Comment by anon1m0us | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon1m0us | Hacker News Reader

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oh, I wonder if this is fitting with my current obsession with truth and lies.

Not only are we increasing the number of lies in the world, using lies to get what we want has become more and more acceptable through social media, politics, capitalism, etc...

But we are increasing the number of things you can't prove are lies. You can't falsify me, therefore I am right.

OMG, this is very religious. This is all because of postmodernism! Prior to today, you couldn't prove that my religion was wrong. The more people I could get to believe my lie about the origins of the universe, the more powerful I was.

Tribalism requires agreed upon unfalsifiable lies. I am with you because I believe the same thing you do.

Postmodernism has done this to us. With religion and an omniscient being watching us, heaven for the good, hell for the bad, we had a -- conscience.

Now, it's the internet. The internet is omniscient. Facebook is watching us. Google is watching us. The CIA and FBI are watching us through the internet.

We've replaced god with ... the internet. The internet is the new god. And thus, we are evolving toward the biblical God that created us in his image. We are walking down the path to omniscience via the internet.

I wonder if you might try the subtler word myths instead of lies.

Reality is formless, and we reason about it through what Foucault called grids I think, where every structure that we impose on it to bring something new into view necessarily obscures something else.

This is a bit like what Alan Watts talks about when saying that stories are like music, in which it wouldn’t have any form unless there were notes left out.

I think of a fact as a compressed statement of experience in service to some story. This is like the surprising observation that bits of information seem to always have some color that cannot be captured[1].

And there is the type of myth I like to call Fruith, as opposed to Truth. Most myths comprising culture might be these—in that we pretend things are true in the belief that it brings something more important to fruition, and that is the truth which overrides the seminal “lie”.

I see your despair, but I think it’s bigger than what you may be suggesting.

[1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

When you say, "... it's bigger than what you may be suggesting."

What is ... "it"? My despair?

I understand your point about lies vs myths. If I substitute the two words in my mind according to your explanation of myths and their purpose, then everything actually does seem to make more sense and is more acceptable in my mind.

If someone tells a lie the connotation is that it's meant to harm others to their own benefit. If it's a myth, then they need that ... not accurate portrayal of the world in order to keep going... to survive, perhaps as an individual or group.

The problem is that strongly-held myths can still cause a lot of harm to others. While it may be understandable for people to cling to some myths, we should still work to stamp them out, but compassionately.

Not sure if you got it, but it’s myths all the way down. It’s only by the values of one myth that another should be “stamped out.”

The book Sapiens covers this well, that you cannot escape the prison of a myth without being contained by one larger.

That's a matter of philosophy and opinion, not established fact.

> That's a matter of philosophy and opinion, not established fact.

If one takes “myth” to mean something that is itself believed without being falsifiable, it is true by necessity of any belief system with any content beyond statements about the subjective experience of the believer

“It” being what I understand about your philosophy of truth and what you mean by “accurate”. It’s hard to describe directly, since I’ve thought about this from a bunch of different sources that I struggle to synthesize, but I recommend this short story by Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling[1], which I think does a great job of capturing that ineffable, paradoxical nature of truth.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...

> "If someone tells a lie the connotation is that it's meant to harm others to their own benefit."

Who's connotation? I think that's a very myopic take on lying. Insofar as people care for others, people frequently lie to benefit those they care about. Some people believe the truth is more important than sparing the feelings of somebody you care about, and that's totally fine. But that point of view is not universal to humans and many people believe lying for the benefit of others to be reasonable or even obligatory.

I won't bore you with examples of such lies; I think you can probably imagine a few. Some are trivial, and others far more substantial. Whether or not those lies are justifiable under your personal system of ethics (or my own) is beyond the point; the point is that to some people those lies are justifiable and for those people, lying is motivated by a desire to benefit others.

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