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Tool of Objective Truth

created by anomie

(thing) by anomie (6.1 y) (print)   ?   (I like it!) Thu Jun 01 2000 at 9:23:51

There exists a theory that the Internet contains the sum total of all human knowledge, averaged out over all the various sites. Assuming this is true, with a sufficiently powerful search tool we could discover the validity of any proposition. The truth returned would be an objective truth, not subjective to any group or individual smaller than the entire human race.

Using the AltaVista search engine to approximate this tool (mostly because it's easy), we could tap this immense intelligence with today's technology.

Various websites have realized this, and offer the objective truth on a variety of subjects. Some samples:

  • http://www.zdnet.co.uk/athome/misc/toot/
  • http://srom.zgp.org/
  • http://www.Lehigh.EDU/~sol0/rules.html

(thing) by viterbiSearcher (7.2 mon) (print)   ?   (I like it!) Fri Sep 15 2000 at 14:53:13

The above writeup of Tool of Objective Truth is flawed because it makes the following dubious assumptions:
  1. human knowledge is sufficient to discover the validity of any proposition.
  2. the sum total of all human knowledge, is objective rather than subjective.
  3. that the entire human race has sufficient internal variation in outlook, experience or intellectual approach to be worth averaging over.
I would argue that Godel's incompleteness theorem implies that the first can't be true.

Until we have open contact with our first intelligent Extra Terrestrial Lifeform I very much doubt we can even begin to think about whether the second two are true.


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