I don't think there is such a thing as truth; at least not for anything that matters to human meaning. The truth is we're just apes living on a planet that we're unable to stop ourselves from destroying; a tiny, ultimately meaningless rock that will be gone one day in a universe that won't even notice, let alone care. That truth is very hard to accept (I never really have) and so we create other stories to give us meaning, but these stories are too arbitrary and subjective for us to collectively agree upon.
> I don't think there is such a thing as truth; at least not for anything that matters to human meaning.
1+1 = 2, the earth is ~80% water, water freezes at 0degC.
What to you mean there aren't truths?
Do you mean people form opinions that are wrong? Sure. After sitting back at looking at it, it seems like the big problem is: there are small circles of power that make decisions for the rest of their population under the guise of "best interest of the people" when in reality we all know this isn't true.
So these small groups make the little people distracted with things that are very hot-button topics that affect a very small majority of people, by making appeals to emotion on both sides.
The small folks eat this up, rip a huge divide, and the small circle people sit back and laugh.
Trivial facts, yes. I like "1 second is the time needed for Cesium-133 to vibrate 9,192,631,770 times" or "the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second", but who cares if the values were a bit different?
What does a life well lived mean? Is there a god or gods? Which one should one worship if so? What does it mean to be a good or bad person? Where does one find meaning? I don't believe there are truthful answers to questions like that, and modernity seems to annihilate the answers that cultures have developed in past. I'm not particularly versed in Nietzsche, but I believe he said it as "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
Fortunately, Nietzsche was simply diagnosing a disease rather than expounding on the nature of health. Yes, many of us in the 20th and 21st centuries act like God is dead. But "right is right, even if nobody thinks it is" is something that people have recognized since ... oh, Socrates? And once you probe how something can be "right" even if "[everyone in society]" disagrees you find a law giver. That's when the rubber really meets the road.
> "right is right, even if nobody thinks it is" is something that people have recognized since ... oh, Socrates?
Something recognized since Socrates, whose death was foretold by Nietzsche, and finally rendered obsolete by the postmodernists a la Baudrillard (1981):
All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on
representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning,
that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something
could guarantee this exchange-God of course.
To parse this idea properly it is important to define your terms, and lack of adequate definition is what leads to confusion especially as regards philosophical and especially religious discourse. "God" here should be taken to mean the belief in an absolute truth, a common, shared, objective reality from which our subjective realities are derived; metaphysics, spirits, ghosts, "energies," New Age quantum bullshit, and creationism all need not apply here (and are better dispensed with). It is the underlying reality to which all symbols refer; the concept of the pure simulacrum, the hyperreal, is a symbol with no reference to any underlying reality whatsoever, no referent, and thus untethered to any actual reality - atheistic and "without God."
Language and rational discourse are based upon this principle - that when we exchange words or symbols with one another that refer to a thing, we have some hope in hell of referring to the same thing, such that I can represent an object in the "external world," or even a thought in my intellectual "internal world" or "soul", serialize it into a literate form, and have you deserialize that literate string into the same intellectual or cognitive structures that I beheld in my own soul when I put those words together and hoped to communicate to you.
"The death of God" means that we can no longer guarantee this exchange of "meaning" between minds/souls (both of which I regard as terms that refer to exactly the same thing and are perfectly coextensive), because no symbols are tethered to an underlying objective meaning nor reality. Language and definitions are relative, malleable, subject to revision. Context and intent of language and expressions are irrelevant; the meaning of any string of symbols is now unilaterally determined by their impact or impression on the receiver, and thus any subjective meaning can be inferred from any expression.
The condition of post-truth is a consequence of this rejection of objective reality, of the elevation of relativism to the highest degree, and the confusion of (hyperreal, manufactured) symbols with actual reality. There is no objective truth any more, only relativism, narrative, and belief.
An excellent insight for which I have only one nit to pick:
> finally rendered obsolete by the postmodernists
is better render as "finally discarded as obsolete by the postmodernists". Since, after all, they didn't prove that symbols do not correspond to reality (they couldn't do that, since that would upend their arguments), they simply asserted that it was so.
You're moving the goalposts. This seems to be happening a lot lately...
You posited a lot of philosophical questions, and quoted a famous philosopher.
"Philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, and value. These are questions that everyone asks" [0]
If you're trying to say "we don't have answers to the philosophical questions of our time" I would agree with you. This would not be a salient point on your end, or even a useful one. This is an example of a well-established... dare I say... fact.
I don't feel like I moved any goalposts, but I'll fully admit that I'm not among the best at using language here. Objective fact may be possible, but truth is a human value and I no longer believe that such a thing exists. It's actually rather simple to get there from just what you said above. If "Philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, and value." and "we don't have answers to the philosophical questions of our time", then it would seem to follow that we cannot agree on the nature of reality which would seem to me to mean that we cannot find a truth that all can agree upon.
Plato has dealt with both of these already in the analogy of the divided line as dianoia (mathematical reasoning) and noesis (understanding). To Plato, facts are likenesses of the truth, just as an imagined object is a likeness of a real object.
Engineers have a hard time with this, because we work in a very 1-0, falsifiable world.
When people talk about "truth" with regard to society, government, politics, culture, etc, they're talking about "the story". A story is something that shortcuts discussion, an agreement that two parties don't need to litigate the foundation of.
Take the statement "Joe Biden is president of the USA." Many people accept that as truth not requiring further discussion. Many people do not accept that for a variety of reasons. If you're going to make that statement, you need to be prepared that some percentage of those hearing it will object. There are people that will object to "The earth is round."
So "post-truth" means that there's not a stable foundation of generally agreed upon facts. The least common denominator for discussion and agreement is smaller.
> Many people do not accept that for a variety of reasons.
That doesn't mean it isn't true about Biden being president. It is a fact, Biden is the sworn-in president of the United States. The part where people don't believe this doesn't make the world post-truth, it just makes some people wrong.
I don't care how hard someone believes Biden isn't president, he is. he was sworn in, this is a fact, not an opinion, not a story, not up for debate. The dude was sworn in as the president, he is the president.
Was he elected fairly? I think so, some don't. Debate that, sure. If two people on the opposite of that debate try and convince the other, it won't happen. That isn't post-truth, at all.
Truth still exists. People don't look for it. I posted this the other day as an example: My Brother-in-Law said recently "The NFL has declining viewership and is losing interest because of all the different platforms they stream to." Which I'm sure he heard/read somewhere, and knowing the fella, had a political slant towards what he was saying. I do not know what the slant was, but I DO know he was wrong. The NFL had one of the best ratings years ever in the 23-24 season.
My brother in law is just spouting nonsense. He didn't try and find the truth. We argued for 3 minutes, I pulled up the numbers, and he was wrong.
That isn't post-truth, it is willful ignorance, choosing to believe a false narrative because it aligns with core values.
This is a self-defeating statement. It's false on its face. If there is no such thing as truth, then this statement can't be true because it would mean there is at least one truth.
Not really. It’s a hyperbolic statement. It needs to be understood as such.
Normally this falls into the realm of moral truth. Or perhaps in a broader sense existential truth. For example: rape is wrong is not an absolute truth. It’s just like your opinion man.
In an entirely materialistic system morality is not universal. It merely the taste of whatever society wants at a time. Morality is ultimately might makes right. If you can enforce your morality through force, your morality wins. If the pro-rape camp could enforce their view, within a few generations we’d all say that the anti-rape camp was on the wrong side of history.
The truth is that we are very limited apes that are highly prone to self delusion and believing nonsense, trying to understand an impossibly complex world.
At the aggregate we seem to be making progress while at the individual level humanity always seems doomed. It seems a constant that the individual wants to pretend they live in the end times because at least then your time on this rock was a little bit special.
I’m more of what might be called “The Last Man” (as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not really enough of a Nietzsche reader to really throw out his terms but sometimes they do seem apropos). I’ve never wanted to be special; quite the opposite, I just want to be left alone to my TV, video games, and garden. Safety and comfort are what little condolence I take against the nihilism of existence. And it has become quite clear to me that climate change threatens that. What is strange to me is how many people believe that perturbing the Earth’s carbon cycle could not possibly have dire consequences for the Earth when not only has it happened before in the Earth’s history, we have models showing how bad it could possibly be and are already seeing the effects unfold. My suspicion is that I lack a lot of the denial mechanisms that get most people through the day and that they also prevent people from thinking that things can actually go wrong. Take it from someone who has seen quite a lot go wrong - they can.
Nothing you said is truth. Those are just your own blind beliefs. How do you know the universe is meaningless? Maybe it’s a simulation being run for a purpose, and the beings running it care about the outcome. You’re just spouting YOUR truth, which is not truth at all.
> Maybe it’s a simulation being run for a purpose, and the beings running it care about the outcome.
This sounds an awful lot like a higher being who sits in judgement of their creation; and something that humanity seems to reach for very quickly. I was taught something similar as a child, but lost the belief when I was still quite young. I'd love to believe in a higher power or purpose because nihilism is quite a terrible experience. I often wonder if I'm just wired differently so in some way unable to believe things as others are or if a lifetime of chronic pain has revealed things to me that most people do not learn until they are older.
It’s hubris to think we can know anything about the reason for the existence of the universe. But just because we can’t know doesn’t mean there is no reason, that line of thinking is just hubris in the other direction.
