Re: Facts vs truths - dogmatic belief in uniformitarianism?
Posted: February 27th, 2021, 6:27 pm
Something that hit me today, or at least came back around as I'm taking an afternoon rest from programming.
It's about truth the franchise rather than truth in relation to individual constituents or compoenents.
A couple bullet points which I think at least roughly satisfy it:
- That which reconciles against itself.
- That which captures reality in its self-reconciliation process not through coercion but through empathetic penetration.
So in the grand sense it could be considered the enterprise of keeping order and 'what from what'.
The thing that's a bit scary about that definition though - it doesn't really have a central cohesion outside it's reaction to chaos, disorder, grifting / deception, snake-oil sales, etc.. I can't tell right away whether that's a good or bad thing though. Perhaps it might be akin to a herculean effort to keep 'red' things in the world if nature was hellbent on making the color red vanish from existence or if red took an amount of energy incommensurate with the laws of thermodynamics to keep on its own under entropy. Since our reality isn't defined that way we don't have a sense of that being a particular battle front and it might be that having 'truth' vanish into the background might be interesting occasionally (at least for a bit of rest once in a while) but for as long as it seems like conscious agents are at each other to fight over scarce resources the only thing that seems to really maintain the whip-hand of truth, aside from nature to some degree, is power and it has to be power used very judiciously and with a lot of humility.
It's about truth the franchise rather than truth in relation to individual constituents or compoenents.
A couple bullet points which I think at least roughly satisfy it:
- That which reconciles against itself.
- That which captures reality in its self-reconciliation process not through coercion but through empathetic penetration.
So in the grand sense it could be considered the enterprise of keeping order and 'what from what'.
The thing that's a bit scary about that definition though - it doesn't really have a central cohesion outside it's reaction to chaos, disorder, grifting / deception, snake-oil sales, etc.. I can't tell right away whether that's a good or bad thing though. Perhaps it might be akin to a herculean effort to keep 'red' things in the world if nature was hellbent on making the color red vanish from existence or if red took an amount of energy incommensurate with the laws of thermodynamics to keep on its own under entropy. Since our reality isn't defined that way we don't have a sense of that being a particular battle front and it might be that having 'truth' vanish into the background might be interesting occasionally (at least for a bit of rest once in a while) but for as long as it seems like conscious agents are at each other to fight over scarce resources the only thing that seems to really maintain the whip-hand of truth, aside from nature to some degree, is power and it has to be power used very judiciously and with a lot of humility.