pl patterns

Absolute Subjective Truth

When someone I know has a baby…

I say: Congratulations! :-D
I think: I’m sorry… :-/

Yes, I was lying to all of you. The funny thing is that people with kids reading this are probably thinking “I’m sorry…” towards me. After all, they get so much joy and life fulfillment from their kids.

Truth depends on your perspective. Depending on what fundamental beliefs you have, you draw different conclusions from the very same facts. You can literally change what must be true by changing your most-basic beliefs. Like the axioms and inference rules of your life, your most-basic beliefs define the system that you live in.

Truth is also subjective because you can’t even have a perspective without a subject and object, viewer and view. And something, even the truth, can not be known without a knower, so there’s no such thing as truth independent of all perspectives. Quantum mechanics is starting to see this. The computer screen isn’t there (or is in multiple places) until you look at it.

That doesn’t mean that truth is relative, though. There could be an Absolute Truth — knowable only from an Absolute perspective. Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach talks about how the mind is software running on the brain (the mind’s hardware). But a mind could run on different hardware such as ants in an ant colony. Throughout the ages, people have written about cosmic consciousness. My take is that this experience is the mind transcending the brain — jumping off its hardware! — and running on the combined hardware of all humanity.

The Absolute perspective, though, is one in which the viewer and view become one, what people call the experience of no-self. As in Taoism, opposites define each other. It’s so difficult to imagine death because the mind thinks in opposites (or binary). The mind can’t remove one side (itself, the viewer) without removing the other (the world, the view).

As for having kids… in the grand scheme of things, it probably doesn’t matter. But now I’m starting to sound like Dr. Manhattan, so I’ll stop right there.