When you fix your thoughts on truth l

We label an idea as truth, when it comports with facts and reality, has proven to valid time and again without fail, and we have no contrary evidence. Yet, we realize, there may always be truths we haven’t discovered yet, but the truth is an ever retreating desire (the more we know, the more we know we don’t know). Just as we believe we’ve found it, someone comes along and either falsifies our belief, demonstrates the truth of a conflicting idea, or demonstrates it to be a smaller facet of a greater truth, than previously believed.

Newton explained gravity to the point it was accepted as a universal truth, but, Einstein demonstrated it didn’t apply at the atomic level. Now, this did not completely destroy the truth of Newton’s theory, it simply showed it only applied sometime, and we now hold to the truth of both. The truth of a belief, is not dependent on, the number of people believing it, the level of desire to believe it, our ability to prove or disprove it, the celebrity of people believing it, the willingness of people to be persecuted for it, or even the weight of evidence appearing to support it.

Think about the fabric of meaning. Everything you can think about, organized nice and reasonably by topic, no weird kinks and knots. Religion lives on this fabric right along side science, and you can walk from one side to the other and explore both domains, without having to climb any mountains or falling into any holes. This is truth, flatness in the topography of meaning. Any kind of discontinuity or even just the slightest grade in the map points to a degradation of truth. You should not have to climb a hill to get some information.

If you run across a discontinuity, that means there’s complexity there to unravel and dive into. You can operate without untangling it, many many people can go through life with their identities oriented around profound cognitive dissonance, but it feels better to challenge topological defects in their own map of understanding. There is another sense in which you can take this word. If you gather a bunch of people together around a common idea, they’re going to work together to come up with a shared, collective truth. What this is is a path through the map of meaning.

Well it starts around a core idea and a direction for the group to go. If you read Oscar Tay’s magisterial answer on the genesis of the Esperanto community, you can see how a group of people are grappling towards a meaningful direction for the community to go, answering questions that various people come up with in order to build a better, more ideal world, one in which everyone who wants to communicate with one another can use the same language in which to do it.

Humans can only operate in a few dimensions at any given time. We use mental tricks to reduce everything down to a dimensionality that we’re comfortable with. In order to communicate though, everyone has to be in agreement on both dimensionality, the ‘shape’ of the meaning map, and the ‘direction’ which determines how it’s relevant to people. In the first sense, articulated at the beginning the, truth refers to smoothness, the second one articulated in the third paragraph, refers to a shared direction.

I wrestled with the truth idea a while and decided that what we believe to be true is what builds the reality within which each of us lives. That is a subjective reality. Those beliefs are ours alone, unless we recognize who shares them. I also came to understand that we cannot know if we have found an ultimate truth. We can only build our own world of truths (soul for the religious) and hope to come close to the ultimate truth by avoiding being self-righteous. It's very possible that the main reason we exist is to try discovering absolute truths about life. I like to say that life is the universe trying to discover itself, so we are important in that quest. However, I believe that none of us can claim that we have found an ultimate truth.

Each of us have beliefs on what is good that builds the reality in which we live, but we can't know if our belief is an absolute truth. So, the idea is to share our good beliefs and let others’ good beliefs into our minds, so we can get different views and hopefully slowly move closer to absolute truths. Criticism goes backward on getting to better truths. People criticize to manipulate others and stand on their self-righteousness, demanding they have the ultimate truth. So, criticizing is the completely wrong thing. It's sharing beliefs in badness instead of sharing good beliefs. Keep bad thoughts to yourself and try to erase them.

Many heated arguments are centered around people having different definitions. Many established church officials promote confusion by not defining the terms they use. Confusing people is a favorite technique used to control masses, a favorite of politicians and church officials. If we are confused and don't understand then we tend to just follow. So, look for the goodness in discussions with others and don't assume they are using your definitions. Atheists hit on something good when rejecting the official personified God and believers hit on something when they see there is goodness all around and that goodness is all powerful.

Even our most treasured good beliefs will be shown to be at least somewhat inaccurate in the future. Newton had good opinions on gravity; Einstein showed his belief was incomplete. Someone will probably clarify Einstein. So, share your goodness, listen to others’ goodness and realize you can't say you understand an ultimate truth, absolute truth, complete reality, ultimate goodness or the mind of God. Cheers!