Wednesday 25 August 2010

Entropy of Truth:Shuffling Facts


What would you say if I tell you that all along history the little Devil Boltzmann mixed true quotations with false ones? Our little devil likes just the sake of it; he doesn't have any strategy nor he wants to deceive human beings, not in particular. He simply wants to have fun.
History wouldn't be credible anymore? Is it now?
Now let's say some people know he did, but they have no way to systematically discover it; they found some of samples of wrong quotations, they corrected them or did try and that's it. The lesson is that now they know.
History wouldn't be credible anymore? Is it now?

I think we are ready to change game: what do you do with genuine quotations? What do you do with truth in general? Don't take me too radically: it's not this game. I know that truth can be meaningful if in the majority of cases, it's more or less what we think. Call this the basic notion of truth. Now keep on the game. After you know the meaning of truth, after you collected a vast sample of true propositions (and a lot of true quotations), you're ready for the game.

Do you think that at the end of the series of the true sentences and the true quotations, there is something? Or someone? There is a price? Do you find the sense of truth at the end of this...rainbow? Do you know really something more? Do you know everything now? Are you wise?

It's a thin line this. Radical deceiving is pointless: it transforms your words in verbalism. Fine. But a mixing false quotations, just to shape a new sense, a new meaning, is that evil? I don't find evil, but patronising. You have your mystical agenda and your false quotations are supposed to lead me to your imaginarium. It's a game.


You have also an alternative: mixing false quotations randomly. So precisely, even you don't know which are the good, which the fake ones. Why? Well you'll start to think more. It's not a quotaton or a proposition that makes the truth sense. You need much more effort, you need to work in very stormy cognitive conditions. And you know it, so you're not exactly misled, it's more a virtual conceptual training camp. This is the entropy of truth: good cartesian reflection on fakeness of language.

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