I don’t think that truth itself is an oversimplification. 2+2=4 | {2, 4} ∈ ℤ remains true regardless of observer or their acknowledgement of that truth. This shows that at least some things are true, and available for knowledge.
However, we humans (plus any other potentially intelligent being) do not have a complete knowledge of truth. It’s impossible. And conflating “what I know from the truth” with the truth itself is what I believe to be the oversimplification. (More specifically, conflating subjective and objective matters.)
I would not call anyone in an anonymous place a valid primary source either. However, that does not mean that all descriptive statements coming from those people (us) are lies; it’s simply that I don’t know if it’s true or false, let alone if the person believes on it (false, but not a lie) or not (a lie).
Regarding science, truth could be seen as a “goal” for science; consensus, collaboration and time as the means to reach that goal. (…or at least that’s what positivists would say, I think. Popper would instead say that the goal is not to reach the truth, but to get rid of false claims. And Feyerabend would probably agree with you and not me.)
The older I get, the more I think that people primarily lie to themselves, and then tell others that “truth” that they have internalized.
Part of this is that people think in a sloppy manner, but if they were to acknowledge that (to themselves) then it would cause emotional distress. So they… don’t. To clarify: I don’t even say that fully as a value judgement so much as an observation of human psychology i.e. an instance of the natural world. And yes I include myself in this as well:-).
This paradox means then that these “truth-tellers” are fully literally incapable of telling you the objective Truth, b/c they do not know it themselves - and even if they are aware that they do not know, that part they will not admit for fear of being perceived as weak. (Edit: obviously there is a spectrum here, and different people operate in different modes at different times, e.g. an actor who knows a lot about conveying emotions with their facial expressions might not know anything about physics and vice versa, but neither of them knowing anything about pediatric care, and so on - so even someone who is capable of telling the truth in their chosen area of expertise might not be capable of doing so outside of that sphere, especially if they drink their own cool-aid and allow themselves to forget where the proper demarcating line is - which seems to me to be roughly 100% of all people who ever lived… though I might not be fully capable of telling the truth there?:-P)
Another part is the lies that get passed back and forth so often that they begin to take on a ring of truthiness - this seems to just be an extension of the above, using an external second party rather than happening solely inside of one brain. (This one I *do* levy a value judgement at: just b/c all your “friends” think that a vaccine does not work, does not outweigh the opinions of actual medical professionals - nor do such people even truly believe in this manner themselves, b/c whenever they get sick do they turn to their “friends” or do they suddenly cry out for help from an actual doctor? this is just hypocrisy plain & simple: “hanging out” and “playing around with”, like a kid in a playground, is not the same thing as “believing” in the adult world, and when shit finally gets real these people suddenly start adulting, so why not do the adulting at all times, especially when e.g. voting on things that affect millions of other humans?)
This second group could tell the objective Truth - b/c they suddenly do it themselves when they have a personal stake in the matter - but for whatever reason they choose not to, I guess for fear of losing friends.
Either way, it seems unreasonable to expect the truth from someone who does not value that concept themselves - either in their own minds or in their discourse with others. The same with compassion, and patience, and every other aspect of life that can variously be either a virtue or a deficit depending on how much someone has or lacks of it.
Lying to oneself / self-lie is such an amusing concept - if lying is defined as “saying something knowingly false”, once you get rid of that piece of knowledge it stops being a lie. As such, self-lie only keeps being a lie if it’s ineffective. It’s a lot like you said later on about lies being passed back and forth being an “extension of the above, using an external second party rather than happening solely inside of one brain.”
This second group could tell the objective Truth - b/c they suddenly do it themselves when they have a personal stake in the matter - but for whatever reason they choose not to, I guess for fear of losing friends.
I wonder if it isn’t because sometimes saying the truth is far, far more complex than saying some simple lie. It’s easy to say this shit like “ivermectin is good against covid!”*, but it’s hard to actually dig into what doctors say, and why they say it, to reach conclusions that agree with them.
And typically there won’t be any benefit for you to tell the truth - in both cases you’ll get people screeching at you (“what do you mean? The water isn’t turning the frogs into gays? You should check yourself, you soy-drinking degenerate! Reeee!” versus “you’re being a fucking stupid muppet”).
To clarify: I don’t even say that fully as a value judgement so much as an observation of human psychology i.e. an instance of the natural world. And yes I include myself in this as well:-).
No worries - I get that you’re being descriptive, not judging.
Either way, it seems unreasonable to expect the truth from someone who does not value that concept themselves - either in their own minds or in their discourse with others.
This makes me wonder if we [people in general] aren’t falling into solipsism. As in: “if truth is unreachable, then what’s true or false doesn’t matter”.
*context: dunno in the rest of the world, but at least here in Brazil ivermectin - a parasite medication - was being touted as fighting against COVID (a virotic disease), because of a muppet of a former president. I’ve had the displeasure to talk with those people, and their reasoning is never something plausible like “it’s a side effect” followed by studies, it’s consistently ignorance on the difference between parasites and virus.
First, a lot of people are indeed falling into solipsism. However, not everyone is, and not everything is “impossible”. It is true that the barriers can sometimes be high, but they are never insurmountable - e.g., how hard would it be for someone to go get a medical degree? Okay, so that one is high, but there are other, much more low-hanging fruit! e.g. if a religious authority figure says that “nobody will die”, and then a couple of months later, half the congregation dies, that does not need a decade’s worth of study to figure out that the person “lied”. Either knowingly or unknowingly.
Which brings me to point 2: if you can say the former phrase about lying unknowingly, then the definition of lying must be a bit broader than what you are using? People can be said to be “living a lie”, as you said b/c they find out later - but perhaps even if they do not? Google’s AI when I type in “lie” says:
used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression
So someone can be lying unknowingly if they pass on a statement that is itself a lie - and depending on the context, the punishment might not even be that much less severe, i.e. whenever the consequences are highly severe. But it varies with the level of “responsibility” aka the expectations set forth. Example: a nurse repeats word-for-word what they are told by a doctor to say - are they lying? Not really, especially if they are clear to attribute what is being done, in terms of merely “relaying” the message. The message itself may be a lie, but the person was clear, so is not a responsible agent for the deception, even if participating in it. But a doctor prescribing ivermectin on the other hand? They should have known better, and thereby for a person in such a position of responsibility to pass on improper information, may still constitute a “lie” in that case, even if an unknowing one - b/c they should have known. And if they did not know, then they should have found out. Others may need DECADES of study to catch up to them, but for a doctor who already knows the foundational framework, it is only a matter of a few hours to read some primary source material to catch up on exactly whether that drug is indicated in that scenario, and like what the side-effects are, etc.
In the above I had to make a major presumption here, in that someone did not pollute the various information streams that doctors have access to. Indeed if that were to happen, then it is possible for even doctors to, while passing on incorrect information, not be “lying” while doing so, in the same manner as a nurse. But I think at least that my former scenario is what happened during the pandemic? Someone started talking about using that horse drug, doing the work of a scientist except skipping the parts about actually doing proper testing, and so essentially doing unauthorized “human trial experiments” on actual, live human test subjects! :-( Perhaps they thought it was for the greater good even, like if people were going to die anyway then at least they could offer some protection? Except that’s not even how that drug works under the most ideal conditions, thus doing so violates the most foundational and sacred oaths of the medical profession: to first do no harm. So then… it’s a lie either way? Whether through nearly criminal ignorance or to fully criminal and unethical behavior. Tbf, not every “doctor” is a good one, BUT, in defense of my position, EVERY doctor (in the USA at least, and I thought in every part of the world?) MUST take the Hippocratic Oath. So it gets REALLY hard to defend such a person then, who either lied while taking it (in that they could not in fact manage to uphold those standards of integrity) or got lazy later on in terms of upholding it.
Which begs the next question: how can someone both “lie” and yet “not know that they are lying” at the same time? Admittedly this one is fairly complex in needing to dig deeper into human psychology. Or, I don’t even think this is unique to humans, though it does seem far more developed in us than in animals. Let us switch scenarios b/c I think I have an easier one here. Let us say that a person has read the Christian Bible, and know for certain what the commandment by Jesus to “love one another” means - it means to be patient, and… you know what, let’s just stop there. So when someone KNOWS that they have been COMMANDED to be patient, and yet they are NOT patient, but they still call themselves a “Christian” - that word means “follower of” btw - how then are they not “lying”? The answer, I believe, is that they are lying to themselves. Specifically, I am referring to cognitive dissonance: b/c our brains are complex enough that we utilize neural pathways that interconnect with one another without necessarily having to uphold one single, consistent Truth, it is fully possible for someone to both “know that they are lying”, but also “not know that they are lying”, at the same time. Such a person is usually LOUD in their condemnation of others who lie, and who e.g. are impatient, and yet they do not choose to see that they themselves are being thus. Hence the lie, b/c this is “knowing / willful misrepresentation of the Truth”, the caveat being that here, only half of the cognitive processes are aware that it is a lie, while the other half act as if it is legit. These people will look you full in your face and claim that they are telling you the Truth. And that is the Truth. But it is also a lie.
2+2=4 | 2, 4} ∈ ℤ is a True statement? But if I say then that 2+2=2 ∈ ℤ is also a True statement, is that a lie? What if I have no idea what those things (“numbers”) mean? That gets back to that “accountability” issue from above - I really should know that, and all the more so if I am the one bringing them up? So acknowledging that and setting it aside, adding statements that are untrue converts a True statement into a False one. “There exists a True statement within this pair of statements” is True, but the overall pack of them is False. Hence, someone suffering from cognitive dissonance is guilty of telling a lie, to themselves. We all do it I am sure, it takes ENORMOUS efforts not to, especially when our culture is… well, as you mentioned, the way that it is. Though as we agreed: it is a descriptive statement to say that if and when that happens, those statements are still “lies”, even if they are only partially known while partially unknown.
And all the more so when someone raises themselves up to become a (co-)leader of a nation - e.g. by voting. In that case, the statement that “they should have known” raises that specter, yet again, of responsibility: if they are going to chart the way forward for the entire nation - i.e. by depriving people of certain rights, like to medical care - then they should have thought deeper about the matter, and the excuse “but I did not know” does not work anymore. The reason it does not work anymore is b/c if you ever cross one of these people, they will cite this exact thing to you: YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. It is the metric by which they judge - so it is not even me judging them, so much as acknowledging that this is the metric by which they judge themselves, and indeed by which we all judge our “leaders”. At which point… they really should have known better, than to believe in a lie so hard that they actually vote on it, and all the more so when they do that in order to overturn the determinations of the people who actually DO know better - e.g. the doctors, who are aware that ivermectin is a horse drug, and if ever to be used in humans is only for extreme cases and for malaria, not covid and especially not as a preventative, and all the more so not as a substitute for a vaccine.
I don’t think that truth itself is an oversimplification. 2+2=4 | {2, 4} ∈ ℤ remains true regardless of observer or their acknowledgement of that truth. This shows that at least some things are true, and available for knowledge.
However, we humans (plus any other potentially intelligent being) do not have a complete knowledge of truth. It’s impossible. And conflating “what I know from the truth” with the truth itself is what I believe to be the oversimplification. (More specifically, conflating subjective and objective matters.)
I would not call anyone in an anonymous place a valid primary source either. However, that does not mean that all descriptive statements coming from those people (us) are lies; it’s simply that I don’t know if it’s true or false, let alone if the person believes on it (false, but not a lie) or not (a lie).
Regarding science, truth could be seen as a “goal” for science; consensus, collaboration and time as the means to reach that goal. (…or at least that’s what positivists would say, I think. Popper would instead say that the goal is not to reach the truth, but to get rid of false claims. And Feyerabend would probably agree with you and not me.)
(also @Crackhappy@lemmy.world)
The older I get, the more I think that people primarily lie to themselves, and then tell others that “truth” that they have internalized.
Part of this is that people think in a sloppy manner, but if they were to acknowledge that (to themselves) then it would cause emotional distress. So they… don’t. To clarify: I don’t even say that fully as a value judgement so much as an observation of human psychology i.e. an instance of the natural world. And yes I include myself in this as well:-).
This paradox means then that these “truth-tellers” are fully literally incapable of telling you the objective Truth, b/c they do not know it themselves - and even if they are aware that they do not know, that part they will not admit for fear of being perceived as weak. (Edit: obviously there is a spectrum here, and different people operate in different modes at different times, e.g. an actor who knows a lot about conveying emotions with their facial expressions might not know anything about physics and vice versa, but neither of them knowing anything about pediatric care, and so on - so even someone who is capable of telling the truth in their chosen area of expertise might not be capable of doing so outside of that sphere, especially if they drink their own cool-aid and allow themselves to forget where the proper demarcating line is - which seems to me to be roughly 100% of all people who ever lived… though I might not be fully capable of telling the truth there?:-P)
Another part is the lies that get passed back and forth so often that they begin to take on a ring of truthiness - this seems to just be an extension of the above, using an external second party rather than happening solely inside of one brain. (This one I *do* levy a value judgement at: just b/c all your “friends” think that a vaccine does not work, does not outweigh the opinions of actual medical professionals - nor do such people even truly believe in this manner themselves, b/c whenever they get sick do they turn to their “friends” or do they suddenly cry out for help from an actual doctor? this is just hypocrisy plain & simple: “hanging out” and “playing around with”, like a kid in a playground, is not the same thing as “believing” in the adult world, and when shit finally gets real these people suddenly start adulting, so why not do the adulting at all times, especially when e.g. voting on things that affect millions of other humans?)
This second group could tell the objective Truth - b/c they suddenly do it themselves when they have a personal stake in the matter - but for whatever reason they choose not to, I guess for fear of losing friends.
Either way, it seems unreasonable to expect the truth from someone who does not value that concept themselves - either in their own minds or in their discourse with others. The same with compassion, and patience, and every other aspect of life that can variously be either a virtue or a deficit depending on how much someone has or lacks of it.
You cannot extract blood from a stone.
Lying to oneself / self-lie is such an amusing concept - if lying is defined as “saying something knowingly false”, once you get rid of that piece of knowledge it stops being a lie. As such, self-lie only keeps being a lie if it’s ineffective. It’s a lot like you said later on about lies being passed back and forth being an “extension of the above, using an external second party rather than happening solely inside of one brain.”
I wonder if it isn’t because sometimes saying the truth is far, far more complex than saying some simple lie. It’s easy to say this shit like “ivermectin is good against covid!”*, but it’s hard to actually dig into what doctors say, and why they say it, to reach conclusions that agree with them.
And typically there won’t be any benefit for you to tell the truth - in both cases you’ll get people screeching at you (“what do you mean? The water isn’t turning the frogs into gays? You should check yourself, you soy-drinking degenerate! Reeee!” versus “you’re being a fucking stupid muppet”).
No worries - I get that you’re being descriptive, not judging.
This makes me wonder if we [people in general] aren’t falling into solipsism. As in: “if truth is unreachable, then what’s true or false doesn’t matter”.
*context: dunno in the rest of the world, but at least here in Brazil ivermectin - a parasite medication - was being touted as fighting against COVID (a virotic disease), because of a muppet of a former president. I’ve had the displeasure to talk with those people, and their reasoning is never something plausible like “it’s a side effect” followed by studies, it’s consistently ignorance on the difference between parasites and virus.
First, a lot of people are indeed falling into solipsism. However, not everyone is, and not everything is “impossible”. It is true that the barriers can sometimes be high, but they are never insurmountable - e.g., how hard would it be for someone to go get a medical degree? Okay, so that one is high, but there are other, much more low-hanging fruit! e.g. if a religious authority figure says that “nobody will die”, and then a couple of months later, half the congregation dies, that does not need a decade’s worth of study to figure out that the person “lied”. Either knowingly or unknowingly.
Which brings me to point 2: if you can say the former phrase about lying unknowingly, then the definition of lying must be a bit broader than what you are using? People can be said to be “living a lie”, as you said b/c they find out later - but perhaps even if they do not? Google’s AI when I type in “lie” says:
So someone can be lying unknowingly if they pass on a statement that is itself a lie - and depending on the context, the punishment might not even be that much less severe, i.e. whenever the consequences are highly severe. But it varies with the level of “responsibility” aka the expectations set forth. Example: a nurse repeats word-for-word what they are told by a doctor to say - are they lying? Not really, especially if they are clear to attribute what is being done, in terms of merely “relaying” the message. The message itself may be a lie, but the person was clear, so is not a responsible agent for the deception, even if participating in it. But a doctor prescribing ivermectin on the other hand? They should have known better, and thereby for a person in such a position of responsibility to pass on improper information, may still constitute a “lie” in that case, even if an unknowing one - b/c they should have known. And if they did not know, then they should have found out. Others may need DECADES of study to catch up to them, but for a doctor who already knows the foundational framework, it is only a matter of a few hours to read some primary source material to catch up on exactly whether that drug is indicated in that scenario, and like what the side-effects are, etc.
In the above I had to make a major presumption here, in that someone did not pollute the various information streams that doctors have access to. Indeed if that were to happen, then it is possible for even doctors to, while passing on incorrect information, not be “lying” while doing so, in the same manner as a nurse. But I think at least that my former scenario is what happened during the pandemic? Someone started talking about using that horse drug, doing the work of a scientist except skipping the parts about actually doing proper testing, and so essentially doing unauthorized “human trial experiments” on actual, live human test subjects! :-( Perhaps they thought it was for the greater good even, like if people were going to die anyway then at least they could offer some protection? Except that’s not even how that drug works under the most ideal conditions, thus doing so violates the most foundational and sacred oaths of the medical profession: to first do no harm. So then… it’s a lie either way? Whether through nearly criminal ignorance or to fully criminal and unethical behavior. Tbf, not every “doctor” is a good one, BUT, in defense of my position, EVERY doctor (in the USA at least, and I thought in every part of the world?) MUST take the Hippocratic Oath. So it gets REALLY hard to defend such a person then, who either lied while taking it (in that they could not in fact manage to uphold those standards of integrity) or got lazy later on in terms of upholding it.
Which begs the next question: how can someone both “lie” and yet “not know that they are lying” at the same time? Admittedly this one is fairly complex in needing to dig deeper into human psychology. Or, I don’t even think this is unique to humans, though it does seem far more developed in us than in animals. Let us switch scenarios b/c I think I have an easier one here. Let us say that a person has read the Christian Bible, and know for certain what the commandment by Jesus to “love one another” means - it means to be patient, and… you know what, let’s just stop there. So when someone KNOWS that they have been COMMANDED to be patient, and yet they are NOT patient, but they still call themselves a “Christian” - that word means “follower of” btw - how then are they not “lying”? The answer, I believe, is that they are lying to themselves. Specifically, I am referring to cognitive dissonance: b/c our brains are complex enough that we utilize neural pathways that interconnect with one another without necessarily having to uphold one single, consistent Truth, it is fully possible for someone to both “know that they are lying”, but also “not know that they are lying”, at the same time. Such a person is usually LOUD in their condemnation of others who lie, and who e.g. are impatient, and yet they do not choose to see that they themselves are being thus. Hence the lie, b/c this is “knowing / willful misrepresentation of the Truth”, the caveat being that here, only half of the cognitive processes are aware that it is a lie, while the other half act as if it is legit. These people will look you full in your face and claim that they are telling you the Truth. And that is the Truth. But it is also a lie.
2+2=4 | 2, 4} ∈ ℤ is a True statement? But if I say then that 2+2=2 ∈ ℤ is also a True statement, is that a lie? What if I have no idea what those things (“numbers”) mean? That gets back to that “accountability” issue from above - I really should know that, and all the more so if I am the one bringing them up? So acknowledging that and setting it aside, adding statements that are untrue converts a True statement into a False one. “There exists a True statement within this pair of statements” is True, but the overall pack of them is False. Hence, someone suffering from cognitive dissonance is guilty of telling a lie, to themselves. We all do it I am sure, it takes ENORMOUS efforts not to, especially when our culture is… well, as you mentioned, the way that it is. Though as we agreed: it is a descriptive statement to say that if and when that happens, those statements are still “lies”, even if they are only partially known while partially unknown.
And all the more so when someone raises themselves up to become a (co-)leader of a nation - e.g. by voting. In that case, the statement that “they should have known” raises that specter, yet again, of responsibility: if they are going to chart the way forward for the entire nation - i.e. by depriving people of certain rights, like to medical care - then they should have thought deeper about the matter, and the excuse “but I did not know” does not work anymore. The reason it does not work anymore is b/c if you ever cross one of these people, they will cite this exact thing to you: YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. It is the metric by which they judge - so it is not even me judging them, so much as acknowledging that this is the metric by which they judge themselves, and indeed by which we all judge our “leaders”. At which point… they really should have known better, than to believe in a lie so hard that they actually vote on it, and all the more so when they do that in order to overturn the determinations of the people who actually DO know better - e.g. the doctors, who are aware that ivermectin is a horse drug, and if ever to be used in humans is only for extreme cases and for malaria, not covid and especially not as a preventative, and all the more so not as a substitute for a vaccine.