AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Jul 28, 2021 11:04 pm
These things can be cleared up if we adopt a more living sense of "truth". The modern age also led us to think "truth" is when some facts external to us hold good absolutely and for all time (clearly this stems from Cartesian S-O dualism, and Kant adopted it as well in his epistemology). So then the modern intellectual says "
Aristotelian logic is untrue, because later we discovered other forms of logic which seem inconsistent with it." If we do not ignore our own role in assessing the "facts", and we consider our own activity in the world one of those facts, then "truth" becomes what holds good (proves useful towards specific aims) under definite circumstances and under definite conditions. That is generally the pragmatic notion of truth.
To be clear, though, I was not referring to logical or mathematical systems. I was just saying the concept of "triangle", for ex., I do not hold to be as abstract as the concept of "velocity", the latter being several concepts put together. And I am not saying abstractions are untrue - abstract reasoning and concepts were very useful in the Middle Ages for penetrating into some 'layers' of the spiritual realm, but they have very little such utility in the post-modern age. We need to get in the habit of thinking of all these things, especially "truth", as relational and context-dependent. Truth is more about how we assess and combine various facts of Nature (including ourselves) under various conditions rather than any absolute state of facts.
OK, let's consider a specific scenario: the world we live in is a "simulated" or "secondary" layer of reality that functions and appears to us in a completely different way from how the actual Reality functions and what it actually is. There can be multiple ways for that to happen:
- As in BK's scheme, the world we see is a result of mind-created ideations of MAL. We don not experience the MAL directly and do not communicate with it, we only perceive its ideations directed towards us through our "Markov's blankets" in which we are completely wrapped and isolated from teh MAL.
- As in the Matrix movie, the world we see is a computer simulations having nothing to do with the reality where the sumulating computer is running.
- As per Hoffman's model, the world we perceive is an "interface" that has little to do with the "hardware" on which the "code" creating such interface is running.
In either case, the reality we live would be a construct, a "game" unfolding according to its own rules. No matter how much we study the rules and the behaviors of objects within the game, they will tell us nothing about the Reality behind it where the "game" is being created, just like studying the appearances on the computer screen may give us some insights into how the code works, but will tell us nothing about the hardware on which it is running. So, if we follow your definition of truth (which I'm ok with and agree), we can find all kinds of practical evolving content-dependent and relational truths and shared meanings that will make us more adapted and fit to the simulated reality we live in. These practical truths will be all valid ones, but they will only be relevant to how things "function" in the simulated layer of reality, but not what things actually are on the hidden level of the "base" Reality. Those truths will actually have nothing to do with the base Reality. This is what I was asking about.
So, applying this scenario to your question, in my engineering work I deal with concrete experiences of how my designs actually function and I acquire practical knowledge of their behaviors and functioning. But again, all these experiences and knowledge only appears within the apparent reality and applies to the rules and behaviors of the objects residing in the apparent "simulated" level of reality. All this knowledge would be irrelevant to the "base" level of Reality.
On the other hand, there could be different more optimistic scenarios where the reality we see is an "extension" of the "base" Reality, and by studying and knowing the shared and content-related truths of the apparent level of reality, we could at the same time advance our knowledge of and get insights into the actual "base" Reality.
I can easily foresee you objection: what I'm proposing here in the first "pessimistic" scenario is a hopeless Kantian divide between how the reality appears to us and how it actually is as the "thing in itself" with a hopeless disconnect between these two levels of reality, which leads to an epistemological dualism. But I'm just giving this example as a possible scenario, I'm not saying this is how things actually are, I'm only saying that this is how things could be, but we have no reason to claim they could not be this way. But we also have no reason to claim that this is how thisgn necessarily have to be. The fact is, we do not know. We can hope that the Reality is fundamentally comprehensible by our knowledge down to the very fundamental "ontological" level, but we can never be sure that it is in fact true and that there is not another "turtle" underneath of it that is inaccessible and incomprehensible to us.
But practically I'm all for it: we should not adhere to these pessimistic and agnostic types of scenarios because they are practically counter-productive. In the situation of uncertainty like this it is more productive to deliberately choose more optimistic paradigm, because it will give us a chance to progress in case if it turns out to be true. If it turns out to be not true, well, at least we tried. Another way to call this strategy is "faith" - we don't know with certainty how things are, but we still hope and have faith that the Reality, no matter how challenging it may be to us, is still ultimately "friendly" to us and comprehensible for us.