Your reflections on truth and boundaries are thought-provoking. Here are some of my key takeaways:
• You argue that truth is a “location for humans” – a mental construct based on patterns we perceive and name. Truth emerges from placing boundaries that demarcate what we consider “true” from “false”, “inner” from “outer”.
• These boundaries are useful and important for survival – they shape our perceptions and actions in the world. But they are ultimately human constructs, subject to change as we zoom in or out, erase, add or modify boundaries.
• Some boundaries, like those defining how lungs inhale and exhale air, have persisted across history because of their usefulness. But upon closer inspection, even these reveal more boundaries and complexities.
• What makes a boundary “true” is its usefulness and importance to humans, not some absolute correspondence to an objective reality. Truth is pragmatic and emotion-laden.
• Much of human activity involves debating boundaries, looking at different scales from categories to smaller distinctions, and developing new boundaries we consider important.
The main insight here is that truth is intersubjective and constructed – a result of how we divide and demarcate the world, not an inherent property of reality itself. While these boundaries can be useful and serve important functions, they are ultimately provisional human creations, not immutable facts. There is wisdom in realizing the conditional nature of our conceptions of truth.
The essay raises interesting questions about the relationship between usefulness, importance and emotions in shaping what we consider true, and how fixed versus mutable our perceived boundaries really are. Overall, it invites a more pragmatic, relativistic and circumspect view of truth and knowledge.