What does ultimate truth consist of?
  • Daz
    34
    Most concepts described with words are fundamentally fuzzy. (Take chairs. When a chair is manufactured, at point is it in fact a chair? When it finally falls apart, when does it stop being a chair? If I sit on a rock, does that make it a chair? Etc.)

    But some things seem to me to be part of ultimate truth, in the sense that they are not fuzzy. The categories that come to mind are, in no particular order:

    1) Physical reality. Meaning, everything that exists or occurs in the physical world. Whether in the past, present, or future. Anywhere in our universe, or even in disjoint universes, in case there are any.

    2) Consciousness, meaning all experiences that are experienced.

    3) Mathematical truth. This includes not only theorems that have been proved, but all theorems that are true whether they have been proved in the past, will be proved in the future, or even if they will never be proved. (A possible candidate for the last case is the Twin Primes conjecture: The claim that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers whose difference is 2, like (3,5), (5,7), (11,13), (17,19), etc.)

    By listing them, I'm not proposing that they are necessarily entirely separate from each other. I haven't come up with any other categories of ultimate truth.

    I'd like to hear what others think about this general issue.
    Daz Options
  • xyzmix
    40
    I don't agree with 3, that is universe, and universe is not 'math'.
    xyzmix Options
  • Gregory
    4.7k
    The world has existence, but in what sense does it have truth?
    Gregory Options
  • A Seagull
    615
    ↪Daz

    Ultimate truth is the belief that that is the way things are, that no improvement of ones perception of them will change that belief.
    A Seagull Options
  • Daz
    34
    I'm not referring to belief. By "ultimate truth" I mean truth that is not kinda, sorta, -ish.

    That's why I mentioned how words are often fuzzy, to make it clear I'm not talking about fuzzy truth.
    Daz Options
  • Possibility
    2.8k
    Most concepts described with words are fundamentally fuzzy. (Take chairs. When a chair is manufactured, at point is it in fact a chair? When it finally falls apart, when does it stop being a chair? If I sit on a rock, does that make it a chair? Etc.)

    But some things seem to me to be part of ultimate truth, in the sense that they are not fuzzy.     — Daz

    2) Consciousness, meaning all experiences that are experienced. — Daz

    So let me ask: When consciousness emerges, at what point is it in fact consciousness? When does it stop being consciousness? If a computer program can simulate conscious interaction, does that make it consciousness?
    Possibility Options
  • Daz
    34
    In my opinion, consciousness does not emerge; it is present at all previous times. I believe that because I cannot imagine its emergence from a state where it previously did not exist.
    Daz Options
  • Relativist
    2.5k
    Most concepts described with words are fundamentally fuzzy. — Daz
    Agreed
    But some things seem to me to be part of ultimate truth, in the sense that they are not fuzzy. The categories that come to mind are, in no particular order:

    1) Physical reality. Meaning, everything that exists or occurs in the physical world. Whether in the past, present, or future. Anywhere in our universe, or even in disjoint universes, in case there are any.
    Still fuzzy. Intuitively there's an existential difference between me a Julius Caesar: I exist now, Julius does not. Similar with the future.

    2) Consciousness, meaning all experiences that are experienced.
    Stiil fuzzy. I experience redness (the quale). Does redness exist?

    3) Mathematical truth.
    Are all mathematical axioms true?
    Relativist Options
  • Daz
    34
    Good questions.

    1) The truth of physical reality means everything about elementary particles — of which everything is composed. (People have the same type of fuzziness that chairs do in that there's no agreement on exactly when a person begins to exist or stops existing.)

    2) I maintain that consciousness per se is not fuzzy at all — it's only our attempts to describe it that are. (To answer whether redness exists would depend on what it means: Does redness mean the concept of electromagnetic waves in a certain range of frequencies? Actual electromagnetic waves? Or the experience of someone's seeing them?)

    3) Mathematical axioms are not subject to being true or false. The things that are true or false are the facts that — from a given collection of axioms — certain conclusions can be logically derived (or not).
    (There are some other things, too, that can be true or false regardless of the fact that they cannot be derived logically.)
    Daz Options
  • Possibility
    2.8k
    In my opinion, consciousness does not emerge; it is present at all previous times. I believe that because I cannot imagine its emergence from a state where it previously did not exist. — Daz

    In my opinion, too, to some extent - but for different reasons. Still, that doesn’t stop consciousness (as a concept described with words) from being ‘fuzzy’. I dare say most people would struggle to conceptualise atomic interaction as ‘consciousness’, for instance.

    The ‘fuzziness’ of a concept refers to the relativity of perceived potential or value. Concepts are irreducible to four-dimensional reality. We approach a definition of ‘chair’ by inserting a range of agreed values into its four-dimensional relations, and then ‘solving for x’, so to speak - where x is the concept ‘chair’. That’s harder to do with consciousness, because we don’t have all the experiential data. Or even most of the data.

    We can agree that consciousness exists, yet we can only imagine that it exists all the way down. Or fail to imagine its non-existence, as it were. Ultimate truth or not, what about ‘consciousness’ as a concept isn’t fuzzy?
    Possibility Options
  • Daz
    34
    When I call something fuzzy, it's not because human's concepts of it are fuzzy ... though that can certainly accompany fuzziness. It's because in an absolute sense the very thing itself is ill-defined, at least when you look at it closely. Consciousness — experiences that are experienced — is exactly what it is, no two ways about it. That's why I don't consider it fuzzy in the least.
    Daz Options
  • IvoryBlackBishop
    299
    I'd argue that nothing outside of pure mathematical theory will ever be "true" in said axiomatic sense; presumably all theories no matter their content being constructed or approximated from mathematics.
    IvoryBlackBishop Options
  • Daz
    34
    IvoryBlackBishop: Suppose you have a certain experience on a certain day. Then the fact that that experience was experienced is true, and nothing can ever change that fact.

    This is completely independent of how anyone may choose to describe that experience.
    Daz Options
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    ↪Daz
    I think you nailed it with your categories: matter, math and mind. The first is obvious, the second describes the first very well and the last can well be called an unsolved mystery. Viewed like this it becomes clearer what our priorities should look like:
    1) Mind
    2) Math
    3) Matter

    Despite all our self-aggrandizing claims it seems that humanity has spent the better half of its existence going after the proverbial low hanging fruit - tackling matter with math has proven to be by far the easier task than getting a grip on the nature of consciousness.

    Perhaps consciousness too obeys mathematical laws or, at the very least, must have awareness of the mathematical laws that govern all matter. Maybe there's no necessity that the mind be mathematical in construction and/or function and that matter behaves mathematically is an exclusive matter-only gig. We could go on till the cows come home but I fear, given the poor track record of even eminent thinkers, it won't amount to much; let's just be happy with understanding matter and math. :smile:
    TheMadFool Options
  • tim wood
    9.2k
    I haven't come up with any other categories of ultimate truth. — Daz

    Maybe I've misread, but you appear to have "ultimate truth"="truth." What meaning if any attaches to the word ultimate in this context?
    tim wood Options
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    13.1k
    But some things seem to me to be part of ultimate truth, in the sense that they are not fuzzy. The categories that come to mind are, in no particular order:

    1) Physical reality. Meaning, everything that exists or occurs in the physical world. Whether in the past, present, or future. Anywhere in our universe, or even in disjoint universes, in case there are any.     — Daz

    The problem here is that the future is indeterminate, so "vague" or "fuzzy" are not even applicable terms for the future, it's more like non-existent.
    Metaphysician Undercover Options
  • Daz
    34
    Maybe you mean the future is indeterminate with respect to the present. But (and I'm not considering the "many-worlds" hypothesis of multiple futures here) the future will occur, regardless of whether anyone knows what it consists of now. And when it does, *something* will happen.

    I'm not speaking of what humans can or do know. Only what's true. And as they say, que sera, sera.
    Daz Options
  • Daz
    34
    Maybe I've misread, but you appear to have "ultimate truth"="truth." What meaning if any attaches to the word ultimate in this context? — tim wood

    As I tried to suggest in the original post, I'm *not* considering facts like "The book is on the table," no matter how clear and useful they may be for us humans — because nouns like "book" and "table" aren't well-defined in an absolute sense. (They belong to fuzzy sets, especially at the boundaries.)
    Daz Options
  • xyzmix
    40
    @themadfool not 'math' because you have named the anomaly you don't know lot's.

    There's not just math there, but simulation free of math, so we call it the 'maker's math', or even incomplete math and thus not math and universe.
    xyzmix Options
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