The Quest for Truth

Does it Really Exist?

Back in May 2025, I posted about reality and truth, how we view them, and how we war over dogma differences about those views. Here, let’s dig deeper and play some more with those concepts.

So, what is “truth”? Or, rather, what’s “The Truth”? That’s the beauty of it (or “Beauty”): no one knows or even can know. And thus our human quest to discover, or uncover, the mystery (or “Mystery”) of The Truth. As far as I know, which admittedly may not be too far, humans are the only Earthly creatures to have such a quest. Notice “Earthly”. That’s hubris enough to ascribe such a mission to us mere humans, without presuming it applies to all creatures of the entire Universe (thus granting the possibility that there are others).

Actually, the quest (or “Quest”) is two-fold. Maybe there are more folds, but let’s go with two for now. So, Fold #1 is to dis- or uncover The Mystery of The Truth. No matter how impossible a task that may be (and it is), we must still chip away at it. So Fold #2, then, is to be OK with that. To acknowledge and accept that we are embarked on an impossible Quest and to pursue it anyway. To learn to live in the Not Knowing and with the humility that even what we think we do know, pieces of The Truth that we think we’ve so far uncovered by chipping away at its shroud of Mystery – like Michelangelo revealing the godlike David hidden in a block of stone – may actually not be so after all. That it’s all merely a mirage just waiting to dissolve in the light released by new chips – be they from science or epiphanous revelation.

So, why the upper case Truth, Beauty, Mystery, Earth, Universe, Not Knowing? It’s hard to say. It’s just that writing the lower case didn’t seem to feel right. I think it’s a matter of distinguishing each of those things in their physical or even conceptual incarnations (lower case) from their core, abstract essence.

And the task may be even more impossible than we can imagine. Maybe there is no absolute, objective Truth to be un- or discovered! What if the ultimate nature of Nature, the fundamental essence of Reality, does not exist to be un- or discovered but rather only comes into existence as we relate to it? This seems to be where quantum physics is pointing. That is, we can sort of understand and accept that matter as substance may be an illusion of highly dense clusters or concentrations of energy, and thus that energy is more basic than the matter that arises from it. But even energy itself may be an illusion of an even more basic fundament of Nature, namely, Relationship and consequent patterns of Possibility and Potential.

That is, The Truth may be “nothing” more than upper cases – that is, abstract essences in the form of patterns that, like Schrodinger’s capriciously quantum cat, swim and swirl in an endless pool of potential waiting for a relationship in order to be resolved into a specific lower-case instantiation. But a relationship with what? Another swimming, swirling upper-case pattern? Or, in a chain of relationship-induced pattern resolutions, some other lower-case instantiation? And does the resolution depend on what kind of relationship it is that induces it? What kinds of such essential relationships are there? I don’t know! It’s a Mystery. And that’s the truth!