Truth vs. truth

We haven't lost our ability to find Truth. We never had it in the first place.

Truth with a capital “T.” Maybe all caps, and bold, and underlined, and like size 1 million font. Not your truth, my truth, our truth, and definitely not Truth Social; I’m talking about The Truth. If there is a God, then it would be the absolute TRUTH spoken only by that dude (dudette? It? They/Them??). What is it? How do we get it? Let’s do this.

What is Truth?

First, let’s face the fact that I will fail at the task of actually defining Truth. Quite possibly miserably so. But I don’t think the impossibility of the task, or the inevitability of failure, is necessarily a signal to avoid the task. We all just need to manage our expectations. Good? Great, let’s get on to failing.

I think the concept of God is actually a good foundation on which to build an understanding of Truth in the absolute sense of the word. (Note I said “concept” of God, and that it doesn’t really matter whether you believe God exist or not). It’s useful because in most monotheistic religions God knows and/or IS the Truth. The word of God is unquestionable and absolute. Sooo, how does he/she/it/they/them do that? How does God know what “Truth” is?

 Well, it turns out our buddy God has 3 primary traits: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. The first one, omnipotence, is not particularly important for this thought experiment. While being all-powerful sounds cool, and technically gives one the ability to change Truth at a whim, it doesn’t necessarily explain why God would know the absolute Truth in the first place before it was changed.

So, omniscience is where we will start; which is defined as the knowledge of everything, all-knowing, or infinite knowledge. This is essentially the “what” of Truth. Absolute Truth, is everything there is to know about a thing. Let’s take a pencil for example. Not just any pencil mind you, but the specific pencil that you may or may not be holding in your hand and/or mind right now. The Truth about this pencil is every possible data point (past, present, and future) that can be known. Think about it’s entire life’s journey both as a final product, and of each component it’s made of. In fact, think about every aspect of everything it’s made of (material compositions, molecular structures, combustion temperatures, rates of decay, etc. etc. etc.). This is the Truth about this pencil. God, apparently, knows this level of truth about all things; i.e. everything about everything.

Side note, I think the time aspect of Truth is the part that most people get hung up on or completely overlook. In order to actually know a thing, you need to know it from beginning to end. A singular human perspective is simply not enough.

The second important Godly trait is omnipresence, which is defined as a presence in all places simultaneously or an unbound/universal presence. This is essentially the “how” of Truth. By that I mean: if God knows everything about everything, then how? Omnipresence. Inherently, something that is present in all places, at all times, would actually find it easy to know all things. As I just mentioned, I think the part that gets overlooked is “at all times”- past, present, and future. In other words, Truth is known by existing outside of the dimension of time, or having an “unbound” presence. One must know the entire scope of existence of a thing to know the absolute Truth about a thing.

Or, to put it more depressingly, Truth with a capital “T” is impossible for any human to know. We simply don’t have the bandwith in space, time, or in raw processing power.

Truth vs. truth

At this point I imagine you’re rolling your eyes, or moving on to something else, because all this BS about capital “T” Truth is abundantly obvious. Of course we aren’t “God,” and of course we don’t have magical powers that allow us to transcend time and expand our minds into infinite perception. Obviously…But are you sure? Have you listened to or read the news recently? Have you tuned-in to any of the talking heads on the radio, podcasts, and YouTube these days? I’m not sure about you, but I see an awful lot of “just telling it how it is,” and referring to “the facts, and nothing but the facts,” and “fact-based reporting,” blah, blah, blah. I mean, despite the fact that it should be obvious that none of us are capable of knowing the absolute Truth about anything, there seems to be a lot of people selling it regardless. All the while all the “facts” floating out there seem to be in a state of constant contradiction.

Why is that?

Maybe because we are all dealing in something else entirely, and it just happens to have a name that sounds the same and looks very similar. We are talking about little “t” truth (differentiated as “absolute Truth” and “perspective truth” from here on out). If absolute Truth is everything about everything, then perspective truth is some things about some things. A perspective truth is not wrong or false, it is simply a massively restricted view of the whole. In our pencil example, it would be the “truth” about the pencil from my singular perspective (i.e. my personal limited understanding about “everything” there is to know about the pencil). Unfortunately, I could spend the rest of my life documenting and researching the nature of this pencil and I would still land woefully short of the absolute Truth. The absolute Truth would escape me, as it would us all.

So, here’s the rub; perspective truths are technically the best we can do individually. The problem with this is twofold. First, we are more often than not completely unaware that we are constantly confusing perspective truths or “facts” (whether it be ours or someone else’s) for absolute Truths. Second, our beliefs and daily decisions are all produced in this state of confusion. This, in turn, creates an immense amount of cognitive dissonance when the actual absolute Truth comes along and punches us in the face. Worse still, back in the day, disseminating your perspective truth to a wide audience took a lot of effort and time, so we had far fewer perspective truths to get confused by. Now, thanks to the glory of the interwebs, it is not only extremely easy to spread your perspective truth, but you can also consume millions of other’s truths simultaneously. You can even tailor your information stream (consciously or unconsciously) to only get the perspective truths you want to hear.

But wait, if the absolute Truth is everything about everything, then logically easy access to millions of perspective truths at least should get us closer to the absolute Truth, right?

No…maybe…or at least not yet, and definitely never in our current system.

The Power of We

Let’s recap. The absolute Truth about anything can only be known by an entity capable of omniscience and omnipresence (infinite knowledge of all things throughout space and time). Omnipresence is required because there are simply too many variables throughout space and time for any one perspective to see or fully comprehend. In other words; humans are not capable of omnipresence or omniscience, therefore they are not capable of knowing the absolute Truth…about anything…ever.

So, the natural question- and the one that I’m seeking the answer to- is how close can we get? If we are doomed to forever walk around in the dark, then can we at least bring a flashlight? And how many? Can we bring a few extra sets of eyes as well, so we can look in multiple directions? If the fundamental problem is a lack of infinite perspective, then logically I need to gather more perspectives, right? In other words, if I alone am limited in what I can see, how limited are We?

I ask about “We,” because if we accept the fact that omnipresence is necessary to truly know absolute Truths- then I think the computational and perceptual powers of “we” are the only thing we can work with to get us even remotely moving in the right direction. We have yet to discover how to transcend time, or expand our minds to hold “infinite knowledge,” so that’s out of the picture. And I personally can’t experience more than one place at one time. But technically “we” can. We can be in a lot of places at a lot of times. Every year there are more of us, in more places, at more times. We cannot be infinite, but how close can we get? Can we get 10% of the way there? 20%?

To be clear, 20% of infinite is kind of an ambitious and possibly impossible goal. But it’s a nice even number and it allows me to segue into a discussion on the concept of the 80/20 rule, so that’s what I’m going with. As you may know, the 80/20 rule (aka Pareto Principle, law of the vital few, etc.) is a general observation that explains the correlation between effort and outcome, namely that roughly 80% of the “outcomes” come from 20% of the “efforts”. You see this in business, relationships, even exercise and health ( i.e. you don’t need to be a marathon runner, powerlifter, or insane like David Goggins; you just need to do some exercise regularly to achieve the vast majority of the health impacts of exercise). I would argue that this applies to the pursuit of absolute Truths as well. While having absolute certainty about the absolute Truth would be nice, for humans it isn’t possible and, more importantly, probably isn’t necessary. What IS possible (especially now), is the accumulation of a large number of differing perspectives with the intent of triangulating towards common truths that move us in the direction of absolute Truths. This is “The Power of We.”

The Glorious Internet…

Here is where you say “yeah, we have a place where a large number of perspectives are gathered, it’s called the internet, and it’s a shitshow.” And you would be correct. In fact, it’s fairly obvious that the internet is not only a great pile of feces, but also seems to be pulling us farther from absolute Truths, not closer. To which I would argue that’s because neither the internet, nor any service on it, was built with the “intent” aspect of the equation. Instead, the current internet is more like the result of man’s constant push for ever more powerful technology and then just dumping it on society and saying “hey, isn’t this cool? Have fun and try not to kill yourself!” (To be fair we have a long history of this: fire, automobiles, atom bombs, smart phones, you name it). The point being that the internet is indeed a powerful tool, but we have yet to figure out how to use it effectively or in a way that consistently provides a net benefit to society as a whole (yes I’m aware of all kinds of great things that have been facilitated by a more connected world, but in this post I’m focusing on the overall big picture, and in particular the pursuit of absolute Truths). In reality, no significant part of the internet is focused on truth gathering. But I think it can be.

While I’m not sure exactly how it can be facilitated on a large scale, I think the first step is to discover and define what criteria need to be met in order to move us towards absolute Truths, or at least what will more consistently get us 20% of the way there. What are your thoughts? How do we become better truth-seekers on a personal level? How do we better accumulate perspective truths and analyze them effectively? How do we do this on a mass scale to invoke “the wisdom of crowds?” Would A.I. be useful here? Are there downsides to an organized system of perspective harvesting? These are some of the questions I’ll be tackling over the next few days; I’m sure I’ll have it wrapped up by next week, and then promptly solve all the world’s problems…but then what am I going to write about?