The Maniac Pursues Truth

The pursuit of truth consumes. Trying to define the concept is maddening enough. No one seems to agree what truth should be. There are dozens of schools of thought about defining truth.

Most people take the old personal truth approach. That means the only truth one can find is personal, subjective, different from different viewpoints. That can be dangerous indeed. When the only arbiter of truth is the self, the self is the only one needed for verification. Sure, we can incorporate other people's ideas, but ultimately, we still keep what we want and reject the rest. Our integrated view of truth becomes our beacon for finding truth.

Another popular approach is that the truth is unknowable, proven by a very interesting idea. Human beings cannot, as human beings, define themselves because they are human beings and therefore, logically, not a valid proof of themselves. You can't define a system if you are the system. You need an outside observer, of which, currently, we have none. No non human observer.

Unless you believe in a God or Gods. But then, that's belief, and a subjective truth know only to those who believe it. Of course, believers claim it's true for everyone, regardless of belief. When asked for proof, they offer their belief. Another self defining system.

But if we cannot know the truth, we amputate our ability to reason. If it's unknowable, then why advance society and technology and science towards truth? I don't know. I like my oven and my hot water. I like open communication via internet. It's worse than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it's not admitting there's even a baby.

Some argue that society creates truth by consensus. The Inquisition was bad, but it was consented to by the powers of society and thus became a truth. It happened. Unfortunately, that implies the human race creates truth. That ignores some obvious non human creations which plants recognize as the sun, although we never consulted them about the sun.

The value of searching for truth is surety in life and maybe progress towards living better. So we can't even say finding truth is valueless.

Simple platitudes won't do it either. There's an underlying, undiscovered, knowable correctness that cannot be summed into a sentence. Perhaps it can't be contained in words or thoughts.

At the moment, the author is resigned to the moment, which he missed entirely while writing this.