Absolute Truth

[SolusLupus]

This is a curiosity to me, and I'm more of curious what the surrounding arguments around the idea of Absolute Truth state. I know that, technically, this might not be "against the mainstream", but I felt this might be best to post it here, since it might be... I'm not sure what's surrounding this issue, hence my question.

I had once been in a philosophical debate with a friend. I was talking about the idea of Absolute Truth - that behind everything, there is truth. For instance: I have a table. This table is made of wood. These are facts. It is currently in my living room. Fact.

People can debate about this table across the world. Even though they can't see it, it's still there. Even if 6 billion people don't see it, it still exists. Even if 6 billion people don't acknowledge its existance, it still exists. Nothing changes this fact.

Thus, I was basically explaining that in my view, no matter all the beliefs, the conjecture, and the ideas, the truth is always somewhere in there. And it's not what we make of it, but how we perceive it.

Yet, this idea seemed to emit some resistance from my friend. I couldn't tell why. He can be VERY vague when he disagrees with something, and rarely goes into detail why.

So this is my question - why would anyone contest the idea of Absolute Truth? WHen I say it, am I unknowingly spouting off a different philosophical standpoint? Am I just confused as to the "true meaning" of it? Or what?

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance.

[tbm]

Greetings.

You say your table is made of wood and that is the truth.

Where is your evidence? I cannot prove your truth either way; I cannot test your truth either way. I am taking you at your word. You say that it is wood. Are you a carpenter? A trained forester?

There are so many ways a truth can be questioned. Testing (proving?) a truth is another matter.

Personally I believe you. I have a "table" made of "wood". But you will have to take my word for it.

And that's the truth.

(Anybody remember Lily Tomlin's characer "Edith Ann"?)

tbm

[Gillianren]

(Anybody remember Lily Tomlin's characer "Edith Ann"?)

Yes. She's why that's not my name. (I'm legally Edith. My younger sister's middle name is Ann. Mom likes the name Ann, but--wisely, to me--chose not to saddle me with both names.)

And again, no, we cannot agree that the sun will rise at a certain point. We can agree that the sun will appear to rise at a certain point.

[Frog march]

why don't you take a picture of this "table" and post it on this thread, that should clear things up.

[Frog march]

seriously though, you could also ask the question, if you play a game of chess and keep a record of all the moves made and then halfway through the game destroy the record(piece of paper) then arn't those moves still the moves that got the chess pieces to where they are? Surely nothing can alter those facts.

[Bathcat]

I think the absoluteness (absolutivity?) of truth depends on how fine-grained it is.

You have a table made of wood.

Good, we can agree that that is the truth.

You have a table made of 5X10^10 molecules.

Well, I think we could eventually, after laborious investigation, agree that this is true.

You have a table in which the position of Electron Number 7 around Molecule Number 5,1295,998 is precisely equidistant between the nucleii of the third and fourth carbon atoms.

No, we cannot even in principle agree that this is the absolute truth.

----

We can agree that the Sun will rise at 8:59:33 tomorrow, given a particular city, skyline, and date.

We can agree that the Sun will rise at 8:59:33 on the same date a few years hence.

But we cannot agree that it will rise at an exact time 100,000,000 years in the future because the motions of the solar system are chaotic beyond analysis over very long time periods.

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So: absolute truth depends on being somewhat coarse-grained: on averaging out quantum indeterminacy, and on summing over the effects of chaos in certain systems.

----

What about maths? What about logic? Is it an absolute truth that 2 + 3 = 5? Why? We might speculate that it's a result of the conservation laws, but why should they be Truth?

I dunno.

[nokton]

Hi Lonewulf, hope your day good for you.
Understand your path wulf, but dwell awhile on concepts.
We all have a different level of understanding of the world
around us, that level is determined by knowledge and experience.
The 'big picture' is determined by ones experience of life and knowledge.
Quantum theory dictates we can be in two places at the same time.
Your table is there for you, in your time. In someone elses, is not.
Hope you understand,
Nokton

[tbm]

"We can agree that the Sun will rise at 8:59:33 tomorrow, given a particular city, skyline, and date."

You and I may agree, but Nancy Lieder would have a problem with that.........


tbm

[Disinfo Agent]

Suggested reading: The problem of induction (Hume's analysis), The problem of induction (Karl Popper).

[Frog march]

there is alway the possibility that we are all in some kind of matrix and then you could say "there is no table". You can't discount this possibility.

[NanC]

Thus, I was basically explaining that in my view, no matter all the beliefs, the conjecture, and the ideas, the truth is always somewhere in there. And it's not what we make of it, but how we perceive it.

I don't understand the part "how we perceive it". Our perception of the truth should also have no effect on it. Whether we perceive it or not or if we perceive it incorrectly the truth doesnt change. Was this misspoken?

[SolusLupus]

No no no, you all got it all wrong! (I think)

Okay, first of all: the truth is STILL IN THERE, and if we cannot claim to know the answer, that doesn't effect the basic truth. The trick is knowing the truth - and it seems to me we're far off from KNOWING every truth, with every expert.

Also, as for how we perceive it, I didn't mean to imply that it affected the truth. The only thing is, our perception of the truth might be different than what that truth is. One can see Lightning and describe the true reason for lightning. Back a few thousand years ago, we'd give a divine reason for it. Well, from the looks of it, that wouldn't be the Truth - just our perception of it. Thus, the perception is wrong, but the truth is not. Still, my point is this:

Hidden under all these blankets of misinterpretations and misperceptions, the truth still lies within. This is common sense - the truth never changes, it isn't altered. Even if something is changed (for instance: My table blows up at 11:00 AM Tuesday...), it doesn't matter for the truth (...my table still had existed at 10:00 AM Tuesday)

The thing is, I'm not claiming that anyone KNOWS the "Absolute Truth". I'm just claiming that it's THERE, that it exists. Some people seem to disagree with that concept, and I'm curious as to why.

[Disinfo Agent]

That is a sensible, common sense assumption, to use Popper's term, and I don't usually challenge it myself.
Still, can you prove it?...


'If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?'

[SolusLupus]

Yes, it makes a sound. Sound waves are a documented and proven thing - there is no reason to believe that the tree falling did not make a sound wave. As well, there is nothing changing the fact that the tree fell in the first place. Thus, it's only logical that "sound", as we know it, was made - it just didn't vibrate the eardrums of "anybody" (which applies to just humans, or humans and animals, depending on what you mean by "nobody")

[Disinfo Agent]

I do not have an answer, myself. I don't think anyone does.

Yes, it makes a sound. Sound waves are a documented and proven thing - there is no reason to believe that the tree falling did not make a sound wave.

Perhaps, but how can you prove it did, if no one observed the sound wave?

As well, there is nothing changing the fact that the tree fell in the first place. Thus, it's only logical that "sound", as we know it, was made - it just didn't vibrate the eardrums of "anybody" (which applies to just humans, or humans and animals, depending on what you mean by "nobody")

That's logical, but it's not a fact. We assume that the universe is regular, or at least act as though it were regular, but can we be really certain that we live in a logical universe?

[NanC]

I am interested in the answer. I can't imagine a scientific reason someone would doubt that the absolute truth does exist whether we know what it is or not. Is it not the truth behind an event that causes the event to occur? By truth I think you are referring to actual facts, reality, not the opposite of lies or falsehoods. I require to think that because it doesnt make sense in my phrasing otherwise.

Is there actually a scientific argument that a tree would not make sound in the forest if it were not listened to? I have never understood that question at all.

[TheBlackCat]

Although there is certainly absolute truth, there is no reason to assume anything we percieve is the absolute truth. Everything we percieve is filtered by our brains. We never really see anything, our brain takes the photons of light to trigger electrical impulses, these impulses are filtered. Then parts of the brain look for certain patterns in the electrical impulses (impulses corresponding to shape, movement, orientation, color). The actual impulse is broken up into a massive number of individual characteristics of individual parts of the image, and these characteristics are processed by a number of completely different sections of the brain. All these pieces are then re-assembled by your consciousness to form an image. There is no reason to assume such processes are perfect. We know the brain misses certain things, we know the processing isn't perfect. In the end all perception is purely subjective. There is no way to prove, for instance, that the human brain is not wired in such a way that although your table is really made of stone, all the sensory input from the table is altered so people percieve it as being wood. You can't disprove that statement. You can't prove that what you are percieving is really how things are. In fact, you can't even prove you are percieving anything, for all you know you could be dreaming. You can't even prove your own existance, you could be the dream of some other entity.

There is actually a game called "The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening", where your character is trapped in the dream of a sleeping creature. You are real, but all events in the game, the characters you meet, the monsters you fight, everything is simply the dream of this creature. However, you don't know it. You simply pass out when your boat is destroyed in a storm and find yourself on an island. You set about trying to save people on the island from a group of monsters. In reality you are not on the island, but sleeping as you drift on the wreckage of your boat. The monsters are trying to keep the creature asleep to preserve the world they live in. In the end you kill the monsters and wake up the creature, setting you free but killing everyone in the dream (except for one character, who miraculously gets transformed into a seagull if you manage to beat the game without dying).

[SolusLupus]

Interesting concept. But doesn't that mean that the fact that it was a dream mean that it was the Absolute Truth?

[Bathcat]

Lonewulf: "The thing is, I'm not claiming that anyone KNOWS the 'Absolute Truth'. I'm just claiming that it's THERE, that it exists. Some people seem to disagree with that concept, and I'm curious as to why."

What I'm suggesting is that at the quantum level there is no absolute truth. There are only probabilities that something is or is not true.

It's not common sense, but it appears to be true anyway. You cannot, even in theory, assert that an electron is exactly there and also moving exactly that way because the universe does not allow both things to be absolutely true.

It's not that we can't figure out both things about an electron, it is that the universe is consituted in such a way that certain absolute truths are impossible if you look closely enough.

(Incidentally, quantum physics may in theory allow you as a large, non-microscopic human being to be in two places at once, but quantum physics also says that the chance of this actually happening is so incredibly tiny that we would have to wait billions of years before even one large-sized object -- one in the entire universe! -- to shift its position one meter by means of quantum tunneling.)

----

Now, it also depends on what large-scale absolute truths you want to assert. There are testable, objective truths: The Moon exists. And there are subjective truths: Evil exists, beauty exists.

I'd agree with all those statements. But it would be hard to assert that evil exists in an absolute, objective context. It can be defined in a human context, but perhaps not in the context of the Moon.

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So: do you mean, Good Sir, that macroscopic, non-quantum, objective truths exist?

I would say they do, if only conditionally (because they have not been disproved and we cannot imagine that they would be -- realistically, I can't imagine that someone will prove that the Moon does not actually exist.)

This comes close to the definition of scientific evidence and theory, doesn't it?

I think that's no accident. I think science searches for exactly the kinds of absolutes you imagine: it looks for things that are not disproven by the evidence we have, and which all disinterested parties with proper experimental equipment would agree about.

And for things like quantum indeterminacy we look for mathematical laws which explain the form which the stubborn, uncooperative universe seems to take when it does not allow us absolute knowledge.

----

Long reply. I may have been drinking beer, and therefore departing from absolute sober Truth.

[NanC]

It's not common sense, but it appears to be true anyway. You cannot, even in theory, assert that an electron is exactly there and also moving exactly that way because the universe does not allow both things to be absolutely true.

I do know that this is an accepted scientific statement. I cannot even begin to comprehend it despite my best efforts and reading many books. The cat in the box illustrate also utterly escapes me. To say that the cat in the box is both alive and dead and that the act of discovering its state is what makes it one way or the other seems to be the ultimate in obfuscated logic. There is something that simply refuses to let me accept the concept and this may be simply I have not ever had it properly explained to me. I doubt that. But it is possible. Would you like to take a stab at teaching me?

[SolusLupus]

I'm still finding it hard to buy all this Quantum stuff. :/ From my knowledge, the "cat in the box" thing was only meant as a joke (according to a reliable source)

As for subjective truths, they are subjective. However, that's an example of perception. If a man steals something, then it's a fact that he took an object which was considered a theft within the area he was in. It's a fact that he was considered to have committed a crime, according to enstated laws of the area.

However, calling it "evil", "good", or "acceptable", is dependant on perception of that Truth.

[Bathcat]

NanC: The cat in the box illustrate also utterly escapes me. To say that the cat in the box is both alive and dead and that the act of discovering its state is what makes it one way or the other seems to be the ultimate in obfuscated logic.

Sheesh, Shroedinger's cat is, as Lonewulf mentioned, more of a joke than an actual example. A cat cannot be alive/dead, or up/down, or any other quantum superposition of states because a cat is a MACROSCOPIC OBJECT!

Shroedinger surely knew this perfectly well.

The hammer which breaks the vial is non-quantum, and the Geiger counter is a big honking box of seriously non-quantum size.

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If we hit a vial of cyanide with a hammer it will break exactly when we hit it. By contrast, though, the exact time a radioactive atom decays is not caused by anything. A given atom may decay in five minutes, or in five days.

Therefore, until we get a macroscopic event that tells us the atom has decayed we cannot know, even in principle, whether it has busted apart or not.

The detection-event in the Geiger counter is essentially that link between the quantum and the macroscopic.

The only use for the cat is to make some joke, nein?

----

Better perhaps to think about a tunnel diode.

In a precise universe an electron cannot cross a particular insulating barrier. (It could if we cranked up the voltage enough to arc across, but never mind that -- we are speaking of the case in which the barrier is classically too great.)

However, suppose the universe is not precise. Suppose that as an electron comes down a wire to the barrier it is not really at any exact point but rather "smeared out" across a range of points, with a mathematically defined probability of being at any real spot at any given time.

We can imagine a situation where the electron approaches the barrier such that 60% of its position-probability-curve is on one side of the barrier, 30% inside the barrier, and 10% of its position-probability-curve is actually on the FAR SIDE of the barrier!

The skinny tail of its possible positions would be over in a place that it could not ever get to in a classically absolute universe.

We would expect that, if there is not really an absolute position for an electron but only probabilities, that one in ten electrons would magically appear on the far side of the barrier.

And that's what the real universe tells us actually happens.

The electron does not have an absolute position AND an absolute velocity.

The darned universe allows tunnel diodes to work, and it appears they work precisely because at the quantum level absolute truths become impossible. (Truths of certain kinds, anyways. Those we describe as linked by Heisenberg uncertainty.)

----

Really, the English language is not suited to explaining this stuff. Everybody talks the kind of language Newton used to describe an absolute reality. For that matter, all we see with our eyes and handle with our hands appear to be things that obey macroscopic, absolutist-type laws.

We are not evolved to intuitively understand quantum reality.

We just aren't! We are evolved to throw macroscopic, Newtonian rocks at bananas, and catch the macroscopic Newtonian bananas when we knock them out of the tree.

So the general wisdom is, you can't intuitively understand quantum indeterminacy the way you can intuitively understand Euclidean geometry.

If you're looking for that kind of understanding, I don't think you'll easily find it. I certainly have no glimmer of it.

[NanC]

Sheesh, Shroedinger's cat is, as Lonewulf mentioned, more of a joke than an actual example. A cat cannot be alive/dead, or up/down, or any other quantum superposition of states because a cat is a MACROSCOPIC OBJECT!

I apologize for not knowing this was a joke. I have some more problems with understanding things than most people so I try harder so probably I was too busy trying to understand it to realize it was a joke.

However, suppose the universe is not precise. Suppose that as an electron comes down a wire to the barrier it is not really at any exact point but rather "smeared out" across a range of points, with a mathematically defined probability of being at any real spot at any given time.

So the electron does not actually exist in one place but is just a probibility that it could exist there? I really am trying. Does this mean my TV somehow works with only this probability of electrons moving around if you look at it on the quantum level or does this mean it works on actual electrons or are electrons just probabilities?

[Wolverine]

Thread moved into General Science -- while the underlying theme perhaps might be more philosophical, I think it's more at home in this section rather than ATM.

FWIW, long as I'm posting: given the dynamic nature of the universe and what we've observed to date, the concept of an "Absolute Truth" strikes me as being somewhat of a chimera. I'm quite comfortable dealing with variables and unknowns, and accept (somewhat reluctantly) that answers to some fundamental questions concerning the cosmos simply aren't within our grasp during our lifespan.

[ASEI]

The skinny tail of its possible positions would be over in a place that it could not ever get to in a classically absolute universe.

We would expect that, if there is not really an absolute position for an electron but only probabilities, that one in ten electrons would magically appear on the far side of the barrier.

And that's what the real universe tells us actually happens.

Could this possibly still be explained in terms of unknown, but determined properties when we take into account the inexactness of our knowledge of the barrier as well? After all, there may be a small path through the barrier that an electron can make it through? Or not? Is the shape of the electron's probability curve effected by the presence of the barrier in this case?

[Ken G]

In my view, Absolute Truth is a scientific theory, like any other. It happens to be the best of all scientific theories, in that every experiment ever conducted under controlled and repeatable conditions has failed to falsify this theory. It is also very simple (Occam's razor), and extremely useful at organizing facts. Voila, a great scientific theory, and one so basic that even non-scientists have come to rely on it daily. But like any scientific theory, we may one day discover a situation or regime in which this concept breaks down. Relativity and quantum mechanics were both blows to the concept, but neither destroyed it because relativity allows you to transform from one person's reality to another (so the broken concept is in effect glued back together by these known transformations), and quantum mechanics allows the microscopic probabilities to congeal into a macroscopic reality when the system is large enough. Still, it took a few hits there! Who's to say some new experiment won't completely shatter it? That's science. But in the regimes where it has already proven itself to be of value, we should continue to use it. That's about all you can say, within a carefully defined mode of thinking.

[SolusLupus]

FWIW, long as I'm posting: given the dynamic nature of the universe and what we've observed to date, the concept of an "Absolute Truth" strikes me as being somewhat of a chimera. I'm quite comfortable dealing with variables and unknowns, and accept (somewhat reluctantly) that answers to some fundamental questions concerning the cosmos simply aren't within our grasp during our lifespan.

You still don't get it :P

The idea isn't "discovering" Absolute Truth, but the possibility of it existing. Unless you mean "We'll never know if there is Absolute Truth", which I would accept.

In my view, Absolute Truth is a scientific theory, like any other. It happens to be the best of all scientific theories, in that every experiment ever conducted under controlled and repeatable conditions has failed to falsify this theory.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. After all, what if the universe is far more chaotic, but we don't know it? I just think that Absolute Truth has a lot of evidence behind it, however - there's the possibility it doesn't really exist, but it seems to exist for almost all things, except for those tricky quantum-level thingies.

I don't know why my friend disagreed with my idea. I'll have to ask him to define the concept of Absolute Truth first, so I can see what he thinks he's disagreeing with. Thanks, all.

BTW: Sorry for posting up at ATM. I wasn't sure where it would fall, really.

[Nereid]

We will all, I'm sure, agree that quantum theory is the most successful of all theories of physics, so far (let me know if you'd like a looooong list of reasons why).

It's also not terribly controversial that things are really, really weird in the quantum world - crunch the math and you get exquisitely accurate descriptions/predictions of what you can observe.

Now what does it all mean? This Wiki page may be a good place to start - interpretations of quantum mechanics.

And it didn't get much out of the realm of 'deep thinking' until the experimental tests of Bell theorem became so strict - you certainly have to 'give up' something in our 'absolute' world - is it (part of) logic? (part of) realism? or perhaps the most creative of scifi writers just haven't had sufficient creative imaginations??

[Bathcat]

ASEI: "Could this [electron tunneling] possibly still be explained in terms of unknown, but determined properties when we take into account the inexactness of our knowledge of the barrier as well?"

Last I read there was a very slim chance that some version of the "hidden variables" theory might be possible. Most easy versions of the "unknown, but determined" properties being responsible for quantum indeterminacy have been ruled out by experiments and mathematical analysis.

I don't really understand the debate, all I can do on that is parrot what I've read. Google on "Bell's Inequality" and "Quantum Theory Hidden Variables" -- there are technical papers online as well as non-technical discussions.

NanC: "So the electron does not actually exist in one place but is just a probibility that it could exist there? ... Does this mean my TV somehow works with only this probability of electrons moving around if you look at it on the quantum level or does this mean it works on actual electrons or are electrons just probabilities?"

(Dont' apologize about the Shroedinger's cat thing, a lot of people take it very seriously indeed. I just can't believe Shroedinger would, or did! My opinion.)

But yeah -- inside the picture tube of your TV the electrons flying from the gun toward the screen have no absolutely defined momentum and position. They are "smeared out."

BUT -- (the cool part) -- when they hit a phospor dot on the back of the glass screen, suddenly they have caused a macroscopic event that reveals exactly where they are! They have a position, and it is well-defined!

Information on their movement, though, is gone. We can know their position OR their momentum, but not both.

Back to your TV: Quantum theory is by and large a theory of probabilities and averages. As you know, if you roll a pair of dice only 10 times it's not hard to get some pretty odd streaks of numbers. But if you roll them 100,000,000 times you will almost certainly come up with a very close approximation of the mathematical probabilities for each number combination.

The electrons in your TV "roll the quantum dice" so many times (because there are so many electrons) that the overhwelming odds are that the TV will behave exactly as the sum of average electron behavior says it will.

----

I once read that undergraduates are sometimes asked to calculate the odds that the Moon will quantum-tunnel to a new position in the sky. After all, an electron can do it, why not the Moon?

It turns out that for an object the size of the Moon to "roll the quantum dice" and come up with a "lucky streak" that would quantum-tunnel it a foot in any direction would, on average, take thousands of times the present lifespan of the Universe.

As the author whose name I can't recall said, the point of the exercise is to bring home to the student that quantum tunneling of macroscopic things is, practically speaking, impossible.

The Moon and your TV obey Newton's and Faraday's laws not because every single electron in them obeys classical physics, but because on average they do. And the probability is overwhelming that this huge number of particles will behave exactly as the probabilities say they will.

And the probabilities end up being identical to classical physics in nearly all large-scale cases like televisions and moons.

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At least that's my layman's understanding of the situation. Perhaps someone else can put it more clearly.

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Addition, a minute later: I keep writing things like "nearly all large-scale cases" because there are odd exceptions. A lump of macroscopic Bose-Einstein condensate behaves in some ways as a quantum object, for instance.

[Grey]

Last I read there was a very slim chance that some version of the "hidden variables" theory might be possible. Most easy versions of the "unknown, but determined" properties being responsible for quantum indeterminacy have been ruled out by experiments and mathematical analysis.

A hidden variables model could underlie quantum mechanics as long as you're willing to throw out locality (locality says that information has to be physically transmitted by something to get from one place to another, which limits the speed of information to the speed of light, since that's as fast as anything can go; Einstein referred disparagingly to hypothetical nonlocal interactions as "spooky action at a distance"). For a while, physicists dismissed the possibility of hidden variables because they were convinced that locality held. However, Bell's Theorem shows that quantum mechanics isn't consistent with locality no matter what, and there are even experimental results that support this, so any replacement theory for quantum mechanics would also have to allow nonlocal interactions to be consistent with observation. So it turns out that particles definitely can pass information to each other faster than light, though it also appears that they do so in a manner which doesn't ever allow us to use this to communicate faster than light. A grand joke the universe has played on us, perhaps. So, as long as you have to throw out locality anyway, the idea of hidden variables underlying quantum mechanics isn't out of the question, though this isn't the most popular view.

(Dont' apologize about the Shroedinger's cat thing, a lot of people take it very seriously indeed. I just can't believe Shroedinger would, or did! My opinion.)

Not quite a joke. More an attempt to show that there must be some deeper description of reality than quantum mechanics, to describe how things went from a mixture of states at the quantum level to one or the other at the macroscopic level. Many of the brilliant physicists who developed quantum mechanics nevertheless felt that there would be some more complete theory that would avoid all the weirdness of quantum theory and the strange probabilistic nature of reality that it seemed to imply. Of course, decades of research since then has led us to believe that, if anything, the universe is even weirder than they supposed.