absolute truths/objective reality
 

i somehow got myself into writing a paper refuting some claim rather than just supporting it. But anways my paper is refuting the notion that there is nothing that is purely objective by saying of course that there is an objective reality, being that of absolute truths. The problem is that this topic now gets a little philosophically deep, which is the discipline I have very little knowledge of. Any good books to recommend on the topic?

And I have a few examples that I'm working with:

Some mathematical concepts:

-1+1=2 (being that 1 bag of chip and another bag of chips will equal 2 bags of chips in the domain of bags)
-1=1 (being I equal myself because of its reflexive/symmetric properties)
-a rock on a moon marked X, being that it exists or not will be an absolute truth...independent of anyone's sensory experience. (one of my former TA gave me this so I don't know how to articulate this much further)


I remember in logics class we did subproofs to reach a contradiction. After the contradiction we are allowed to presuppose anything...does that work the same way with premises?

I'd have to see how your argument is running. The reason you are allowed to assume anything after a contradiction is because of the following.

Assume p & ~p (that's your contradiction)
p implies p v q, where q is anything your heart desires.
but (p v q) & ~p implies q.
Therefore q.

Additionally, your third concept is going to be debatable as an objective truth.

Even the math, occuring withing one's mind, might not be true.

You might be a brain in a bottle, with all your thoughts tweaked and controlled. Possibly you think that 1+1=2 is true and self evident, but what is really happening is that the evil genius is tweaking your thought processes to make 1+1=2 seem true.

Simularly, the evil genius might be making you think my arguement is true, when in reality it is just jibberish.

What really matters is, what do you mean by Absolute Truth? Do you mean something you can know? Or, do you mean something else? Without a definition of a term, it is hard to talk about it.

It seems to me that, even if you are a brain in a vat, 1 +1 = 2 is going to be true, regardless of what the evil genius does, in an analogical way similar to the fact that, even if you're a brain in a vat, you still know whether or not you are in pain.

You get into a question of semiotics which is the philosophical concept that there we live in a world of representations. For instance, when I say "dog" you and I both think if innately different dogs. Thus our connotations are different. Ultimately what semniotics says that there is a representation for everything because we can never truely define reality. We use the color red to illustrate the concept of "stop." People might have different perceptions of love, although we all know what it "roughly" is.
Now, this relates to the question of absolute truths, and whether fact can truely be difined or explained. Semiotics would tell you that you can never have absolute truths because man can never know "the full side" to any story.

Can't resist adding a religious bent to this -

The fact that we can't seem to find the absolute truth is a very compelling reason to conceive of a God that is omnipotent. This then, becomes an absolute truth...

Because we can conclude that the interpretations based on our sensory inputs, coupled with the inherent processing of our minds, are purely SUBJECTIVE, its nice to imagine a God that we can't sense, is all powerful, and based purely on faith...

What if we were God? What if everything were one? (meaning that all things, quite literally are one, as in a big ol' clump) Then 1+1 loses its meaning because there IS only 1. It would be quite hard to perceive ANYTHING if EVERYTHING was 1. Maybe everything that we 'perceive' is just an illusion that facilitates our self-awareness...we have to perceive of something that ISN'T us in order to perceive ourselves, right?

Seems like a plausible (albeit far-fetched) rationale. The illusion has just gotten out of control, that's why it defys logical explanation.

Sorry I can't recommend any books for you, which was what you'd asked for... :(

The problem with the subjective vs objective reality argument is that it encompasses so many different areas of philosophy. One book on philosophy which I am reading at the moment (about the only one I've ever read) I would recommend to anyone new to western philosophy. It has a brief overview of 25 famous philosophical topics presented in the most reader friendly way imaginable, with further reading reccomended at the end of each chapter.

I would suggest the following chapters:

From those I have already read:

3) Brain-Snatched
5) Into the lair of the relativist
8) The strange case of the rational dentist
14) Why expect the sun to rise tomorrow

just by the titles:

18) The strange realm of numbers
19) What is knowledge

John - What was the title of the book?

yea what was the title of the book??? I would be interested in reading it

Sorry I wasn't really with it when I made that post. The book is called 'The Philosophy Gym: 25 Short Adventures in Thinking'. It's by Stephen Law and you can get it from Amazon.

FOR REFERENCE: Any number followed by ~ represents a repeating decimal. (IE: .9~ = .999999999etc)


.9~ = 1
(exactly not approximatley...)


ELEMENTRY PROOF:
.3~ = 1\3
.6~ = 2\3

(1\3) + (2\3) = 1
.3~ + .6~ = .9~

.9~ = 1

ALGEBRAIC PROOF:
x = .9~
10x = 9.9~
10x - x = 9.9~ -.9~
9x = 9
x = 1

x = .9~ = 1

CALCULUS PROOF:
lim(m --> inf) sum(n = 1)^m (9)/(10^n) = 1
0.9999... = 1

wtf?

there high logic proofs-

That book you mention is good- I think the author wrote a nice one on ethics as well.

by the way John- your sig is driving me CRAZY :D

Just because he never fails doesn't mean he always succeeds!

Does Santa clause ever fail? No. Does he always succeed? no. why is that? Cause he doesn't exist~!

Just like a Toaist sage, having no ambitions, has nothing that exists to either fail or succeed.

Its not either fail or suceed here.

This is my problem with a lot of eastern Philosophy- maybe I'm just so biased by reason and logic. :D

I don't really get why 5thCandidate has done all that maths. Can't really understand how it relates to absolute truth.

People often cite maths as having some bearing on absolute truth, but Idon't understand why. Maths is essentially abstract. It is fundamentally based on the concept of number, which is in itself based on the separation of the world into discrete entities.

Saying "There's one of these here and two of those there" is a very useful thing to be able to do, but it's subjective and merely an artefact of human perception.

As for my sig, I think I shall start a thread on that.

That's sort of my point. Khuct mentioned 1 = 1 as an absolute truth, and I was simply demonstrating that it was not an absolute truth.