What does ultimate truth consist of?
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.
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.
Comments (18)
Ultimate truth is the belief that that is the way things are, that no improvement of ones perception of them will change that belief.
That's why I mentioned how words are often fuzzy, to make it clear I'm not talking about fuzzy truth.
Quoting 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?
Agreed
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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.
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Still fuzzy. Intuitively there's an existential difference between me a Julius Caesar: I exist now, Julius does not. Similar with the future.
[Quote]2) Consciousness, meaning all experiences that are experienced.[/quote] Stiil fuzzy. I experience redness (the quale). Does redness exist?
[Quote]3) Mathematical truth.[/quote]Are all mathematical axioms true?
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.)
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?
This is completely independent of how anyone may choose to describe that experience.
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:
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.
I'm not speaking of what humans can or do know. Only what's true. And as they say, que sera, sera.
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.)
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.