response 1 of 105:

Feb 6 13:34 UTC 1998

I should've added, How do you define the term "absolute truth"?

response 3 of 105:

Feb 6 18:32 UTC 1998

The only truth in the universe is change.

response 5 of 105:

Feb 6 20:49 UTC 1998

How do you know it exists, Mike, if you can't perceive it?

response 9 of 105:

Feb 6 22:23 UTC 1998

There's an absolute truth, and we can't see it, and we see the world through
colored glasses.  Thank you very much.

response 11 of 105:

Feb 7 05:47 UTC 1998

         Valerie, just because you weren't there when the tree fell doesn't
mean someone else wasn't. You can only verify that a tree did fall.

response 13 of 105:

Feb 7 08:06 UTC 1998

 What was that line from 1984?

  Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4.

  I recall in the book, Winston was brainwashed into thinking that 2+2 could
equal 3, 4, or 5, depending on how Big Brother wanted it. Truth in that
instance was only absolute if Big Brother said it was.

  No, Rane, I want to say that nature has inherent truth. One plus one is
always 2. That will never change, no matter who says otherwise.

<omni now has a sinking feeling that he has really stepped in something messy>

response 15 of 105:

Feb 7 14:57 UTC 1998

Do numbers exist "in reality" or only "in your mind"?  We then to perceive
the world as being divided up into discrete "things" but is that reality or
is that the way our perceptual systems work?  I don't entirely know what I
believe about how real reality is.  Even in my most realist moods, I think
that "reality" is mostly an artifact of the structure human minds and
perceptual systems and are basically consensual.  When you are a kid, people
deliberately teach you concepts like "number" ("here's one spoonful of mush,
now let's have another").  A lot of what we perceive as reality is a cultural
artifact.

In my most idealist moods, I don't believe that there is any hard physical
reality underneath all this subjectivity.  No rocks, stars, planets or atoms.
What I do believe exists is Mind.  Mind tends to structure itself into lots
of smaller minds that operate sufficiently independently to start feeling like
individuals.  I'm one of those.  You're another.  So's your cat and the
cockroach under the counter.  The borderlines between individuals, and the
protocols by which they can communicate have been evolved within the Mind
and are essentially malliable.  By communications protocols I mean ideas
like each having a "body" and associating those bodies with "locations" in
"space".  The protocols say that we must establishing co-location as a
prerequisite for certain kinds of communications actions like kissing or
throwing concepts called "bricks" at each other.

Death in this framework may be either the extinguishment of a sub-mind, or
it may correspond to that mind reaching a state where it is unreachable by
any communications protocol know to the consensual reality.  That mind may
or may not establish itself as part of some other consensual relatity.  There
is no reason different disconnected relaties can't co-exist.

Individuals can change their perceptions of reality, but if they go too far
in that direction they just drop out of the consensus.  So the minds we can
communicate and interact with all have pretty similar perceptions of reality
(ie, communication protocols) to ours.  That's why we can communicate with
them, and that's why we get the illusion of universal agreement on the
"reality" of some basic things like time and space.

This means however that reality itself can evolve.  If you can push an idea
of how the world works hard enough, and convince people that it is true, then
it becomes true.

I'm not sure how much I believe that, but it has an appealing simplicity that
the idea of there begin an actual physical reality that is the source of all
our perceptions lacks.  That actual physical reality is such an inscrutable
object.

response 17 of 105:

Feb 7 21:17 UTC 1998

Too late for that.

Anyway, getting back to the question "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody
is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Even within my most idealist theories of reality, the answer is "yes, of
course it does."  You can't go mixing up levels.  Even if it exists only
within our collective imaginations, reality is by definition real, and that
question is whole imbedded inside of reality.  It talks about trees and
forests and people and sounds and subjects and observers - all of its
assumptions are within the system and the only possible sensible answer is
the one from inside the system:  When the tree falls, it inevitably hits
other objects and the some of the imparted energy propagates outward in the
form of compression waves through the air, and these constitute "sound" with
or without the presense of any observer.

I think reality works a lot like genetics.  Members of a common consensual
reality are like members of the same species.  Just as there is wide variation
among individual humans genetically, there is also wide variation among their
individual subjective realities.  Still, there is an overall pattern for what
a "normal" human being looks like and for what his or her perception of
reality is like.

There are two moralities (using Pirsig's word) in each case.  One values what
conforms to the established patterns.  You want your baby to be born "normal"
and you distrust people whose perception of reality is not "normal".  This
is what Pirsig calls "static quality".  It's important.  We cannot exist
outside a pattern.  Things that don't fit it are justifiably treated as
"freaks".

But there also exists what Pirsig calls "dynamic quality".  Some of the freaks
turn out to be extremely valuable.  They may have traits that work so well in
their environment that they eventually become part of the "norm".

Or they may not.  The static pattern is the accumulation of all the positive
contributions of past freaks.  Most random departures from it are not advances
but degeneracies - steps that lose some of that past accumulated value.

So how do you tell if a person with a freakish subjective reality is a
genius or a kook?  Basically, you can't short of waiting fifty years and
seeing if those ideas got integrated into the consensual reality.  But
generally ideas that are persuasive are more likely to win out.

So even if I believe reality is not based on any absolutes and is subject
to change without notice, if you ask me a question about "what is real"
then the only way to answer it is to bring to bear the most persuasive
ideas within the context of the current static consensual reality.

As far as I can see, the most persuasive system for answering questions
within this consensual reality is Science.  It is built on a network of
many people who carefully and redundantly examine everything and announce
any inconsistancies they find and figure out ways to revise reality to
iron out those inconsistancies.  As social instruments for the construction
of systems of reality go, it's the ultimate steam roller.  Systems of Religion
and Magic have their uses, but if either wanders onto Science's turf they
get obliterated.  If their results are consistant with Science, fine.  If not,
then they will find it impossible to sustain their claims in the face of
Scientific Investigation.  The priest of the great God Skrpl can say A, but
if Science says B then the vast majority of people are going to buy B because
Science carefully and exhaustively connects everything it says to everything
we already believe.

So I think even if reality is not absolute, Science is still the best method
available for structuring reality.  It does a thorough job of building new
static realities, while never closing its doors completely on the possibility
of dynamic change.  It's great stuff, but it doesn't mean that there are or
have to be absolutes.  Our consensual reality can keep evolving without their
being any particular "absolute reality" that it is evolving toward, just as
our physical bodies can keep evolving without their being any "perfect being"
that we are evolving toward.

response 19 of 105:

Feb 8 06:06 UTC 1998

Say, the forest is submerged in water, so that the trees rot away and
settle slowly into the sediments. They fall, but make no discernable
noise.  Therefore the uncircumscribed "absolute truth" of falling trees
making noise is meaningless.

Say the trees fall because the sun explodes and the plasma shock wave
evaporates them before they move a micron. The falling of the trees
makes no "noise".

Consider other scenarios that I have not thought of in which the falling
of the tree makes no noise. Can you prove there are none. It is not
possible to prove a negative, and therefore there is no *absolute truth*
to the statement. 

How much is the sum of 1 toad plus 1 orange? There are *set theoric*
answers to that, but there is no *absolute* answer (e.g., 2 organisms, but
1 "group of life forms"). How much is the sum of 1 and another 1 at right
angles to it? It is sometimes sqrt(2). Again, the answer is determined by
how it is circumscribed, so there is no "absolute truth"  about it. 

Those that say 1 + 1 = 2 are *assuming* that the ones are scalar countable
dimensionless quantities that obey particular rules. However the *rules*
have no "absolute truth" to them. We made them up because they are
convenient to us for many purposes. 

response 21 of 105:

Feb 8 08:09 UTC 1998

Great stuff in this item.

Rane, what do you say about this statement:  "It is an absolute truth that if
you assume all the standard postulates about integer arithmetic, then 1+1=2"?
(Imagine that instead of saying "all the standard postulates" I had listed
them.)

response 23 of 105:

Feb 8 12:42 UTC 1998

"We milk the cow of the world and as we do,
We whisper in its ear 'You are not true.'"

               -- Richard Wilbur