Is there such a thing as objective truth? Part II

[Vincent]

jennstall:

The Matrix illustrates that the objective truth in the story world is that everyone is asleep and being used as a human battery. The false premise that needs to be exposed in order to understand this objective truth is the premise “I am awake.”’

I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.

I’m pointing out that the movie implies that you can never really know whether you’ve reached reality. In other words, you *think *you’re awake, but then you’ve realized that you’re really not, and so you take the red pill and wake up.

But have you? Really?

How do you know you’re not *still *asleep? How do you know whether you’ve really woken up and are now in The Real World ™? How do you know you’re aren’t still trapped within a matrix, within a matrix, within a matrix…ad infinitum?

You really can’t.

What this philosophy boils down to is that you can’t ever reach objective truth.

Oh really? And is that objectively true? :ehh:

 

[AlanFromWichita]

jennstall:

I think one of the false premises that we need to root out when considering the movie philosophically is the false premise that the filmmakers knew exactly what they were trying to achieve. This false premise is easily exposed for a falsehood by watching the the rest of the trilogy.

Good observation!

There were lots of interesting ideas, and many things patterned after Biblical teachings, places, etc. but they really didn’t seem to know where they were going.

I really liked the first movie, except I thought Morpheus was a bit aloof and condescending; I thought what he said was often profound but less so than if he hadn’t acted so much like it was. I thought the second movie was a big yawn and don’t remember anything from it except there really wasn’t anything new. There was a third?

Alan

 

[AlanFromWichita]

Vincent:

How do you know you’re not *still *asleep? How do you know whether you’ve really woken up and are now in The Real World ™? How do you know you’re aren’t still trapped within a matrix, within a matrix, within a matrix…ad infinitum?

You really can’t.

Dear Vincent,

I think you are right in that you don’t really know, but I don’t think the movie lent itself to that extension for the average and even slightly above average movie-goer. I think the movie itself tried to portray the people as batteries, Morpheus’s ship, etc. as the “real world.”

The movie itself, I believe, clearly meant to indicate a “real world” and an illusionary world within “the Matrix.”

Alan

 

[Strider]

I see the question kid H asked as the key to the whole discussion.
Since Truth is someone, not something, and that someone is Jesus Christ, then the Catholic Church is the deposit of all objective truth because she is the deposit of all that Jesus taught.
Therefore, the Magesterium, the teaching authority of the Church, decides, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, what objective truth is.
This includes the black and white truth of mathmatics as well as the seemingly gray areas of morals, faith, and human interaction.
That not everyone believes in the Church or even in the fact of objective truth itself does not change truth.
One’s opinion of God does not change God.

God bless

 

[PilgrimJWT]

Certainly there is objective truth–if 2 plus 2 were to equal 5 tomorrow, it would be hard to function in this world.

However, our understanding of what truths are objective truths can be problematical. The truth does not change but we may see it from different angles that make it look different to different people. Of course the Church enjoys infallibility but irreformable declarations are few. The Church still has authority which is to be obeyed; but occasionally its rulings have changed through history.
Of course, this makes life difficult. How much easier it would be if the opinions of churchmen were always correct and the earth were still at the center of the universe…!

 

[martino]

Antonio B:

Kid A wrote: If different people have different definitions of truth, why does Pope John Paul II disagree with this concept in Veritatis Splendor?

Kid B wrote: What authority in the Church determines what objective truths are?

With so many issues in the gray area, how does one know all truth?

Kid C wrote: What does Natural Law have to do with “objective truth?”

Kid D wrote: Is there an objective truth when it comes to politics and types of governments?

Kid F wrote: How does the theme of the Matrix conflict with objective truth?

Kid G wrote: Is the Church’s infallibility an opinion or objective truth?

Kid H wrote: Who is to decide what is objective truth?

Please, do answer any of these questions. They were asked by Juniors in my World Religions class.

When I asked today “Why do you think I have introduced this subject at the beginning of this course,” one of my students gave me this reply: “If there is objective truth, there has to be subjects that all religions agree on.”

Now, I was impressed by that statement from a kid. Are you? Why? Why not?

Antonio

A) Opinions are meaningless when dealing with objective truth! By definition objective truth supercedes any human opinion.
B) The Magisterium (teaching office) of the Catholic Church is the infallible teacher on all matters pertaining to faith and morals.
C) Natural Law is an “objective truth”. Natural Law is a reality that is not subject to the opinions of man, which is what makes it an objective truth.
D) I would say NO! Governments are all human institutions and are subject to error! No human institution is without error.
G) The Church’s infallibility is an objective truth, it is a reality whether or not anyone happens to disagree.
H) In matters of faith and morals the Catholic Church has been given authority to pronounce what is true and what is not. The Church’s infallibility does not cover any area outside of faith and morals.
My answer to the last question: The major world religions actually do share certain truths. The Church teaches that even though other religions possess certain truths, only the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of truth.

 

[jennstall]

Vincent:

How do you know you’re not *still *asleep? How do you know whether you’ve really woken up and are now in The Real World ™? How do you know you’re aren’t still trapped within a matrix, within a matrix, within a matrix…ad infinitum?

You are projecting way too much into the movie. There is never any indication in the entire trilogy that after taking the Red Pill you might still be inside a Matrix. Stories have rules. One of the rules of a story is that if you are supposed to take something else into consideration a hint will be dropped so that you will be led to consider an alternative possibility. No such hint is dropped in The Matrix trilogy and I’ve seen each movie many times. Zion is the real world, no doubt about it.

Have you ever seen the science fiction movie, The 13th Floor? It is another movie where reality is not what it appears to be, but in that particular movie a hint is dropped that even after uncovering one truth, there may be another hidden underlying truth. In the movie, a man travels back “in time” to an artificially created environment and because of this another character discovers that he’s “not real”. The first character finds out later in the movie that his own “time” which he thought was the real world is just another artifically created world within a world and that he himself is not “real” either. So when he jumps ahead to a “future time” you would be well within your rights to think it reasonable that he still has not discovered reality and that the person who led him there is not “real” either.

In the Matrix, on the other hand, there is one reveal and there’s no later trick to suggest that the world outside of the Matrix is not the real one.

 

[Antonio_B]

jennstall:

You are projecting way too much into the movie. There is never any indication in the entire trilogy that after taking the Red Pill you might still be inside a Matrix. Stories have rules. One of the rules of a story is that if you are supposed to take something else into consideration a hint will be dropped so that you will be led to consider an alternative possibility. No such hint is dropped in The Matrix trilogy and I’ve seen each movie many times. Zion is the real world, no doubt about it.

Have you ever seen the science fiction movie, The 13th Floor? It is another movie where reality is not what it appears to be, but in that particular movie a hint is dropped that even after uncovering one truth, there may be another hidden underlying truth. In the movie, a man travels back “in time” to an artificially created environment and because of this another character discovers that he’s “not real”. The first character finds out later in the movie that his own “time” which he thought was the real world is just another artifically created world within a world and that he himself is not “real” either. So when he jumps ahead to a “future time” you would be well within your rights to think it reasonable that he still has not discovered reality and that the person who led him there is not “real” either.

In the Matrix, on the other hand, there is one reveal and there’s no later trick to suggest that the world outside of the Matrix is not the real one.

O.K. so who is right about the movie? What is the “objective” truth about the movie or is the whole thing (movie) subject to subjective interpretation?

Antonio

 

[AlanFromWichita]

Antonio B:

O.K. so who is right about the movie? What is the “objective” truth about the movie or is the whole thing (movie) subject to subjective interpretation?

Antonio

Of course, it is I who is right about the movie. I know I’m right, because if I were ever wrong, I’d change my mind.

I don’t remember anything in the movie dropping hints that outside of Zion there might be another reality. It was pretty plain that the movie intended it to be the “real world” v. “the Matrix.” That doesn’t detract, however, from the theme that the “real world” is completely unknown and even unknowable by the vast majority of the population who live their entire lives in the illusion that is the Matrix. The illusion is so real to them they have no idea their sensory (name removed by moderator)uts and even their perceived motor functions are all manufactured and fed into their brains.

That said, there is nothing wrong with speculating beyond the duality of real world v “matrix” and I even think it’s an interesting discussion. However, I tend to side with jennstall in that there was no hint of that.

If you want a book that is fairly short (about 120 reasonable size pages) that does clearly hint at alternate realities, check out the story written over 100 years ago by Edwin Abbott, a mathematician and theologian, called “Flatland.” The difficulties and the misconceptions to overcome by a 3-dimensional being trying to explain “up” to a 2-dimensional being, clearly lead to speculation into higher dimensions. The book was instrumental in helping me understand the possibility of space being curved, as in Einstein, and in understanding the concept that there may be a being (such as God) compared to whom I am but a shadow in wisdom and complexity. It also has a lot of interesting commentary about different classes and intellects of people.

If you haven’t read “Flatland” you might really like it. It might even be useful for your class, and help open them up to realities beyond their perception, and how easy it might be to mistake a magician for a God.

The book is in public domain and is available, among other places, at project gutenberg. One version with pseudo-illustrations is at gutenberg.org/dirs/etext95/flat10a.txt

Bookstores often carry several editions for less than 10 bucks, with forewards by different people. I like one by Isaac Asimov, but there are other good ones. The good thing about getting the book is that you get the pictures too – there aren’t a lot of pictures but it’s nice to have them.

Alan

 

[Cherubino]

Alan,

Thanks so much for the link to “Flatland.” I’d never heard of it and it looks like a lot of fun.

A longtime fave of mine is Michael Polanyi’s “Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy” (UChicago Press, 1958), which is abot 475 pages of print so tight you’ll need a magnifing glass to decipher the footnotes. I first got into it 35 years ago when I was a grad student in sociology and was challenging their claim (to state it as briefly as possible) to objectivity as valid-- hence supporting sociology’s claim to be a science-- on the grounds that they adhered to the verification theory of meaning.

This tenet has had a rocky road in the philosophy of science, and was soundly refuted first by Isaiah Berlin in a paper he presented to the Aristotelean Society in London in 1939 (“Verifiability in Principle”). Berlin demonstrated that using the critera set forth in the deductive method, the statement “Nothingness nothings” is empirically verifiable!

A J. Ayer tried to revive the paradigm with his second (1952) edition of “Language, Truth and Logic” in which he proposed that the verification theory would work if only the meanings of words were made precise and immutable by (one must suppose) academic decree. Despite the immense practical difficulties in governing linguistic usage, however, the logical positivists are still in business and Ayer’s “LT&L” is still their bible.

A small sampling of Polanyi and I’m done for now: “Owing to the unceasing changes which at every moment manifestly renew the state of things throughout the world, our anticipations must always meet things that are to some extent novel and unprecedented. Thus we find ourselves relying jointly on our anticipations and on our capacity ever to re-adapt these to novel and unprecedented situations. This is true in the exercise of skills, in the shaping of our perception and even in the satisfaction of appetites; every time our existing framework deals with an event anticipated by it, it has to modify itself to some extent accordingly. And this is even more true of the educated mind; the capacity continually to enrich and enliven its own conceptual framework by assimilating new experience is the mark of an intelligent personality. Thus our sense of possessing intellectual control over a range of things, always combines an anticipation of meeting certain things of this kind which will be novel in some unspecifiable respects, with a reliance on ourselves to interpret them successfully by appropriately modifying our framework of anticipations… To affirm anything implies, then, to this extent an appraisal of our own art of knowing, and the establishment of truth becomes decisively dependent on a set of personal critieria of our own which cannot be formally defined… Our mind lives in action, and any attempt to specify its presuppositions produces a set of axioms which can not tell us why we should accept them.”

 

[RMP]

Interesting quote from a book by a protestant, Josh McDowell by an agnostic…“Truth is not relative to minds:”…"It will be seen that minds do not create truths or falsehood. They create BELIEFS, but when once the beliefs are created, the mind cannot make them true or false…What makes a belief true is a fact, this fact does not in any way involve the mind of the person who as the belief.

We may differ in our belief about what is true, but that does not affect truth itself. And by the way, truth can only be absolute. For a truth that is not absolute, is liable to be no truth at all. So, yes truth is objective. At least that is MY belief. lol

 

[Antonio_B]

AlanFromWichita:

Of course, it is I who is right about the movie. I know I’m right, because if I were ever wrong, I’d change my mind.

I don’t remember anything in the movie dropping hints that outside of Zion there might be another reality. It was pretty plain that the movie intended it to be the “real world” v. “the Matrix.” That doesn’t detract, however, from the theme that the “real world” is completely unknown and even unknowable by the vast majority of the population who live their entire lives in the illusion that is the Matrix. The illusion is so real to them they have no idea their sensory (name removed by moderator)uts and even their perceived motor functions are all manufactured and fed into their brains.

That said, there is nothing wrong with speculating beyond the duality of real world v “matrix” and I even think it’s an interesting discussion. However, I tend to side with jennstall in that there was no hint of that.

If you want a book that is fairly short (about 120 reasonable size pages) that does clearly hint at alternate realities, check out the story written over 100 years ago by Edwin Abbott, a mathematician and theologian, called “Flatland.” The difficulties and the misconceptions to overcome by a 3-dimensional being trying to explain “up” to a 2-dimensional being, clearly lead to speculation into higher dimensions. The book was instrumental in helping me understand the possibility of space being curved, as in Einstein, and in understanding the concept that there may be a being (such as God) compared to whom I am but a shadow in wisdom and complexity. It also has a lot of interesting commentary about different classes and intellects of people.

If you haven’t read “Flatland” you might really like it. It might even be useful for your class, and help open them up to realities beyond their perception, and how easy it might be to mistake a magician for a God.

The book is in public domain and is available, among other places, at project gutenberg. One version with pseudo-illustrations is at gutenberg.org/dirs/etext95/flat10a.txt

Bookstores often carry several editions for less than 10 bucks, with forewards by different people. I like one by Isaac Asimov, but there are other good ones. The good thing about getting the book is that you get the pictures too – there aren’t a lot of pictures but it’s nice to have them.

Alan

I would like to read it but right now I’m reading two books plus the one that deals with the Religions of the World to keep up with my lesson plans.

Antonio