Quote:
Originally posted by Flame Of Liberty@Sep 29 2004, 02:29 AM
What I am trying to say is that there is one truth. There may be several `understandings` of the truth, however the truth itself does not depend on a human, because facts are result of "natural laws" such as for example "time is scarce" that are a priori true and cannot be proved wrong logically. Thus facts are independent of humans and work even if no one is prepared to acknowledge them. Im not sure where relativists see the problem?
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Actually, that's wrong. There's no such thing as a fact that exists independently of an observer. Let's take "time is scarce" for example. Time is a human concept we use on several levels -- the average person uses it to delineate their day, physicists use it for god knows what (I don't pretend to be a scientist -- some relativity stuff etc.). However, there is no such thing as 'time' persay, just as there is no such thing as 'length' -- we artificially and arbitrarily impose linguistic barriers on time and then call it an 'hour', or an 'evening', or an 'event'. There is no universal clock ticking off the nanoseconds into eternity. There is no 'time' out there to be found.
Furthermore, scarcity is a far easier concept in which to reveal its intrinsic 'humanness'. Scarcity, unlike time, is a relative term. Therefore, it has to be compared to something. What is the only thing that can compare two things? You got it -- an observer. The phrase 'time is scarce' only makes sense if you have an idea what 'scarcity' means, and you can only know what that means if you have something that is abundant to compare it to. If time is scarce, that means it is MORE scarce (or less abundant) than some other thing -- let's say oil, just to keep this marginally on topic.
As such, the phrase 'time is scarce' is not only not a fact -- it wasn't a fact even before I began this post, it is a judgment -- it is a phrase that is entirely meaningless without a linguistic consciousness to interpret the "world" and then make this judgment.
In regards to a later post in this thread, about the tree falling in the forest -- you're missing the point entirely. Yes, the scientific mechanisms are probably still in effect if no one is around to hear the noise a falling tree makes. The point of that thought experiment is, what is a sound that doesn't have an observer? You can't just say "it's a compression of air waves moving through space", because that doesn't mean anything to our discussion. A sound only becomes a sound once it is heard -- there are untold numbers of compressed air waves moving through space that are never heard. But there has never been a sound that was not heard.