Surely you would admit that this breaks down in many cases. Suppose you are teaching someone to drive. They might have some funny ideas about what they can do safely. But there isn't any room for debate. Same if we are building a bridge. I can't come in with some creative new idea and implement it with out first learning the right way to build a bridge. Nature doesn't have some mental model that I can choose to disagree with. It is what it is and I have to adapt my model or suffer.
> They might have some funny ideas about what they can do safely. But there isn't any room for debate
What are the ideas, and why isn't there any room for debate? It seems like a bit of an imaginative and wide-open perception to yield much traction for the purposes of this discussion.
> I can't come in with some creative new idea and implement it with out first learning the right way to build a bridge
Hmm, is there "a" right way? What size is the bridge? For what use? I can build a Lego bridge that's pretty strong. Did I just meet nature at its bridge-building rules while not knowing your right way, or are those rules perhaps more nuanced than expected? Also, are we sure that the imaginary creative idea in question is in total disagreement with nature? What if it's fitting observed perceptions? Perhaps it has leverage in this way or that. Again there's not much else to be said in the conceptual zone here. I'd also add that dichotomous model like "adapt or suffer" is in my experience a common sign of a mental model which may be in need of further adaptation :-)
Adapt or suffer is not a mental model. I'm not talking about politics or religion. If you routinely drive down the wrong side of the highway because you would not adapt then you will suffer. That's just the way it is. Can you agree on that?
The imagined example seems suspiciously detached from real context, and also detail-avoidant. Hypotheticals that get even broader and less detailed aren't really doing such an absolutist position any favors. Instead they would seem to buttress the position that absolutism is easily divorced from real-life utility and social benefit.
I would offer that the questions you ask do seem to point at a fixed mental position, around which theoretical and intractable constructs are arranged as seems most expeditious to the closure of the discussion. If that's what you really want, permission to go your way and think your thoughts without others butting in with details, then you don't really need a partner with whom to reach that decision. But there's also no guarantee that relevant and contextual details won't cause someone in your position considerable philosophical trouble in the future, around this fixed concept of truth...
Fair enough. You avoided my question. Looks like we are at opposites then. I see your position as absolutist. Everything is a model. No exception. There is no truth.
I think there is truth and that we have to drop our egos and continually adapt and understand. To be honest I think that humanities ego has never been bigger, postmodernism is a symptom of this, and we are suffering more than we need to because of it.
To be clear, your question about traffic was unwisely unencumbered by real context and details. Let me give you a personal example: I have a friend who routinely drove in the oncoming traffic lane. She never had to adapt to a rule about driving in this way, because she had an additional layer of frameworks to protect her. She was a construction engineer. The adaptation was already performed for her, by smart civic policy.
So what you have to ask is, who's doing this thing, and why? What factors are involved? Details. Otherwise the solution will fail to the extent that it is divorced from context. And that's no way to develop policy, be it personal or public. This kind of fixed, non-adaptive thinking leads to the Judge Judy phenomenon, rewriting public policy discourse as shallow "common sense" pornography for what amounts to entertainment for armchair critics.
Your summary of my position as "no truth" is also unfair to the details, since I communicated upthread that multiple truths and perspectives may exist, and that this can create a smarter approach to problem-solving. This is true even in computer programming, where multiple, conflicting truths about an object can be reconciled, simulated and leveraged. But the trick is depth, and details. That's why there's no computer program that stops everyone from driving in oncoming traffic. By itself it's not a useful rule in that it fails to account for the exceptions.
What seems to be happening at the end of your comment is that you have a set of perceptions from your past, these exist as fixed labels or categories in your mind, and you are attempting to map them onto my words without so much as asking if they're relevant. Which, unfortunately, they're not. Postmodernism needn't be involved; these ideas predate it by quite a stretch. So while your conclusion seems to have felt therapeutic, it's also a communication of subjective-emotive values, and not quite ready for logical and useful public discourse.
I'm trying to be straight with you and ignoring the condescension in your comments. (Anyone can do that). This appears to have been far too charitable given your last sentence.
Anyway, I'll continue to treat you as an equal and tell you straight that I think you are being dishonest throughout this exchange. Most people when asked the question about driving in the wrong lane would give me the benefit of the doubt and assume that it wasn't the highly unusual situation you describe. I think your know full well what I meant but you chose to come at it like a lawyer (which is what I mean by dishonest). In order to prevent that I'll try to lock it down:
Would you agree that if you routinely drive down the wrong side of the highway when it is fully open to the public and there are cars driving against you in the lane that you are in that in that case you are likely to suffer as a result of your failure to adapt your model to that of the rest of the society around you?
> come at it like a lawyer (which is what I mean by dishonest)
This seems to get more and more emotional, but even if not so, I would suggest that people who feel it's an absolute truth that every lawyer is dishonest are really doing the legal world a disservice by not at least offering training via ethics courses.
I also admit to being frustrated at the unfairness of the argument, in which I've communicated several times a point that gets at the crux of the issue: Real context and details. Both are needed.
So what happened was: I encouraged you to think about real context, and instead you added more details to the fake example, turning it into a corner case and making it an exceptional situation as opposed to a workable general example justifying absolute truth. In effect you've further marginalized the reality and utility of the absolute truth idea.
Your sense of the existence of absolute truth is apparently held hostage by unrealistic conceptual examples, turning it into a straw man, which I hope you can understand I'm not interested in debating...
There's an article linked from hn that I just read where the author says:
"There are, after all, no post-fact conversations when we talk about how to build a bridge, for example."
I don't know if I would be able to function in a world where this kind of statement had to be qualified every time. The editor of Die Zeit appears to think similarly. So it looks like there's at least three of us who think like this. But you're not alone either. Each to their own.
Your scenario has changed significantly now to someone willingly driving at oncoming traffic in the same lane. I think you’ve inadvertently proven your adversary’s point.
Knee jerk black and white statements are very rarely correct.
