PhiloPsycho Freedom

Recently, this quote from a song by Metric has been brought to my attention:

tu sais que tu n'aimes pas ta réalité. on ne peut pas fabriquer la vérité.

This translates roughly to:

You know that you don't like your reality; One cannot make truth.

Upon considering this quote, I find myself thinking that truth is not set in stone. If we look at the history of how things are understood, at one point something was widely accepted to be true, even within experts in the field, but have now been proven to be false. I can hear my one friend right now arguing that there absolutes, that there are truths, and I'd have to agree that there are some absolutes (like the fundamental forces in physics). But for the rest, reality is generally fluid and perceptual.

What I mean by this is that truth changes with the times. It may have been true at one point, but it isn't now. Since that's the case for, arguably, the majority of our knowledge thus far in our history as a species, I think that this shows the very nature of how we understand, and illustrates how fragile our current "truths" may be. As well, it may be true for the time being, but it could quite possibly only be true for our current state of the universe, never to be true again once a substantial shift happens.

Another perspective we could take is that truth is entirely perceptual; take an extreme solipsistic view of the world, reducing truth to nothing but an artificial reality constructed entirely in our head. Another alternative for truth being perceptual is the theory (I forget who to credit,  but this is not my own construct) that we are currently in an artificial reality, not unlike that of the Matrix. This theory starts by postulating the eventual development of an artificial reality as lifelike as our own. Eventually, it says that there is the possibility that there are an infinite number of alternate realities between these artificial constructs. It then asks which is more probable: that we are currently in one of these infinite number of artificial realities, or that we are currently in the one and only reality; the true reality. It must be conceded that, if we can make such a lifelike reality,

that it is more probable that we are part of one of an infinite number of realities. The only way we can attack this theory is by attacking the original assumption of creating these realities.

I felt that posting on this was important because people like to have hard, steadfast truths in "mainstream science", especially psychology. This is true, not that. 100% of the time, or at least majority, that is true for people. In reality, people are way too complex to have an assumption that stands even for the majority of people,  but that doesn't mean that we can't break the complexity down to its components. We need to realize that the world is more gradient-based, rather than truth-falsity based. Science is based on theories,  not absolute truths; we can only prove something false, not something to be true. Think of it like Sherlock Holmes: How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?