Search This Blog

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Truth :::::

The " ::::: " means "ongoing", so I'll fill this out as time allows.

start part 1

I still have my 1966 edition of the journal Science, which was published in the United Kingdom, presenting an outline of the new entities called Quasars, or Quasi-Stellar Radio Sources. These were discovered by Maartin Schmidt in 1963. Previous to that time, quasars did not exist in as far as they did not form the part of any intelligent structure, whether it be imagery, science, words, music... there were no quasars.

As happens when there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people staying up late at night, peering at the starry skies, some of them become scientists and make a life's work out of staring at the skies. This constant focus reveals the incredible detail that is present: a vast amount of data.
They keep changing things; one day no quasars, next day quasars - ta da !!

Along with it, what is true changed. On day X-1, everyone would have laughed at your assertion about quasi-stellar radio sources. On day X+1, everyone is wearing t-shirts with witty quasar jokes screened onto them.

I suppose we could play the game and say that even though there was no one around to see the quasar - or the tree in the forest fall -  they were still there nonetheless... and that tree made a lot of noise, even though we were all miles and miles away.
Play the game of idealized and absolute structure, or Truth: Quasars would still be there even if nobody ever discovered them.
And upon this we base the notion of an Absolute Truth of the "real" way things are.

However, there is no guarantee of which I am aware that says that things MUST be in a certain way; a way that is discoverable and that will be revealed if we  but experiment and snoop around enough.
Even though we speak of the "Laws" of Nature and the Laws of Newton, we have not established that there is a Law or a Nomic (based on the Greek "nomos" meaning "law") which says absolutely that there is an inherent structure to the universe which can be comprehended within a finite amount of time.

"A finite amount of time" ! We do not have eternity to discover the laws of nature; we only have a finite amount of time. If the universe has such immense detail, and if it changes over time and place, and there is a great complexity overall and nothing resembling Nomic regularity, we cannot establish a science which is True for all times and places.
Hence, for sufficiently complex objects that bear constant scrutiny, there is possibly no Absolute Truth. Since this is the case, the statement "There is an Absolute Truth" cannot be asserted with... any... sense of truth itself.

Notice we mention "scrutiny": the experimental method of those mad men of science constantly measuring and counting and throwing neutrons at one another.
The constant focus in a field of infinite detail will discover infinite detail. Only neglect will give an object a sense of being immutable and changeless. The only things which seem to us to be remotely capable of being Absolutely True are precisely those Objects of Observation which are not observed... we believe we have all the answers in that field, so we totally neglect it. Thus, whatever phenomena they are sit in their lonely eminence of "Absolute Truth", which is more like the out-of-sight & out-of-mind torture of Prometheus than the royal eminence and splendor of Zeus' Olympus.

end part 1

No comments: