The First Level of Truth: Assumption

(preamble: Underlying these efforts to understand and explain how society works in order to identify with a functional role within that society is the assumption, belief, hope, faith, fantasy, or delusion that understanding allows a problem to be solved and that finding my place in society is a problem with a possible solution.)

The first level of Truth is

Assumption

The basis of all logic and math by necessity begins with unprovable statements that are accepted as correct. All further knowledge and facts are correct or incorrect, conditional on these accepted statements. This is the ground level, the bare and naked truth. Which has no reliance on other statements. Its only source is experience of physical reality. [assumption] since reality, the physical state of the universe, is temporal, fleeting, and cannot ever be reproduced (much less at will), [deduction] truth, the time-independent, constant, and reproducible representation of reality taken at a specific time and spatial position, cannot be a mirror copy of reality. Reality is a state of the universe. It is affected by time, its internal configuration of constituent matter-energy, and laws/physics/principles (if these are separate entities at all and aren't just manifestations of aforementioned configuration). Truth is a "photograph" of reality. It does not change with time, the medium that stores truth exists in reality and therefore can deteriorate but the representation itself is an abstraction that does not ever change. So the photograph may fade colors or smear if the paper is damaged, so the truth is no longer accurately represented, but the representation itself though it might no longer have a correct physical counterpart never changes. However good a representation, truth is not reality. Because truth is not affected the same way as reality is by its own configuration, by what it is. It does not change into something different. It is not alive, but reality is.

Truth will not respond to stimuli, it cannot produce descendants of itself. Reality you can either view as self-contained, meaning with the inclusion of all time as its existence it never changes it is what it was is and will be and that is its entirety. Or you can view it as its existence ever changing in time. Either way, truth is different because it either possesses no temporal existence or it never changes itself. It is at best, one dimension short of reality. Even if you map every point in space with absolute precision and synchronous time, using identical materials as representations; i.E. Clone a freeze frame of reality at a point in time ( which is impossible that would require reality itself to be stagnant and contradict its own internal configuration and physics ). That representation would lack history and future knowledge. It doesn't know what it will do next or where it comes from (temporal). You could say, well map all the velocities and forces etc. But those have no meaning in absence of time. You could say, take two representations at at time interval apart and then you could judge the temporal properties. Apart from the lack of precision that entails, the failing remains that truth itself does not dictate its own existence the way reality can. You would need to string together separate distinct representations outside of itself to know a property of the corresponding reality, namely consequence. Truth is only an observation of a state of the universe at time and space. It has no information about causality or consequence. Perhaps reality does not either. But at least it holds the outcomes, where truth does not.

Anyways you can't prove that the representation is reality. It is not. The only thing that corresponds to the representation is reality, which is gone the moment it is and can't be reproduced. So representation is an approximation. It is valid if 1) it is self consistent. It does not contradict itself. 2) it does not contradict current state of reality in that the current reality does not forbid it. It is correct with regard to an aspect if to any extent that representation agrees with the state (at a certain time and spatial) of reality. How do we verify if a representation is in agreement? There is no provable way. The only thing we can do is use our experience of reality to guide us. If the representation and the experience (memory, recording, observation, whatever indicator we use) produce the same or similar outcomes to the observer, then a valid representation may be correct.
Truth is a valid representation of reality that the observer experiences in the same manner as he does reality.

Sadly truth is a construct that is fabricated on a static layer on top of reality. Reality itself contains no truth. Reality simply is what it is. Truth cannot also simply be what reality is. That notion is illogical, because then it would have to be reality and simultaneously not be. Truth is a representation which has no inheritance of provability that reality possesses. Reality does not prove something is. It simply is.

In fact provability is a property that applies only to logic. Reality is not bound by logic. It does not do what "makes sense" for that would require 1) an objective, and 2) thinking. Actions based on a belief or understanding, 3) deliberate decisions. Choices. That's what can be proved with a logical assertion. The objective is either true or false based on the correctness of the understanding the relationship between two or more assumptions, whether the choices are able to be taken and whether they are relevant, and whether the objective is an outcome of the process.

You can't really ever prove anything such as did some event take place. You assume it did if you collect enough indicators and you decide to arbitrarily stop. Indicators being pieces of representation, truths, that corroborate a single valid representation that is your original statement to prove. But you haven't really proved it. You have just gathered a lot, a lot, of second level circumstantial evidence.

If a man confesses to a murder, a room full of people testify to witnessing him do the murder, and his dna and fingerprints are found on the murder weapon, did you prove that he did it? No. Even if the defendant believes he did it, and all the people are honest, and the weapon evidence is authentic. You did not rule out all alternative possibilities. You gave one credible possibility and provided many pieces of supporting truths. But did you show all your truths made it impossible for the defendant not to have killed the victim? That is the impossibility of real proof.

The first two are all testimony from people, who are not reliable sources of representing reality. A man who is confused or full of sorrow may be convinced he did commit murder when he didn't. Witnesses are all relying on memory which is not accurate, and their interpretations of what they saw. The whole concept of proving guilt through social testimony is archaic and flawed. It was around because before video, and dna, fingerprints, and technology the only record or data or representations were stored in the memories of people.

But even data itself can be used to construct different representations of reality. One could show a video of the murder. It can be faked, it can be digitally edited. Before that was possible without detection, let's say the tape is completely real. Everything is visible and the action is clear. Video is not self-justifiable of a person's thoughts. We can even see victim insult the murderer, then the murderer expression show anger, then shoot. We would construct a valid representation of what happened as the murderer got mad and decided to kill. Another valid representation is the victim manipulated the gunman to take his life, essentially assisted suicide. You only rule out one or the other when you can produce a representation based on indicators that contains no self-contradiction, which also make all other representations self-contradictory.

But the grounds of all these indicators are unprovable themselves. There is no way to prove that individual facts are correct, only if multiple of these reported facts are in agreement. So it goes back to the original point of basis of truth. It is unprovable. At some point you have to make the assumption that your representation is correct, then base all other provable statements off of your original representation. If enough representations agree with each other, say the same thing, then you make the assumption that the agreed aspect is a correct representation. But only because you have no further way of knowing. That's as close as you get to reality. If you have an agreement of representations that says the other representations are inaccurate, then you compare the two sets with a larger set of representations to see which is more consistent. There is no proving. Proving only applies to logic. Where you start with a statement, a representation mind you, that you don't even question. It is assigned either true or false, and assumed correct. Then you evaluate a second statement as true or false. The proving part is evaluating a process that rules out all other statements as valid. You are left with a single valid statement, therefore you must adopt it as your representation of reality, if you wish to utilize any representation of reality at all.

Any recording of an indicator of reality is non-exclusively valid. Even atomic clock that measure time. Over a period of time if all readings are equally spaced, and all things point to it being accurate. If it measures some event occurred at time a. There is an imprecision. Okay, you say, well the event did happen at that time, it's just the measuring device isn't precise enough. But the event itself did happen at one precise moment. Well, no event can be defined precisely. What is an event? Is it the atom itself moving? Then, yes the time it hit is the time it hit. But that is not a functional indicator or measurement, because i could have told you that with no recording device. It has to be relative to other events to have any meaning. So what possibly could be arbitrarily precise synchronization of separate events? When an object passes by? The first atom of it? Where do you define the atom? It's made up of moving particles itself, that have no fixed position. The clock has to be linked to some other mechanism to either display or record the measurement as well. That movement of electrons/whatever to produce the measurement requires a very small but finite and positive discrepancy between atomic clock reality and recorded representation. It is impossible to remove this error. You would need to know the precise length of wiring, transmission speed, etc. Those things change with state of environment. You may not ever have that level of precision affect the outcomes of any differences of your representation vs the reality. But fundamentally, there is a difference. At some point, you have to say good enough, the two are not identical but the representation is still correct, because the outcome of the representation has sufficiently small difference with the outcome of reality.