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What is truth? What are your thoughts about the truth?

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Think about the fabric of meaning. Everything you can think about, organized nice and reasonably by topic, no weird kinks and knots. Religion lives on this fabric right along side science, and you can walk from one side to the other and explore both domains, without having to climb any mountains or falling into any holes.

This is truth, flatness in the topography of meaning. Any kind of discontinuity or even just the slightest grade in the map points to a degradation of truth. You should not have to climb a hill to get some information.

If you run across a discontinuity, that means there’s complexity there to unravel and dive into. You can operate without untangling it, many many people can go through life with their identities oriented around profound cognitive dissonance, but it feels better to challenge topological defects in their own map of understanding.

There is another sense in which you can take this word. If you gather a bunch of people together around a common idea, they’re going to work together to come up with a shared, collective truth. What this is is a path through the map of meaning. It starts around a core idea and a direction for the group to go. If you read Oscar Tay’s magisterial answer on the genesis of the Esperanto community, you can see how a group of people are grappling towards a meaningful direction for the community to go, answering questions that various people come up with in order to build a better, more ideal world, one in which everyone who wants to communicate with one another can use the same language in which to do it.

Humans can only operate in a few dimensions at any given time. We use mental tricks to reduce everything down to a dimensionality that we’re comfortable with. In order to communicate though, everyone has to be in agreement on both dimensionality, the ‘shape’ of the meaning map, and the ‘direction’ which determines how it’s relevant to people.

In the first sense, articulated at the beginning of my answer, truth refers to smoothness, the second one articulated in the third paragraph, refers to a shared direction.