Today I woke up with the second- or even actual-worse coughing fit yet.
It's lessened, now, but when I do cough, it's a worse cough than my original cough.
Blast.
Oh well.
I'll continue to try some unconventional therapy.
I mainly came here to blog about something I was inspired to write about.
I read an article (well, skimmed, really), and I couldn't help but think that the main thing that article was about is...the subject of truth.
And if you're feeling as philosophical as I am, have this for a quote.
There is no such thing as an absolute truth. Only the truth as we perceive it to be. The only true truth is that truth is relative.
This might seem a bit cynical. But it's true. Throughout history, time and time again, this has been shown to be the case. It is practically hardwired into the human condition. Have you heard the expression, "History is written by the victors."? Yeah, guess why that expression exists. It is because the victors get to record their version of the "truth".
It was the absolute truth to people at a time that the world must be made up of four elements. It was the absolute truth to people at a time that we had an earth-centric universe. It was an absolute truth to, say, the Roman people that those outside of their civilization were savages. It was an absolute truth to history that the fall of the Roman Empire was the "fall of civilization". It was an absolute truth to Christians that their holy wars were to reclaim the sacred lands from the savages. It was an absolute truth to their opposing side that their peaceful, prosperous, philosophical selves were forced to fight back against barbarian looters, more or less.
It was an absolute truth that the New World was ripe for the taking. It was an absolute truth that the denizens of the land were less than human. It was an absolute truth that slaves were less than human. We hold as an absolute truth that people believed the world was flat. We hold as an absolute truth things such as "primitive" cultures seeing "advanced" cultures as being gods.
We hold as an absolute truth that civilizations which held religion believed every single word of said religion. We hold, as an extent of these beliefs, the absolute truth of an idea that those who came before us fundamentally thought of things differently than we do. So we hold the absolute truth that "we are better than they were". (I'm mostly getting at things like, humans are fundamentally storytellers. We like to tell fictional stories and embellish the truth about real ones. We also like to create explanations for phenomena, so we combine those two. That doesn't mean literally everyone believed them, or even believed most of them. It just means that enough people told the stories that we got them recorded, and yet, to us, we foolishly believe everyone took those to be true. It'd be like a person from 3,000 AD looking at OUR society and thinking "everyone in that age believed in a single God and took the Bible literally", and them laughing at the foolishness of us primitives.)
Some people hold as an absolute truth the literal words of religious texts, thinking they are meant to be followed to the actual letter. Some people hold as an absolute truth that these religious texts are actually literally the Word from God Himself. Some people hold as an absolute truth that God absolutely demands they do certain actions. Some people hold as an absolute truth that science is perfect and that we know basically everything and it should be followed instead.
I could go on all day about these absolute truths that people believe in. Some people believe in the absolute truth of their facts. Some people believe in the absolute truth of the other side's facts. Some people believe in the absolute truth that facts are easily manipulated. You get the idea. The point I make should be evident enough from this all.
None of those are actual, true, absolute truths. What they are, are relative truths. They are truth, as perceived by an individual. To that individual, it is the truth. To that individual, that is how the world was, and how the world is. To that individual, they cannot fathom how someone can cling to the falsehood which is the stance in opposition to their own, because they have all this evidence, all this proof, which backs up, which verifies, which vilifies their truth, so how could any sane, any rational, person see things in a different way?
And what they fail to grasp is that the other side holds those same exact views on their own personal, perceived, relative truth. So the truth is subjective. The truth is in the eye of the beholder. Nothing in this world, absolutely nothing, can be called a truly absolute truth.
Because things happen in our world. Yet how those things are seen is different to each of us. This actually ties into my meism, believe it or not. It's been a while since I've talked about my personal religion (it's weird--new readers of my blog, I'm afraid I can't sum it up so you'd just have to search through my archives manually since there are bits and pieces spanning the two years I've been running this blog), but the last time I did, I think I briefly covered this.
The reason I call it my meism is because it is a belief system centric to me. It is my personal belief, my personal outlook on all aspects of the world, taking from religion, science, history, even fictional stories, to paint a picture of our world as I perceive it to be. In other words: my personal truth.
More or less, my belief there is that perception is power, in that how we perceive the world is how we shape it to be. In a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, to some extent we can warp reality, be it in our favor or to our detriment. The multiverse is an infinitely-expanding tree, with new branches forming every minuscule millisecond. We get to shape, to influence, which paths our tree grows on, and it is through that system of seeing the world through our differing beliefs which makes this possible.
I really wish I could fully put together everything about my highly-complex, ever-evolving, seemingly-contradictory meism in one place, and also to fully explain the concepts in my head which are largely not given in-depth (especially since I don't actually know what I have, and haven't explained more often than not), but oh well. I suppose this was a sufficiently crazy ramble for today.
Basically, the definition of truth is "what actually happened/is happening". But while events happen every millisecond of every day, these events exist both outside of human perception, and yet are defined by human perception. And because humanity has no way of universally seeing the outside of human perception, and human perception differs from individual to individual, we can never have anything which is truly an absolute truth. Simply...truths which we usually accept as being the truth.