I call this thermodynamic truth.

And while it is the sole arbiter of truth, the moment something occurs that truth starts decaying via entropy. Photons fly away at light speed never to be seen by us again. The energy that remains starts mixing in ways that cannot be reversed. You quickly lead to scenarios where more than one initial state could lead to the current state we can measure.

And worse we can never exist in a system where we capture and keep this information. You either alter the 'experiment' by measuring it, aka chaos theory. Or, you bring about the premature heat death of the universe.

There are facts and there is the context of the facts and the impact those facts have on people.

One can argue the news should just report the facts, but they add additional context and information to explain why the facts matter.

Verifying the facts / truth is objective and clear (e.g. it rained 2 inches today). Determining whether the impact is properly reported (e.g. “devastating” flooding occurred) is murky. And the flooding could have been devastating - to one family, to a village, to a school. So it’s not untrue, it’s just more subjective as you move from numbers to impact. And the news cares more about reporting impact than facts and will tailor the narrative to explain the impact to their audience.

Look at the news service all sides. You can figure out the facts (e.g. a law was passed) then see what each side is saying about the impact. The impact may be true for both sides, just presented in a vastly different way.

I agree with this position.

The idea that there may be 'truths' sounds utterly bonkers to me. a ^ -a is considered a contradiction for a reason.

There is a lot of subtlety hidden in "a ^ ~a is a contradiction", because physical reality is more complex than it appears.

For example, one of the stunning consequences of Special Relativity is that there exist situations in which an observer says that event A happens before event B, and another observer says that event A happens after event B, and both are correct. Nature does not appear to be at all bothered by this "contradiction", however, and the world works just fine. Even more puzzling "contradictions" arise in quantum mechanics.

For all we know, it appears that reality is indeed dependent on the observer at a deep level. Maybe there is an even deeper level at which statements such as "a ^ ~a is false" hold, but so far nobody has been able to discover any.

I think the real difficulty is in human language. "a ^ ~a is a contradiction" is still perfectly applicable but apparently requires a "for observer A" clause. To supply all of the clauses necessary to make a completely unambiguous statement would be way too long to be humanly comprehensible. It makes me think of the Carl Sagan quote about needing to invent the universe before you can make anything "from scratch".

I'd argue that "event A happens before event B" is objectively true if and only if event A happens in event B's past light cone, and so there's no actual contradiction. The only weirdness you get is that if events A and B are space-like separated, none of the statements "event A happens before event B", "event A happens after event B", or "event A happens at the same time as event B" are objectively true. But you wouldn't say it's contradictory or paradoxical, just that it's a partial order rather than a total order.

You're simply misrepresenting what the actual statement with a truth value is in these cases. The fact that events happening close to each other temporally from fast-moving inertial frames can't be given a canonical temporal ordering doesn't undermine the existence of truth. A happens before B in the inertial reference frame of one observer and B happens before A in the inertial reference frame of a different observer are both true statements, and the converse of each is a false statement. The insight of special relativity is that there exists no God's eye reference frame independent of inertial reference frames. Nothing moves against some eternal static backdrop serving as a coordinate anchor. Things only move with respect to other moving things. That is in and of itself also a true statement, and the converse is false. Non-contradiction still holds everywhere. That you need further details and context to determine the truth of a statement doesn't mean it has no defined truth value.

The Special Relativity example you brought up is not a good example because it's about observation, not the truth of the order of the events.

Reality is not dependent on the observer, but we are observers, so that's why everyone thinks they have their own version of the truth. We are the weak link.

>Nature does not appear to be at all bothered by this "contradiction"

There is no contradiction. Our intuition for what 'A happens before B' means and implies is just bad/incomplete, as special relativity models.

>Even more puzzling "contradictions" arise in quantum mechanics.

I would bet a couple years of wage that what seems like contradictions will eventually be cleared up with some non-intuitive models, just like with special relativity.

I imagine the 'changes based on observer' problems of quantum mechanics will be more understandable once we decide what an observer is ( goddamnit people from physics, you don't add such a highly abstract variable to your model without giving it some good definition x( ), with some better experimental apparatus or with some deeper models of reality.

Please then tell me what is the one true religion? :)

Humans are not logical systems.

>Please then tell me what is the one true religion? :)

I dunno. I'm inclined towards none of the ones I know a little about being true since they really like to ask you to 'trust me bro, feel it in your heart' instead of just giving you good reasons to believe them.

Newton gave us far better arguments for universal gravitation than most people do for their religions, and he was ultimately wrong/incomplete.

>Humans are not logical systems.

Yes, that is a bug in the humanity system. Generally we try to diminish its effects when truth-judging (or maybe probable-truth-approximation-judging if you care about your epistemology). Recognizing this bug is useful to try and diminish its effect.

>Yes, that is a bug in the humanity system.

So the urge for flying to the moon is a bug? Climb a Mountain?

It depends on your utility function, of course. Will flying to the moon or climbing a mountain bring you closer to the things you value?

The urge is a bug if it doesn't match the things you value. The urge is not a bug if it matches the things you value.

With some fat margin for uncertainty around 'matching the things you value' because that's hard to quantify.

Utility functions can have 'axiomatic values' in them. Not everything you value is deduced from underlying principles.

Try cocaine (saying this could be deleted by Google if it hosted this message)

And see for yourself whether we humans have bugs.

Belief is independent of reality. There is only explanation of our origination that is true.

The one true "religion" is science. Once a religion is discovered to be true then science will include that religion.

Science is NOT religion, believes have no weight in science just proof.

Religion is the exact opposite.

>I believe there is only one truth, and everything else is false.

That is maybe true with science, but not with living breathing things.

Just one example:

What is the best system to live in? Capitalism, Socialism or a mix of Capitalism AND Socialism?

Often it is just not a question of truth when it comes to humans.

It just appears that there's multiple truthful answers to that question since you haven't fully defined what the word "best" means.

If you rigorously define what you mean by that word in this question, then there will be one and only one answer.

Of course, whether we're capable of finding that answer is a separate question.

>It just appears that there's multiple truthful answers to that question since you haven't fully defined what the word "best" means.

That's exactly what i mean...humans and everything that comes with them are not systems....let alone logical ones.

Hell even science makes a difference (hard science and soft science)

>That is maybe true with science, but not with living breathing things.

Are you saying living things have some irreducible complexity that's unexplainable or undetectable by scientific methods?

>Just one example: What is the best system to live in?

It's a pretty bad example. There's necessarily an answer which, if nothing else, is the best for the largest number of people. People aren't infinitely variable.

>Are you saying living things have some irreducible complexity that's unexplainable or undetectable by scientific methods?

No i said Humans are not logically describable systems.

>There's necessarily an answer which, if nothing else, is the best for the largest number of people.

Having Slaves because it's an easier life for the larger population for example?

>People aren't infinitely variable.

Try to mathematically proof that ;)

>No i said Humans are not logically describable systems.

Arguably they're equivalent statements.

>Having Slaves because it's an easier life for the larger population for example?

Yes. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it couldn't be the "best". By the way, historically, slave-based economies needed the majority of the population to be slaves. It makes sense, since the slaves are consuming their own production and are expending more energy than the non-slaves.

>Try to mathematically proof that ;)

Humans don't grow arbitrarily large or small, nor do they grow arbitrary numbers of limbs, nor have arbitrary numbers of bones. A person chosen at random from anywhere in the world isn't equally likely to hold any opinion from the infinity of opinions they could conceive of. For example, I could confidently say no person has ever simultaneously believed that Google should be subject to more regulation and that the current pharaoh is a living deity.

If you post like this again we will ban you, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. We've had to warn you about this before. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.