Can one know "the truth"?

[Kyriakos]

I think you're invested in a bit of a word game, actually. You're placing an indeterminate value on "truth" and then snapping back and forth to a "truth value" which is, supposedly, apparent.

I don't believe it is apparent.

Just as in the "static curtain" reference in my post above, everything we see and understand is based by our flawed, limited perspective. It's never the "whole story" and therefore inherently "a lie". Just as it's covered with every dream, every sense of love, every human triumph, it's equally adorned by every catastrophe, every hallucination, every bad acid trip, and every prejudice. When I ask you, "What is real?", you point at that curtain and you say, "That. That is what is real.".

I think Kafka realized this. I think he really wanted to say, "There is a truth out there, and we are not part of it.". Now we have people postulating, "But what if we were?". Well, we're not. While we're definitely part of "something going on", we'll likely never be quite aware of its true nature because of this truth we've fashioned for ourselves.

Claiming that "the whole story" cannot be known does not mean you cannot know even a tiny part of it. You do not know the full value of pi cause it seems to have endless digits which are not appearing in any periodicity. But you do know its part in the calculations of a circumferance. So you know part of it, anyway, and therefore you know that part as true, and that part is part of the truth.

I doubt Kafka had what you meant, in mind, since what you meant appears to be included in a larger meaning the phrase was argued to have, ie indeed if one is not part of the truth he cannot see it as its actual meaning, but then again if one is part of the truth he cannot see it either (in any way) according to that quote, cause he would not have it in his own horizon, since the truth would be always behind him, so to speak, and tied to him.

 

[Adjuvant]

I'd say you're "functioning within the lie" and then "trying to garner truth".

To your example specifically, you believe "a measurement" (pi's relation to circumference) to be real because you can empirically test and prove it, but it's only true in euclidean space, that which you're acquainted, because it's that of which "we seem to be composed" and that which "we readily perceive".

But we're learning more and more that it's not the complete picture, not even close. "Step out" of being a "human in euclidean space" for a moment... there are "more sides" for "more vectors", "more facets" for "more dimensions". In that greater perspective, pi is meaningless.

Now as an aside, as I read Kafka's "actual quote" which you've generally paraphrased from the beginning, "There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.", I personally form a different mental picture. It's of truth being the "lofty" concept, as a sort of large pool or subset, and the juxtaposition of "standing outside that pool" throwing something in, "a lie". The lie is not accepted into the greater "truth indivisible" and therefore, expelled, never being "the same stuff". So, accordingly, while we "truly exist", but since we cannot "know this truth", and all we can know is lies, so all we can know of ourselves "are lies".

 

[Kyriakos]

I'd say you're "functioning within the lie" and then "trying to garner truth".

To your example specifically, you believe "a measurement" (pi's relation to circumference) to be real because you can empirically test and prove it, but it's only true in euclidean space, that which you're acquainted, because it's that of which "we seem to be composed" and that which "we readily perceive".

But we're learning more and more that it's not the complete picture, not even close. "Step out" of being a "human in euclidean space" for a moment... there are "more sides" for "more vectors", "more facets" for "more dimensions". In that greater perspective, pi is meaningless.

Now as an aside, as I read Kafka's "actual quote" which you've generally paraphrased from the beginning, "There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.", I personally form a different mental picture. It's of truth being the "lofty" concept, as a sort of large pool or subset, and the juxtaposition of "standing outside that pool" throwing something in, "a lie". The lie is not accepted into the greater "truth indivisible" and therefore, expelled, never being "the same stuff". So, accordingly, while we "truly exist", but since we cannot "know this truth", and all we can know is lies, so all we can know of ourselves "are lies".

Hm, since you seem to think you have cancelled pi's significance by moving into your multi-faceted domain, maybe you should immediately send your work to an esteemed journal so that we all can be freed from the continuous interest in irrational numbers

(or just post your proof that pi has no meaning in more dimensions here, if you are so humble).

 

[Adjuvant]

You want me to somehow "prove" to you that everything we know is based on imperfect form and perception?

I don't think I can, actually, right now, over the internet. I can express to you how other measurements we perceive as "constant" are only appearing so because of "where we are", but in actuality are "not constant", like time. I think, if you took the opportunity to think about it, you'd get a glimpse of how other "constants" are not so, too.

 

[Kyriakos]

You want me to somehow "prove" to you that everything we know is based on imperfect form and perception?

I don't think I can, actually, right now, over the internet. I can express to you how other measurements we perceive as "constant" are only appearing so because of "where we are", but in actuality are "not constant", like time. I think, if you took the opportunity to think about it, you'd get a glimpse of how other "constants" are not so, too.

That is general, while you mentioned specifically a noted irrational number (pi) and i asked why you think it becomes meaningless when the dimensions are altered.
I asked not so as to attack you (cause i have no reason to, and i like your posts) but because it seemed an idea which is most probably not correct. I base my own assumption on the fact that you can even combine irrational numbers and get a rational number as a result (for example for an unknown* fibonacci number in the position n of that series, you can write the identity of it by using phi, which is another irrational number. It is written in a fraction, mostly populated by equations centered on the square root of 5 (itself an irrational number), but the end result is obviously rational, cause all positions in a sequence are integers. So it seems strange to argue that you can just cancel pi or other irrational numbers by moving in more planes in your examination. You may on occasion turn them into rationals, in some identity based on them, but this does not at all mean they stop being irrational.

* A simple presentation of this, found in a web-page i just googled for:

Perhaps a better way is to consider 0 in the Fibonacci sequence to correspond to the 1st Fibonacci number where n = 1 for 0. Then you can use this formula, discovered and contributed by Jordan Malachi Dant in April 2005:

fn = Phi n / (Phi + 2)

Both approaches represent limits which always round to the correct Fibonacci number and approach the actual Fibonacci number as n increases.

http://www.goldennumber.net/fibonacci-series/

Note that this is just an approximation; it uses "closest integer rounded to", but the main formula is just for theoretically knowing the n-th fibonacci being in a position which is obviously an integer (n) but being in identity to several irrationals in a fraction.

 

[Adjuvant]

Yes, but axioms are not axioms because they are "universal truths". They are what they are because "they work" given "this set of circumstances", "under these parameters", "to this method of measurement".

I can invent any axiom I want and express it with a symbol.

I could say, "For every event which can happen, there's no correlation any event actually will happen", and label it "kappa minus 1". So I've given a symbol to a postulate, and subsequently I can go through motions trying to prove it forward and back.

Math is not "truth". Math is a tool for examining and labeling. You cannot take math, in and of itself, and prove itself, on the nature of itself. Numbers are not real, they're a system of comparison.

In the case of pi, it's a correlation between parameters in euclidean space. That's all it is. It's not magic. It's not divine. It simply is what it is because of what we have.

 

[Kyriakos]

I am not entirely against that, but then again if you changed the numbers/relations to something more chaotic (eg a and b are in the same sequence, where b comes immediately after a, and b differs by a in the smallest possible value in the sequence, BUT the difference between a and b is not taken as some sort of obvious meter) then you could have a= (lets say 1, it is not 1 in that new chaotic system) 1, and b=piX34, c=e^452 and so on. You could have this system, where effectively the irrationals would have entirely different meaning, and surely pi would play no recongisable role in a circle. But what would you have helped with by creating a chaotic numbering system? For starters it would make the actual values of the first few numbers already difficult to know, whereas now we always now that the first positive number is 1, and the 123456789th positive number is 123456789, which is a good basis for further calculation

 

[Adjuvant]

Well, again, I charge it's only a "good basis for calculation" because we basically invented it, gleaned from our perspective.

Maybe we do need "a new math".

 

[lovett]

Epistemology -- that is, the study of knowing -- says you cannot know anything.

That you cannot 'know' anything is an old view (mostly correct in my opinion) which gave birth to the many branches of what later on got known as Idealism (a term originating from "the world of Ideas", by Plato).

Neither of these things are true.

 

[Kyriakos]

^Why?

 

[eduhum]

Maybe to find the truth by the discard method.
I find the truth, as everyone, a field so vast it is almost unreachable.
But many philosophers have tried to find the truth in a direct way.
Only by working like Socrates did, by discarding the illogical things we can achieve something.
Many people say that something logical doesn't have to be true. For me, this apparently logical thing must have something illogical hidden, maybe very very difficult to acknowledge. What is logical is true.

 

[lovett]

Neither statement corresponds to the facts.

 

[Kyriakos]

Maybe to find the truth by the discard method.
I find the truth, as everyone, a field so vast it is almost unreachable.
But many philosophers have tried to find the truth in a direct way.
Only by working like Socrates did, by discarding the illogical things we can achieve something.
Many people say that something logical doesn't have to be true. For me, this apparently logical thing must have something illogical hidden, maybe very very difficult to acknowledge. What is logical is true.

^+1

Logical is a nice term, which may help in the question of what "true" can be deemed as. Indeed some may argue that while a statement/thought (to use an utterly simple example, 2+2=4 ) can be true in the context of a defined system where they have defined values, this can be not so in other systems. The question then is if we have a logic/pattern system that was borne out of our own means as a species (including any possible variations of it), or if that system is arbitrary as well in regards to ourselves. My view is that it almost entirely is not arbitrary in regards to ourselves, which in turn means both a positive and a negative:

Positive, cause it follows that we can always expand a system that is almost perfectly fit to our own abilities to think as a species.

Negative, cause it follows that the system, no matter how expanded, will have a limit that falls before anything which was not potentially in human grasp to begin with.

 

[Borachio]

Neither statement corresponds to the facts.

And a fact is what exactly?

Could it be something that's thought to be true, by any chance?

So, you're saying neither statement is true because neither is true?

I don't think we're making progress.

Are "facts" any more knowable than "the truth"?

 

[warpus]

We have to assume everything as true, unless we know for sure it is false.

That leads to an infinite list of assumptions though, which is unfeasible in practice. You couldn't for instance write down everything that is true, if somebody asked you to.

So it's unnecessarily complicated.. Plus it would contain a lot of assumptions that end up being false.

edit: not to mention contradictions between various assumptions.

 

[timtofly]

And a fact is what exactly?

Could it be something that's thought to be true, by any chance?

So, you're saying neither statement is true because neither is true?

I don't think we're making progress.

Are "facts" any more knowable than "the truth"?

Epistemology does not say you cannot know anything. If that were true, then epistemology does not exist.

Idealism was in contrast to the thought that the mind could not know what knowledge was outside of itself. It would seem to me that until humans started to think about thinking, they would not have said, "We cannot know anything." How would they know they did not know? People always had thoughts and acted on those thoughts, but until the Greeks starting thinking about those thoughts, it really did not matter to most humans. In fact even today, most humans do not give thinking a second thought.

That leads to an infinite list of assumptions though, which is unfeasible in practice. You couldn't for instance write down everything that is true, if somebody asked you to.

So it's unnecessarily complicated.. Plus it would contain a lot of assumptions that end up being false.

edit: not to mention contradictions between various assumptions.

It would seem to me that people do not want the truth, because they cannot accept it. So throwing all of it out and starting over seems to be what humans have done. Maybe I am misinterpreting your statement. If the truth is too insurmountable and able to fit into human comprehension, starting from nothing and adding to it, as humans agree to it, will work also, but it may from the limited human perspective, never gain access to certain truth because humans would never know to look for such truths. It would give humans confidence that they have mastered some truth, but that would infer humans are not confident in how well they think they have abolished what used to be held as truth.

 

[lovett]

And a fact is what exactly?

Could it be something that's thought to be true, by any chance?

So, you're saying neither statement is true because neither is true?

I don't think we're making progress.

Are "facts" any more knowable than "the truth"?

Not sure [maybe a set]. No. Yes. No.

To explain further, there's not all that much that can be said about the statement 'Epistemology says we cannot know anything'. It's implies that the author has not read any actual epistemology. I know precisely zero epistemologists who are sceptics: it has never even attained the status of 'minority view' amongst philosophers. The interest in the sceptical problem is as a constraint on appropriate theories of epistemic kinds (e.g. knowledge, justification, rational belief revision). The can be put precisely as a constraint on the appropriate axioms in an epistemic logic.

The second supposition was that general scepticism 'gave birth to the many branches of idealism'. This is also wrong. The British idealists were motivated by consideration regarding perception: they (especially Berkeley) though that because all we perceive directly are ideas, and we perceive objects directly, objects must be ideas. On the continent, transcendental idealism was motivated by specific worries about the a priori and how a priori knowledge was possible.

 

[Tahuti]

That leads to an infinite list of assumptions though, which is unfeasible in practice. You couldn't for instance write down everything that is true, if somebody asked you to.

So it's unnecessarily complicated.. Plus it would contain a lot of assumptions that end up being false.

edit: not to mention contradictions between various assumptions.

Well, truth doesn't really exist in a meaningful sense anyway, since it is contradistinguished from false at best. Truth is the likeliest form of "maybe". How many scientific theorems that were long considered to be undeniable facts ended up being proven false? I don't know any precise numbers, but I'd say a lot.

 

[Adjuvant]

Truth is the likeliest form of "maybe".

I like that.

Also,

Much of "fact" is solely dependent on the language used to infer it.

"The sun rises every day."

Inspirational, but is it fact? It is because of "what those words have been created to mean". It's not really what's going on, though. You know that. I know that.

 

[Angst]

I like phenomenology. It doesn't really concern itself with truth in an objective sense.