Is truth unified?

The world is in conflict. To name a few: we’ve passed 1000 days since the Ukraine invasion; there remain ongoing conflicts between Israel and Hamas; North and South Korea are still at odds; and an atheist-theist war is dividing the west.

They’re certainly no easy way to resolve these conflicts, otherwise they would be happening. Needless to say, these wars are larger manifestation of the conflicts you face in your everyday life. Perhaps if we can elucidate the source of these conflicting ideas, we can begin to understand how things have gotten so far. That begs the question, are they complicated, or merely complex?

If you take a formal debate in any subject, where do they start? Definitions. The first thing you can expect from the opposing parties is to establish agreement in the metaphysics of the subject matter. The reason is that the landscape of cognition—and knowledge ultimately—builds on hierarchical dependencies.

“Tyler, what the hell does that mean?”.

Well, here’s one way of thinking about it: suppose you’re trying to determine the importance of a scientist’s work in the field, one of the ways you do that is by tracking the citation count of their works. If that area hasn’t been corrupted by p-hackers, the more citations a paper has, the more other works rely on that paper’s results, and therefore their work is more fundamental. Now, imagine that you can continue down this path of dependencies, at some point you hit a floor through which all things rest, and that would be what you consider ‘fundamental’.

So why set definitions in a debate? They establish the foundation through which each party can build their tower of arguments. From there—if both debaters are being academically honest—each of them can build higher and higher, until they reach point of conflict to rectify, knowing that the foundation is mutually solid.

I wondered to myself where the bedrock rests because I don’t believe it is simply ‘turtles all the way down’. There comes to mind a plethora of ideas, but one common-ground worth considering is that the order of the universe is built on effable, albeit complex, properties such that are consistent across it’s entirety. Now, perhaps it will take forever to go from the metaphysics of the universe to resolving the war on pure theory, but the bottom line here is, we believe that truth is unified. If you just rolled your eyes, thinking to yourself “that’s so obvious”, then I believe we’re on the right track.

I will leave this train of thought here: where do we go from there?