This deviant's full pageview
graph is unavailable.
Member
I am a Pseudo-Intellectual
aliceinreality
20/Female/United States
Why I Am Here
No reason given yet
Last Visit: 15 weeks ago
Tawny
Art Zone
Personal Zone
Misc. Zone
This is the place where you can personalize your profile!
But, how?
By moving, adding and personalizing widgets.
You can drag and drop to rearrange.
You can edit widgets to customize them.
The left side has widgets you can add!
Some widgets you can only access when you get a premium membership.
Some widgets have options that are only available when you get a premium membership.
We've split the page into zones!
Certain widgets can only be added to certain zones.
"Why," you ask? Because we want profile pages to have freedom of customization, but also to have some consistency. This way, when anyone visits a deviant, they know they can always find the art in the top left, and personal info in the top right.
Don't forget, restraints can bring out the creativity in you!
Now go forth and astound us all with your devious profiles!
i don't know that my pictures are getting any better, but i've found that shooting through the viewfinder forces me to compose the shot better. hopefully this means that the pictures i take are getting more interesting, but i can't promise anything.
Sigh. I got to your page by following an argument on artistic decency and then was distracted by the Field Marshal... Anyway, I feel very clever pointing out that by capitalizing "truth," it is always negated.
Odd how statements we wish not to believe require the most proof. However, I am pleased that my aphorism was found lacking as evidence. Any discourse on this subject is going to suffer from the conceptual fuzziness inherent to words, but maybe the "feel" of the argument will suffice.
I am assuming that by "Truth," we might understand a vague notion of "ultimate" or objective truth--succinctly "the way things are." That is the underlying "engine" of reality, the mechanism that controls the workings of the universe. It is difficult to see how an idea as deceptively fundamentally "self-evident" as that could be false, but consider the case in which there are a number (possibly infinite) of those engines and that reality is the "average" result of those many mechanisms.
However, I think that for our purposes, we are really talking about something subtly different. We are considering "the way things are" as experienced by humans. I believe that any human experience of reality is either false or should be treated as false by the very reason that it _is_ a human experience of reality.
In my view, an experience of "Truth" may be obtained in one of three ways:
1.) It has been deposited into human minds via some outside source
2.) It has been induced from reality by observation
3.) It is the result of reasoning mechanisms that rely purely on an internal
algorithm separate from any external input (essentially the cases not
covered by 1 and 2)
Since case #3 relies on no external information about reality, we can reject any result of this process as being "ultimate truth." It would be like reaching into a container with an infinite number of items and picking exactly the right one. The probability of that event is exactly 0 (really).
The next simplest case is case #2, because humans are imperfect. People do not perceive the world as it is. Instead, our perceptions are based upon a sampling of physical properties that are used to construct an operational representation of reality.
Our sensory experiences with the world are models. Models are representations of a system that obey a simplified set of rules, which mimic the properties of the system on which they are based. For instance, meteorologists use models of the weather to cast predictions. Actual weather systems are far too complex to consider. Only the parts of the weather that past measurements suggest are the most reliable predictors are used to make forecasts.
The things we believe about the world are also models. We observe phenomena (events) in reality and then induce possible underlying explanations. Those explanations are models (c.f. Hidden Markov Models). At some point, a person will observe something that is not explained by the current model. Once the model is thus shown to be incorrect, people sometimes work on creating a better model that fits the new data. When that process occurs, it is called science. If the strange observations are ignored or jammed into a faulty model, then no progress in developing an understanding of "ultimate" truth is made. Even the best scientific theories are false, but scientists are continuously trying to improve them. To have a given theory be correct is also like reaching into a container with an infinite number of items and picking exactly the one you were looking for.
So far, ideas about "Truth" that come from cases #2 and #3 don't look very promising, so we have to turn to case #1. Ultimately, all models are wrong, but what if we could get help from an source that KNEW something about the underlying engine of reality? Then, we wouldn't need to worry about models--it would be a direct link to "Truth." Let us call such a source of ultimate truth "God." Yet, there are some conditions that must be met before we can accept outside knowledge as part of "Truth." First we need to suppose that God only gives humans correct information. We also need to assume that God has no competitors: other sources that appear to be Godlike (possessing of "Truth"). These other sources might be called Satans. If Satans exist, then humans could be unable to determine if part of "Truth" came from Satans or from God. Additionally, it must be the case that an individual's experience of "Truth" can not be duplicated or lost by mental conditions such as delusion, hallucination, memory loss, etc.
Unfortunately, in order to know those things about the possible sources of "Truth" or "Truth-like" experiences (I would call this Metatruth), people would have to have the ability to uncover "Truth" independently from outside sources. For instance, we might experience that God is the only source of "Truth" and that God never lies. Yet, it is possible that a Satan might tell something to that effect in order to mislead us into accepting all "Truth" without question. If we make an unfounded guess about the reliability of this knowledge, which we might call "Faith," then our _experience_ of "Truth" is in danger of diverging from the _real_ "Truth." However, the two ways that people might discover "Truth" on their own have been explored in the treatment of cases #2 and #3.
Since people cannot discover "Truth" by their own means and prior knowledge of "Truth" is required to accept any "Truth" from an external source, then we reach the conclusion that any experience of "Truth" must be treated as false. The best we can accomplish is to adopt a model of reality, which we know will be wrong. Those models constitute the lowercase truth; human experiences based on approximations of reality. Thus, by capitalizing "truth," it is always negated.
This is perhaps bleak, but there is some hope. Intelligent life can modify the universe. We may not be able to predict the Earth's weather as it now, but consider the possibility of a weather machine. A weather machine would command sufficient energy to "override" the natural weather and replace it with whatever the operator desired. It would then be very possible to predict the weather--just look at the setting on the weather machine. Likewise, intelligent life might eventually have the capacity to create a "virtual machine" that runs over actual reality. This system would become a source of "Truth." And that system is "The Omega Point."
Well, it is more subtle than that. I am saying that is the case about objective reality, the BIG TRUTH, etc, not _necessarily_ about an individual's perception of that reality.
Let me try this again... People learn about the world inductively--by observing events and then trying to make some sense out of them after they happen. Unfortunately, this process is not gauranteed to produce correct results. This is a dumb example: if you see thousands of black crows, it doesn't mean that all crows are black...unless you "cheat."
It is possible to invent knowledge about the world, but through the use of abstract concepts. For instance, you can prove that all crows are black by specifying very, very specifically what is meant by "crows." If part of your definition of "crow" is "a crow must be black," then of course it follows that a bird of any other color cannot be a "crow." Your mind has assembled the concepts you use from observing and partitioning its perception of reality, which can also include concepts from other people and society as a whole.
So, it _is_ possible to know things, given that you adopt a set of conceptual rules for reasoning about the world. The field of mathematics is based on that process. However, it is important to realize that conceptual reasoning systems worlds are disconnected with reality. At this point, crows stop being a good example. Our concepts are developed by fitting induced patterns to percepts, and then imposing deductive rules on what we've induced. We perform a valid method of inference on invalid statements about reality (remember our perceptions are only models to begin with).
Note that it is perfectly fine to make statements about concepts, but not about the reality those concepts are trying to model. That is why this argument does not just refute itself.
The tricky part I was attempting to get at was that _if_ we knew exactly how our concepts mapped to reality, we could _maybe_ use that function to deduce facts about the Truth. I have tried to prove that it is impossible that a "higher-power" could give us that function without incuring some penalty of doubt. Obviously, people cannot make discover this mapping by observing reality due to the afforementioned reasons. The only way this could be done would be to create a virtual reality like the "Tiplerian" Omega Point.
It's funny how you and Okto always reply to my comments at the same time. Do you get together in chat and strategize on how to deal with "evil nazis"? Hahaha
photog
--
Dulce et decorum est pro patria notare!
--
pax Christi
I am assuming that by "Truth," we might understand a vague notion of "ultimate" or objective truth--succinctly "the way things are." That is the underlying "engine" of reality, the mechanism that controls the workings of the universe. It is difficult to see how an idea as deceptively fundamentally "self-evident" as that could be false, but consider the case in which there are a number (possibly infinite) of those engines and that reality is the "average" result of those many mechanisms.
However, I think that for our purposes, we are really talking about something subtly different. We are considering "the way things are" as experienced by humans. I believe that any human experience of reality is either false or should be treated as false by the very reason that it _is_ a human experience of reality.
In my view, an experience of "Truth" may be obtained in one of three ways:
1.) It has been deposited into human minds via some outside source
2.) It has been induced from reality by observation
3.) It is the result of reasoning mechanisms that rely purely on an internal
algorithm separate from any external input (essentially the cases not
covered by 1 and 2)
Since case #3 relies on no external information about reality, we can reject any result of this process as being "ultimate truth." It would be like reaching into a container with an infinite number of items and picking exactly the right one. The probability of that event is exactly 0 (really).
The next simplest case is case #2, because humans are imperfect. People do not perceive the world as it is. Instead, our perceptions are based upon a sampling of physical properties that are used to construct an operational representation of reality.
Our sensory experiences with the world are models. Models are representations of a system that obey a simplified set of rules, which mimic the properties of the system on which they are based. For instance, meteorologists use models of the weather to cast predictions. Actual weather systems are far too complex to consider. Only the parts of the weather that past measurements suggest are the most reliable predictors are used to make forecasts.
The things we believe about the world are also models. We observe phenomena (events) in reality and then induce possible underlying explanations. Those explanations are models (c.f. Hidden Markov Models). At some point, a person will observe something that is not explained by the current model. Once the model is thus shown to be incorrect, people sometimes work on creating a better model that fits the new data. When that process occurs, it is called science. If the strange observations are ignored or jammed into a faulty model, then no progress in developing an understanding of "ultimate" truth is made. Even the best scientific theories are false, but scientists are continuously trying to improve them. To have a given theory be correct is also like reaching into a container with an infinite number of items and picking exactly the one you were looking for.
So far, ideas about "Truth" that come from cases #2 and #3 don't look very promising, so we have to turn to case #1. Ultimately, all models are wrong, but what if we could get help from an source that KNEW something about the underlying engine of reality? Then, we wouldn't need to worry about models--it would be a direct link to "Truth." Let us call such a source of ultimate truth "God." Yet, there are some conditions that must be met before we can accept outside knowledge as part of "Truth." First we need to suppose that God only gives humans correct information. We also need to assume that God has no competitors: other sources that appear to be Godlike (possessing of "Truth"). These other sources might be called Satans. If Satans exist, then humans could be unable to determine if part of "Truth" came from Satans or from God. Additionally, it must be the case that an individual's experience of "Truth" can not be duplicated or lost by mental conditions such as delusion, hallucination, memory loss, etc.
Unfortunately, in order to know those things about the possible sources of "Truth" or "Truth-like" experiences (I would call this Metatruth), people would have to have the ability to uncover "Truth" independently from outside sources. For instance, we might experience that God is the only source of "Truth" and that God never lies. Yet, it is possible that a Satan might tell something to that effect in order to mislead us into accepting all "Truth" without question. If we make an unfounded guess about the reliability of this knowledge, which we might call "Faith," then our _experience_ of "Truth" is in danger of diverging from the _real_ "Truth." However, the two ways that people might discover "Truth" on their own have been explored in the treatment of cases #2 and #3.
Since people cannot discover "Truth" by their own means and prior knowledge of "Truth" is required to accept any "Truth" from an external source, then we reach the conclusion that any experience of "Truth" must be treated as false. The best we can accomplish is to adopt a model of reality, which we know will be wrong. Those models constitute the lowercase truth; human experiences based on approximations of reality. Thus, by capitalizing "truth," it is always negated.
This is perhaps bleak, but there is some hope. Intelligent life can modify the universe. We may not be able to predict the Earth's weather as it now, but consider the possibility of a weather machine. A weather machine would command sufficient energy to "override" the natural weather and replace it with whatever the operator desired. It would then be very possible to predict the weather--just look at the setting on the weather machine. Likewise, intelligent life might eventually have the capacity to create a "virtual machine" that runs over actual reality. This system would become a source of "Truth." And that system is "The Omega Point."
--
Dulce et decorum est pro patria notare!
[link]
--
pax Christi
--
Dulce et decorum est pro patria notare!
--
pax Christi
Let me try this again... People learn about the world inductively--by observing events and then trying to make some sense out of them after they happen. Unfortunately, this process is not gauranteed to produce correct results. This is a dumb example: if you see thousands of black crows, it doesn't mean that all crows are black...unless you "cheat."
It is possible to invent knowledge about the world, but through the use of abstract concepts. For instance, you can prove that all crows are black by specifying very, very specifically what is meant by "crows." If part of your definition of "crow" is "a crow must be black," then of course it follows that a bird of any other color cannot be a "crow." Your mind has assembled the concepts you use from observing and partitioning its perception of reality, which can also include concepts from other people and society as a whole.
So, it _is_ possible to know things, given that you adopt a set of conceptual rules for reasoning about the world. The field of mathematics is based on that process. However, it is important to realize that conceptual reasoning systems worlds are disconnected with reality. At this point, crows stop being a good example. Our concepts are developed by fitting induced patterns to percepts, and then imposing deductive rules on what we've induced. We perform a valid method of inference on invalid statements about reality (remember our perceptions are only models to begin with).
Note that it is perfectly fine to make statements about concepts, but not about the reality those concepts are trying to model. That is why this argument does not just refute itself.
The tricky part I was attempting to get at was that _if_ we knew exactly how our concepts mapped to reality, we could _maybe_ use that function to deduce facts about the Truth. I have tried to prove that it is impossible that a "higher-power" could give us that function without incuring some penalty of doubt. Obviously, people cannot make discover this mapping by observing reality due to the afforementioned reasons. The only way this could be done would be to create a virtual reality like the "Tiplerian" Omega Point.
--
Dulce et decorum est pro patria notare!
--
______________________________ __________
have nice days.