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What is truth.
Intentionally lie? - never.
I wouldn't call anyone in an anonymous place a valid primary source. So maybe I view all of this as a lie?
I think the very concept of truth should be questioned. Human memory is not truthful or accurate in nature. The very act of remembering has been shown to alter one's recollection.
Science is about consensus, collaboration, and time. There are few binary truths and everything is subject to new evidence and revision based on observation.
I view truth like all oversimplifications. It is useful in a fake idealized world, within a lie - if you will, but absolutes are a fallacy in the real world.
I enjoy your overthinking.
If a truth is given as an answer such as a favorite color or song, while lying to one's true self about one's underlying complexity, is the answer a truth or a lie?
Green. Why? Because when I asked someone special why she said green, she had the prettiest smile when she said, "It's the color of life."
"Green" is truthful to who I am by a concept with deep meaning; a truth to your intentions and expectations in asking the question; but a lie in saying I have any color preferences for some narrow frequency band in a spectrum.
Did I tell the truth?
I like you.
I don't think that truth itself is an oversimplification. 2+2=4 | {2, 4} ∈ ℤ remains true regardless of observer or their acknowledgement of that truth. This shows that at least some things are true, and available for knowledge.
However, we humans (plus any other potentially intelligent being) do not have a complete knowledge of truth. It's impossible. And conflating "what I know from the truth" with the truth itself is what I believe to be the oversimplification. (More specifically, conflating subjective and objective matters.)
I would not call anyone in an anonymous place a valid primary source either. However, that does not mean that all descriptive statements coming from those people (us) are lies; it's simply that I don't know if it's true or false, let alone if the person believes on it (false, but not a lie) or not (a lie).
Regarding science, truth could be seen as a "goal" for science; consensus, collaboration and time as the means to reach that goal. (...or at least that's what positivists would say, I think. Popper would instead say that the goal is not to reach the truth, but to get rid of false claims. And Feyerabend would probably agree with you and not me.)
(also @Crackhappy@lemmy.world)
The older I get, the more I think that people primarily lie to themselves, and then tell others that "truth" that they have internalized.
Part of this is that people think in a sloppy manner, but if they were to acknowledge that (to themselves) then it would cause emotional distress. So they... don't. To clarify: I don't even say that fully as a value judgement so much as an observation of human psychology i.e. an instance of the natural world. And yes I include myself in this as well:-).
This paradox means then that these "truth-tellers" are fully literally incapable of telling you the objective Truth, b/c they do not know it themselves - and even if they are aware that they do not know, that part they will not admit for fear of being perceived as weak. (Edit: obviously there is a spectrum here, and different people operate in different modes at different times, e.g. an actor who knows a lot about conveying emotions with their facial expressions might not know anything about physics and vice versa, but neither of them knowing anything about pediatric care, and so on - so even someone who is capable of telling the truth in their chosen area of expertise might not be capable of doing so outside of that sphere, especially if they drink their own cool-aid and allow themselves to forget where the proper demarcating line is - which seems to me to be roughly 100% of all people who ever lived... though I might not be fully capable of telling the truth there?:-P)
Another part is the lies that get passed back and forth so often that they begin to take on a ring of truthiness - this seems to just be an extension of the above, using an external second party rather than happening solely inside of one brain. (This one I *do* levy a value judgement at: just b/c all your "friends" think that a vaccine does not work, does not outweigh the opinions of actual medical professionals - nor do such people even truly believe in this manner themselves, b/c whenever they get sick do they turn to their "friends" or do they suddenly cry out for help from an actual doctor? this is just hypocrisy plain & simple: "hanging out" and "playing around with", like a kid in a playground, is not the same thing as "believing" in the adult world, and when shit finally gets real these people suddenly start adulting, so why not do the adulting at all times, especially when e.g. voting on things that affect millions of other humans?)
This second group could tell the objective Truth - b/c they suddenly do it themselves when they have a personal stake in the matter - but for whatever reason they choose not to, I guess for fear of losing friends.
Either way, it seems unreasonable to expect the truth from someone who does not value that concept themselves - either in their own minds or in their discourse with others. The same with compassion, and patience, and every other aspect of life that can variously be either a virtue or a deficit depending on how much someone has or lacks of it.
You cannot extract blood from a stone.
Thank you. I appreciate what you're saying about objective truth, because objective is still subjective.
Lying to oneself / self-lie is such an amusing concept - if lying is defined as "saying something knowingly false", once you get rid of that piece of knowledge it stops being a lie. As such, self-lie only keeps being a lie if it's ineffective. It's a lot like you said later on about lies being passed back and forth being an "extension of the above, using an external second party rather than happening solely inside of one brain."
I wonder if it isn't because sometimes saying the truth is far, far more complex than saying some simple lie. It's easy to say this shit like "ivermectin is good against covid!"*, but it's hard to actually dig into what doctors say, and why they say it, to reach conclusions that agree with them.
And typically there won't be any benefit for you to tell the truth - in both cases you'll get people screeching at you ("what do you mean? The water isn't turning the frogs into gays? You should check yourself, you soy-drinking degenerate! Reeee!" versus "you're being a fucking stupid muppet").
No worries - I get that you're being descriptive, not judging.
This makes me wonder if we [people in general] aren't falling into solipsism. As in: "if truth is unreachable, then what's true or false doesn't matter".
*context: dunno in the rest of the world, but at least here in Brazil ivermectin - a parasite medication - was being touted as fighting against COVID (a virotic disease), because of a muppet of a former president. I've had the displeasure to talk with those people, and their reasoning is never something plausible like "it's a side effect" followed by studies, it's consistently ignorance on the difference between parasites and virus.