Truth — Existence
Recent events in my life have caused me to consider truth pretty critically. I wanted to get some of those thoughts out of me and into the wild. My intent is that this be a three-part series, discussing truth’s existence, its knowability and its utility.
Personal
As my marriage recently fell apart, my ex-wife and I became serially incapable of communicating about past events without becoming infuriated with each other. We would talk about events from several years ago, and our recollections of them seemed so different as to be describing different events. As time progressed and our distance from each other increased, our ability to speak to each other about more and more recent events seemed to disappear. We each thought the other must be crazy, lying, or simply wrong.
After we gave up and I started trying to piece my life and mind back together, I realized that neither of us was lying — we simply saw the events from two perspectives that had become more and more distant. What she expressed as truth from her perspective was true to her, but I couldn’t find a way to understand how it could be true to me. I don’t know how to be okay with this, but I’ve at least come to the point that I can accept it.
Are the things I believe about those events true? Are the things she believes true? I believe what I believe because it seems true to me, but what makes something like that actually true?
Political
If you look at the US Presidential election of 2016, you’ll see two groups of people who have thought out their positions very well, and simply can’t conceive that the half of the country that thinks differently than they do could be anything other than insane, ignorant, bigoted, etc.
If one can truly open his mind to the perspective of either side, there are factual (?) arguments that lead to the conclusion that their candidate is better than the other. Further, there are arguments that prove that the opposing candidate is actually a very dangerous prospect.
Was one of the sides right? Were any of the arguments true?
Causal
This is one of the things that immediately caused me to question the value of my perception of truth as I realized that my ex-wife hadn’t been lying to me or crazy. It gets a bit messy, so please bear with me.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone,
“In flat spacetime, the future light cone of an event is the boundary of its causal future and its past light cone is the boundary of its causal past.”
As we consider events in the universe, it’s important to note that some events are causally related — that is, one of them is part of the cause of the other. I would argue that events that are not causally related are not orderable. For example, consider two stars that are 100 light-years apart. Now suppose those two stars collapse at the same time to an observer exactly in the middle of them. We’ll call this observer Bob. Meanwhile, Alice is very close to one of the stars, while Charlie is very close to the other. As Alice, Bob and Charlie try to talk about the events they observed, Bob claims that the events were simultaneous, while Alice and Charlie each claim that their star collapsed nearly 100 years before the other. Obviously all three of them are correct, but their perspectives led them to believe different things about the order of these causally-unrelated events.
Note that for the sake this example, all three observers can be in the same inertial frame of reference (meaning they’re all moving in the same direction at the same speed), simply at different positions, and their perceptions regarding the events are completely different, but completely true for each of them. This already creates a universe of events whose order is messy at best, but when you allow for things like observers in different inertial frames, or even observers in non-inertial frames (meaning their velocity isn’t constant), the prospect of ordering non-causal events in the universe seems completely ridiculous.
Our nature as humans is to document our observations as “history” and to consider it “truth”. If we were to compare our record of astronomical events with the record of a civilization distant from us, there would seem to be a lot of discrepancies.
The fact that we can discuss this difficulty likely means that we can find a solution to it. In the example, Alice, Bob and Charlie would almost certainly understand why their perceptions were different and have no problem with it.
In my mind, this all ties back to the types of truth I discussed earlier because the ordering of astronomical events like stars dying seems like a fairly simple flavor of truth, but it requires non-trivial depth to reconcile these different perspectives. The types of truth that come from our perceptions about people and their intents are much more messy. So if these simple truths either don’t exist or aren’t knowable, what hope is there for messy truths?
Quantum-physical
In the world we are all accustomed to, we get comfortable with the idea that we can locate things. My car is in the garage, for example. Well, at a quantum level, things aren’t so simple. Suppose we have a hydrogen atom and the means to reason well enough about it for the sake of this thought experiment. At a given moment, we want to believe that the electron is at a certain position. The classical atomic model (the Bohr Model) would certainly lead you to think that such knowledge should be attainable. Well in the quantum model, the electron doesn’t have a position, but rather a wave function — a probability distribution of where it might be. Note that this doesn’t mean that the electron is somewhere and we just don’t know where it is. In fact, the electron doesn’t have a location until it’s observed.
If quantum theory is a good model of the universe, and everything is a probability distribution, what does that mean for truth?
I don’t bring up any of these examples in order to make the claim that truth doesn’t exist. Within the light cone of a given event, it is certainly true that the event happened. My argument is simply that truth is much more complex, subjective, and nuanced than I have ever given it credit for.
I’m confident that many people have a far better grasp on the idea of truth than I do. It shocked me to consider that my perception of truth may have little or nothing to do with what is actually true.
Truth is important to me. As I rebuild myself, I want to rebuild on truth. It doesn’t seem like I can do this until I have some clue about its nature. I insist that it exists, but beyond that I only have suspicions and hopes.
