Hello again. What is the truth? How do you know that something is true? Is it because somebody (Parents/friends) had told you that? If it is so, how can you believe them? Maybe, (only maybe) they have told you all the wrong things!
All these statements lead to a very fundamental question: What IS truth? I believe that truth is something that everyone knows is correct; or something that can be proved so that everyone will know it is correct. Everyone knew the truth that earth was flat. Someone (Magellan?) proved that the earth was in-fact a sphere and everybody believed the 'new' truth. This means that truth is something that is not absolute in sense; it can be changeable. So, coming to another question: Are all truths based on previous truths? Yes? If so, then nothing new (different from previous truths) can be ever discovered. No? Then it is re-inventing the wheel (as the expression goes) all the time.
I believe that the answer to this is: Mostly, Yes. When you want to tell people something new (a new truth), you need to tell it in terms of what they already know. (If Magellan proved earth was round, he must have done it on previous truths (1. Ships travel on water; 2. When you reach a point from the same point and travelled a lot, you moved around a sphere and so on). Only if I tell you something in a language or sense you can understand, you can come to a point where you can accept my views. I say the answer is 'mostly', yes because of some exceptions; if Einstein wanted to prove that that length, mass and time were relative, he only could prove it by contradicting the 'then' truth that l, m and t were absolute. Even then, he needed most other 'then' truths to prove his theory (like 2 X 2 = 4, d/dt(m.a) = m.da/dt + a.dm/dt and so on).
Why am I telling you all this? The primary reason is, as put by Isaac Newton (recently, a book was published with this as a title by Stephen Hawking), we are all "On the shoulders of a giant"; the giant being all the previous inventors and discoverers. The view that we are getting is because we are so highly situated on such a giant. When we see something new, we see it by sitting on the giant. So our entire ideas are, can I say, corrupted by the possible mistakes the giant might have committed. As previously said, we (new-truth tellers) may not agree with the giant totally; but mostly, we believe what he has told us.
This sparks a great amount of 'What if?' questions: What if the first person who built the giant was wrong? Then all of us might be exactly in the wrong path. What if someone hadn't invented something? By inventing something like fire (is fire an invention or a discovery?) he had prejudiced the minds of his successors in favour of it. If he hadn't done it, we might have invented something better than it!
As a concluding remark, I would like to ask this question (is a question, a remark?): "Can we believe the 'now'-truths?; Do we have a choice?" After all, we are all on a giant; truth or lie, are we better than being on a giant than by being on the ground? The answer is very subjective; it tells you whether you want to believe something or not.
Cheers,
Ravi Teja R.
All these statements lead to a very fundamental question: What IS truth? I believe that truth is something that everyone knows is correct; or something that can be proved so that everyone will know it is correct. Everyone knew the truth that earth was flat. Someone (Magellan?) proved that the earth was in-fact a sphere and everybody believed the 'new' truth. This means that truth is something that is not absolute in sense; it can be changeable. So, coming to another question: Are all truths based on previous truths? Yes? If so, then nothing new (different from previous truths) can be ever discovered. No? Then it is re-inventing the wheel (as the expression goes) all the time.
I believe that the answer to this is: Mostly, Yes. When you want to tell people something new (a new truth), you need to tell it in terms of what they already know. (If Magellan proved earth was round, he must have done it on previous truths (1. Ships travel on water; 2. When you reach a point from the same point and travelled a lot, you moved around a sphere and so on). Only if I tell you something in a language or sense you can understand, you can come to a point where you can accept my views. I say the answer is 'mostly', yes because of some exceptions; if Einstein wanted to prove that that length, mass and time were relative, he only could prove it by contradicting the 'then' truth that l, m and t were absolute. Even then, he needed most other 'then' truths to prove his theory (like 2 X 2 = 4, d/dt(m.a) = m.da/dt + a.dm/dt and so on).
Why am I telling you all this? The primary reason is, as put by Isaac Newton (recently, a book was published with this as a title by Stephen Hawking), we are all "On the shoulders of a giant"; the giant being all the previous inventors and discoverers. The view that we are getting is because we are so highly situated on such a giant. When we see something new, we see it by sitting on the giant. So our entire ideas are, can I say, corrupted by the possible mistakes the giant might have committed. As previously said, we (new-truth tellers) may not agree with the giant totally; but mostly, we believe what he has told us.
This sparks a great amount of 'What if?' questions: What if the first person who built the giant was wrong? Then all of us might be exactly in the wrong path. What if someone hadn't invented something? By inventing something like fire (is fire an invention or a discovery?) he had prejudiced the minds of his successors in favour of it. If he hadn't done it, we might have invented something better than it!
As a concluding remark, I would like to ask this question (is a question, a remark?): "Can we believe the 'now'-truths?; Do we have a choice?" After all, we are all on a giant; truth or lie, are we better than being on a giant than by being on the ground? The answer is very subjective; it tells you whether you want to believe something or not.
Cheers,
Ravi Teja R.
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