`` As if - the explanation of Emergence

Under Construction


The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth


When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth - Arthur Conan Doyle - The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes


Truth alone will endure; all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time - Mohandas Gandhi


Index


  1. Defining Truth

  2. Personal Truth

  3. Beyond True and False

  4. My Truth

Defining Truth


Truth is one of the most important philosophical concepts, because not only is it vital for knowing anything, but it is also closely tied to the fundamentals of being, and so plays an essential role in Existence. There is also one great big fly in the ointment of truth, and that is Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem - however, as I [somewhat ironically] deny the truth of that theorem, I think we can park the issue for now.


Verity, meaning truth, is where we get 'very', meaning something like 'completely, or almost so', and there is the first clue as to what is meant by our everyday usage of the word true - to be true is to be totally something; to be unadulterated by not being partially something else. But what 'something'? The answer being whatever any given thing is being true to. That is; A is true to B whenever A = B. We could even say whenever A ≡ B, meaning A is identical to B, they are one and the same - which is tantamount to A being true to itself. However, there are subtle differences between each of these statements, so not only do we have to be careful about what we mean by 'truth', but we need a good technical understanding of why truth is what it is.


Truth can be defined as coincidence, or as coherence, or as convenient pragmatic usefulness [and in many other ways that I personally do not consider very helpful]. Which is the best? It is a particularly tricky question in the Twentyfirst Century, a time that is sometimes described as a post-truth age, beset as it is with a politics, media, and Internet, that are all chock full of falsehood.


The answer is not any single one of these, they all have their place in our experience of truth. But that said, we can define that a truth is a fact. Without this simple, naive, definition we are nowhere, and certainly could not recognise truth in any guise; and although objects can come in many forms, some real, some ideal, and so on, I think we can all agree that facts pertain to objects, which is to say that any fact about an object is, in the manner of the fact, an identity with the object, i.e. in the sense of Leibniz' Law, there exists some indiscernibility between the fact and the object. NB. By object I mean the target of the fact, one node of some relationship.


So, there is no doubt that there are truths of coincidence out there, the kind of truth that is true because of the similarity between two things - when they are the same then they tell on another's truth. But such truths can frequently be hard to perceive. However, it is worth noting that this standard of truth exists, because it is fundamental for knowledge. The truth of correspondence is always a statement about existence, in some manner or another, in the sense that to be true is to exist - in this case we are saying that existence is a true fact rather than a false fact. Also, correspondence truth is fundamental to Leibniz' Law - indiscernibles are true to one another, so much so that they are an identity, i.e. they are one and the same thing in an ontological sense.


The truth of coincidence is somewhat lesser than the truth of complete correspondence. We often hear claims that 'coincidence is not causation', and while that may be correct, it is also correct that whatever our minds consist of, they to some extent coincide with reality, while not being composed of the same material objects, just mental images of those objects, enough to interact with reality. Coincidence should therefore be seen as incomplete correspondence - one where the overall facts are similar, but the detail is perhaps lacking in some respects. This, we shall see, is crucial for explaining consciousness.


The truth of correspondence is the 'gold standard' for truth, and it is only through this that we can fully know anything about anything. For instance, we believe that there is a real world out there, because all the evidence points to that, but we, like Descartes, cannot directly know the fact of that, because we may potentially inhabit a Matrix, rather than a real world.


Coherent stories tell a truth that may apply to the coincident truth, but only because the truth is contained within the coherence of the parts, and it is then considered plausible that such a truth applies to the actual, but occult coincident truth. This kind of coherent truth is the truth of theory, whether philosophical or scientific.


For coherent truth to be of any value it has to be useful in some way, so in general we are happy to take a moderately coherent truth [theory], that is testable and passes some tests, as a useful truth, even though we don't know the whole truth. I would argue that Evolution gave us conscious awareness because the various sensory adaptations we gained told a coherent story that consistently coincided with reality.


Convenient truth is defined as pragmatic by Charles Sanders Peirce; as 'the eventual opinion reached by qualified experts'.


The first truth is too pure to be applicable in much more than pure mathematics, although it is a necessary part of the other kinds of truth.


The last truth is unreliable if we want to extrapolate, and thereby answer difficult questions. It is the truth of Subjectivism and Relativism, and those just can't help us with global questions. It is also one step away from the post-truth chaos that we are living through in modern times, a quarter of the way into the 21st Century. Who, from even just a little while ago, would credit that we would get to a stage where so many have so little regard for the truth.


The middle way, the truth of coherence is the most adaptable, having a foot in both other camps, and a sufficiently wide and coherent theory will span [most of] the gulf between types one and three, and in the process allow reliable extrapolation. That is how we got the Big Bang, and other extrapolatory truths.


My contention is that emergence, following the mechanisms of Virtualism, allows us to bridge the chasm between Science and Rene Descartes, thereby answering all the mysteries of Existence. The claim is 'some emergence is true' can be extrapolated to 'all emergence is true', once we understand the rules of emergence. Then we can be reasonably sure of the coherent truth of the emergence of everything, just as we can be reasonably sure of the truth of science.


The full quote from Sherlock Holmes is as follows:


'That process,' said I, 'starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains however improbable, must be the truth. It may well be that several explanations remain, in which case one tries test after test until one or other of them has a convincing amount of support.'


So even, the great Sherlock Holmes cannot assume to rely on pure coincident truth, rather he too recognises that the coherence of 'a convincing amount of support' is the means by which to arrive at an acceptable level of truth.


Personal Truth from Experience


Personal experience is a great reformer of truth, for the individual. David Hume may have advised disbelief if what we think we experienced stands outside of the norm, but we humans have a great capacity to believe in our own perception of reality, however crazy that may seem to others. It is one thing that the British in particular have been noted for; their eccentrics. It not only adds colour to life, but stems from a national characteristic that is conscious of the fundamental power of that which is true to govern reality. Consciousness is the production of truth, by co-incidence [that is the truth of things being the same, not the other meaning of things happening together by random chance], and so consciousness alters reality, and not just for the eccentrically minded!


Our knowledge of Quantum Mechanics, in the light of Virtualism, shows that reality emerges from truth, and that consciousness forms a significant part of what is true. Consequentially, we should not be surprised that observation is claimed to play a role in collapse of the wave function [one explanation of what happens]. My personal experience has made me conscious of numerous 'eccentric' truths, not least of which is the truth of Ki, and it is partly to explain Ki that I discovered Virtualism, and that explanation is consistent with the notion that one's consciousness is one of the factors that forms a constraint on the response of matter, as well as mind, to the changes that occur in response to the endless chain of changes to the heart of the Universe, as much as to changes to the heart of our own self every time we change our mind.


Beyond True and False


I gather that Fredrich Nietzsche wanted to move beyond true and false, just as he searched 'beyond good and evil', however I am not aware of a satisfactory answer arising from that. I would claim that beyond simple true and false lay four truth values, and that they exactly correspond to the possibilities that can be discovered in the Mandala. Therefore they correspond to the possible relationships that underpin Virtualism. To make it clear:


  1. Objective truth is necessarily true for all comers, so it must in principle be provable, as some sameness that always holds to be the case, even if in practice that proof cannot be made, i.e. it must be the case that there is consistently no contradiction to this kind of truth, and no possible contradiction, even though no witness knows this. For instance, Existence must be true, objectively so, because it is entirely true to itself, and most importantly, has no contrary. I know this flies in the face of Incompleteness, but not so on my terms.

  2. Objective non-truth, falseness, is necessarily not true for all comers, so it must in principle also be provable, even if in practice that cannot be done, i.e. it must be that there is consistently some contradiction to this kind of falseness being truth. That is, there must always be some difference that prevents sameness.

  3. Subjective falseness, i.e. some inconsistent difference, a difference that only pertains for some witnesses, or we might say, for some situations. This kind of non-truth is necessarily unprovable, but may be experimentally found to show that falseness under certain conditions.

  4. Subjective truth, i.e. some inconsistent sameness, a sameness that only pertains for some witnesses, or we might say, for some situations. This kind of truth is necessarily unprovable, but may be experimentally found to show that sameness under certain conditions.

  5. One final case, which happens to be fundamental to Virtualism, is contradiction. It too branches into a variety of flavours, but in essence, contradiction breeds paradox, and paradox causes emergence. Contradiction may be between ironclad, objective truths, in which case some novel reality must emerge, because immiscible truths cannot meet. Within an individual we frequently encounter choices that cannot simply follow a Spock-like logic, because we contain all four truths, leading to irrational decisions that make perfect sense - at the time.

My Truth


If instead of using standard logic and maths, we redefine things such that along with emergent numbers, any collection is true if it is the same as any other set, so identity is truth; then, up to 50% there is a possibility of truth with sameness to some part of the other 50%, i.e. with no overlap occurring. Above 50%, the possibility to check continues if there is some overlap that has sameness, then the parts that do not overlap have to be checked, and the definition of truth ceases to give true if the non-overlaps are non-null.


Under this definition, the entirety of Existence is true, entirely within itself, because the non-overlap is necessarily null. This is really saying, there can be no contradiction to the whole of Existence. That is intuitively also a definition of truth, i.e. a lack of contradiction is as much the marker of truth as is sameness. Under such an explanation, the truth giver is the thing itself, by virtue of Leibniz' Law, any given thing is necessarily indiscernible from itself, and therefore is identical with itself, and may be its own truth.


This means that any sub-collection has to be true to itself, necessarily. That is subjective truth. It may be nonsense, but at least it is one's own nonsense.


From that, it ought to follow that any consistent system should be composed of true subsystems that not only are true individually, but because of consistency, lack of contradiction, must be true for the whole system.



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