Replying to Avatar Katie

Pretty much everything under the umbrella of spiritually, for one. Beliefs about what a family should look like. What someone believes is right for their children. What someone believes are appropriate boundaries or limitations for engagement with others. Most things in life aren’t black and white, and it’s ok if we don’t all have the same definitions/goals/beliefs. In fact, battling to push beliefs as universal ideals have created a significant amount of harm historically.

I think of ML models such as deep nets are a good metaphor for this, sometimes the weights converge in roughly the same spots every time if left to train long enough. Most of the time, they don’t - the data is too complex, or there are unknowns. The patterns it picks up are valid, but they’re a byproduct of their journey. They get stuck in local minima and sometimes it takes awhile to get out of that space, sometimes they never do. One model may be more “right” than another.. but only if we can agree on the metric that we use to assess that, which usually there is not a single one or it’s measuring the wrong thing, or our target variable is flawed. Especially when it comes to encoding, which is what humans are doing every day.

Most probability density functions are simplified estimates based on limited observations. You can use something like a KDE to more accurately model distributions, but they’re highly sensitive to the data they’ve observed. Universal truth is more rare than not.

Even gravity, which we had a mathematical equation for on earth, was proven to be only valid… on earth. And the “true” model is more sophisticated when you looked outside of earth - which is when the theory of relativity was created. We are all estimating reality through our own observations and those that we collect from others. It’s unreasonable to assume we all have or should have identical encodings.

Ah, sure. A lot of variation based on circumstance etc. is perfectly reasonable. I imagine nearly everyone can agree on that. For me, it’s good to be married to my wife but obviously that specifically is not true for every other human. Or at the very least it can’t be true for my wife who can’t marry herself. 😆 anyway, the point remains that in a certain way “being married to gregorius’ wife is good true for gregorius but not her”

But you go too far if you use the word “humans” in a way that defines us from other things and yet do not think we have a shared nature about which a great many things are true (or false) for all of us.

Certainly many claims under the umbrella of spirituality are either true for all or false for all. It is illogical to hold that there is an omnipotent being for you but not for me. Or that “we are all one being” is true for me but not you. These are universal claims to truth and there’s no way around it.

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Some may believe there is not an omnipoent being. Some make believe there are many such. Some make feel the "spirit" is woven into the fabric of nature. I agree with the OP that what is True for an individual may not be true for all. There are many such topics and fields of study into this, no?

A universal claim is either universally true or universally false. Claims like “there is an omnipotent being” or “a spirit is woven into the fabric of nature” are universal claims, and whether you or me or anyone knows the truth of them doesn’t change that they are in fact either true or false universally.

But different people claim contrasting things as their truth

Indeed. And a strong understanding of “their truth” is the concept here I’d argue against. The fact of multiple claims doesn’t tell us anything about the claims per se.

1+1=1

1+1=2

1+1=3

It doesn’t matter how many people claim any of those is true or false as regards the truth of the claims themselves. We also don’t have to investigate any of these claims to be able to say that at most only one of them can be true.

Ah i guess I see where you are coming from. There are many truths but only one is true but only if they are mutually exclusive and from the same frame of reference

Maybe. I’m not at a place where I am willing to say, even conceptually, one religion or spiritual belief is inherently correct and the others are inherently wrong. Quantum is showing that unobserved elements can exist at a probabilistic state.

We make decisions, more often than not, based on probability distributions. And sometimes arg max probability is conflated with correctness or truth or accuracy. When in reality, sampling from a distribution is usually far more accurate.

Oh sure, I’m not, here, making a claim for any particular universal truth - just defending the idea of such a claim at all!

Yeah! I didn’t think you were :) but I think there is something to be said for the unknown. And I think there is a case to be made against even the existence of a universal truth in this. In either case, what someone believes spiritually, as there is no known, can’t be deemed as being more or less correct as what someone else believes. So in that sense… they are either all right or all wrong, as opposed to one being right and the rest being wrong.