There Is No TRUTH
By Jessica Lake
Just like everyone else, I love to write pithy aphorisms about philosophical ideals I hold dearly. Below are some top hits.
There is no truth, only answers we accept.
Do you know why we can never find the truth? Because we stop looking when we believe we have found it.
Although the investigation was thorough, it still left many answers unquestioned.
But I have never had occasion to put pen to paper about my obsession with the truth.
What Truth Means to Me
—Jimmy Olson, 1952
I begin with an observation.
Evolution Prefers Sufficiency
Evolution.
A protozoan senses dark and light.
It thrives.
Its descendant senses the source of the light.
It prospers.
A short epoch later, another protozoan can see predators and prey.
You get the picture.
This will be useful in a bit.
Think of a thermometer.
Alcohol is sealed in a glass pipette. Temperature goes up, the expanding alcohol goes up. It is calibrated from bottom to top in degrees. You read the useful thermometer with a glance. You measure heat by its action on an intermediate.
A thermometer is an instrument.
The protozoan navigates by her model of reality. Light sensitivity is her instrument. The microorganism’s concern is food, safety, and reproductive success. If it improves fitness, both evolution and critter are happy.
There is no perfect.
Only tradeoffs.
Nature balances the costs and benefits of an instrument.
We evolved too.
Our model is fancier, but still bounded.
And we are fruitful.
This is relevant to what we mean by truth.
I promise.
We do not perceive reality directly. Rather, we navigate from our internal model of reality. A model that rewards useful behaviors.
In the big picture, evolution is not interested in veracity.
It is interested in sufficiency.
Every new instrument may produce a better model.
That does not make the model reality itself.
The Black Box
Let us say I give you a black box with buttons you push and colored lights that respond. You have no way of knowing what is inside.
And I ask you:
“Learn as much as you can about the behavior of the box.”
So, you push buttons. You watch the responding colored lights. You write down your observations. You try predictions.
After many iterations, you come away with a description that explains how the box behaves.
Does your model tell us what is inside the black box?
No.
It does not.
What you’ve discovered is a way to model the behavior of what is contained within the black box.
It may be highly accurate.
Perhaps even indistinguishable from perfect.
But you cannot be sure what is in the black box. You can only model its behavior.
In general, the above lets us construct a model from our observations. Models are useful because they predict behaviors commensurate with what we observe.
But there is something subtle here.
A model’s predictions are compared against our observations.
Never against the interior.
The interior is forever hidden within the black box.
Suppose we invert the experiment.
Buttons, colored lights, and you are inside a black box.
You may press buttons.
You may observe every light.
Eventually, you infer an astonishingly accurate model. It predicts every experiment you perform.
Have you discovered what is outside your box?
No.
You have a model that hints at the outer world.
You are limited by the veracity of your imperfect instruments.
That is all.
Truth and Models
A protozoan evolves.
Evolution is quite happy with “close enough.”
Sufficiency.
That is us too.
Every scientific theory.
Every philosophy.
Every religion.
Every political ideology.
Every personal belief.
Every one acts as a model attempting to make predictions about reality from our observations.
No one has direct access to reality itself.
This is why I no longer think truth is something we uncover.
By truth I mean the answers we currently accept.
By TRUTH I mean reality itself.
Truth is a judgment we apply to a model.
A model becomes “true” because it predicts sufficiently well that we stop looking for another one.
Notice what happened.
What we call truth did not emerge solely from reality. It emerged from human acceptance of a model.
The distinction matters.
When Truth Changes
A better model can always arrive tomorrow.
History demonstrates this repeatedly.
The Earth ceased being the center of the universe.
Continents began to drift.
Neanderthals became sophisticated humans.
Dinosaurs became creatures with feathers.
Every human generation mistakes its best current model for reality itself.
Then reality politely disagrees.
Science, at its best, understands this.
It does not establish theories as final TRUTH.
It tries relentlessly to prove them wrong.
Every surviving theory is simply the least unsuccessful model we currently possess.
That is not a weakness.
It is the greatest strength science has.
The Danger of Truth
The danger appears when we forget the distinction.
The moment a model becomes TRUTH, it ceases to be questioned.
It becomes—
Defended.
Promoted.
Taught.
Protected.
Entire societies synchronize around shared models because synchronization has enormous value.
Communication improves.
Cooperation improves.
Prediction improves.
But synchronization carries a cost.
The more successful a model becomes socially, the easier it is to mistake consensus for correspondence with reality.
Consensus is not reality.
It is merely many minds sharing the same model.
That model may be excellent.
It may even be the best one humanity has ever produced.
But it remains a model.
The Purpose of Inquiry
I therefore think the purpose of inquiry is not to discover TRUTH.
It is to construct increasingly useful models that survive ever larger collections of observations.
Every observation is another constraint.
Every contradiction is an opportunity.
Every failed prediction is reality reminding us that our map is not the territory.