is subjectively true, that I can subjectively test it. So I tested it subjectively and found out that it is true that I can test it and that subjectivity is true both of you and I. So reality is in part subjective, otherwise we couldn't be doing this. Try again.

Regards
Mikkel

Can't be bothered. You seem to be trying to slip truth past the filter such as to equate it the same for both religion and science.

 

[Mock Turtle]

I agree except that most people want to impose the tiny bit known by science as a template for understanding all of reality. They never notice that reality does not make a good fit and is spilling out in all dimensions. They don't notice that even if we project what science might learn in the future that reality and our understanding are unlikely to ever be the same.

When an individual takes on beliefs it becomes very difficult to see anything but those beliefs. We all see everything in terms of beliefs and "scientific beliefs" can be more limiting than religious beliefs simply because it is easier to not be able to understand "God's will" than it is to not understand the "Law of Gravity". People tend to come to take for granted the stars in the sky and the satellites among them because everyone believes they understand both.

I'm not suggesting that science necessarily is such a template, just that it tends to uncover (proper) truths more easily than any other method.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Can we settle on some definitions for the sake of clarity?

Here are my definitions. Truth is the quality that only facts possess, facts being linguistic strings (sentences, paragraphs) that accurately map some aspect of experience and can be used to predict or control outcomes.

But lately, I've been moving from asking what is true to asking what ideas are useful. I see people chasing their tails asking about ultimate truth, absolute truth, objective truth and the like. None of that is productive.

"scientific beliefs" can be more limiting than religious beliefs

Scientific beliefs aren't limiting at all. I believe that the universe has been expanding for about 13.8 billion years, and that water is a good solvent. How do those beliefs limit me?

Religious beliefs can be limiting. If you keep a kosher home, you can't have meat and dairy in the same meal.

In terms of truth, there is something to be said for the simplicity of philosophical materialism. The idea is the only things that are real and true are things that can be experienced by more than one person. If it can't be tested then it doesn't exist. The problem with this way of thinking is there are some ideas that cannot be tested

I consider things that are the case only for me or a subset of humanity to be just as meaningful as as if these things were the case for everybody. It remains the case for me that I will have an unpleasant experience if I eat Brussels sprouts, whether that is also true for you or not.

it is that simple. In practice both science and religion are limited as it comes to the truth

I don't find any truth in religion, by which I mean any belief system that includes gods. The idea of a god adds nothing to any topic, and can detract from many including what is true and what is good and right. Stick a god into the theory of evolution, and what does it do to make the theory more explanatory or predictive? Nothing.

Likewise with every other idea. I can't make a single idea more useful by injecting a god into it.

I believe in what works good and useful.

There you go. This is a better way of thinking. Why travail over the ontological status of experience. Just learn how to control your experience of it as best as possible to maximize pleasant experience and minimize the unpleasant.

I fight the rationalists, who think they can define reality by using words.

How else are you going to define reality? With pictures?

I define reality for myself. It matters not who agrees. For me, reality is the collection of phenomena that do or potentially affect experience. To say that something that one considers undetectable even in principle such as the supernatural is real or actual is meaningless to me. Such a thing would be indistinguishable from whatever one making such a claim considers nonexistent and can be included in that set..

I try to make us equal in that there is no THE TRUTH for any of us

I have defined what I mean by truth, and there are truths for me - ideas that I use to navigate life as comfortably as possible, ideas refined by trial and error. Perhaps that's not what you mean by truth. This says it well for me:

"Truth has no meaning divorced from any eventual decision making process. The whole point of belief itself is to inform decisions and drive actions. Actions then influence events in the external world, and those effects lead to objective consequences. Take away any of these elements and truth immediately loses all relevance.

"We should expect similar decisions made under similar circumstances to lead to similar outcomes. Pragmatism says that the ultimate measure of a true or false proposition lies in its capacity to produce expected results. If an idea is true, it can be used in the real world to generate predictable consequences, and different ones if that idea turned out to be false. In other words, the ultimate measure of a true proposition is the capacity to inform decisions under the expectation of desirable consequences.

"All we need to know is that we have desires and preferences, we make decisions, and we experience sensory perceptions of outcomes. If a man has belief B that some action A will produce desired result D, if B is true, then doing A will achieve D. If A fails to achieve D, then B is false. Either you agree that truth should be measured by its capacity to inform decisions and produce results or you don't. If you agree, then we can have a conversation. And if we disagree about some belief, we have a means to decide the issue.

"If this is not how your epistemology works - how you define truth - then we can't have a discussion, and I literally don't care what you think, since it has no effect on anything." - AntiCitizenX (anonymous Internet persona)

So are you saying there exists a subjective truth as well as an objective truth?

I am. There are things that are true for all of us, and things that are true only for some of us, like not liking Brussels sprouts. They are equally true and relevant for the individual.

IMO, the truth of conscious experience really is not the truth of reality but is is just as important.

Agreed, and I'd take it a step further. In my opinion, experience is more important than what is being experienced. Understanding what's out there is only relevant because of what it can do in here in one's own theater of consciousness..

 

[sayak83]

Okay, something simple. The grammatical status of the words "the truth". Those words means that there is one version of the truth. So there can't be different versions of the truth. That is simple to test: 2 examples are given now.

Someone: The truth of how the world is...
Me: Stop, you don't have to continue, because I can just do that differently and think differently about the truth than you. I.e. as long as humans can't in practice eliminate subjectivity, I just have to do something different than you and out the window goes the truth as only one truth for the world.

Someone: The one true God is...
Me: Stop, you don't have to continue, because I can just do that differently and believe differently about God than you. I.e. as long as humans can't in practice eliminate subjectivity, I just have to do something different than you and out the window goes the one true God.

Yeah, it is that simple. In practice both science and religion are limited as it comes to the truth. I know, how to test for it, because I accept for the subjective subjective results as valid evidence. For the objective I accept objective evidence as valid, but I try not to confuse the 2.
That is how I learned to do it and I accept that you can do subjectivity and objectivity differently, but I will still just check if what you do appears to be subjective regardless of you claim science or religion, how ever you do it.

Regards
Mikkel

Earth rotates around it's axis seems a true statement.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

...
No, it means we have different definitions, which causes confusion.

Can we settle on some definitions for the sake of clarity?

No, we can't, because words can frame reality. So no more truth for now. @Jim remind me of something I will try to find back to. I will henceforth in this the post speak of truth as some people speak of god. That neither are out there in the universe. So when someone says that truth matters, that is not what I get from it. It is that, the universe with humans in it, matter.

What we are trying to get at, is what matters, what is useful and that is always something to humans. Truth to me happens in humans, because there is no truth out there in the universe just as there is no god. Right, Polymath257? So now try to treat truth as redundant just as god. So what are you left with, as now there is no truth and no god?
Well, look up from the screen and look around. The world is still there and you are in it.
The world is still there. Try to hold on to that thought. Just as you don't need god, you don't need truth.

You want to find out what you want and what you need. What matters to you, what is useful to you and what is good to you. And I bet that you want that for other humans too. You want to find out, how you work, how other humans work and how yet other parts of the world work and how it is apparently all connected.
You don't need truth for that. You just need to figure out how it works for humans. Not what it is or how it exists! How it works in relationships to humans.

So relationships it is. Are there a relationship between you and the Big Bang. Yes, apparently. So what is objective - it is in one sense a relationship between something which you can't control solely by thoughts and feelings. Gravity is such an example, but gravity is not in the strong sense independent of you, because then you couldn't know about it.
So the map and the landscape. Scientists make maps/models of the landscape. Right, but where do they do that? Well, in the landscape as a part of landscape.
So it is the duality that is at play here. The binary duality of 0 and 1 and all the other variants of is and is not. But that idea of that the dog is black has a limit. How? Because if I am so say that the dog is black, I have to be there to say it. There has to be a relationship between the dog and I.

So you describe how something works be describe what you do in relationship with something and what happens.
See, you don't need truth nor god for that. You just describe what goes on and how you use words. You describe words by explaining how you use them and what is going on in relationship to you.

So it is not about truth. It is about telling others what matters, how it matters and so on.
Remember something when you go up against a skeptic. We pay attention to what other humans say and then we try to replicate what they say.
So there are certain words that some people use, I can't replicate because I get another result, when I test it.
So here is an example of that.
Someone in this thread: Truth equals reality.
Me: I can't replicate that, because when I test it and say no, it becomes absurd.

So here you are @Jim I try to care for other humans and I try to not hold truth nor god over them. So here it is for whomever made it this far.
If you claim something in effect is objective either as truth or god and I can't replicate it, I can't say that it is wrong for you or that you are mistaken. I can only say that you can do it differently than me, but so can I.

So Polymath257, this is not really about you or I. It is to me about being honest as a human and include that we are subjective. That we can't avoid social constructs and that to me in the everyday world we apparently both are a part of, both truth and god are social constructs.
And they only matter for their usefulness to humans.

So no, no single definitions of truth, because we apparently can't agree on what the world is.
So here it is as philosophy:
"...

• “Reason is whatever the norms of the local culture believe it to be”. (Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 235.)
• “The choice between competing theories is arbitrary, since there is no such thing as objective truth.” (Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. II (London, 1963), p. 369f.)
• “There is no unique truth, no unique objective reality” (Ernest Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1985), p. 84.)
• “There is no substantive overarching framework in which radically different and alternative schemes are commensurable” (Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia, 1985), pp. 11-12.)
• “There is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society—ours—uses in one area of enquiry” (Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 23.)

...
Cognitive relativism consists of two claims:
(1) The truth-value of any statement is always relative to some particular standpoint;
(2) No standpoint is metaphysically privileged over all others.
..."
Cognitive Relativism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

If you get this for these 2 points (1) and (2), then we can talk about truth. But not using just one definition. Now you don't have to agree with me, because we don't have to become a "we". There is no need for that. I would like for it to happen, but I don't need it.

Regards and love
Mikkel

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Can't be bothered. You seem to be trying to slip truth past the filter such as to equate it the same for both religion and science.

I accept that truth is different for you than me.

Regards
Mikkel

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Earth rotates around it's axis seems a true statement.

You don't need truth for that. You need to be able to turn that statement into behavior, which can be replicated by others.

Regards
Mikkel

 

[Jim]

You don't need truth for that. You need to be able to turn that statement into behavior, which can be replicated by others.

Regards
Mikkel

I have a simple algorithm for helping to improve behavior in Internal discussions. It’s to not respond at all in any way to any behavior that you personally think might be harmful, no matter how much you like what the post says or how much you object to it. I have some ideas for responding to posts spreading misinformation, or vilifying or disparaging people, without pointing at any post specifically.

Another idea for helping to make Internet discussions more fruitful and beneficial is to use an online training course to study and practice cultural competency, and post in the forums about what you’re learning.

 

[Polymath257]

You don't need truth for that. You need to be able to turn that statement into behavior, which can be replicated by others.

Why would you need to do that? The statement is true. There are a host of similar statements that are true.

Why is it relevant if behavior is replicated? And if it were, would it be a truth that behavior is replicated?

 

[Jim]

Just as you don't need god, you don't need truth.

Exactly what I was thinking, before I saw this post. Only, I would say “I don’t need ‘objective’ or ‘absolure’ reality or truth.”

“I have no need of that hypothesis.”

 

[WhyIsThatSo]

Okay, something simple. The grammatical status of the words "the truth". Those words means that there is one version of the truth. So there can't be different versions of the truth. That is simple to test: 2 examples are given now.

Someone: The truth of how the world is...
Me: Stop, you don't have to continue, because I can just do that differently and think differently about the truth than you. I.e. as long as humans can't in practice eliminate subjectivity, I just have to do something different than you and out the window goes the truth as only one truth for the world.

Someone: The one true God is...
Me: Stop, you don't have to continue, because I can just do that differently and believe differently about God than you. I.e. as long as humans can't in practice eliminate subjectivity, I just have to do something different than you and out the window goes the one true God.

Yeah, it is that simple. In practice both science and religion are limited as it comes to the truth. I know, how to test for it, because I accept for the subjective subjective results as valid evidence. For the objective I accept objective evidence as valid, but I try not to confuse the 2.
That is how I learned to do it and I accept that you can do subjectivity and objectivity differently, but I will still just check if what you do appears to be subjective regardless of you claim science or religion, how ever you do it.

Regards
Mikkel

There are TWO kinds of "truth".
One kind is relative, the other is absolute.
ALL things are "true" relatively, but all things are NOT "true" absolutely.

Does the sun rise ?
YES it does, but only relatively, as it just "appears" that way from our perspective.
NO it absolutely does not, as the sun never moves.

 

[Jim]

... the sun never moves.

Most of the best astronomers might disagree with that.

 

[cladking]

Earth rotates around it's axis seems a true statement.

I don't think so.

I believe that an "axis" is simply part of the definition of "rotate". There is nothing else around which a single object can rotate. "Center of gravity" as well is implied by "rotation".