Hello truth seekers,
First, in the FREE WILL thread JOHN PRIOR says:
> Jonathon,
> When you say,
> >Descartes might equally have said "I have free will, therefore I am"
>
> You sound in agreement with my postings equating free will and
> mind/consciousness. ...
Absolutely. Thought without free-will/choice between alternatives is an
oxymoron.
JOHN P.
> If free will exists, then one can choose to NOT be free. Thus one who
> argues that everything he does is mechanistically determined and
> consistently acts and thinks according to this dictum, has freely
chosen
> (albeit unconsciously) to be "determined". And thus cannot percieve
free
> will and denies its very existence.
>
> Interesting. Free will is a choice.
>
Surely every belief is a choice. As a believer in free will, I think
your paradox illustrates nicely why denying free will leads to
absurdity. I'd like to see a counter argument from a free-will denier.
As for the TRUTH/Many Truths thread:
The point of ZAMM was to present Quality before Truth in our map of
reality. One interpretation of SOM is the portrayal of Truth as the
basis or reality. It is fairly easy to show why such a metaphysic fails.
I know lots of things that are NOT true, but nevertheless exist.
Phlogiston theory definitely exists and so does the story of "Little Red
Riding Hood" though neither of them are "true"; thus truth cannot be
used as the yardstick for reality.
Several people have given definitions of truth, mostly based on
consistency - I go along with this.
The "many truths" idea is that there are often many (true) statements
that can be made that are consistent with experience, though these
alternative statements may be mutually contradictory.
Any one of them may be true, but they can't ALL be true at the same
time. The difficulty is in selecting the BEST truth. Actually, when we
look deeper, we may find that few truths are perfect - we may have to
fudge things e.g. claim that the data contains errors! The validity of
the truth then becomes not an issue of black vs. white, but of shades of
grey.
Putting Quality first makes it clear that selecting the truth is a
Quality choice for the best explanation.
It also means that by selecting the best, we must reject the bad. This
is why the "anything goes" version of truth is unacceptable - it simply
results in low-quality truth.
Jonathan
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