How to find out the truth about everything
How can we build a “truth-detector-method”?
Maybe on-chain peer-reviewing could be the answer. Decentralised peer-reviewing can help a large group of people to achieve consensus on what is collaboratively perceived as truth (1, correspondence theory: “Truth is the correspondence between a statement or belief and the actual state of affairs in the world.”).However, even an event that is to 100% accepted as truth can never be an absolute truth, as truth only exists in its momentary context (2, social theory: “Truth is constructed by human perception, thus rather than an objective reality, it is shaped by cultural, linguistic, or individual factors.”). Truth is therefore a fluid concept, that can only be investigated employing a reliable adaptable method, that can integrate mutating and/or newly arising information in a given coherent context (3, coherence theory: “A statement is considered true, if it fits logically and harmoniously with other statements in a coherent system.”) over time.
For instance, a few hundred years ago, African and native American people were regarded as inferior and dehumanized, therefore they could be subjected to slavery or murdered at will. That was an objective truth for many people in that time. Nowadays, people know that Africans and native Americans are also humans and therefore cannot be randomly murdered or oppressed. This is (hopefully) a current objective truth. In 500 years, the objective truth may have evolved to where humans can accept animals as equals. The average person in the future may look back at us with the same type of horror, that we experience looking back at slavery. According to their truth, we may be committing the worst crimes of all time, by industrializing the systematic assassination of beings, that they consider equal to humans.
Thus, an iterative collaborative curation of what true information is allows us to evolve. A “truth-finding” process, that is more inclusive, accessible and transparent, creates a scaffold of coherence and accountability that collectively safeguards the quality of information. This creates the fundament for many real-life applications, useful to our society, which still remain to be further investigated.
The truth-backed currency
I recently wondered, if just as banks serving as middlemen in our financial system, we actually lived in a world where centralized entities such as media outlets, governments and educational institutions serve as middlemen for the “currency of objective truth” (or knowledge).
What if we had a truth-backed currency, where value correlates to the cumulative energy required to create a particular piece of knowledge, which is transparently and collectively verified as objective truth. All token holders would have an intrinsic motivation to search for and reward the finding of objective truth, as the “truth-token’s” value would be reduced to zero any time the truth-detector method fails to accept something as objective truth.
One could argue that we already live in such a system, because we use a currency (US dollars), that is backed by the “truth” that productivity in our economy will be high enough to pay back all incurred debt sometime in the future. But, if we put this truth into the truth-detector, would it pass the test?
What if I don’t want to live with a truth, that turns true only because I believe in it - what if I prefer to protect truth and in turn let it provide me with what I need to live?
When I grow up, I want to be a validator on the truth-token blockchain network, which uses decentralized peer-reviewing (alias trustless fluid mutability) as consensus mechanism. It won’t be fast, but it will have an impact. The first use case I want to work on is finding the objective truth to the history of everything and I will need your help.
Imagine prince Charles apologising to the people of Kenya for all atrocities committed during colonial imperialism, not because of awareness or empathy, but because in a truth-backed economy, if he didn’t, his net worth would disappear in a heartbeat.
Wouldn’t that be great?