What is a true statement?

Exactly, the less romantic way to say the same thing, is that the one self-evident truth is, nobody knows the whole truth, and everyone is full of BS. If you aren't full of crap, you are starving to death, and if you can't work your own crap out, you're up shit creek without a paddle. Your life can be a dream, a fantasy, and a nightmare, but it always includes reality, making cultivating personal integrity important.

 

There is no such thing as a half truth. The truth part, on its own, is a truth. A truth put together with an untruth it simply a deception. As a whole, a so called half truth is not true.

 

I think when people come together to achieve something, something useful and productive, good feelings arise. There is a lack of this in contemporary society. The current agenda is one of division, solitariness and self-striving. If truth equates to love then what we hate is not really the individual but rather the phantom of the other which we simply don't understand, alienated and objectified so as to deny them the dignity and rightful place on Earth which we accord ourselves. We sometimes think we are the bad guy but most of the time this isn't the case. Lies are used to serve institutions of power and domination in what in effect amounts to an instrumentalized psychopathy targeted against the broad species-being of humankind itself. We become mere numbers and producers of GDP, lumpen flesh and gristle ground down to our bones as we fight for our minds. (It has been calculated that one in five Americans now suffer from a mental health disorder, similar figures for Europe.)

 

Anything that is not true is not real. A real person is truthful and truth-filled. They are genuine and authentic as truth is. That is the highest personal integrity.

 

How? A fake person is still a person and is still real. Your perception of them may change but it doesn't make them any less real.

 

Then even saying that there is no such thing as a half truth, is a lie.

 

Assuming 42 is as good an explanation as anyone is ever going to get, then reality without dreams is just somebody's nightmare and dream without reality are someone's else's fantasy. Which is exactly what all the physical and even mathematical research suggests. That means, among other things, to become more conscious can require us to become more unconscious as well, and consciousness can be thought of as the focus of awareness. We sleep, we dream, we space out, we have a brain fart, and that's the price of being conscious and aware, explaining why the more intelligent the animal, the more social, playful, and more they dream. Stay awake long enough, and you hallucinate.

Note, this is a pragmatic view of life that fits the observable evidence, which has contradicted classical logic for over a century now.

 

Ego-fear is the human problem.

The ego fears invalidation, because it knows that it really is invalid. Ego is a fabricated story by the mind to make sense of itself. The main task of the mind is to make sense of what the body senses. But since the brain has no nerve ends to itself, the mind cannot sense itself. By the time a child is about two year old, the mind starts to create stories about self. I, self, me, comes into our language. The mind knows its deeper truth, of self, as being nothing else but an iinvalid story. That is why the ego always 24/7 seeks some sort of validation _ to keep the story alive. The mind fears losing this identity, as if it would lose its mind it it became consciously invalid. Nobody likes to think they are invalid (another story to fight with). But the mind is not invalid, just its story about itself.

The ego fears losing any validation (losing self-esteem). It will instantly seek any compensation to regain its lost self-esteem. This fear, rules the human condition. Humans are basically running on fear. All fears come from the ego. All discomforts / tensions are fear based. Greed, anger, anxiety, depression, doubt, resentment, revenge, gloating, and so on are fear based. Investing in these things causes the human problem. The truth will set you free, from fears.

 

But what comes first - number or word? Are the two mutually exclusive or dependent on each other? Can philosophy provide an adequate description of the World alongside mathematics or is it redundant?

 

This is a very useful description. I would like your post but I think it superfluous to validate your ego ;-)

 

I think that your gnostic theory of knowing produces the same result: a story that you tell yourself, which could be true or false.

 

The story or narrative that life is meaningless, and only the truth has meaning, in a word, idealism that can be less than idealistic.