on the importance of truth
We live in a social and political climate sometimes described as ‘post-factual,’ which means, in part, that people are not clear on what facts are, and/or suspect they don’t exist in any reliable fashion. To make matters worse, the general public feels an increased distrust of experts and authorities in nearly every field. A primary factor in this breakdown is of course the Internet, which since its privatization in 1994 has given people access to an enormous amount of information and a staggering amount of misinformation. On the Internet, information and misinformation are constantly mixed together in ratios unknown to the reader. In combination with the profound failure of our education system to make itself relevant to real life (most schools and universities still do not require students to take classes in critical thinking skills or understand the basic logical fallacies), ), this means that the vast majority of people today cannot skillfully separate fact from half-truth, or half-truth from outright fiction.
Let’s engage in a bit of that much-needed discernment right now by going on a little journey together to establish how we can know what is true. (This is what scholars call epistemology.) First off, we can define a fact as something everyone can agree on, if they bother to make a careful observation. For example, every single person who takes the trouble to measure it will find, like Galileo did, that an object dropped from a tall building will fall at a rate of 9.8m/s squared. So that’s a fact.* Facts also exist in other disciplines besides the hard sciences: for example, a massive amount of evidence demonstrates that a passenger liner called the Titanic sank on 15 April 1912, such that no reasonable person who looks at the evidence could doubt it. Facts don't change over time, though the general public has seemingly become skeptical of that truth, probably because scientists, ever in the process of collecting more data, often revise their earlier conclusions in light of an expanded data set. But facts themselves don’t change; rather, our ability to describe them slowly improves, which sometimes entails the realization that an earlier effort at description was off the mark.
Now, by contrast, a fiction or untruth is a statement for which no careful observer can find enough evidence to compel them to endorse it as true (such as ‘aliens built the pyramids’ or ‘vaccines cause autism’), assuming that that observer is not already committed to the proposition when she begins her observation. That last point is super important: only inquiry motivated by curious openness to explore and discover, without a foregone conclusion, can produce truth. These epistemological principles—that is, the principles by which we can form valid conclusions—are sadly no longer the common coin of our realm, even among educated people.
There is also a special kind of scientific fiction called a hypothesis, which means something that very well might be true but for which there is not yet sufficient evidence to provide surety. Now here’s where it gets slightly more complicated. In science, it is well understood that nothing can ever be proven with 100% certainty (because the scientific method is mostly inductive), but we can get close enough to 100% to bet our lives on it. For example, we let computers fly our planes most of the time (the pilot flies manually only on takeoff and touchdown, in most cases), being more than 99% certain that the algorithms the computers are running are correct. We can’t be 100% sure, but most people are okay with that: since they see they planes fly successfully all the time, they feel confident in boarding one. And there are countless such examples. When a hypothesis reaches a very high percentile of likelihood (like, 99%), it is called a theory in science. This usage confuses the general public, because nonscientists frequently use the term ‘theory’ to mean ‘hypothesis’ or even ‘guess’. But the Theory of Relativity and the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection are called such because they are more than 99% likely to be correct. By ‘correct’, we mean that these theories have a very close correspondence with reality: so close that they can both explain observed phenomena and make accurate predictions about phenomena not yet observed. How do we establish that correspondence? We design lots of tests and experiments to predict what will happen in a given scenario on the basis of the given hypothesis, and then we run the experiments to see if the hypothesis gave an accurate prediction. And then we do that over and over again. This is the scientific method. Whenever you fly in an airplane or turn on a home security system or use your smartphone, you’re expressing your implicit faith in the scientific method. You believe it yields reliable results, or you wouldn’t use those high-stakes technologies. But somehow, when science reveals new information, such as a climatological model that shows that human activity is causing potentially catastrophic climate change, many people are skeptical, even though the scientific method used is exactly the same as the one that established the technologies they’re willing to bet their life on.
Now, a theory is a successful mental model, so in the terms of an earlier blog post of mine, it is part of second-order reality, not first-order reality. It’s not reality itself, it’s a finely-tuned mental representation of reality. Reality is never reducible to our descriptions of it, but it is hugely important to recognize that some mental models are more accurate than others (measured by the fact that they stand up to repeated testing and make accurate predictions). But can mental models outside of the realm of science have strong relationships to reality-as-such, the way scientific ones do? Strong enough to help us reliably navigate the complexities of life better? Strong enough to designate them as something more than mere opinion or belief? Yes, I argue.
If there weren’t some fundamental truths about human nature, principles of the human experience of reality that we all share in common (whether we’re aware of it or not), we would never be able to accurately communicate or authentically connect with one another. These kinds of truth are very hard to articulate, because even though there is such a thing as an accurate generalization (something that’s verifiably true often enough to make it an accurate guide for behavior), it’s very difficult to phrase it in such a way so as to entail the least number of exceptions—and critics will always point out the exceptions as if that invalidates the generalization. However, we can try an example from social psychology: I think we can all agree that all human beings have an indeterminate number of mental/emotional needs, such as the need for a measure of personal autonomy, the need for a sense of safety or security, the need for a sense of meaning or purpose, the need for human connection, and so on. These are impossible to quantify or even state precisely, but we can all agree we have such needs. And with a little reflection, we will probably agree that what most people are doing most of the time is trying to get their needs met in the best way they know how. Insofar as we all agree about these basic propositions, we can call them facts; or at least, truths.
But how does this apply to spiritual philosophy? Doesn’t spirituality belong to a different domain entirely, beyond the domain of what is verifiable? No, I argue. If it does, it is not spirituality but fantasy. Wishful thinking. Here, I am making a crucial distinction between spirituality and religion. Unlike religion, which is built on a dogmatic belief system, spiritual philosophy offers propositions (hypotheses) that can and must be verified in your direct experience. Any pragmatic spiritual philosophy (or PSP) presents not only a vision of the nature of reality, but also practices and techniques that allow one to test the assertions comprising that vision. As such, it explicitly or implicitly argues that what it asserts is verifiable through those practices. Of course, for these ‘experiments’ to work, that is, to establish a warrant for truth, it’s important that you are not already emotionally invested in that particular spiritual philosophy being right, but merely open to the possibility that it may have established some truths about the nature of human existence that are verifiable through direct experience. The difference between science and a PSP is that the former establishes truths upon which you can rely without direct experience of them (if the scientific methodology utilized is sound), whereas the latter asserts truths about the nature of reality that are only verifiable first-hand. In other words, spirituality offers propositions that, by their very nature, can only be verified in the subjective space of one’s direct experience, not in objective public space. But the subjective space of conscious experience is precisely what one is most concerned with in the context of the quest for meaning and fulfillment in life.
In the arena of subjective direct experience, we must admit that any verbal proposition can only approach the truth, never perfectly articulate it, because direct experience is, by its very nature, nonverbal and nonconceptual. To explain: in any given moment, we have a direct experience of reality that is separable from the interpretation of the experience that follows. This truth is obscured by the fact that the mind usually interprets experience within one or two seconds of having the experience. But if experience itself were not nonverbal and nonconceptual, it would be impossible to be mistaken about what you feel or to struggle to articulate your feeling—and that’s clearly not the case. That is to say, if experience were inherently conceptual, words would map onto experiences perfectly, and there would be no such thing as a communication breakdown.
Having said that, it’s certainly the case that some interpretations approach the wordless truth of direct experience more closely than others. This must be the case, if there is such a thing as reality-as-such, prior to conceptual overlay. Reality-as-such is simply reality as experienced directly, free from the interpretive frames imposed by our cultural conditioning.** Contemplative traditions of South Asia, which gave us the disciplines of meditation and mindfulness, assert that not only is there a reality prior to (and independent of) interpretation, but further posit that the goal of spiritual practice is to know that reality with certainty.
Here some readers might object, “Are you not simply replacing one set of culturally-contingent interpretive frames with another, equally contingent?” I certainly hope not. Despite the challenge entailed by such an effort, I hope touse words to point beyond words, thereby illuminating something real (and perhaps even universal) about our shared human experience. In the Sanskrit language, the capacity of words to communicate something they do not explicitly say is called dhvani, and successfully leveraging that capacity is the highest aspiration of anyone who writes on spiritual philosophy. Which brings me to the question of precisely which conceptual tools I use to point towards the nonconceptual truths of conscious experience.
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NOTES:
* To be more precise, this number varies slightly depending on where on Earth you are. Because of the slight effect of centrifugal force, objects fall slightly faster near the poles (9.83m/s2) than near the equator (9.77m/s2). But this doesn’t change the point being made, which is that everyone making the observation at the same location will agree on the outcome. (Incidentally, running this experiment would be an easy way to disprove the ‘Flat Earth’ conspiracy theory observationally, if you could get yourself and your Flat Earther friend to the pole and equator.)
** A number of contemporary philosophers think this is impossible, and I am aware of their arguments; but the whole weight of the many-branched and highly durable contemplative traditions of Asia stand against their view.