Language, Data, Theorems & Truth

As I sit listening to the hum of hard drives duplicating information from the past decades of my life, I pause to reflect for a moment on language, data, theorems, and truth.

Few of us know of Kurt Gödel’s incompletness theorems. Which are, actually, proofs. The first thing we failed to understand was that theorems and proofs are distinct.

It’s that second thing, though.

Truth is a matter of context, perspective, and degree. That’s step A. But step B is the leviathan: it is precisely the unprovability of truth at its own order of statement, that allows for anything resembling it to exist at all.

In simpler terms: truth is perceived only from beyond the system that establishes it. And that beyond is incredibly mysterious. Though it has relationships with data and or what we most often negligently refer to as ‘facts’, the nature of truth is (perhaps formally) transcendental to facts. It’s beyond the nature of logic, or of systems.

No language can encompass it…

Of course within the context of specific systems such as mathematics and logic (which both depend upon us taking foundational axioms ‘for granted’), facts and other kinds of pseduo-truth emerge to our appreciative awareness.

Appreciative because our goal was, originally, to at least partly divest ourselves of the responsibilities inherent in participating directly in truth. We want the convenience of having certainty. So we forget, together, that the goal of certainty is, most often, departure from relational participation. An endpoint. An abandonment.

Once we understand this, other options become available. It is then possible for us to approach experience with intentions that precede the desire for certainty, facts, and ‘truth”.

How?

By ensuring integrity in our relationships. With nature. With the universe. Each other. Language. Knowledge. And perhaps most centrally: purpose. The transcendental nature of truth is married somehow… to integrity. Sincere intimacy. Honesty. Humility.

Virtue.

Now the American public is in a war. A war about disambiguation, data, language, style, psychology, and the manipulation of the many for the benefits of the few. It’s a terrifying frontier, and a lethal one. Nearly everyone is grabbing their weapons of preference (or habit) and wielding them ignorantly at the apparitions that appear in their (mostly poorly-educated) minds.

But there’s something better than a weapon: actual insight. Actual intelligence. It’s possible for us to engineer the opposite of a bomb. And while that possibility hangs by a slender, delicate thread… it’s the one I work in hope of.

Truth won’t help slaves or a dead nation. It won’t resurrect the victims of an opinion war we were too ready to be baited into. It won’t protect our hospitals, lives or future. It won’t even protect our history.

But intelligence, discovered and enacted with and for each other, and the history and future of life on Earth might. At the very least, we can count on it to limit the casualties and expand the opportunities.

Which is precisely the opposite of the outcomes the bizarre array of charades our nation is currently chasing as if they were wish-granting jewels.

They are poison.

But we, together, can become the antidote.

Or, we can replay the worst catastrophes in human history on a scale heretofore unimaginable.

One of these paths is leads to a future worth participating in.

The other leads to endless graveyards.