(December 8, 2010 at 10:48 am)Chuck Wrote:(December 8, 2010 at 5:31 am)theVOID Wrote:(December 8, 2010 at 5:16 am)Chuck Wrote: I would argue truth is a artifact of an perceptive mechanism evolved for the purpose of organizing mental models of the material world. Without intelligence, the rest of the material world continue to exist, and continue to behave. But the organized perception would not exist and so truth would not exist. So truth does not exist regardless of whether god exists. Truth only exist because you exist, and truth appears to be shared only because the perceptive mechanisms of your peers are similar, and when conditioned by similar social programing, generate similar communicable artifact.
That makes truth contingent upon minds, if no perceptive mechanism exist then nothing is true.
If truth is contingent upon minds then without minds A =/= ~A would be "untrue", which is false.
The proposition that truth is contingent upon the mind seems to me to be far different from the proposition that what is determined to true by the mind would be false without the mind. The concept to which the mind assigns a truth value would not exist without the mind.
I think you are making a mistake limiting truth to concepts relative to their consistency with reality, for instance, a mind determining that x is true has no impact on whether or not x is true, all it tells you is the opinion of the person evaluating x. For x to be true means that x is consistent with reality and that is something that is independent of mental processes.
I also think you might have contradicted yourself. For truth to be contingent upon a mind means that without minds there are no truths in the same way that water is contingent upon hydrogen and oxygen. Without hydrogen and oxygen there is no water, this is contingency. I suspect you had a different intent when you said contingent though.
Quote:You might postulate that something which is true must be seen as true by adequately sophisticated mind of any construction different from ours. This is difficult to establish either observationally or deductively. But even the acceptance of this does not imply independent existence of truth outside the mind. It merely means perceptive mechanism might be under certain convergent evolutionary pressure.
I would outright reject that notion. You can have two different mind-types or a million, what is true is still that which is consistent with reality, no matter how many different mind-types agree.
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