What is a truth? A sum over all logics leading to it. So even lies, errors, delusions, and emotions, labelled as such, can, and must be part of a truth. Yes, Truth even includes all the falsehoods excluding it, just as light is defined by dark. Truth diffracts from error. Any truth incorporates not just the errors defining it by contrast, but also the maximum contexts of the logics leading to it.
This is eerily similar to the sum over histories of Quantum Mechanics!
Love is good, worth dying for, and how one came to be, but it’s also endorphins and how we survive. Truth and logic everywhere, and universal attractors of logic, in the differentil topological sense, are elements of truth… And yes, this includes errors, not just logical errors, data errors, but also emotional errors. Paths not to follow become themselves data points.
Thomas Edison’s response to a question about his many ‘experimental failures.’ “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”
The truth about the concept of energy is itself, as modern physics has it, but all the histories which led to it. It’s not just a question of how we got there as a civilization, but also often how we got there as growing neurologies, personally. Some errors are so natural to do, they should be taught, just as shoals have to be pointed out on maritime maps.
This is why truth, any truth, is hard to get to: truth is always a hydra made of many minds (each logic having a mind, a mentality, and emotionality of its own). Even a concept as mistakenly seemingly simple as an electron [1].
This is why censors should never be used: they cancel a piece of logic, and thus mutilate the truth.
Censors should never be used, except in the case of war, of course [2].
This general, abstract approach to truth may sound remarkably similar to the “sum over histories”, the path integral method of Quantum Physics. This is no accident, the same object, reality itself, having the same causes. Any physical event, says Quantum Physics is, in some sense rich in computational consequences, a sum over histories, and, as we talk about wave emplitude here, by “sum” is meant a sum not in the sense of adding numbers, but in the richer sense of interfering waves.
In the parable of the elephant, blind men describe various pieces of the elephant, in many different ways. The point is that the elephant is all that, and more. I propose to replace a set of three dimensional objects (here pieces of a pachyderm) by a set of logical systems. A logic can be incredibly general, and includes all categories (in the mathematical sense of the term).
The truth about an elephant is made of all the known logics leading to descriptions of the elephant, including the history of how its DNA evolved… (As new science will evolve, new logics, hence new truths about elephants will appear…)
But then getting to a truth is flowing along a logic which leads to it. It’s always going to be only part of the truth, because many other logics also get there… But the point is that, to approach a truth, one has to get along with the program of a particular logical-emotional logic flowing on its own like a river.
That means that any approach to truth is, and must be slanted, to use Emily Dickinson’s word. Most of the time, an immense variety of logics, each represented below by a particular colored arrow, points and constitute, as a set, what is meant by a particular truth. Truth is an inward and outbound hydra happily squirming in the boiling ocean of imagination made real:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
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[1] Even a concept as mistakenly seemingly simple as an electron in (Quantum and, or Classical) physics is such an hydra (yes even in Classical physics; consider near fields, advanced and, or retarded potentials, etc.; in QFT, electrons have become even intractable: fields…)
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[2] Censors should never be used, except in the case of war, of course. I listened, read and studied the arguments of tyrant Putin and his obsequious Orcs. I know them well, their lies are parts of the logics leading to the war they lead in Ukraine.
P/S: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —” muses on how to tell the truth, pleading for delivering truth not too directly. Truth would only overwhelm the recipient. Instead, she advocates to get at the truth in a sort of roundabout way, telling it gently or bit by bit, so as not to shock people with its “brilliance.”
So I gave a very different… slant on the subject of truth, turning Emily Dickinson on her head and transforming her in a drilling apparatus —one of America’s most influential poets weaponized—the poem showcases her skill with vast abstract ideas in succinct lines (in contrast to my firestorming style). Like nearly all of Dickinson’s poems, and many a great thinker’s work, it was not published until after her death. It was written sometime between 1858-1865.
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 