[Aaargh20318]

> It depends on your definition of a good life.

For me it's simple: an easy, comfortable life with as little contact with human beings as possible.

> Objectively describing what reality is is not possible

I disagree. I believe there is such a thing as absolute, objective truth. A 'fact' is not a shared assumption, a fact is any statement to which a truth value can be assigned.

[yonoataraxia]

To say it in programmer terms: belief systems are functions that assign truth values to assumptions.

for example a belief system can look like this:

belief_system("earth is flat") -> false

belief_system("life is meaningless") -> true

Where is the truth value coming from? For a flat earther: They can e.g. use a emotional and individual belief system to determine truth values. For a scientific-minded person: They assign truth values based on scientific evidence (which is a type of assumption).

btw: saying there is absolute and objective truth is highly unscientific - science is based on the premise that you can replace theories with another theory if the evidence suggests it. The problem of induction shows the limit of empiric evidence and I hope that most scientists are aligned with this scientific principles (otherwise they aren't scientists by definition). IMHO there is no absolute truth that can be identified as such (I'm not assuming that there isn't objective truth, but merely that we couldn't identify it if there is such a thing).

It's like IT security, it is a relative measurement and the relations (in this case) are made by belief systems. There is a consensus that there is no "absolute security" in the security sector. If you accept that there is no absolute security in IT systems and only "reasonable security" (I do not assume that you do assume this), why do you have problems to accept that there might not be a way to recognize the "true truth values"? If you see absolute security as a given you don't have to solve this conflict.

I'm merely exercising logic here using my assumptions (and yes, some of them I call "facts", but I see them as something which gets defined by my belief system).

your belief:

belief_system("there is such a thing as absolute, objective truth")

my belief:

belief_system("truth as we use it in our daily lives is defined by our belief systems")

btw, would love to see discussions using assumptions and then logically deriving conclusions. Especially funny when somebody has conflicting assumptions (logic of explosion).

[Aaargh20318]

> btw: saying there is absolute and objective truth is highly unscientific - science is based on the premise that you can replace theories with another theory if the evidence suggests it

Where is the evidence coming from if there is no underlying absolute and objective truth (a.k.a. 'the real world') to generate that evidence ?

> There is a consensus that there is no "absolute security" in the security sector. If you accept that there is no absolute security in IT systems and only "reasonable security" (I do not assume that you do assume this)

To use your analogy, of course there is such a thing as absolute security. As in, it is theoretically possible for a system to be 100% secure. The difficulty lies in designing one and proving it. It's not fundamentally impossible.

Just because it's very hard or even impossible to discover the objective truth, that doesn't in any way mean there isn't one.

[yonoataraxia]

Although I share your point of view w.r.t. scientific thinking and I don't disagree on objective reality (personally), this question can still be answered in a different way and may lead to the conclusion that objective reality is a construct that gets created by perceiving.

Subjective idealism states that there don't has to be objective reality to get truth values from it. Trying to understand this from a materialistic point of view is not easy because those philosophies are basically in contradiction to each other.

It's just important to realize that the belief that objective reality exists is one of many points of view.

> As in, it is theoretically possible for a system to be 100% secure. The difficulty lies in designing one and proving it.

> It's not fundamentally impossible.

How is "100% secure" defined in this context if you can't prove it?

In a sufficient complex logical system Gödel's incompleteness theorems are turning relevant. It might not be possible to prove some aspects of it if the system is logically consistent. This may also apply if you model reality in a logically consistent way. Logics has its limits.

Although I agree with you, I think it's important to realize that our positions are and can't exceed to be beliefs or even strong beliefs called facts.