mean*

Truth is not false. It is subjective.

"Truth is not false"

that is definitely an objective truth, man.

And saying truth is false in also self-contradictory, because the statement "truth is false" is supposed to be taken as a truth I guess, but it gets into the paradox of the man who says "I can only tell lies."

Everyone believes something to be true. Therefore it is subjective.

Is it also subjective that everyone believes something to be true? Or is that not also an absolute truth.

Take your pick. ; ) Does it have to be one or the other? Why does something have to be true OR false? Maybe it's both. Or neither? Haha.

It's a paradox that opens a whole new world... The mind. Without us holding truths or falses thinking is not possible and nothing is really let that sink in. Think of something you hold true...
The apple is red
the blueberry is not
this paradox opens up a whole new world.

If everyone agrees that there is no greatest prime number, that's subjective because people believe it...rather than what

what would make it objective

if an object believed it

:/ logic for dummies woo~

To believe "Truth is false" you have to be a master of doublethink.

to expand on my op.

Truth, with a capital T, as a concept, something which it is not neccesary for us to understand - that there is some ultimate Truth to be known, (even if humans can't understand it) is false.

Or perhaps i can be clearer, all truths which we hold are merely subjective opinion. Their truth value remains free to the will of the observer... hmm...

To believe "all truths which we hold are merely subjective opinion" you have to be a master of doublethink.

yeah, you must believe that the idea that 'all truths ... are merely subjective opinion' is merely a subjective one.

I do not subscribe to this view, i'm just looking for someone who does.

What I know is true could be false with new information.
What you know is true might be different than what I know as true yet one of us has to be wrong.
An apple is red and a blueberry is blue but how do you know that my blue doesn't look like your red? They're just words. How do you know your eyes see the same shade of blue that my eyes do?

when i say blue, i can mean 484 nm light, it can measure that with a diffraction grating spectrometer, it will come out near the 484 nm line.

A meter is defined by the distance light travels in a vacume in some fraction of a second - the second is defined based on the oscillation .

You can repeat these measurements, and we can agree on which words to use for a given colour. I will be using blue for around 484 nm.

Well, the average human can see a certain maximum and minimum wavelength, unless. Blue has a wavelength range. You can compare the limits of what wavelengths you call blue with the limits of your neighbors' 'blue' and can compare the results.

Or you can do what orathaic said.

yeah, it's some range somewhere around 484 nm, it depends on the source, you can split up white light into it's constiuent colours - like a rainbow splits up sunlight - you can choose to agree on which bit of the rainbow you call blue, and where purple and green start (or you might also like to define cyan between green and blue, i'm looking at a picture of a rainbow right now and it's rather difficult to tell quite whee blue ends... but i think there is cyan)

yeah but you can't measure light wavelength/frequencies to arbitrary precision. There will always be an uncertainty what the "real" wavelength was. And that raises the question if there even is such a thing as the "real" wavelength.

How do you know that 484 nm looks the same to you than it does to me? You can say that 484 nm of light looks like 484 nm of light, but perhaps 484 nm of light looks red to me.

I think you are picking the wrong example.

I don't care what it looks like to you, it's only important that we agree that it's called blue, and it measure 484 nm. Perhaps your brain is configured differently so blue evokes a different emotion, but that is an entirely subjective responce. The cones in your eye happen to react to a specific range of wavelenghts of blue light.

The molecule which triggers an electric signal to your brain is the same as the one in my eye. So only light of the same wavelenght will trigger this (same energy which is being absorbed by that molecule, you've got at least two other receptors in the eye for other wavelenght, unless you're colour blind, in which case you may be missing one)

@Evil grass, i'm not trying to measure to arbitrary precision, i'm defining blue to be around 484 nm. i'll give it +/- 100 nm. The uncertainty principle is cool, but not really relevant to this conversation.

oh, and so long as we agree our definitions of blue, then we really mean the same thing.

@ orathaic: Oh but it is very relevant! The question of the OP is: is there Truth? And my answer is, yes, but only up to a certain precision. The uncertainty principle tells us that that is an inherent property of nature. This means that there is no absolute Truth on the very small scale, and that of course then automatically applies to the larger scales as well.

Everybody's talkin' 'bout the new sound
Funny, but it's still rock and roll to me

touché.

however i think, (if you believe what quantum mechanics is saying), that you are saying a specific mathematical construction truely describes the position/velocity of a particle as a probability distribution. Then yes the nature of truth is based on probabilities.

(though i still claim it's not relevant, as i think it's a different conversation)

That the true energy of a system can be characterised limited by the amount of time that you observe it. (right?) or that the position of a particle can only be characterised to an accuracy limited by you knowledge of the velocity, does not mean you can't know perfect 'true' information about the probability distribution which describes a given particle. (what the Truth is, being a different conversation, is still really cool to understand - and i don't only to some limited version of quantum mechanics which doesn't include special rel.)

Also you imply that no Truth on one scale means no Truth on another, however you fail to ocnvey the interesting thing. How Truth seems to work on the very small scale is qualitatively different from how it appears on the larger scale, thus how important it is. So i will accept the waht we think of as 'true' on a normal scale human expierence is infact an approximation.

The reason for this is if you scale up the position-velocity relationship to the scale we expierence in daily life it become proporitonally smaller. (so the uncertainty in the position of a road outside your house is very small compared to the distance to the road, can you give me an estimate of the uncertainty?) Similarily when you look at a phenomenon like quantum tunneling you can tell that it is possible for two solid objects to pass through each other, however given that the probability of this happening means that to observe it you'd have to watch for longer than the current age of the universe (on average) this is not part of our usual understanding or how things work, but it is True (True, but not useful... except when you use quantum tunneling for something useful of course.)

that was, of course, directed at Evil grass.

Yes you're right that the probability distribution is a truth in itself of course. This is only slightly comforting, but at least it's something...

And yes, the uncertainties get relatively smaller on bigger scale but I was talking about the principle. Take for example the measurement of light wavelength. Let's say you put a "border" for colors at 400.0 nm. So everything below that is purple, and above (or equal), it's blue. Now let's say you have a light source and the first time you measure the wavelength, you get 400.1 nm, and the second time you get 399.9. This poses the problem as to what name you will give the color. You can obviously measure it a hundred times and then take the mean. So you can define: "if from a hundred consecutive measurements, the mean is higher than (or equal to) 400 nm, it's blue, otherwise it's purple." But is that really a good definition? Because if someone else measures it (or you repeat the experiment), he can just get "unlucky" and get a "wrong" mean after a hundred measurements.

So there is actually no way you can with certainty say: this is blue and that is purple. Because maybe your measurements up till now were just coincidences and the "actual" mean is somewhere else. I deliberately put quotations around "actual" because all this of course raises the question: is there really such a thing as the "actual mean" / "the actual wavelength"?

and yes, the end of that post slightly contradicts the beginning... excuse me for that, my train of thought progresses as I type.

i'm happy to allow for values within a certain range to be defined as blue and purple, or better Bluey-Purpley.

There should be a value which is precisely on the border between blue and purple (on average) and it is useful to have a word to describe a thing which is is range of this wavelenght. I mean, it is useful if we want to keep our usual definition of blue and purple and avoid the difficulties which you raise.

In many things humans group/categorise to simplify and these categories of black and white usually fail to describe the greys very well - so i imagine it is more generally useful to have a vocabulary to desrcibe this middle ground, especially when you can't do a precise average as you do in this wavelenght measurement. (which should be, say 399.9 +/- 0.2 nm, as a real measurement will always have some error due to either instrumental or systematic limits, perhaps the error will be the full width at half maximum (FWHM) - this being useful for most readings which are normalised, as the example of the wavelenght you gave would be.

The only truth is that nothing is true. All is relative.

Otto: please expand.

:( otto went away...

ottovanbis: All facts are definite. Only perceptions of facts can be relative. (Unless, that is, you are Einstein) On the other hand, all opinions are relative.

@ottovanbis

Than the truth that all is relative is also relative, which means some things are not relative - but instead are in fact true or false. Then the question becomes: is the truth that all is relative one of the relative truths or one of the things that is in fact true or false?

If "all is relative" is relative, then it's essentially meaningless.

If "all is relative" is true, then it's contradicting itself and creating a paradox.

If "all is relative" is false, then it's at best contradicting itself - though more likely (and worse yet) complete jibberish of a sort that creates more philosophical problems than the preceding alternative.

"all is relative" is false --> Not everything is relative
That's not gibberish.