I usually don’t comment on old threads, but the “related topics” led me here. It got me thinking about the “why” of why I ask why. Or, put another way, is philosophy just navel-gazing? I hope not. I hope that discussions about who we are and what’s true will lead to a more livable world for people who have not yet been born. Someone did that for me, so that’s my motivation.
An application then of what is beautiful and what is true, for me, is talking with young people. Until the brain gets fully formed, short-term pleasures tend to take up the mind’s capacity. Somewhere, in our twenties, if we have any sense at all, we start to settle on something, something that’s “true” to us. So, here’s the philosophy of that:
First, we can’t know for sure if something is absolutely true. We can posit that if we do something there will be a result. We can measure that and place values on those outcomes. We do this intuitively when we reflect on our past and ask ourselves if we are happy with who we are.
We can see if our idea that we consider true causes harm, either to ourselves or others. If we are going to pursue this true thing, practice it, use it, get better at it, then any harm it might cause should be minimized. Being minimally harmful is a basic value that I won’t go into in this post.
Second, to have your truth be something that has you thrive in the world, and maybe contribute to the world thriving, don’t make it a dogma.
Dogma ends the pursuit of truth and when taken to an extreme leads to harm regardless of how true or good or healthy the ideas are. If any challenge to your truth is only met by resistance and eventually anger, then what are you pursuing, the truth, or the defense of the truth? If your truth is so true that it should be obvious to everyone and it is provable beyond a shadow of a doubt then you have ended all pursuits, all growth, the idea of searching for wisdom is obsolete. That would be great if it was the ultimate truth, but nothing like that exists.
As Einstein explained to Tagore, truth is something that we believe in. It’s a basis for the scientific method; that the laws that we describe and create formulas for are consistent in all places through all time. When they don’t apply we have places that we can’t go, like the “time” before time existed, or the event horizon of a black hole. We can’t prove that our theories are provable.
We can only hope to find our place in the world of competing ideas and a range of values. In a world where harming others is rewarded, I can’t prove that not causing harm is a value you should have. I can combine all the knowledge we have of evolution, climate, neuroscience, everything, and come up with some psychology that is testable and some chemistry to help us feel “right”, but my idea of right should still be questioned by the next generation.
4/11 edit: clean up the “minimally harmful” section.
4/14 edit: add connecting words in 3rd paragraph that were missing
5/7 note: I said consistent laws are a basis of science, but it’s really a conclusion Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them • Richard Carrier Blogs