The statement below is false
The statement above is true
It is just so ridiculously easy to manipulate language that any truth can be suitably twisted to suit our own personal experience, and/or to create logical fallacies and contradictions for our own amusement.
This is true even for mathematical truths, which are often cited as the ultimate example of a priori knowledge, which means that they're not dependent on our perception. However, in my "experience", these truths are very much the results of our perceptions.
- Geometric shapes are essentially idealizations of the shapes we observe in nature.
- Arithmetic is almost completely an experience-based mathematical system.
- Algebraic truths are arrived at using a set of notations that follow a fixed set of rules predetermined by a human agent.
The only redeeming quality of mathematical truths is that they do not appear to change with time and space, and in that sense are indeed "universal". However, even this property is bound to come under scrutiny with the discovery of mysterious regions of the universe where spacetime itself breaks down, and objective truth loses all meaning. We try to capture our lack of understanding of these regions by calling them 'black holes', another trick of language based on our perception of colours. Black signifies darkness, both literal and intellectual. Truly, the only thing we know for certain about these suckers is that we really don't know much at all!
As soon as one person, no matter how much knowledge he has accumulated, postulates an idea of truth independent of human perception, the idea becomes just another theory. And theories can be (in fact must be) refuted, whether by simple observation and intuition or by another equally self-consistent theory. What theorists often seem to forget is that the rules ‘created’ by them will always apply to their own theories, because that is their very definition! But the universal application of any theory will always be limited to things that we can actually perceive. So unless we can perceive the imperceptible (contradiction alert), we can never come up with a ‘theory of everything’. It’s a self-defeating exercise, but it does provide some interesting insights about things that we actually can perceive. These can be used for practical purposes, but it’d be helpful to remember that we may never find what we’re really looking for.
This is, of course, just another theory.
