When I was a young child, I naïvely believed anything I experienced or that anyone told me as true. As I started adolescence, I started to question that, and realised that people who tell me stuff might be mistaken, or intentionally lying to me. I became very interested in optical illusions, and realised my senses could be fooled too. I had to rely on measurable, repeatable truth that scientific experts had written in pop science books.
Then I thought about simulations, being in a story (like in Sophie’s World), gods, and every other possibility that the entire world I experience is not real and is created to test me, to observe me, indifferent to me and I’m there by accident - whichever it was, I couldn’t believe for sure that anyone besides me really existed, or anything I knew through my senses. Only my logical reasoning could be trusted. I am doubting therefore I exist, but I couldn’t know anything else for sure.
Until recently, I realised when I was ruminating one time, and thinking about which is better: truth or happiness. Most of the times I’d ruminated, I knew I’d come to the conclusion that I’d rather be right than happy. I had logic to back this up, it’s more important to know the truth because then I’m happy about being right. But when I’d been happier, I thought being happy was more important than being right - after all, what’s the point of being right if it doesn’t bring you pleasure, seeking pleasure and avoiding suffering being the whole goal of life?
I realised that what I thought was logical reasoning to support my conclusion wasn’t logical at all. It was a rationalisation to support whichever conclusion made me happier at the time. When, for chemical reasons in my brain, I was happy, I wanted to remain happy. So I’d subconsciously convinced myself that I had logic to convince myself that happiness is preferable. When my hormone levels were low so I was feeling down, telling myself that at least I feel better because I know the truth is a way of coping.
And I realised that when my ‘logical’ reasoning is just a rationalisation for an emotional state caused by brain chemicals and my body, I can’t trust any ‘logical’ argument my brain thinks of. I don’t exist because I’m thinking, I exist because I have an innate sense of existing. So therefore, I can’t trust anything I think is logical. But wait, that there is a logical statement! So I can’t trust it either! And so on… aaaAAARGH!
The more I try to find truth, the less I find I know. I somehow get even more agnostic than I thought it was possible to be, I at least thought, ‘Alright, I have no idea what the universe is, but as an external observer I know that I exist.’
I am no longer an external observer! My observations about how my hormones and body affects my emotions, which in turn affect how infuriated I am at the fact that I don’t know stuff, that I don’t have free will - not the other way around - means I can’t even think anymore, as my brain is part of the compromised system. I am compromised.
The more I learn, the less I know.
(I will ignore the context for the sake of argument)
The measurement itself can’t be trusted. If you have a 1m stick and you measure it, its still is 1m stick. But if it’s moving really fast (close to the speed of light) the stick is somehow shorter. We have made models to predict that but still we can’t measure the true length of the stick. We can’t know the true length of the stick. Just the approximation within quality of our measurement device.
There are actually two truths: subjective truth and objective truth. We can’t really know objective truth but we can get really close to it with our subjective truth.
Subjective truth is really powerful concept as it can be modified by ourselfs. If your subjectivity taints your thinking then change it so it reflects your values.
The philosophy is a study of “How to think” even in the face of hormones and emotions. Thinking logically can be trained and it can be learned. It can also help state right questions and not all questions are logical.
Also not all thoughts come from logic. Some come from emotions or some other place some people call soul. The question “Do I prefer being right or being happy” is not a logical question. It can’t be answered logically. The question should be: “Should humans strife for being happy or being right?” Is closer as it can be argued for one side or the other but emotions don’t play a huge role in swaying the consensus of arguments.
Emphasis mine.
You seem to be conflating a couple of things here. Relativistic effects and the finite resolution of our measuring tools are totally different things, and neither make a case for objective truth not being “knowable”, unless “knowing” means “with absolute certainty”. But if truth being knowable requires such, then “subjective truth” suffers from the same issue of lacking absolutes.
Sticking with the metre stick example, there are a number of reasons why we cannot know, with absolute, unquestioning certainty it’s exact length, the major one being that, at the molecular level it has not absolute boundary. There is no firm boundary between “metre stick” and “not metre stick” once we look at that scale, just as for the Earth there is hard and firm boundary between “the atmosphere” and “the vacuum of space”. In both cases, there is only a gradation of molecular density.
But let’s stick to the macro scale here. Now, yes, we run into an issue with it not being possible to craft measuring devices with absolute accuracy or precision. The gradations printed or etched into them are not always totally and absolutely perfectly placed, and they are not perfectly thing. There will be some level of inaccuracy in our measurements because of this, and because of basic things like human error. This is where we get into the whole “just an approximation” thing. But it’s also where we get into the “to what degree of precision do you give a shit” thing. We already know the boundary between metre stick and not metre stick is fuzzy. On some level we’ve decided to not care about that. So, what is the level where it is useful or meaningful for you to care?
Because when taking measurements, you want to make sure your measuring tools are at least as good as that threshold. And then, you follow a procedure to start eliminating lengths that the metre stick is not. Through repeated measurements – usually a lot of them – you can say with a large amount of (but not absolute) confidence that the metre stick categorically is not more than 1.1m long, nor less than 0.9m long. Or not more than 1.01m long and not less than 0.99m long. Or not more than 1.00001m long and not less than 0.99999m long. Or… you get the picture.
At some point, you will either decide that knowing that the length is quite definitively between two numbers is good enough, and/or you will decide that the metre stick has no boundary. Both are true statements, and both can be held within you without contradiction.
So far, I’m just repeating what you’ve said, but using many words when few would do, right?
But the thing is, none of this is related to the bit about relativistic effects. The fact that lengths contract along the direction of movement is not in any way a measurement accuracy issue. And it’s not a mathematical hypothetical. It’s something that can be measured directly, and has been. It’s also something that can and has been measured by proxy, because length contraction is a corollary of time dilation.
The thing with relativity and relativistic effects is that all measurements require some kind of reference, and there is no universal reference. It can be easy to read that and think it means “my measuring stick will read something slightly different from your measuring stick, and so we cannot know what is the true number”, but that’s not what it’s about at all. Using the same measuring device, you will get different measurements of the same object based entirely on what the relative velocity is between them. And, if we assume (for fun) that the boundaries of objects are not fuzzy at the molecular level, this would be true with an absolutely perfect, absolutely precise measuring device.
But also, if you know the relative speed between the measured and the measuring, you can transform that measurement back into the “rest” measurement, which is what you would get if the measurement device and the metre stick were moving with 0 velocity relative to each other.
This is known as a “rest frame” measurement, and it’s the one we generally treat as both the natural measurement and the “true” one in daily life.
The classic thought experiment around this is the airplane and the barn. Imagine an airplane that is 10m long, and a barn that is 9m long. The barn has doors at the front and back large enough for the plane to enter/exit, but there is no way to fit that plane inside the barn with both sets of doors closed. But a funny thing happens if the plane is flying fast enough relative to the barn (131,000 km/s or faster): The plane fits totally inside. You can close both sets of doors, and the plane will not intersect them.
At least, you know, until it plows head on into the now-shut doors in front of it.
But the thing is, if this was just some trick of measurement, the plane just wouldn’t fit.
I know you get this. You’re subtly using this as a way of saying that there’s no objective length measure. But there is. Everyone standing at rest relative to the barn will see the exact same thing. There will be total agreement on how long that plane is, with their infinitely precise, infinitely accurate measuring devices.
And when the plane comes to a stop and they measure its length, they will all agree once again.
Just on a different value.
It’s not that the plane does not have a “true” length, it’s that that length is a function of something else: the relative velocity between the measured and the measurer. You can – and we do – define a natural (or proper) length for an object by using the rest frame of the object itself, that is by measuring it when the object is at rest relative to measuring device. To the object itself, it will always be that length (barring issues of damage or molecular decay), so this is equivalent to its self-measurement.
None of this is to argue against the idea that we cannot get to an arbitrarily precise measure of objective reality. Just that you’ve presented two very different things in a way that conflates them.
I have used few words and failed to convey what I meant. Thank you for better explanation.
I wanted to highlight how subjectivity is built in into the world by relativistic effects, and we need to know the reference frame to know if the object is contracted or not in the first place.