Since we (humans) basically cannot even agree on what "truth" is, what "knowledge" is, or what even a "fact" is, it makes a lot of sense that all of those things would be different, since we there is no consensus on what they mean. We even have a whole field about it, epistemology, where people been arguing for millennia about what those things mean.
Question is, what are you trying to say with that, and how does it relate to the quote?
> Since we (humans) basically cannot even agree on what "truth" is, what "knowledge" is, or what even a "fact" is
We technically can, but we don't. And _that_ is the problem. There is an unending stream of people blaming social media, Big Tech, phones (and apparently even 'the internet') for all our woes and even though there is certainly some blame to be put on the amoral profit-seeking companies, the real problem is the nature of humans.
Each of us is a walking pile of zerodays and ancient legacy biological code, just waiting to be exploited. The only thing that is protecting us is a fairly effective but thin and fragile protective layer of cultural overrides and rationality.
Barring genetic engineering those zerodays are going to be with us for a while. Instead of (or in addition to) trying to play whack-a-mole with the swiftly evolving technological environment and the companies leveraging it through regulation and public outcry, we should go all in on cultivating that protective layer.
Many people I know are not addicted to their phones and many are able to determine what 'facts' are. The key is to make active choices in avoiding low quality shit and put in the effort to act rationally. But that starts with being taught how important that is and realizing that lacking it is a very dangerous deficiency in yourself.
Blaming others and the outside world for being addicted to entertainment or being misinformed makes things worse. We should be screaming from all rooftops and in all classrooms that it is us. We need to change.
I've been coming to similar conclusions, but trying to change human nature is an impossible task. Throughout history we saw time and time again how any attempt at it was met with overwhelming rejection. Even in movies there are plenty of examples of people choosing messy human life over enlightened unification. Being aware of the power your instincts have over you is a privilege of the few, and taking action against it is a Sisyphean task. It all feels futile because nothing will ever change, time is a flat circle and wheel of samsara will keep turning nonetheless.
From my totally biased understanding, truth is what groups of people agreed on, people believe what they believed in. Even though people agreed on the same thing, each of them would have different interpretation of the truth that they believe it, with certain levels of overlap.
I would call this "consensus" or "mainstream knowledge", or something like that.
Truth exists regardless of whether people agree on it. I suppose about some things we cannot ever claim we know "the truth", though in common speech we agree to call widely held beliefs as the truth, for simplicity's sake.
But just because a bunch of people agreed on it, doesn't mean it's "absolute truth", like how doctors for a long time didn't want to wash their hand, because they didn't believe in germ theory. Countless of examples where we've ("scientists" and/or humans) all agreed on something, which later turned out not to be true.
And believing that truth is just "consensus between people" would lead to people never trying to go against that, even if their truth seems more truthy than the "established" truth.
Yes, it's truth as in "consensus" but not the absolute truth, and I don't think we are going to reach the absolute truth anytime soon.
You're assuming that everyone will agree on the truth just because it's the "truth", but why do you think we no longer believe that earth is the center of world?
There will always people who questions the truth and did research and study about it, discovers new observations of the subject and replace the existing if it convinced the majority.
It's question that lead us closer to the truth (occasionally it does the opposite). That's why we made new discoveries, and that's why you are here questioning about the truthfulness of truth.
I have a different take. The more that people cannot disagree with X, the more X is truth. This is separate from fiction and intentional misrepresentation of events.
When you directly witness something happening with a few others, you can't disagree about what you saw, so that is high truth (assuming no intentional mispresentation). Of course sometimes even here you may not all have seen the same exact thing at the same exact time.
Video of events tends to be up there as well. Of course I mean raw, unedited video and not edited clip-montages of stuff interspersed with commentary, opinions, etc. Even raw video is not guaranteed to be high or complete truth if it's omitting other things that were part of an event.
When we get into things like testimony, opinions, second-hand accounts, anecdotes, and commentary, then we're in the world of low truth (and sometimes its complete absence) and a high chance of deception. Hence the need for heuristics, trust, narrative detection, asking who benefits, etc. Which may not arrive at any truth other than the direction someone is wanting you to go.
Science is interesting because it's reports are a form of testimony, but specifically extending an invitation to be reproduced so it can be directly witnessed again. This alone makes it more trustworthy than things like "here's the testimony of a dead person we can't even talk to anymore" or "everyone seems to accept X so X must be true" - and that last one is dangerous today because many people use social media as a proxy for "everyone" but it's very easily manipulated.
Question is, what are you trying to say with that, and how does it relate to the quote?