On Truth and Falsity

                          How Consciousness Works

While the skeptics contend that no one can tell the difference between truth and falsity in appearances, they do admit that humans have appearances. Since appearances cannot be denied, the question arises as to what do appearances appear? Appearances are moving pictures in the world, but how did they get there? The only possible answer is that consciousness produces them. This fact can only mean that consciousness has to be the active agent capable of producing pictures in the world. Consciousness can produce its appearances even if they all are false. Consciousness can really produce pictures that cannot be denied, and that can only mean that consciousness has to be real. The empiricists assert that humans can only learn from experience. Consciousness also holds the power to produce abstract pictures within consciousness. If consciousness happens to be the only power capable of producing pictures of sense objects and pictures of thought objects, then consciousness has experienced them all.

Human consciousness also possesses intelligence. By its use of intelligence, consciousness can make sense of its moving pictures whether of those in the world or those abstracted from the world which reside as ideas in consciousness. Intelligence holds the power to form its sense objects and thought objects into words and those words into systems, such as sentences, so that intelligence can communicate with other humans and can formulate systems that benefit one's fellow humans. Intelligence could abstract ideas from sense appearances and form a system called a "wheel," and then turn that "wheel" into a sense object that benefits human transportation. Intelligence could abstract ideas from pieces of rare medals and turn those ideas into a system of "numbers" in money that would benefit human commerce. Since consciousness possesses the undeniable ability to use its intelligence to form beneficial systems, then those systems would also have to be real. But how could they be real if formed from sense objects and thought objects that could be false, assuming that falsity means whatever is useless? When the skeptics asserted that no one can tell the difference between truth and falsity in appearances, did not they mean that the true would be useful and the false would be useless? If human intelligence can form useful systems from all of its sense objects and thought objects, then all of its appearances and ideas would have to be real since they all are useful.

But human intelligence can also form systems that are useless or even harmful, such as lies. This means that intelligence can form the idea of falsity. But where does falsity appear to consciousness? When intelligence examines all of its false systems, it finds that all false systems comprise those same useful sense objects and thought objects that have proven to be useful in  the formation of useful systems. That fact can only mean that falsity always resides in the false combinations of true and real objects and ideas and never in the objects and ideas themselves. But that also means that falsity never directly appears to consciousness. So how did human intelligence ever get the idea that a system could be false? Humans noticed that some systems meant nothing or were even harmful to humans. For those reasons, humans called those systems false. But in order to realize this fact, humans used the true and real idea of nothing to make those determinations. Human intelligence had to realize that false systems mean nothing because they all are either useless or harmful to humans. But this knowledge of falsity also proves to be useful to human reality because false systems can be usefully discarded.

Even so, many systems in human knowledge happen to be systems of speculation or opinion which humans must investigate to discover whether they are true or false. But these systems also always comprise true and real objects and ideas. When humans discover that one of these systems is true and real, then that benefits as an increase in human knowledge. When humans discover that one of these systems is false, then that system can be usefully discarded. But some humans use false systems that harm others because of their own evil systems in their minds, or because they believe that through the use of harmful systems they can somehow, someday come to better systems.

The falsity that never directly appears to consciousness has to be the same as unreality. So how did consciousness ever obtain the indirect concept of unreality if it can only experience the true and the real? Consciousness obtained that indirect concept by the use of the real and useful idea of nothing. But how could consciousness use the idea of nothing since it too never directly appears to consciousness? The only possible answer has to be that both the indirect concept of unreality and the inexperienced idea of nothing had to have been given to human consciousness by an Infinite Consciousness because without those two concepts, humans would never be able to know reality because in order to know reality, humans must know how to recognize the true and real and eliminate the false.