Truth???I’m writing about truth because it’s almost three in the morning and I can’t sleep. But that’s not the whole story. I’m not going to go on about truth in general. The aspect of this thing called truth that I’m going to to touch upon is that, with truth (capital-T, small T—doesn’t matter), you never do seem to get the whole story. I could try to talk about truth in an objective-sounding way, but I won’t. I concede that what I’m saying now is my own personal take. But one might say that’s self-evident.

I know of many people who believe they know the truth, or at least something that can be regarded as the absolute truth. Even if they don’t know everything there is to know about every single field of knowledge, they somehow know one or a few things to be true, without a doubt. Of course, you can say that you know that you exist and that there’s no way for that to be false. But I’m not talking about that sort of thing. Even so, I can’t say with the same amount of certainty that I know I exist. Descartes and others already said something about that, though, and so I won’t go further into it.

What I feel about the nature of truth (at the time of writing this) is that there’s no limit at defining it. It seems that no matter how accurately and precise that truth is depicted, it can always be seen with greater accuracy and precision. Our physical senses and whatever instruments we might invent have their limits, but whatever phenomena we observe and our capacity to explain it don’t seem to have any boundaries. It’s like a fractal, and even if it’s basically the same thing no matter how much you zoom in on it, I find the conceptual simplicity and the actual complexity to be incredibly fascinating. It compels me to continue to articulate the matter more eloquently. That is to say, I want to understand the truth about truth itself more and more, and with the increase in comprehension, to be able to actually explain in it in English so that I may attempt to pass that understanding onto someone else, and in doing so, revealing any ignorance so that I can address that and so on.

Passing my understanding of the truth onto someone else is actually what eventually caused me to write this entry and is another aspect of truth that I might share my reflections on some other time. I’m talking about the fact that information copies itself. Genetic information, memetic information, you name it. I can’t even explain right now why I find that so significant, but I do. I guess it’s the part about information self-replicating without anyone else copying it. It just seems to do that on its own. And it won’t stop! You can help information copy itself (e.g., by having offspring or whistling a tune), or try to prevent it, but eventually you’ll be dead and the information will continue on its own. It’s crazy, man.