What is Truth?

Today on Ask Cahlen I'm answering the question, "What is Truth?" Truth is the way things actually are. There is only one thing we can know for certain, but other things can be known to be true with high confidence.

Truth is just the way things are. I think that we all understand what that means when we say that, but when you're getting logical and intellectual about it there are rabbit holes you can go on down where you start to wonder if there's anything which is true. Like maybe it's all just a subjective illusion and everybody's truth is the truth for them.

I think that that is a mistake and people fall into that mistake because they can't find any examples of something that they know for sure with hundred percent certainty, but the thing is we all do have that. We all know that this is happening right now, and that can't be doubted. Now it could be totally an illusion, it could all be fake and it may not actually represent anything in an outside world, but this is happening for sure. So you already know that in this universe at least one truth exists for sure.

Then you have to ask yourself, "Is anything else true?" You have to admit that don't know anything else for sure is true beyond that this is happening, but let's just decide to accept it as a possibility and do some exploration and start to find out if there are things that we can find which are consistently the case. Maybe they won't always be the case, but they seem to be the case for as long as we've been alive, and as long as anyone that has ever recorded anything has been alive.

For example: gravity. If you step off a cliff you're probably going to fall down. Now if you've never stepped off the cliff before you don't know for sure that you're gonna fall just because everyone else did, but it's probably the case and so we can say with 99.99999% certainty that you're going to fall. So at that point, while we admit that we don't know for sure and we could have some anomaly occur, we can say that it is the truth that you are going to fall.

I think we would all agree that that's true, and I think we are all able to understand that even though we know it's true we can still question whether it might not be true. We're right that it probably is true and so we should act according to that. The reason that it's important is because you don't want to fall off a cliff.

Thanks for watching!

Cahlen Lee