Comment by markburns

7 hours ago

The majority of what you may consider to be true is just a representation of your corner of a complex multidimensional truth space.

For a current example take “Lake Ontario (Lake America)” as it appears to me on a map.

The “true” name has at least two definitions, this is because naming things and much of human thought is spent inside a shared space of intersubjective thought. That is to say that much of what we believe to be real and true is only held up by these common shared beliefs. They truly only exist inside human minds.

The last few hundred years have been somewhat unique for humankind as the majority of these intersubjective ideas collided and we ended up with a truly global set of “truths” about how the world operates.

Mostly controlled by putting flags in the ground and having violence back up the beliefs.

But the real truth is that the majority of these intersubjective ideas don’t exist in reality and are no more true than Santa Claus.

And any argument to their truth is only backed by further shared beliefs in other minds.

So for there to be only truths and lies we would have to either drop the intersubjective entirely and think only in real terms and avoid these abstractions or end up in a dystopian totalitarian global state where different opinions are not tolerated.

Those are extremes to demonstrate the point but at its core the point remains that truth and lies are somewhat (inter) subjective assuming we continue with something like our current system.