It is convenient that your worldview can absorb any contradictory information such that it all just demonstrates what you already take to be true. A truly masterful reality-distortion field.
> there is not a single 'objective' truth but multiple often contradictory truths
This is something that's usually said by people who want you to drop your defenses and believe in lies they concocted.
To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing we've seen so far that would suggest we aren't all inhabiting the same, shared, physical universe - so there is objective truth. There are facts about the world around us, and when you're reporting them accurately, you're reporting the truth. If you deny those facts, you are reporting falsehoods.
Now one of those facts is that we all observe the world through a limited and biased sensory and cognitive apparatus. We can't perceive the entirety of the universe, only a small fraction of it. This sometimes leads to "contradictory truths".
The best analogy I've come up with so far is projections. Imagine the universe as a 3D space, and anything of interest as a 3D shape - but what each of us is observing is 2D projections of it. So there is a cylinder in that universe, representing an issue. I can claim the issue is circular. You can claim the issue is rectangular. We've both identified the true aspects of an issue, but our views are incomplete. Our views combined can help us understand the full form of the issue. But what's most important, if someone comes in and says they see a spiked star, they're just wrong. There's no "multiple often contradictory truths here".
This is the way I like to think about the world and debates on issues. Each of us operates on a set of facts and intuitions that are a result of a heavy dimensionality reduction. We operate on projections. But there is an objective reality, of which our conflicting views are different projections, and that reality makes it so that only some projections are valid, and others are wrong.
And just because an issue is primarily social doesn't mean it's magically not about the observable reality. Human beings are physical, material objects. Just damn complicated ones.
I think this is very reductive. The reality is that facts are rarely indisputable, and people have to function in the absence of absolute truth.
So, when presented with a fact that contradicts a preciously-held belief, there are several purely rational actions you can take:
- give up the old belief
- believe that the fact is false (either mistaken or a lie)
- believe that the fact doesn't actually contradict the belief (that there is some missing context that would make the belief compatible with the fact, even if you are unable to see it now)
None of these are irrational, tribalistic, feeling-based reactions, in general. Sure, there are some cases where a fact is simply overwhelmingly obviously true (e.g. it's raining outside), but those are an exception.
The vast majority of facts we have to build our worldview on are not directly confirmable without huge amounts of personal effort - everyone would have to become a world-class experimental scientist, investigative journalist, jurist, l high-level diplomat and many others, to be able to get a true first-hand confirmation of many of the (potential) facts they are presented with. In the absence of such confirmation, we have to choose who to believe based on a complex web of tribalism, perceived history, social cues, emotional intelligence, and priors that have served us well.
Objective Reality is the manifest form of Universal Potential, in the moment of Now.
The “Truth” is a perturbation of Objective Reality.
The “truth” is the approximation in the mind.
Integrity is the measure of consistency between the two.
Subjective is emergent from relationships among existing things. Everything existent is its own subjective.
Subjective does not mean compromised or corrupted, it means partial, limited, and of a fractional representation of what ever phenomena it interprets.
Opinions, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings have their own rightful places among us, yet they in no way should be taken before truth, when Truth is not at hand.
Opinions are at times cover for clever craft, so it may be one’s own hazard to rule out every avenue of uncertainty.
I think it is not just plausible but likely that some world views are more accurate than others, and that various techniques/frameworks can provide not overly difficult means to improve one's approach....but, it is also very easy to wind up with a misleading one, often due to unrealized/unrealizable axioms.
But at the foundation, there is a universal truth. Whether you describe something as a "massacre" or an "incident" is a moral judgment, but whether the event happened in the first place is a fact that continues to be true regardless of the strength of anyone's delusion to the contrary.
Plurality of information and perspective gives you the richest knowledge because (a) the knowledge of which judgments different people apply to the same facts is a fact in itself and (b) all sides lie and omit information to further their own agenda, so you have to try your best to interpolate the universal truth from what everyone else is saying.
But reality is not “the objective truth.” The notion of ‘truth’ belongs to the conceptual framework of knowledge (and the very complex process of its acquisition), and, unless you yourself conflate the mental image with reality, you realize that the objective, material world as such does not have to contain true or false statements about itself.
I think facts, truth, unity, etc, are fundamental building blocks of our perception of reality, not reality itself. That doesn’t make truths or facts invalid. We all share some common perception of the universe, at a very low, fundamental level. I believe knowledge can be built on that foundation.
The presentation of facts can be misleading, and you're right that comprehending the world isn't easy. But that doesn't mean we reject truth or stop aiming for a true view of the world.
The commenter didn't say our collective belief in something holds the world together – they said our collective being in facts (i.e. not fictions). You're failing to comprehend, yourself, and writing as though the comment endorsed tribalism when it did the opposite.
I think what katovatzschyn is saying is that, if you've already decided something is true, it's encoded as 'true' in your brain and hence more easily remembered as such, even if you later discover that it's false.
reply