• Replies 6 replies
  • Subscribers 84 subscribers
  • Views 106 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
Related
Hints and tips
  • To quote someone's message, first select/highlight the relevant text, and then use the Quote button that appears
  • To "mention" someone, type @ followed by the start of the forum name, and choose from the list; that person will get a notification of being mentioned

What is truth?

lostmyway

Curt Godel, the famous mathematician, showed that in any sufficiently complex system of mathematics, there are statements that are true in the sense that they work and describe a pattern of nature that is consistent, but that cannot actually be proved mathematically using the internal logic of the axioms involved.

So, my question is, how can we know that mathematics really describes reality and that reality may simply be a construct that human beings invent on order to stay alive? In other words, more or less "subjective" representations of the way evolution has shaped our perceptions?

Parents

  • I don't know the answer, but I have one perspective.

    There are words which I think map to multiple concepts called, and not all of them are necessarily related at a deeper level. These are called "pluralistic".

    As an example, this is a recent pluralistic view of information. I think that "truth" may be a similar. For example:

    • There is an inner/subjective/conscious experience which is always real or true, even if it is an illusion (the illusion is real, just as a dream is). We experience the truth, in some sense.
    • There is also truth which requires a verification method and is inter-subjective, but usually verification does not hold (Popper says this, for example, with the concept of falsifiability). Even science itself evolves, e.g. the mechanistic views or so-called clock-universe isn't our truth anymore. According Kuhn and other philosophers, science evolve through changes in paradigms. (PS: I think Popper did define truth as "Correspondence of a statement with the facts", in this interview, taken from Tarski, at some point.)
    • There is also the truth of a formal system, which you mentioned.
    • There is also truth in the sense that it must be computable.
    • There is also a sense of truth of any system which survives for enough time understands the environment in which it lives, and has then some truth about how the world works. And we also see their limitations. And there may be such limitations for the kinds of truths humans can find. Some truths that may be reachable only by other natural or artificial cognitive systems. This is related to Noam Chomsky and The New Mysterianism, but goes back to a view of the world by Newton and others.
    • There is also, the notion of truth by William James' pragmatism, along the lines of "that which is useful". A similar but somewhat opposing view is encapsulated in "All models are wrong, but some are useful".

    Overall, I get the sense that there are different concepts of truth, all of them meaningful. (But speaking of Truth, I may be wrong.)

  • in reply to emanningis

    Well, I know Roger Penrise thinks there's more to mathematics than computability in the sense that you need consciousness to understand what is going on, rather than a rule-based model that is limited by it's own parameters.In fact, we may need a new physics in order to account for the deeper mysteries of mathematics which incorporates consciousness.

    His contention is that computers, no matter how powerful and fast, still do not understand what they are processing.

Reply
  • in reply to emanningis

    Well, I know Roger Penrise thinks there's more to mathematics than computability in the sense that you need consciousness to understand what is going on, rather than a rule-based model that is limited by it's own parameters.In fact, we may need a new physics in order to account for the deeper mysteries of mathematics which incorporates consciousness.

    His contention is that computers, no matter how powerful and fast, still do not understand what they are processing.

Children
No Data