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Eugine_Nier comments on One last roll of the dice - Less Wrong
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Things that my brain tells me are green, are green. Things that your brain tells you are green, are green. In cases where we disagree, split the label into my!green and your!green.
Now can we move on? This post is a waste of time.
To see the problem with the above statement, try replacing the word "green" with "true".
You mean, "to see the problem with a wholly unrelated statement". Green is not the same kind of property as true.
Could you expand on that.
Truth is an abstract, rationally defined property that has a meaning beyond my mind. To say that "things my brain tells me are true, are true" is a similar kind of claim would imply that green, like true, has a working definition beyond the perceptual. If this is the case, I'd like to know it. I'm fairly sure it's not actually possible to be wrong about a perceived color, excluding errors in memory. It's possible to consider a statement and be mistaken about its truthfulness, but is it possible to look at an object and be mistaken about the color one perceives it as? That seems nonsensical.
So can you provide a working definition of "true"?
If there was definitely such a thing as an objective reality, my answer would be "a claim that is not in contradiction with objective reality". As it stands, I'll have to settle for "a claim that is never in contradiction with perceived reality. " Note that, for instance, ludicrous claims about the distant past do in fact stand in contradiction with perceived reality since "things like that seem to not happen now, and the behavior of the universe seems to be consistent over time" is a true claim which a ludicrous but unverifiable claim would contradict with. Note that the degree to which you believe truth can be objective is exactly proportional to the degree to which you believe reality is objective and modelled by our observations.