Absolute truth?

I recently had an argument over the idea of "Absolute Truth". I am a person who believes in the "relativity" of it all. Something is something relative to the time,religious beliefs, culture, etc.

"Absolute truth" is defined as inflexible reality: fixed, invariable, unalterable facts. For example, it is a fixed, invariable, unalterable fact that there are absolutely no square circles and there are absolutely no round squares.

The person argued another example of Mathematics and that it is all absolute truth. 2+2=4. Always. My counter was that "2+2=4" is only one part of math. X+Y=4 has different outcomes for X and Y.

I do believe there are some "truths", 2+2=4 True, But I believe the world itself is relative to each person. The sky is blue, to humans, because we see in 3 different colors to us, the sky is blue. The peacock mantis shrimp can see 12 separate colors, so who is to say they see the sky as blue. (I also know the argument can be made to say "who care's about the Peacock Mantis Shrimp". But the Mantis Shrimp is AWESOME and your views on the matter count for nothing.)

But I am interested to see do the Fakku'ers belief in Absolute Truth, or do you believe in the relativity of everything, or a combination of the two?

Nope, there's no absolute truth. Not in perception and not in religion, philosophy or anywhere else.

Everyone perceives the world slightly differently due to differently trained senses.

There's also no philosophy which is the 'true way'. And don't get me started on religion.

Why bother with the perception of animals, I don't think animals are cracking their heads about humans most of the time. They're busy with animal business. Which is more rational and 'true' than human matters.

All human knowledge is painted by the perceptions of culture, the times, and the senses. In that way, we are all biased, and all truth is subjective. Even our understanding of the laws of the universe is constantly changing. I don't think humans have found any absolute, perfect anything--let alone a truth that is unchanging and without exception.

If I understand correctly you're making the argument that because people perceive things differently there is no absolute truth. Instead this relative truth thing is all that exists.

Now people are free to believe whatever they want to. Everyone has the ability to see things differently but perception is not reality. Just because different entities may perceive green light differently (I'm colorblind) doesn't change the fact that it's light with a wavelength of 500nm. Maybe I can't see certain greens with my eyes but if a non-colorblind person and I measure the wavelength we can both perceive it the same way. You can believe yourself as invincible but that does not make your skin bulletproof. Similarly whatever you witness or believe you are subject to gravity no matter where you go.

I think it's sort of arrogant to say that there isn't an absolute truth simply because we can't agree on it. Who are we to say there isn't an absolute truth to begin with? What if somewhere in this universe there is an oracle-like entity that can determine facts with 100% certainty and back them all up with perfect evidence? We as humans are incapable of achieving this. But that does not invalidate the possibility. In a way I'm saying that to deny the possibility of an absolute truth is sort of arrogant in itself.

I was glad that you put 4th choice in the poll. Does it REALLY matter? Fine, let's say there is an absolute truth in this world. 2+2=4. But, so what? Why does it matter, what is the significance or impact of knowing the truth? It works the other way around too. Let's just pretend that the truth to 2+2 is 2+2=9, and that all mathematic answers that mathematicians thought were true were all wrong. Does it really matter that we were wrong? Do we really need to know the right answers and find out the truth? Is it going to kill us to not know? If you are just curious and wish to gather as much knowledge and truth about the universe, that's great. However, personally I am not a curious person. I don't see why I need to invest my time and energy into something that I have no interest in.

It is kind of worrying that humans in general are not interested in what is actually true or not, because it just shows how humans as a species are willing to do horrible things based on subjective opinions or subjective perceptions. But hey, then again, me saying the things we do are 'horrible' is subjective as well.

In my view there are absolute truths, and a lot of objectivity gears towards absolutism. As far as we know, it is an absolute fact that every living organism will eventually die of natural causes. Reality does not change even though human perception of it changes or differs, and the best (if not only) way to understand reality is to seek out truths and facts. Right now i think every countries justice system is based on the concept of us human beings having free will to choose what we do, even though a lot of neuroscientists are coming to the conclusion that humans do not have free will, that we are the same biological machines same as all the other animals. If in the future we discover that or prove factually that humans do not have free will, well then that would change the perception of human lives and how we behave and why we behave the way we do.

Mathematics, 2+2=4 being absolute is so because the way we have designed the calculation of quantity. If we simply pretended that 2+2=9, that would not change the factual reality of quantity of x object. Instead of me having four apples, there wouldn't magically be nine.

The problem of absolutism is that we simply do not yet know everything, there could potentially be new discoveries that change the entire perception of factual reality. What if heaven and hell are real? What if we live in the matrix? These type of things cannot be proven or disproved, but in my opinion we do have good enough grasp of reality that it is unnecessary to assume these type of things to be real.

The only absolute truth is that we'll never know it.

Have fun with that.

I think absolute truth is a man made thing, and something that just has to be accepted as absolute.
We decide the meaning of the words we use. I can say with absolute certainty , that a tree is a tree , because tree is the word we decided to give it. Now we could have also called it "earthpube" and the fact that it is absolute wouldn´t change.

Now numbers are the same thing. They aren´t vague, as for we decided them to be absolute. There would be no meaning in using numbers in the first place, if they weren´t absolute.
But a lot of words are vague, and based on our perception, like pointed out before.
The words hot and cold for example. Every human percieves it differently, what is warm and comfortable for one ,might be freezing for the other.

But in theory we could easily decide to define it. To just say everything above 25°C is hot and everything below is cold. Now we have an absolute statement. We didn´t change anything about the world or our perception of it. All we did ,is change the meaning of a word.Some words are vague or ambiguous, and some are clearly defined. And if they are, we have to view them as absolute. If we would say that 2 can mean both two and five, there would be no point in math ever existing.

To refer to your 2+2 dilemma, it is safe to say that 2+2=4 , because we decided it is that way, we could have decided that 2+2=5 , then that would have been correct, too.
Either of them can be true , just never both.

We are the ones ,that decide what is absolute.

There are some hard facts about the external world (often related to math) but a lot is contingent on culture and dominant belief systems.

Rather than what is true and false though, I think what is more valuable is simply what is expansive, insightful and well thought out versus what is close-minded and such. That way we empower actual thought and dialogue instead of just putting all of our coins on the pursuit of objective facts.

Also, like Hybris said, even said hard facts are actually constructed by largely arbitrary language, making their truthfulness dependant on humanity for their validation as truth.

We know that 2+2=4 because it is a base law or fact. Those never change, but the theory of why and how it affects other theories does.

Along the same lines, science can be said to be the search for an absolute truth. Are we to simply stop doing science because some people decided there can't be an absolute truth? That's ludicrous. Humanity owes countless advancements to the hunt for truth. We wouldn't be here typing on computers or posting on FAKKU! forums if not for these advancements (most of us probably never would have been born if not for medicine).

Truth is subjective, facts are objective.

>blatant sophism

While it's rather easy to argue that if there is an absolute truth we might not be able to find it, claiming there can't be one leads to all sorts of nasty. If truth is subjective and one merely needs to be perceived to be real, logic goes out the window and rhetoric takes over.

Heh, I think we have a word for that. . . . . .

Well there is an absolute truth and that is how the world "ACTUALLY" created and formed. Now we don't know they truth or some don't care to believe in it so it becomes a "to each their own." There are absolute trusts cause 2+2 will always =4 and putting X and Y into changes that equation so to compare the two wouldn't exactly make sense. At the root of most things there is an absolute truth and then we slowly change or add things to it to make it something else.

In the end who really cares whether there is truth or not. We are alive and here and that is truth enough for me.

Well yes, that's to a large degree where most modern views of politicians come from. The Sophists were the original dammed-dirty-politicians. They believed that if you could convince, you were correct, and consequently they taught debate and rhetorical strategies to anyone willing to pay.

All you argue about is semantics, not about absolutism.



Words like hot and cold are subjective, the meaning of absolutism isn't.



Semantics again.



Arguing about the meaning of a numbers is semantics, but the quantity of an x object in the real world doesn't change even if we changed how we define numbers.



No we don't, because for something to be absolute it has to be objectively and unconditionally so.

i belive that you cannot put everything or anything into one law or truth, but i also belive that the one truth there is is taht everything can, should, and will be known, discovred, and done.

the only thing remotely close to absolutely true is that you think you exist. whether that's true or not, we'll never know in absolute terms

How can one prove an absolute truth exist?