All truths are actually probabilistic truths

[xesxss]

I have been dealing with the idea of truth for much of my life, especially since my parents were divorced and my dad would shit talk my mom.

Truth can also be equated with "reality, or taking it further "objective reality". The age old question "what is real, what is not real"
Platos cave is a great example of this.

We all have a glimpse into what the truth is. In platos cave maybe a really smart scientist would be able to say "this is a projection, and it has a bowl at the bottom with spiky things on top so its true form must be something that can hurt us, because we know that spiky things hurt". But someone who becomes more aware by looking behind and using a mirror to see above would have more information to theorize upon.

The truth becomes filtered through each of our own awareness.
More relationships that can be defined between peices of information brings you closer to knowing how reality and it have interacted. Your theory (or model) should not be precdited by reality, it should predict reality (to a degree of accuracy). A better model can simulate past, present, and future situations.

Switching gears
We can take the formula of probability which is intended situation compared to all situtions

This will give us a percentage.
The number of times someone agrees with you, compared to the number of times someone disagrees + agrees, could be seen as a model to measure the truth.

I will leave you with the questions
1. Is this a good measure of truth, and why or why not?
2. Where do the total number of outcomes come from in your view?
3. Where do the total number of favorable outcomes come from in your view?

 

[nakadashi]

I remember coming to this conclusion when I was younger. Then I read about quantum mechanics and realized that, while it doesn't really apply to morals and such, most of the physical rules that shape the Universe are actually probabilistic. Although that is just another model. I believe we will never get "the whole picture". We are perpetually trapped in Plato's cavern. Maybe Nirvana or Satori are analogous to this supreme experience.
As for using that probabilistic definition to measure morals, you should remember probability is a descriptive field, not a prescriptive one. It will be a good indicator of what the truth is for the people who surround you. If those persons are as far from it as anyone else, then you would be no closer to finding it than before.

 

[xesxss]

I remember coming to this conclusion when I was younger. Then I read about quantum mechanics and realized that, while it doesn't really apply to morals and such, most of the physical rules that shape the Universe are actually probabilistic. Although that is just another model. I believe we will never get "the whole picture". We are perpetually trapped in Plato's cavern. Maybe Nirvana or Satori are analogous to this supreme experience.
As for using that probabilistic definition to measure morals, you should remember probability is a descriptive field, not a prescriptive one. It will be a good indicator of what the truth is for the people who surround you. If those persons are as far from it as anyone else, then you would be no closer to finding it than before.

what I'm hearing is basing the truth off a broken society is a dellusion

 

[Fairykang]

Using the ability of a truth to predict past and future events falls solely within the ability of the scientific method which has proved hopelessly inadequate in answering the questions people want from Truth(objective).
What is the meaning of life? To promulgate your genes, but even this is pointless when faced with the heat death of the universe.
How should a society function? When the scientific method was applied to society in the way of eugenics, Americans were shocked to see the photos of the Nazi concentration camps only to discover the same thing was happening across the nation in mental asylums.
Objective Truth would have to go beyond merely being a model to predict objective reality.

 

[赤い男]

I have been dealing with the idea of truth for much of my life, especially since my parents were divorced and my dad would shit talk my mom.

Is this thread just a way for you to cope about your parents divorce?

 

[Chao Tse-Tung]

This statement on truth is, as all statements are, true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless, in some sense.

 

[Taleisin]

I have been dealing with the idea of truth for much of my life, especially since my parents were divorced and my dad would shit talk my mom.

Truth can also be equated with "reality, or taking it further "objective reality". The age old question "what is real, what is not real"
Platos cave is a great example of this.

We all have a glimpse into what the truth is. In platos cave maybe a really smart scientist would be able to say "this is a projection, and it has a bowl at the bottom with spiky things on top so its true form must be something that can hurt us, because we know that spiky things hurt". But someone who becomes more aware by looking behind and using a mirror to see above would have more information to theorize upon.

The truth becomes filtered through each of our own awareness.
More relationships that can be defined between peices of information brings you closer to knowing how reality and it have interacted. Your theory (or model) should not be precdited by reality, it should predict reality (to a degree of accuracy). A better model can simulate past, present, and future situations.

Switching gears
We can take the formula of probability which is intended situation compared to all situtions
View attachment 43360
This will give us a percentage.
The number of times someone agrees with you, compared to the number of times someone disagrees + agrees, could be seen as a model to measure the truth.

I will leave you with the questions
1. Is this a good measure of truth, and why or why not?
2. Where do the total number of outcomes come from in your view?
3. Where do the total number of favorable outcomes come from in your view?

Probability is a good measure of accuracy in the quantitative realm. However, strictly speaking, quantitative information is not objective. Quantity is a relative domain, IE it relies on the interaction and/or relation of a subject and object. A number has no entity except that which it describes, it is an abstraction. (However, concepts themselves have entity, but the entity of a concept is not identical to the entity the concept is abstracted from. the idea of "dogs" is not the sum of all dogs etc.)

Quantitative information necessarily is limited to describing and predicting the behaviour of things. No matter how well your logical system works, if everything is defined as an equation then it says nothing about the thing that is acting in the way described. Physics for instance is a highly effective tool for making predictions about the world, but an electron is merely a concept in mathematics, we don't actually know what it is qualitatively.

Objectivity however is qualitative. What things actually are must be independent of perspective, independent of interaction, for it to non-subjective (objective). We cannot make certain judgements about qualitative truth through quantitative means, including probability. No matter how useful, it's just literally impossible. The best we can get that way is a hypothesis, a projective model with a non-falsifiable assumption component.

Plato's cave is the perfect example of what I'm saying. What we can abstract from the world is not Truth, even if our goal is to increase the accuracy of our model ad infinitum. We do have sources of qualitative information in our experience (key word there), but that's a topic for another time.

 

[xesxss]

Thought I would add a response from chatGPT to this thread

 

[explorAR]

@Eric Outfield 's comment I think is the closest to how I feel about this. His comment about "probability is a descriptive field, not a prescriptive one." is right on the money. Many many many things follow the bell curve and probabilistic distribution.

When I was reading your post I was thinking about how I had this same realization about mental health. All defined mental illnesses are on a spectrum and what is considered normal is just what the majority of people fall into, there isn't an absolute of when you are too short on attention or too hallucinogenic. It's only definitively a problem when you deem it is hindering your ability to live the life you want to.

This is very similar to what you're getting at. I realized though that this is essentially a description of how society is able to maintain itself. In order for it to have the ability to exist and at the same time change over time it needs to have this breakdown of percent of people believing, behaving, acting the same way and it has to have this percent of people believing, behaving, acting contradictory.

I think this is why you see this distribution so often in the natural world, and vsauce has a fairly good demonstration of it using paper clips in this video:

View: https://youtu.be/fCn8zs912OE

The paper clip demo is around 13:30, but the whole video is relevant if you are interested.

 

[Andy Kaufman]

The number of times someone agrees with you, compared to the number of times someone disagrees + agrees, could be seen as a model to measure the truth.

I will leave you with the questions
1. Is this a good measure of truth, and why or why not?
2. Where do the total number of outcomes come from in your view?
3. Where do the total number of favorable outcomes come from in your view?

Sounds like truth turned democracy which in turn sounds like hell.
1. No because the number of agrees is trumped by the qualities of who is agreeing/disagreeing.
2. Randomness, ultimately.
3. Society

 

[eris]

nobody can know anything outside their own cooked little slice of experience so why not just admit that everyone is lying, either to themselves or to others lol

 

[vale-aroma]

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantlog/

 

[explorAR]

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantlog/

Could you give some insight on how you believe this relates in particular? I'd like to learn what you gleaned from this.

I believe the quantum realm deals really only with potentials, but doesn't bear much on this topic since we are talking about collapsed determined reality. The quantum potentials is what brings about the probabilistic distributions the OP is talking about in the first place (once the super positions have collapsed), but doesn't provide much insight into anything.