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Comment by alexpetralia | Hacker News Reader

My metaphysical philosophy has always been:

- Objective truth: the physical world as it is. There are no "chairs" in this world (would an ant recognize a chair, or a bacteria?) - only data from which we can derive patterns.

- Consensus truth: what people have agreed to be true, often via perception or abstract logic. This is math, that is red, this is a chair, that is democracy.

- Subjective truth: what I believe to be true, by my own rationality or my own perception. This can sometimes deviate from consensus truth (eg. optical illusions).

There must be a term for this philosophical position, but I haven't found it yet (or the thinker associated with it). Obviously this is due to my ignorance because this is not a particularly profound metaphysical position to take.

Does anyone know the name of this?

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There's also:

- Survival based truth: what we believe in order to keep being alive and make more of us. The moment we mess too much, we're not there any more. An unforgiving, but strangely, also somewhat flexible truth.

I think this is the winner, at least for people and animals. It's got an internal self-righting system and transcends distinctions such as objective, subjective and consensus - it's all of them. It's the kind of truth that keeps existing by adapting to the world, or else it gets eradicated.

I believe this is what Jordan Peterson calls "Darwininan truth." He thinks it is the ultimate truth, but Sam Harris (on the side of "Newtonian truth") would certainly beg to differ.

I can only imagine that there are both, the "Darwinian" one that we humans use as an interface to an underlying, patternless, data-oriented "Newtonian truth."

The fact that you acknowledge there exists an objective truth means you're a philosophical realist, as opposed to an idealist.

The fact that you recognize there's a subjective truth, and that it can differ from the objective truth, hints at philosophical skepticism -- though skepticism goes a bit further and claims the objective truth is essentially unknowable.

I don't really understand your "consensus truth" category. The things you list are just labels, not truth statements. Apples and oranges.

Thank you for these. I will read up on them.

I don't know any name for it but I've wondered about those same delineations (my term for the second is "consensus-based reality"). I worry about to what extent the first one can be said to definitely exist.

I use "reality" instead of "truth" for all of those positions, reserving "truth" for logic or the opposite of a lie.

The book Sapiens uses the term "intersubjective" for your consensus truth. He describes such things as shared fictions.

Great book, as far as books that attempt to cover all of human history, science, and philosophy go.

Roughly speculative realism?

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