I was reading about Clojure’s views on truth and falsehood this morning. Some of them are interesting:
(true? true) ; -> true
(false? false) ; -> true – a classic double negative
Clojure also has the value ‘nil’.
(true? nil) ; -> false
(false? nil) ; -> false
Then I went on LinkedIn and someone asked if there is ever an absolute truth. It’s a question I’ve been thinking about, so I wrote this:
I think that “at non-quantum scales”, it seems likely there can be only one set of events which actually happened but every human is wandering around in their own model of reality, based on their perception of incomplete data. Sometimes, a slow-motion replay helps fill in some of the gaps but it will be the same every time we look and it may not reveal ‘the whole truth’ we seek. We all have a simplified view of what reality is, based on our personal knowledge and beliefs and we can’t go back in time for more data, so our view of truth is an approximation. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says that it can only ever be an approximation.
In summary: I believe there is one truth but that doesn’t mean we will ever know what it is. Alternative perceptions may be just as valid as our own; possibly more so.
[ The original version of this post said nil meant “I don’t know.” I immediately discovered that was wrong. In Clojure, only ‘false’ returns ‘true’ to ‘false?’ but nil is ‘falsey’, so each of the following forms returns “F”:
(if false “T” “F”)
(if nil “T” “F”)
You can see how that could confuse a stupid person ]
On The Outside 