Absolute truth

[vaneramos]

We seek truth, but what good will it do? Put food on the table or a warm companion in bed?

My father once said something about truth. I had become a born again Christian and begun marketing this brilliant scheme to my irreligious family. One day out of the blue, Dad said, "I believe there is absolute truth." And I didn't know what in hell he was talking about. I understood Jesus dying, knew the fire of my need, felt a sense of meaning from the Bible. But no one had ever explained objectivity versus subjectivity, or how to carry on constructive arguments. Preaching had one purpose, and was never about seeking.

Truth isn't something you can feel. It's a blackboard equation, cold and merciless. It's galaxies colliding and meteorites wiping out species for no reason. It makes little sense of this fizzy biochemical love in which we place so much faith. We lie constantly to retain our hold against gravity's drag. We force square reasons into fragile balloons, bursting and spilling life.

Maybe I sound cynical and desperate, but it's the only reasonable way to be. Despair allows me to make choices. That's the only thing left to do.

Comments

[writer00.livejournal.com]

This is from an interview with Terence Mckenna, conducted a few years before he died. I think it might be of interest to you. You can read more, if interested, at http://www.hermetic.ch/frt/artbell.html


Well, so in looking at this, I created a vocabulary ... actually I borrowed it from Alfred North Whitehead ... but I think I'm on to something which science has missed, and it's this; it's that the universe, or human life or an empire or an ecosystem, any large scale or small scale process, can be looked at as a dynamic struggle between two qualities which I call habit and novelty. And I think they're pretty self-explanatory. Habit is simply repetition of established patterns, conservation, holding back what has already been achieved into a system, and novelty is the chance-taking, the exploratory, the new, the never-before-seen. And these two qualities — habit and novelty — are locked in all situations in a kind of struggle. But the good news is that if you look at large scales of time, novelty is winning, and this is the point that I have been so concerned to make that I think science has overlooked. If you look back through the history of the human race, or life on this planet, or of the solar system and the galaxy, as you go backward in time, things become more simple, more basic. So turning that on its head, we can say that as you come towards the present things become more novel, more complex. So I've taken this as a universal law, affecting historical processes, biological processes and astrophysical processes. Nature produces and conserves novelty, and what I mean by that, as the universe cools the original cloud of electron plasma, eventually atomic systems form, as it further cools molecular systems, then long-chain polymers, then non-nucleated primitive DNA-containing life, later complex life, multi-cellular life, and this is a principle that reaches right up to our dear selves. And notice, Art, it's working across all scales of being. This is something that is as true of human societies as it is of termite populations or populations of atoms in a chemical system. Nature conserves, prefers novelty. And the interesting thing about an idea like this is that it stands the existentialism of modern philosophy on its head ... you know, what modern, atheistic existentialism says is that we're a cosmic accident and damn lucky to be here, and any meaning you get out of the situation, you're simply conferring. I say, no ... by looking deeply into the structure of nature, we can discover that novelty is what nature produces and conserves, and if that represents a universal value system, then the human world that we find today with our technologies and our complex societies represents the greatest novelty so far achieved, and suddenly you have a basis for an ethic — that which advances novelty is good, that which retards it is to be looked at very carefully.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I read a little about McKenna and his theory. My initial response is that his analysis of increasing novelty over time is subjective, but it is indeed and interesting idea.