Sunday, May 15, 2016

Determinism and the Nature of Truth

There is often some difficulty in life determining what is true. The most famous examples come from ethics, such as if the statement "living life according to your virtues is the best life to lead" is true. Or, you could even point to the vigorous debates that occurred some years ago over whether or not Pluto should be considered a planet. In that case, the debate was over whether the statement "Pluto is a planet" is true or false. In philosophical circles, these sorts of arguments can oh-so-often lead to a debate which centers around whether the property of truth is inherent or perceived. Basically, if I say "Pluto is a planet," I would be wrong by today's standards, but would I still be wrong if I said that same thing 15 years ago, when many people did in fact consider Pluto to be a planet? Does truth change with our perception of the universe, or are truthfulness and falseness already inherent in everything we say, even if we may not be aware of which property dwells in our words?

Firstly, the knee-jerk reaction would be to say that truth is an inherent property of the universe. Truth doesn't change simply because we have a different view point. However, if we follow this idea to the logical conclusion, we come up with an interesting idea. When making statements concerning the future, such as "I will have oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow," truth as an inherent property would still apply. Either it is true and I will have oatmeal, or it is false and I will not have oatmeal. We may not know what the answer is, but our perception of this statement at this point in time does not affect whether this statement is true or false. The statement already exists in a state of being true or false, and will not change. In short, my breakfast is already determined. And because inherent truth would apply to all possible statements, then all possible things are already determined. This conclusion doesn't necessarily debunk the idea of inherent truth per se, because the debate surrounding determinism is still strong; tying inherent truth to determinism doesn't necessarily prove or disprove either idea.

However, there is still the less popular idea of truth being a perceived quality of the universe. If truth is a perceived quality of the universe, then that means that truth is a construct of our consciousness. Truth doesn't exist beyond our perception of the universe (and the information contained therein). This distinction between "truth" and "information" is important for this side of the argument. Truth lives inside of consciousness as a lens through which we can then perceive information. If you have less information, you may be more inclined to consider different things to be true than if you have more information. This option doesn't affirm or deny determinism, because the conclusion says nothing about how truth can be applied to the future. (It is worth noting, though, that this conclusion can be used as a small building brick in an argument for the idea that there in only a single consciousness that can be proven to actually be a true conscious--you--and everything beyond is impossible to prove--essentially Descartes's First and Second Meditations.)

Overall, it seems to me to make far more sense to make the distinction between information and truth, and to label "information" as inherent and "truth" as an perceived property that simply arises out of how consciousness attempts to experience reality. It makes less assumptions about the possible determinism of the universe, and by Occam's Razor, therefore seems to be the more rational conclusion to take. As such, we can continue on with our scientific method of utilizing testable hypotheses and proving then to be either correct or incorrect without the philosophical conundrum of whether the hypothesis was false before we even proved it to be so.

No comments:

Post a Comment