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Originally Posted by gregorio
There are two mistakes in your reasoning:
First, you seem to assume that you can identify any lie. You cannot. Most information you receive, can not be verified by yourself.
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Originally Posted by albed
I can identify nutcases and disreputable media organizations easily enough through their lack of ethical standards and compare them to people and organizations who value their reputation and adhere to high standards as well as simple logic and my own experience of what lying lowlifes are like and do quite well in identifying lies.
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Let's analyze that: You define ethical standards (ethical standards are not absolute!), everybody who suffices these arbitrary standards tells the truth.
You use your personal experience (something highly subjective, also far from absolute), to identify liars - you have some profile and if somebody fits that profile (the way he talks, the way he looks, you will most likely be unable to identify what exactly is so suspicious about him), he has to be a liar.
You claim to use logic, I doubt that. I will give you an example: Your neighbour says an flying saucer landed in his backyard last night. You look outside and you see the backyard the way you remember it from yesterday without any kind of UFO. And nobody else saw or heard anything either. What does logic tell you here? Logic tells you that either your neighbour doesn't tell the truth or that the UFO simply landed while nobody else was looking. The second possibility may seem less probable than the first according to your experience but logic itself will not prefer one possibility over another. In order to use logic to identify truth, you would at least need some other truth (and not just any truth - 'cogito ergo sum' is not sufficient) to start with, but you are judging based on your own experience - and your experience has nothing to do with the absolute truth, it is based on what you see and on what you remember and on what you WANT to remember.
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Originally Posted by gregorio
If it appears likely enough, you will just believe it. And if you wait just long enough, most of the information won't even be physically verifiable. For all we know, the ancient cultures of Rome, Egypt or Greece may have been made up by someone else.
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Originally Posted by albed
You seem to assume I know as little as you. I know more than enough than to even consider they could be made up.
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And the fact that you do not even consider the possibility just proves that you blindly rely on information you received from sources that you could not verify, like "It's on the internet, so it must be true!" which is - and you can actually use logic to prove that - not true.
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Originally Posted by albed
What people claim to believe and what they actually do believe are often two different things. Compare their behaviour in supposed privacy to their public rhetoric to find out their true beliefs or offer a reward and see if they change their professed beliefs or even consider that they might be like you and lie to others for their own benefit.
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You don't seem to understand what I was aiming at. What people believe has nothing to do with the truth. Given the choice people will believe the sound lie, if the alternative was the unlikely and uncomfortable truth. In the UFO example from above, let us consider the following as the truth: Last night, there was an UFO in your neighbours backyard, and nobody noticed it, except for him. You won't believe the truth, it doesn't fit in your own reality, you will believe that your neighbour lied and you will call him a liar. And you will add elements of your neighbour to the profile of a liar that is based on your experience. You will be unable to reliably identify any further truth just because your liar-profile has been corrupted by your inability to see this one truth.
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Originally Posted by albed
Truth and reality aren't matters of opinion, they have established defintions and standards of proof. You can claim otherwise but you've already begun demonstrating what your opinion is worth.
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There is an absolute truth, there is an absolute reality. You will never be able to see it, - unless there is a god and you are dead.