It's True: We Cannot Know Truth!

The word truth is thrown around today like a blunt instrument. People use it as if merely labelling something truth, instantly transforms it into an objective fact. But outside of the simplest physical declarations, like pointing to the sky and noting that it is raining, absolute objective truth is an impossibility for us, humans.

Take a simple, observed event: a man in a blue jacket strikes a woman on the third step of a six-step staircase. If three people witness this act, they will recount three entirely different scenes. One will insist the jacket was green; another will swear the assailant used his left hand; the third will argue the blow landed at the bottom of the stairs, not the top. Yet, each will confidently step forward, declaring their version as the absolute truth.

This is a failure of our biological machinery. Human memory is not a body-cam video recording. It is a shifting, reconstructive process heavily distorted by selective attention and the adrenaline of high-stress events.

If this distortion is acute for eyewitnesses in the present, it is multiplied exponentially for the historian. The historian must reconstruct the event centuries after, making sense of translated sources. They are trapped in presentism, viewing the past through the distorted lens of modern morals. Absolute, static truth cannot be found in the archives.

To state that humans can experience the world directly is utterly meaningless. Direct experience is a biological oxymoron. Our brains sit in a dark, silent skull, entirely reliant on sensory organs to translate external reality into electrical impulses from which our brains - our minds - construct our own virtual reality.

Furthermore, our hardware is highly selective long before a signal ever reaches the brain. We assume no filter exists, but our eyes are blind to all but a fraction of a physical universe that possesses an infinite electromagnetic spectrum with no theoretical upper or lower limits. We float in an infinite ocean of physicality, experiencing only a tiny fraction, that which evolution required to survive.

What we call reality is merely our own individual, virtual creation of the out there. It’s a controlled hallucination. Truth is not an inanimate object waiting to be discovered in the dirt. It is a phenomenon that requires a consciousness to perceive it, shape it, and name it.

If abstract truth then, does not exist as a static noun, where does that leave us?

Truth operates exactly like energy: it is entirely unevidenceable as a potential state. An idea sitting quietly in a human mind is just potential energy, invisible and unverified, much like an unread book on a shelf, which Umberto Eco described as a lazy machine, awaiting a reader.

Truth only manifests during the action of converting potential energy into kinetic energy. It is evidenced only when an internal simulation collides with the physical world through action. If you step in front of a moving bus, your internal simulation ends; the truth is proven by the undeniable physical consequence of the collision. Truth is a verb, not a noun. It is a dynamic event, measured entirely by its predictive utility and its real-world impact.

The ultra-post-modern phrase my truth is a meaningless and dangerous linguistic impostor.

When people say my truth, they are not actually speaking of truth at all. They are attempting to steal the majestic, binding authority of the word Truth and to weaponise it to protect what is actually just a highly filtered, deeply flawed, individual perspective. It is stealth, surrepticiously designed to insulate personal biases, emotions, and faulty virtual simulations, from criticism, scrutiny and verification.

There is no my truth, there is only the vast, infinite potential of the universe, the narrow virtual simulation of our individual minds, the kinetic reality of our actions and…..our opinions.

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