Monday, June 2, 2014

What is Truth?

Is truth subjective or objective? I think a useful answer is that it is both.

This is one reason why if you get 12 people to witness something and then you took each of them in a separate room and they each told what they observed each person would say a slightly different thing happened.

So, let's say they all witnessed a car crash. One person might say that the car was this color and it had these kind of wheels (because they liked cars) and the next person might say, "Oh. the driver was a really beautiful blonde and then the people on the side of the road got distracted and walked out in front of another car. And the next person might say, "Oh. Those kids shouldn't have been looking at that blonde lady but watching the street instead for oncoming traffic. And the next person might have said, "Oh. I think those kids were drunk because I smelled alcohol on their breaths and so on and so on.

So, in the end you might get enough information to actually know what might have happened there. But, then you might want to know what the people involved were thinking about and what had already happened to them that day and this is a whole new level of truth. And what if they they didn't tell you the truth or they manipulated the truth because they didn't want to reveal one thing or another to you.

So, as you can see the truth really is hard to get at. And we are here only talking about one event that just happened to have happened in front of several people who became willing witnesses. Imagine other events with only one witness or events with thousands of people witnessing something.

But, even if you witness an event do you still really know the truth about it? Probably not. But, this is the best most people can do.

So, maybe the best any of us can do is to make up our own minds with the information we can gather all the time in our lives. But, that doesn't mean we actually know the truth about anything does it? It just means we are trying to be efficient and respectful while we try to gather enough information that is actually close to being the truth to actually survive one more day of our long lives.

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