On Truth and Lies

 Day 6

Everything here was written in October-November, 2022. There are 52 posts total, one for each day I wrote.

I have never been quite sure what is meant by “that is true”. For example, take a sentence like 'It is true that 2 is 1 + 1'. What does it mean to say that 'one plus one equals two' is true? We can of course make this extremely complicated by arguing about definitions, by regarding truth in a pragmatical sense, or in a verification sense, or in some other sort of logical sense whereby we have a meaning or a reference for the elements of the sentence, and by some combination of these, we can decide that the sentence does or does not have a truth value of 'true', or 'T', or '1', etc.. However, these methods have always seemed somewhat lacking to me. We do not talk about truth just around sentences, after all – we can say that this is a model that truly reflective of the subject. We can say that something truly happened, we can say that something is partially true, we can say that we had a true flash of insight. We can say that someone is telling the truth – we can think that someone is telling the truth. Indeed, is truth an attitude we have towards something, a link between subject and object, a general euphemism for 'effective'? Is anything eternally true, or does the truth of something change? What do we even mean by 'the truth of horses', or 'the true form of a chair'/ It is not clear. I want to review truth through the eyes of my ideas of the world.

In the world, all that is are shards. Shards can connect to each other. Gems are collections of shards. So, there are at least two possible ways that 'truth' can be. The first is a gem of truth. The second is a gem that is true. Because we are reversing Descartes, we think that all shards are true. So, what is a lie? A lie is a collection of truths, because a lie is a gem, and gems are made up of shards. A truth is also a collection of truths, because the concept of true is a gem, and gems are made up of truths. So, lies and truths are made up of the same things. What happens when we encounter a lie? We are directed by that lie to believe in certain things, that is, to modify the world. Presumably, this is what a truth does also. So, lies and truths do the same sort of thing in the world. However, there are clearly differences between a lie and a truth. Presumably, a truth is never revealed to be a lie by another truth, but is sometimes shown to be a lie by a lie. However, a lie can be revealed to be a lie by either a lie or the truth. So, truths verify each other, but lies do not verify anything.

Because a truth is a gem, a truth has different shards in it. That is, there are different aspects to the truth, or a truth, or a true thing. Because all of these are gems, and everything is a gem, and a series of connected gems comprise a world, there can presumably be a world that is comprised only of truths. There can also be worlds comprised only of truths and lies, or of only lies. However, a world of only lies also contains some truths, because all lies are made up of truths. So, just as a truth has many different aspects to it because it is a gem, a lie also has many different aspects to it because it is a gem. Because a lie is comprised of shards of truth, sometimes a lie will be a truth, from a certain point of view. That is, that all lies have at least one aspect where they are actually truths. Presumably, a truth has only aspects where they are true. However, just as a world can be comprised of truths and lies, and the world can thought of as being formed just like a gem, it can also be the case that a gem, or a thing, has aspects to it that are sometimes truths and sometimes lies.

What we have is a very interesting collection whereby by investigation of truths and lies as gems shows that they are possibly intertwined, and I think it is very likely that this is the case for our daily lives. How often do you encounter something that you are sure is totally true? I feel that such events of encountering a pure truth-gem are very rare. Indeed, it would appear that pure truth-gems can act like foundation pillars. After all, they are truth from every aspect, and so they do not have flaws in them. After all, we can break a lie up, we dissolve it into its constituent parts and understand why they are put together in such a way that we do encounter a lie-gem. Or rather, a gem that is lying. It may make just as much sense to say that there is a certain gem of truth that all truths connect to, as it does to say that all gems which are true are unbreakable. However, what does it mean that a truth-gem is unbreakable? It means that that gem by itself is unbreakable – but if we are encountering a gem, then there is a shard of that encounter in the world. Because that shard is an aspect of the truth-gem itself, everytime we deal with a truth-gem, we modify it. Indeed, we can also mix and match a gem of truth. For example, because all things are true, we can think that it is true that the sky is blue, and it is true that the sky is red.

Sometimes this is a paradox when we try to fit them together as being the case at the same place, in the same way, on the same time, and as seen from the same point of view. That is, when we say that a gem is true, and that that same gem is false. This requires two gems. Sometimes this is not a paradox, as when we understand them to be the case at different places in the sky. Remember, the world of gems is not like our normal world, is not physical in the same sense. Indeed, the world is more about living than defining.

What does it mean to say that the world is true? Remember that one of the few things we think we believe about something that is true is that it is unbreakable. However, there are two unknowns in the world. There is the unknown of our will, and so we can always look at a world in a new way, adding onto it and imagining something new until it is a world that is amenable to breakage. We can also find that sometimes things happen because of the unknown outside and so the world is broken because something happens that is impossible in the world. So, we can never know for sure if a world is actually true. We can only think that it is so, at least until we understand one of the unknowns. However, destruction of the unknown will suicide, and destruction of the unknown reality either requires omnipotence or purposeful ignorance. Thus, our world may be a lie.

However, it is made up of truths. After all, all that is, is. That is, that all the shards we have gathered do actually exist. They happen, even though we might not know what they really are. We can't even say that we have experienced something, we can only say for certain that something is. Because we only known things exist through change, we can only say that something changed. Those two statements are the same statements.

We can also look at truth using the ideas of sense and nonsense. That is, for something to be the truth we must first be able to understand it. If we do not understand a statement, then it seems very difficult to realize if it is true or false. What is it for something to make sense? It means that we can sense it, it means that it is a shard or a gem in the world. So, all shards and gem are sensible. What does it mean for something to be nonsense? Something that is nonsense is one of two things. The first is something that is nonsensical, that is, a shard that is not in the world. However, because all shards are the world, anything that is nonsensical in this way is not a shard. Only things that we can not ever know about in any way whatsoever, and which do not impact our world in any way whatsoever even by proxy or effecting another thing in our world, are nonsensical in this way. So, we do not have to worry about something being nonsensical in this way. The other way that something can be nonsense is seen is when we can sense it, but not understand it. That is, when it is a shard that we are aware of but that we do not know how to connect to other shards. That is, a piece of the world which is disconnected from all other pieces of the world. If it was connected to any other piece of the world, then presumably we would be able to make a whole new world based on that shard as a foundation pillar. However, if we cannot connect to it at all, then it cannot be used to create a new world entire. It cannot ever be used to create a gem. However, we know that we are aware of it. We also know that interacting with something creates a new shard, a shard that is necessarily connected with the thing. So, if we interact with the nonsense thing, we can sense it. So, construct something around it, although it may be so strange that we cannot connect it to other shards. Thus, if we use the nonsense thing to create a world, we can end up with other things which are now nonsense. That is, something is only nonsense from a point of view, in a possible world.

What we try and do when we try and find the truth is to create a world that is true and unbreakable. That is, a stable world. Because a piece of nonsense, in this second sense, is always capable of leading to the destruction of the world, what we try and do to create a stable world is to understand nonsense. We can also ignore the nonsense, but that only leads to a closed world by purposeful ignorance, and that sort of world is inherently unstable because we could at any time accidentally run head-first into nonsense, into something that we don't know how to fit into the world and which we do not understand. I still don't know what truth is, but it seems that it is sometimes linked to stability, and sometimes to understanding.

It is also interesting that a lie can sometimes reveal a truth. This, I feel, jives with my actual living experience. After all, imagine something like a play – is it not a lie, does it not tell a story that never happened and is full of people that are pretending to be what they are not? And yet, it certainly seems to be the case that a good play, just as an good story can, is able to show or reveal a truth to us. That we care for life, that slapstick is funny, that there is an emotive aspect to understanding great events in history, showing something to be absurd, or showing an absurd thing to be eminently reasonable. I feel that there are probably a lot of people who has experienced a flash of revelation, a new way of seeing the world or a bright light that led them to know, to enter into a new world, one that is 'truer' then the previous world they were living in. I still don't know what a lie is, but it seems that it is sometimes linked to stability, and sometimes to understanding.

Because truth and lies are so intertwined, I tend to try and not center too much of my investigations upon them. After all, even if I say that something is true, it may very possibly be that what I thought was truth was only the true aspect of a lie, and a greater understanding, a greater world that contain all the world before it in which I understood the previous thing to be true, and now contains that idea and the idea that I know why I thought that to be true, and a greater, more stable, and more powerful understanding. However, that new world could also be revealed to be the true aspect of a lie, and so on and on. We do not know what the future can hold.