Truth

Truth……

Never has there been a more contentious word. It is as ambiguous as it is prevalent. It is both invoked as the supreme arbiter in matters that are factual and as the ultimate negation in matters of dispute. So often have we heard from the frothing mouths of disgruntled masses the demand for “the Truth”, and simultaneously have we heard so often that we all have “our own truth”. Then there is the Christian “Truth” with a capital T, indicating that the Gospels contain the one and only truth. Philosophers have debated it, politicians have twisted it, the masses have lived in perpetual proximity to it, this elusive thing we call truth. So let us try to dig a little deeper into the question of the nature of truth.

In order for truth to exist, there must be a large degree of overlap between individual human experiences, otherwise this entire article is pointless, as is all other conversation. If all there is are mere individual experiences, then the pursuit of truth becomes futile. So if we want to establish that objective truth exists, we must start from first principles; just stating there is overlap is argumentatively unsatisfying.

Here, I start with the first premise, drawn from Chris Langan’s cognitive theoretical model of the universe. And it is very elegant.

1- All that is real must by necessity be inside reality. Nothing can be outside of it, as that would make it not real. Therefore, reality cannot be caused by an external thing. This leads to but one conclusion: reality must be self-programming and self-configuring. (SPSCL Chris Langan)

2- All that is manifest in reality has become so along universal patterns. There is an undeniable tendency towards a goal in reality. Things become extant in order to fulfil their telos, their purpose. All that is manifest is therefore teleological.

3- The most important teleological pattern is Holism (as per Jan Smuts), stating that: “the ultimate synthetic, ordering, organizing, regulative activity in the universe which accounts for all the structural groupings and syntheses in it, from the atom and the physico-chemical structures through the cell and organisms, through mind in animals to personality in man. The all-pervading and ever-increasing character of synthetic unity or wholeness in these structures leads to the concept of Holism as the fundamental activity underlying and co-ordinating all others, and to the view of the universe as a Holistic Universe.”

4- Because reality is both teleological and Holist, the mechanism that creates the reality that humans live in is universal. We never hear people describing a totally different reality than the one we are experiencing, where gravity works backwards, or where food is inserted in the rectum instead of the mouth. There is, of course, the solipsist attitude that only my perceptions are real. This, dear reader, makes you, whom I do not even know, a figment of my imagination. This is patently absurd. As stated, reality is the result of uniform teleological patterns and creates immensely universal experiences of life and reality.

5- Because reality is teleologically uniform, we must address a bit of epistemology, for knowing is only truly knowing if things can be factual, and there are objective “things” in our shared reality. This means that, through reason and disciplined enquiry, we can discover objective facts about the world — facts that are themselves expressions of the same universal teleological patterns that structure reality.

6- Because the very substrate of our lived experience is teleologically uniform and holistically ordered, truth can thus never be ‘relative’ nor ‘subjective’ — it is, instead, the accurate apprehension of those universal patterns.

7- Truth thus emerges when human perception accurately maps onto the physical world. In other words, when humans perceive reality — regardless of minor individual interpretive differences — and cognitively process it, we give birth to the concept of truth. Of course, something “out there” is true even before we label it as such; yet truth as we know it is the integration of human cognition with the epistemically and teleologically uniform structure of reality.

So, truth exists. A statement that will garner very little attention in our post-truth society. For all the use of the term, as a society as a whole, we don’t really seem to care about the nature of truth, largely because the vast majority of individuals have been taught that truth is relative. And that every time they fail to counter someone’s arguments, they invoke the foul and wretched “my own truth” card, a truly odious and intellectually lazy frame of mind. I should like to think that this is a result of the lack of an ontologically grounded system that proves objective truth. As long as one cannot argue for the existence of objective truth from first principles, then one leaves the terrain wide open to the relativists and deconstructionists. This immediately brings into the right perspective the denial of the biological sexes, for instance. The binary division between men and women is teleologically derived from the very fabric of reality. This binary is not an arbitrary social construct but an expression of Holism’s ‘synthetic unity’ — the same ordering principle that drives atoms into molecules, cells into organisms, and mind into personality. It is one of the universal teleological patterns that the self-configuring reality (SCSPL) actualizes.

Only the faint of heart circumambulate bold claims: The human world is a wretched place precisely because we treat truth as a mere utility — a commodity to be stretched, traded, inverted, adapted, altered, or withheld at will. We toss the term around like loose change, utterly desacralizing its nature. In the absence of truth, everything unfolds in the shadows.

Once we recover an ontologically grounded account of truth — one rooted in the holistic, teleological grammar of reality — lazy relativism collapses, and we regain the shared ground on which genuine conversation, science, and even politics become possible again.