I’ve found it best to avoid the word “truth” whenever possible. The concept of “truth” implies an objective reality exists and that you know about it. Since we may be in a simulation, in the imagination of a god, or just hallucinating, we can never really be sure about “truth” and I find it boring to play semantic games in order to better hedge the word.
I find it much better to just focus on predictions and beliefs with explicit levels of confidence.
If you’re talking about whether the sun rises tomorrow, and you say you predict that it will rise with high confidence, and your interlocutor responds, “That’s not my truth,” then you can just ask them to break that down into a prediction. Are they saying the sun won’t rise? If so, okay, you can test that.
If the disagreement is over something that can’t practically be tested, you can still interrogate their concrete predictions and see where they disagree with yours.
Religious people love talking about Truth because it is so confusing. I can’t nail you down and show where you’re wrong if you refuse to be concrete, so if you don’t want to be shown to be wrong, just talk about abstract Truth.
Since we may be in a simulation, in the imagination of a god
Even then, what the simulation is actually simulating or what the god is actually imagining would still be a matter of fact on which people could disagree but at least one of them would be wrong.
That’s true, but I was trying to emphasize the angle that if you are in a universe where the “ground truth” is being hid from you by an adversarial simulator/god, then you very likely won’t ever be able to know the objective truth. And since we can’t ever know 100% that we aren’t in such a situation, it’s pointless to make claims with certitude about the “true” nature of reality. Much better to stick to what we expect to happen in our own domain.
I’ve found it best to avoid the word “truth” whenever possible. The concept of “truth” implies an objective reality exists and that you know about it. Since we may be in a simulation, in the imagination of a god, or just hallucinating, we can never really be sure about “truth” and I find it boring to play semantic games in order to better hedge the word.
I find it much better to just focus on predictions and beliefs with explicit levels of confidence.
If you’re talking about whether the sun rises tomorrow, and you say you predict that it will rise with high confidence, and your interlocutor responds, “That’s not my truth,” then you can just ask them to break that down into a prediction. Are they saying the sun won’t rise? If so, okay, you can test that.
If the disagreement is over something that can’t practically be tested, you can still interrogate their concrete predictions and see where they disagree with yours.
Religious people love talking about Truth because it is so confusing. I can’t nail you down and show where you’re wrong if you refuse to be concrete, so if you don’t want to be shown to be wrong, just talk about abstract Truth.
Even then, what the simulation is actually simulating or what the god is actually imagining would still be a matter of fact on which people could disagree but at least one of them would be wrong.
Not necessarily true.
Why couldn’t god create a reality that is illogical, chaotic, contradictory and random?
That’s true, but I was trying to emphasize the angle that if you are in a universe where the “ground truth” is being hid from you by an adversarial simulator/god, then you very likely won’t ever be able to know the objective truth. And since we can’t ever know 100% that we aren’t in such a situation, it’s pointless to make claims with certitude about the “true” nature of reality. Much better to stick to what we expect to happen in our own domain.