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Comment by magicalbeans | Hacker News Reader

There are no universal truths? Math is quite universal. For all intents and purposes empiristic measurements have margin of error small enough to be more than just a subjective experience. In fact you are experiencing a universal truth right now through a small and a distorted glass. Saying that there's no universal truth anywhere is just full on defeatist poo-poo.

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It’s not defeatist at all. Empiricism derives truth from sensory experiences, which are by definition subjective. Rationalism derives truth from logic, and all statements in logic are constrained from discovering universal truth by the munchausen trilemma.

I think what you’re talking about would be better described as a personal truth, which _is_ a leap of faith.

Calling sensory experiences subjective subtly implies that they carry zero bits of useful information and that everything is up to interpretation. That is profoundly defeatist. Whereas I maintain that there is a universal truth, and that individual sensory experiences are mere samples. The more samples from as many sensory devices and vantage points the closer your approximation to the universal truth it is.

Given a person A and person B, while both have a very small subset of the 'univeral truth' one of them is closer to it than the other approximation. And better yet the combined sample sets are likely to be even closer.

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