The Discordian Menace

[Jasper]

with caveats, and "non-lingual" instead of "sub-lingual", and I agree








shit, that may be the spaggiest sentence I've ever typed

We should be so lucky.  

[MMIX]

with caveats, and "non-lingual" instead of "sub-lingual", and I agree








shit, that may be the spaggiest sentence I've ever typed

We should be so lucky.  

and just what was that supposed to mean? /tongueincheek

[Triple Zero]

Anyway, I think people know what I meant.  It's contradictory to say that "there is no such thing as truth" is true.

that may be right, but AleisterGrowley's remark about axioms is correct. afaik.

I pondered about this for a while myself.

Just like you can place questionmarks by the existence of "Real" numbers (hell, even numbers and counting in general though I forgot how that reasoning went), I also came to wonder about our system of formal logic, that indeed starts out by defining TRUE and FALSE as axioms, and a bunch of rules for logical operators as other axioms. From there you can derive the whole of logic.

While you cannot of course say "there is no such thing as truth" is TRUE, you can still (theoretically) reject those axioms, and thereby formal logic. It'd be useful to replace them with something else though.

OTOH, I could be talking out of my ass.

[Doktor Howl]

Okay, I see what you're saying and I think we're on the same page.  But I was serious when I said that you can't truthfully argue against the existence of truth itself.  It's axiomatic. 

(Unless Beast was simply ignoring the rules, which is about as par for Discordian dialogue as The Capitalization Meme.)

I wasn't arguing about truth, (small 't'') per se, just the concept that it can ever be absolute.

It's always absolute.

[Jasper]

I blame the Sya-Dasti or whatever mythos.  Discordians are taught that anything can be true-ish.

[Cramulus]

I absolutely don't believe in absolute truth, but I think we've been over this in 1230597120357 threads already

[Cramulus]

ahhahahah! related----

[The Great Pope of OUTSIDE]

Isn't just saying that nothing can be proven true weak logic in and of itself? It undermines any attempt to actually FIND truth, or even if truth exists.

[Cramulus]

Isn't just saying that nothing can be proven true weak logic in and of itself? It undermines any attempt to actually FIND truth, or even if truth exists.

IMO

it's not like things are absolutely "true" or "false"

things can have degrees of truth

and I do think that truth is relative to the observer

some facts are true to a wide range of observers. But a things "fact-hood" can change over time as the framework which supports the "explanation" changes. Sometimes this can only be seen in scales of time larger than our lifetimes.

this doesn't mean that one should give up the quest for truth - far from it! But it does mean that you have to treat the truths you find with a degree of skepticism. This helps you let go of them when they are eventually overturned.



Tao Te Ching ch5:

Heaven and Earth do not have human sentiments.
Ten-thousand things (everything) have the importance of a straw dog.*

The sages are not sentimental, thus they act toward the hundred families (everyone) as if they are straw dogs.

The space between Heaven and Earth is like the space inside of a flute!
It is hollow, yet does not get exhausted.
The more active it is, the more it produces.

Too many words bring about exhaustion.
It is better to hold your center.



*Straw dog: A sacrificial straw sculpture in the shape of a dog that was carefully maintained until it was used and then it was discarded.




our work the Chao Te Ching puts it thusly in ch15:

The wise spags understand Chaos,
in that it cannot be understood.
Because of that, they must use metaphors,
which are piss-poor ways of communicating.
Surfing the waves of Chaos;
Attempting a jailbreak;
Preparing for aftermath;
Changing their filters;
Making their own luck.

[The Great Pope of OUTSIDE]

Makes sense.

How do we go about defining the degrees of fact-hood of a thing though? Or is this impossible for the English language?

[LMNO]

Start here.

[Rev. Dr. Narot]

I've always been a terrible liar. Partly because when I was a kid I fucked up and believed it when I was told lying is bad and people shouldn't do it. I say I fucked up because, apparently, people THRIVE on bullshit and lies. It seems everyone is always plotting about what to say to somebody, which is either a lie, or includes an intentional omission of relevant truth. Everyone is in the business of making themselves look good all the time at any expense, and the only account anybody really has to withdraw from here is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - that is, banking on the fact that it will be impossible or too much hassle for other people to figure out they're being lied to, especially when all those people have their own webs of lies to maintain.

This kind of behavior, although I've tried (and failed) to engage in it myself, really really annoys my pants off. Honesty isn't just some high-minded morality thing, it's way the fuck simpler than making up lies all the time to make yourself look good. This, however, is lost on most people. They just don't understand that it's easier to be in control of a situation when you're not tied down by all the lines of bullshit you've tossed out there. And I've found that in everyday life, some of the most hilarious events is when somebody reaches the end of that line and their entire web of bullshit falls apart and everybody ends up hating them.

I'm right with you there. Blame it on youthful innocence, stupidity, whatever, I always in life found telling the truth to be more convenient, and felt like shit when I wasn't. IMO there's no real smile at the end of that rope though. It makes it moderately more difficult to play the social game, participate as "normal" folk do, and for me, drives me fucking nuts when I notice others around me engaging in this tomfoolery. On the positive side, at least the energy saved can be used for more "healthy" activities. "When ya always tell the truth, you never have to lie"

[tyrannosaurus vex]

For the record, I didn't mean the masks people wear in different situations or the selves we project that depend on the situation or the people we're around. I was only referring to the little "white lies" people are always telling each other, "I was doing X" when they were really doing Y, for whatever reason, or "I think you're super!" when they're really talking shit about you to everybody else (people who do this tend to do it to everybody though). The whole clusterfuck you create when you have to lie more to maintain the false realities you've invented with lies, and the precarious place you put yourself in when the slightest slip of the tongue could collapse your little house of lies.

It isn't a moral judgement I'm making here, it's just that it seems to me that it's such a waste of energy and time. I see a lot of people worrying about what might happen if somebody finds out they're lying, or what to say to cover something up, even when they're covering up innocuous things because telling the truth in one area might lead to the truth being discovered in another area. People get trapped and lost inside their worlds, keeping track of so much meaningless information that they have no ability to think about anything important.

And to address the "absolute truth" bit, some things are absolutely true - events, actions, actual things that happened. These are indisputable, even if we don't know anymore how or why they happened, it doesn't have an effect on whether they actually did or did not happen. The Holocaust, for example, was a literal event that absolutely happened, for sure, 100%, no matter how future generations might interpret or dismiss it. Ideas aren't 100% true, because they are only approximate representations of reality. Reality itself is true regardless of how flawed or misinformed or ignorant our approximations of it might be.

[Telarus]

Makes sense.

How do we go about defining the degrees of fact-hood of a thing though? Or is this impossible for the English language?

Building on LMNO's referece to Multi-Valued Logic, and if you really want to get into the meaning behind the Chant of Sri Syadasti, read my thread here (bumped for ease of reference).

[LMNO]

He won't. 

Research is hard. [pout]