Hong’s Cave

Okay, let’s get back to a more metaphysical analogy rubbish by yours truly… I like analogies, good ones I mean. Although they might not be the real things, they definitely help understand them.

This is a concept that I’ve been bouncing around in my head for a while. As with any other ideas I have here, it must have been influenced by ideas of others and is utterly incomplete at this stage. However, I think I have a concrete enough picture of it to attempt to write about it.

I think ever since my teen years, I have been a relativist: I believed (and still do in a way) that “everything” is relative. I came to this “conclusion” because I noticed that everyone was interpreting what he/she experienced, relative to their situation at the moment and that these interpretations, or “filters”, are something we cannot remove from the whole equation because of what we, humans or any sentient beings, are.

The obvious problem with advocating “absolute” relativism (you will easily notice an obvious oxymoron) is that this credo, “everything is relative,” itself has to be relative and becomes self-conflicting. It is logically flawed and it will never be more than a incomplete belief.

Not only that, as much as I could not ignore the seemingly pervasive relativity caused by the interpretation filters, I felt uneasy about completely dismissing the idea of the absolute truth (or a god as some would say). Even a relativistic (or cyclic) belief such as Buddhism has an absolute concept such as Nirvana. So for a while, what I’ve often told was that if there was an absolute being, it must be the universe itself…

But recently, I’ve come up with a better explanation (it’s just a rhetoric anyway…): the relative truths/gods as projections of the infinite dimensional absolute truth/god. I really don’t care whether it’s called the truth or a god. I will just say “truth” to refer both from now on.

If you had taken some geometry classes at school, you might remember hearing about dimensions and projections to a lower dimensional space. For example, if you have a cube in a 3-dimensional space and project it onto a 2-dimensional space, you can get a square, a rectangle, or a distorted hexagon, of varying sizes depending on the positions of the object and the projection plane, and the projection methods. Another example… If you have a triangle in a 2-dimensional space and projected onto a 1-dimensional space, you will get lines with various lengths depending on the condition.

The thing I want to stress from the above examples is that although the original objects in their native dimensional spaces might have well-defined, fixed shapes, their projections onto lower dimensional spaces can take various, sometimes drastically different shapes. From the perspectives of the lower dimensional spaces, those objects look that way (nothing wrong with this), but they have no way to know for sure what the higher-dimensional original objects may look like.

So, applying this analogy, I am going to say that there is (probably) an absolute truth, but it’s in a higher dimensional space (actually, in an “infinite” dimensional space as discussed later). The “truths” we understand (or written down, talked about, etc.) are only its projections (or “filters” as I called above) into our lower dimensional spaces. Since our “positions” in these lower dimensional spaces are different from that of each other (and even from one’s own from different time), the projected shapes of the truth may and will differ.

For some groups of people, their positions maybe close enough that the projected shapes are similar. But the point is that these projected truths are relative to the projection planes, i.e., individuals, and that for us the actual shape of the truth in the higher original dimensional space is beyond our understanding.

One thing to note is that when I say a n-dimensional space, I am not just referring to the “popular” dimensional space of x-, y-, and z-axes. I don’t know exactly what each axis measures (it could even be a concept as vague as “love”, “happiness”, etc.) but it is something that will define each individual within its own understanding.

On a similar line, if you actually think of this dimensional spaces as the popular time-space continuum and its extension, we can think about “superhumans” and “gods.” To us, a being that’s bound by a higher dimensional space would be considered as a superhuman or a god since it can overcome the restriction of our time-space continuum. But to them, another being in an even higher dimensional space would be considered as a god. And if you keep following this, you will reach at a concept of a being in an infinite dimensional space, which one can say is the absolute god. And the truth there would be the absolute one.

Anyway, in one respect, the absolute truth may exist (in the infinite dimensional space). However, as far as our understanding goes, everything is still relative (as its projections onto lower dimensional spaces). So, this is how I “resolved” my relativistic beliefs with a concept of the absolute, and felt a bit better. :p