When I was about thirteen my brother taught me about something in school he had recently learned, Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity. My understanding of the universe at the time was one of objectivity, that things exist because they simply do, that science is the truth and everything else is false. Special Relativity tells us that things in the universe that we believe are constant, like the passing of time and the dimensions of space, are not necessarily so and instead depend on the velocity you're moving at. As you get closer to the speed of light things around you appear to slow down, time moves slower in your perspective. Importantly though those objects aren't moving slower, they just appear to be moving slower from your perspective because those objects appear to be moving fast and to their perspective you are moving fast and it's you who is moving slower in time. I was very interested in this concept but couldn't really understand it, how could both things move slower than each other at the same time? You can only explain it by discarding the concept of an objective truth, of an object reference of time, and instead say there are two different equally valid perspectives of the universe.
This was ground breaking for me. While I understood the concept of subjectivity, like what is the best colour and what is the best song, I had always assumed and believed that even these had an objective answer. Everything to me was objective and I didn't see myself as a perspective in a soup of subjectivity reaching for the objective but instead I was an arbitrator of the objective, my favourite song was the best song, my favourite colour is the best colour. Here however I was given the question which object is moving slower in time? And the answer is impossible to see objectively because they're moving slower in time relative to each other, thinking in terms of the objective only leaves paradox. This to me finally opened my eyes to the idea of multiple truths existing simultaneously, this moved me to Relativism.
Relativism in philosopher circles is kinda a naughty word. Philosophy is about answering the deep and meaningful questions of metaphysics and relativism doesn't really do that. It almost seems both obviously right and obviously wrong at the same time, of course things are subjective. Moral Relativism, the concept that true morals don't exist and instead depend on the society it exists in, seems like something obvious for somethings (like differing cultures and what-not) but seem totally wrong for others (it is wrong to kill pretty much universally). Relativism, to philosophers I suppose, is uninteresting and unimagined, it's like objectivism, it's "kiddy" philosophy that will one day allow you to move to real philosophy once you intellectually matured.
Truth be told this is somewhat true. As I had understood the concept that two truths can exist simultaneously, I started playing around with this concept and extended it to more things. Eventually, as one often does, I started applying it to everything and getting the perspective that "Everything is Relative", a common phrase people come up with. This helped me immensely in my life for a time, I started seeing myself as smaller with less important opinions. I was not the arbitrator of the objective but instead simply a voice in a cloud trying to get my point across. The concept that I might be wrong even if I really thought I was right became common place and I even embraced the idea that everyone could be wrong. Eventually this gave me new insights into empathy, psychology and navigation of social settings, so to me this philosophy was truly life changing. But, I had not applied the intellectual rigor yet and when I would debate this with friends they would be quick to point out its failings. If everything is relative, then is relativity relative? Is math relative? And so forth. Over time I developed my own personal theory of Relativism I call Set Relativism that attempts to address all the criticisms of relativism. I believed, with how impactful relativism had in my life that there must be truth in it. So lets explain what Set Relativism is.
The first principle in Set Relativism is that it is founded in absurdism. This is to say that whether there exists an objective truth to the universe does not matter really because such an objective truth is unprovable. If one person were to claim that they had a proposition that was true for all the universe, there would be no way he could prove with 100% certainty that the absolute truth exists. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is perhaps a testament to that. The theorem states that no mathematical theory can be both complete and consistent at the same time. Most of our mathematics rely on things known as Axioms, these are assumptions that we cannot prove are true but instead assert are true as part of the foundations of our mathematical formulation. Unfortunately we didn't create the physical universe we live in so we can't assert the axioms of our universe and instead can only infer them. These axioms are the laws of nature, the rules of physics we try to document, but where these rules came from we can never truly know and because the best we can do in figuring out these rules is to simply infer they exist we can never truly know whether these rules actually exist in the way we believe them too. So we can never truly prove any foundational proof of our universe, at least that's what Set Relativism postulates. As part of the relativistic theory itself, it doesn't claim to know things as that would be paradoxical. Instead Set Relativism says we assume that no objective truth is provable, and go from there, knowing in our minds that this foundation can be wrong.
The second principle in Set Relativism is that the universe is full of observers. Observers are not necessarily conscious, but are all perspectives, an infinite number, that the universe can possibly be rendered at. A perspective on a fundamental level can be seen as a sort of mathematical algorithm, a set of rules to apply to every point in the universe at every point of time. From these rules you assign certain properties to these points of spacetime in which you can ask questions, what is the colour, what is the distance, what is the morality of this point? For example, how I see this universe is a perspective based on my history, philosophy and limited human physiology, as well as my place in space-time and limited life span. I could ask "what is the colour of this text" and I can say "Black", I could also ask "what is the colour of the star 100 light years away 2 billion years in the future" and the answer would be "I don't know", as that's beyond my possible reference frame. A rock would equally have a perspective, it's function would be governed by physics and it's interpretation, it can only record interactions it has directly. Rays from the sun cause it to increase in temperature, time causes it to eventually crumble, ask it a question like is something morally good and it would have no answer, but ask it about it's physical interactions and it can answer. A question-answer dichotomy may not necessarily be the best analogy, a rock obviously can't answer questions, but what my point is, is that an observer is simply a state of possible interactions ran through some internal mathematical function. Each observer interacts with a limited number of things and these interactions interact in a specific way potentially unique to that observer. The whole collection of possible (and impossible) interactions within all time and all space for that observer make up the perspective of that observer.
The third principle is that each set of observers creates a new observer. As atoms create molecules which create proteins which create cells which create brains which create you, each component when combined creates something new. This is the fundamental concept that makes Set Relativism slightly different as it encompasses not just observers but sets of observers. Another minor concept here is it also encompasses virtual observers, observers that exist within observers in sort the opposite fashion as a set of observers. An example of a virtual observer is the world of mathematics, it's an observer that doesn't really exist but instead exists as an idea in another observer. We'll get to why the concept of observer sets and virtual observers are important in the fourth principle.
The fourth principle is that truth only exists within the confines of an observer set. That is any truth must be framed within a set of observers. For example, normally when we talk about morals we talk with an implicit observer set of humanity, we say what are morals to humanity, not what are morals to animals or to rocks. We know rocks don't have morals, we know that question makes no sense, so we implicitly frame our question of what are good morals in terms of the limited set of humanity. We may ask what is the best song, but what we should instead frame the question as is what is the best song to this group of people, like what is the best song to our friends, to our relatives, to the world, to the universe, each will have a completely different answer. Mathematical truths may seem to violate this. Mathematical truths are true everywhere, it doesn't matter if you're a rock, a human or a god, 1 + 1 will always equal 2. But we have actually implicitly pointed mathematical truths to an observer set, the virtual observer of mathematics itself. Remember the axioms before? We created a universe, a new observer (the virtual observer) with some fundamental rules that we assert are true for this observer, then knowing those rules can prove absolute facts (like 1 + 1 = 2). But these facts only are absolutely true in the universe we created, they're still only true to the virtual observer we created, there is still an implicit concept of relativism here. We cannot prove that 1 + 1 = 2 in our universe, we can only infer that mathematical truths seem to be consistent with universal ones, but we can't prove it.
The Fifth and final principle is the concept of the unknowable. For any questions there could exist a set of observers to which that question is unknowable. An example is what is the best colour, to me the best colour is red and if the observer set is just me this becomes the truth for that observer set. However if I were to ask a friend as well and they said blue, if we combined both our perspectives and we were unable to convince each other of any answer the question of what is the best colour suddenly becomes unknowable. It's possible, but not provable (see the first principle) that all questions could be, when encompassing all perspectives, unknowable.
What do all these principles actually give us a guiding framework? I've already typed a lot so maybe I will just summarize what I believe are the ramification of these principles in nice little words.
1. Everything you know should be considered a belief, and there should exist some doubt in your mind for even the most trivially true assertions. Facts do not exist.
2. When dealing with something that is unknowable for a certain set of observers you have two options, either convince the set of observers to follow one path or to limit your set of observers to believe in a truth. We all implicitly do this, we either argue for our point or admit that the point we have is not knowable and instead focus on what that means to us, or maybe to our close friends.
3. Concepts should be treated in the frame of an intellectual marketplace (the famous "marketplace of ideas"). This might not be popular among my friends but it's important to realize that every opinion and even "fact" still relies on someone to believe it. Belief in that idea is the only thing that truly matters, and convincing people to believe in that idea (whether through intellectual debate, hard scientific evidence or logical fallacy) is the only way to propagate that idea.
4. Uncertainty is OK. It is ok to believe something and to also admit you don't know if it is true. In this regard we ask what is this thing in the perspective of two different observer sets. I believe that homophobia is bad, that is fundamentally true in my perspective and fundamentally true in a lot of other perspectives too. However if I were to move my perspective to the grand universe I understand that the truth of this becomes a bit more unknowable. Even if I were to define a metric of bad, unless the metric was so obvious as to create a virtual observer (Bad = Homophobia, so is homophobia bad?) I still grant that I cannot truly know whether homophobia is bad. But not knowing whether homophobia is bad to the world or to the universe doesn't matter, what matters is that homophobia is definitely bad to me and my friends (an application of 2.), and so I'm willing to invest that principle in the wider observer set of humanity to hopefully align those ideas to mine, creating a new truth for the observer set of humanity.
5. We all have a responsibility to spread the ideas we believe in, because if we do not they will die. Ideas progress via natural selection.
I believe Set Relativism is useful for understanding the nature of truth in our universe, even if it doesn't give any concrete answers. It has helped me immensely and is extremely important to me, but I am always happy to admit that I could be wrong and encourage intellectual debate. I hope this cleared up some ideas of my core philosophy on life and the universe.
