Thoughts, Word, and Truth
1. On thought and language
1.1. Thoughts exist in a higher-dimensional form. Language is their projection onto a lower-dimensional plane.
1.2. To speak/write is to encode. To listen/read is to decode. The message is not the thought, but its compressed form.
1.3. With compression comes loss. With compression comes succinctness.
1.4. The receiver of the message does not receive the original thought; they reconstruct a new one from this compressed projection. This is not a defect of language, but the very foundation that allows communication to happen.
2. On truth
2.1. There exists an objective truth. Call it Logos, call it God, call it Tao.
2.2. This truth cannot be definitively stated in logical propositions, for propositions are lower-dimensional properties projected from the truth.
2.3. Consider a starfruit. A cross-sectional scan of it is absolutely precise: a shape of oval, and a shape of star. Yet a person who has seen only the scan has not seen the starfruit. Precision on one plane equates blindness to all others.
2.4. What reveals the starfruit better is, conversely, an imprecise sketch — one that uses shading and shadow, even optical illusion, to suggest how the thing sits in three dimensions. The sketch is less accurate than the scan and more truthful.
2.5. Accuracy and truthfulness are therefore distinct properties. Accuracy is fidelity to one plane. Truthfulness is fidelity to the higher-dimensional whole, achieved by deliberately imperfect means.
3. On the big questions
3.1. Hence the big questions — what is the meaning of life, what is love, are humans good or evil — could not be answered within the domain of words. Or they admit one easy answer, where the answer is "no answer." Any answer rendered in words is a lower-dimensional object and cannot contain a higher-dimensional truth.
3.2. For example, say "humans are by nature good." Turn the camera to film the opposite angle, and the frame fills with evil and ugliness. It is the moment we defined which angle is considered "good" that "evil" is born. Humans are social animals who find happiness in altruism; they also carry selfish genes that put own desires before others' needs.
3.3. The contradiction is not a paradox in human nature; but a shift in perspective captured by the camera. A multi-dimensional object, photographed from two angles, yields two images that disagree but are both faithful to the truth.
3.4. Every well-known take on the big questions is by nature thought-provoking: it carries one clear image that makes you feel something. Such takes are not "the truth", but well-taken pictures of the truth. They are selectively composed, clarity optimized at the cost of completeness. For truth is always unclear and incomplete when viewed from a lower dimension; to make it clear the image must be cropped.
3.5. But do humans need "truth"? Is it important or beneficial at all? Nice pictures should be enough to make me happy and guide me to a good life. (See Section 6)
4. On good writing
4.1. Good writing is measured by a single criterion: how much of the solid starfruit the flat image manages to restore.
4.2. A plain traced circle is a geometrical scan — mathematical, exact, and restores nothing. Writing that is solely optimized for logic and precision is a scan in prose. Add shadow, and the reader begins to see depth; the illusion, honestly deployed, carries more of the truth than the measurement will ever do.
4.3. A single picture can be composed in two ways. One gathers views from many angles: this maximizes understanding, but many perspectives dilute position, and no position means no opinion. The other fixes on one angle and magnifies its details, as in editing a photograph: this yields force and clarity at the price of the whole.
4.4. Essays and stories are chains of pictures. The essay chains images shot mostly from one angle, edited toward a claim. The story chains images from shifting angles and declines to choose among them. The best writing does both: it commits like an essay and circles like a story, and by the sequence of its shadows lets a solid form appear that no single frame contains.
4.5. There is no "view" available to us from the higher dimension. There is only better and worse paintings.
5. On thinking
5.1. Humans think all day. Call it "default setting." The mind is a camera that cannot be turned off.
5.2. No two pictures are identical, even when taken from the same camera. Each shot differs in the observer's axis, in shot angle, in zoom, in hue.
5.3. The mind is thus a generating machine: it produces images continuously, conditioned on whatever slice of the world is fed to it as prompt. Most of the pictures are discarded. The few that are kept, we call beliefs.
5.4. The question, therefore, is never whether to take pictures, or whether it is beneficial. It is only whether the pictures you take are good, i.e. whether they restore something of the solid, or merely trace circles.
6. On the Tower of Babel
6.1. When Icarus reached for the sun, everyone knew the sun was unreachable. When the people of Babylon raised the Tower of Babel, it was already written that heaven can never be reached from earth.
6.2. Truth in its full dimension is not presentable through any communication system we can access, because it does not live on our plane. Do not think philosophers can escape this cave. They exit one cave and find themselves trapped in a bigger one. The small cave has food, dance, and warmth; the larger cave is an eternal abyss.
6.3. But do not lament how we never see truth whole; the whole is by no means nobler than its parts. If we are given wings, fly, rather than hang in the sky. If we are given bricks and stones, build a tower, rather than dream of the palace above.
6.4. Taking pictures is the pursuit of truth. Contact with truth does not lie beyond the picture; it occurs in the picture, in proportion to how well the picture is taken.
6.5. The beauty we find in literature, in mathematics, in engineering, is not the beauty of truth itself. It is the beauty of instruments invented in truth's pursuit: rulers, cameras, sketches, wings.
6.6. Admire not heaven, but the tower, the church, the house.
6.7. Admire not the truth, but its pictures. It is the pictures — to the eye, to the ear, to the brain — that bring light and music into our world, and make life worth living.