Note: This is part 1 of a five part series on how we can discover truth. Here are the other parts: part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. The entire series makes up the third chapter of my book, The Triple Path, which can be downloaded for free here in PDF and eReader formats or purchased at all major book retailers (in print and eReader formats).

 

Our desire for truth is one of the most fundamental human yearnings. What is truth, though? And how we can come to know it? Thinking about these questions, and their answers, is an important step to shedding our foolishness.

Our Senses and Objective Reality

The most fundamental question in a quest for truth is if some sort of truth in the universe even exists. If the answer is yes, the next question is whether we can discover that truth. Based on our experience with our senses, most of us readily assume without thinking that there is some sort of objective reality. Our perception of reality, however, is limited and imperfect. We only perceive a small part of what we normally think of as being real.

Even someone with 20/20 eyesight has imperfect vision. The level of detail that we can see is limited by the number of rod and cone receptor cells in our eye. Moreover, there are holes and imperfections in the picture our eyes pick up because the distribution of receptor cells in our retina is uneven and because there are not receptors where the optic nerve connects to the retina. Our perception of seeing a complete picture with no holes in it is merely an illusion created by our brains filling in the gaps. Worse still, our eyes can see only a small part of the available light—visible light (the only part we can see) is only two percent of the electromagnetic spectrum.1 This means that we are blind to potentially ninety-eight percent of what there is to “see”. These limitations of perception do not apply only to sight—all of our senses are similarly constrained.
Moreover, our brains have to further filter and interpret all the information our senses receive. Seeing a good magic show is easy proof at how quickly our senses can be fooled.

Beyond just the fallibility of our senses, the very physical properties of the universe make it impossible to be certain about some things. Quantum physics indicates that it is impossible to have complete certainty about certain aspects of subatomic particles: as certainty about a particle’s momentum goes up, certainty about its position goes down, and vice versa. Gaining knowledge about one aspect of the particle makes it impossible to gain knowledge about another. A few scientists have even hypothesized that the physical laws of the universe may not be constant—they may have changed over time, or may be different in other parts of the universe.2

In spite of all these uncertainties and limitations, most of us intuitively believe that some sort of objective truth exists. We perceive an apparently unchanging and constant exterior environment, and we experience the consistency of cause and effect. While our perception of physical reality may be imperfect and flawed, the consistency of those perceptions leads us to assume that our perceptions of reality have a high probability of being generally accurate. Indeed, our continued survival as living beings requires that we act as if objective physical reality exists—for example, without thinking about it, we presuppose that the food we see is real, and we eat it when we are hungry; anyone who does otherwise would soon die.

Our experience indicates that there are physical laws governing the operation of the universe and that, on the scale of human lifetimes, these laws are unchanging. This consistency in our daily experience leads us to assume that truth exists and that we can discover and understand it. Just as we learn through repeated experience from a young age that the sun always rises, we come to expect consistency in other areas, so long as we can discover some sort of pattern.

Our experiences with the consistency of reality contrast with a common unreal experience: when dreaming, we often look at something, look away, then look at it again only to discover that the object has changed in some fundamental way. We perceive “real life” as being qualitatively different from our dreams because we presume that our dreams are generated by our own minds and are thus changeable, whereas our waking perceptions of the universe and the physical world are consistent and appear to be governed by unchanging laws. We feel time flowing on, cause and effect seemingly unchanging and unalterable.

The business of living requires that we assume there is a reality to our existence and that we can come to an understanding of it. We should be bold in moving forward on the best truth we have, and in seeking more of it. It would be wise in this boldness, however, to still have the humility to recognize we will never have perfect understanding. As we confidently seek, we should also humbly understand that the best we can hope is only that our imperfect knowledge and understanding become slightly better approximations of reality. Because of our human limitations, we can never have complete certainty about any of our perceptions.3

When I write in this book about facts or truths or reality, it is because I am communicating with the normal words of everyday language. I write based on my limited perceptions and experiences of an outside world that seems to exist. Of course, there is uncertainty about everything I represent as being true or real, but just as it is wise to have the humility to recognize the uncertainties of life, it is also foolish to be crippled by that uncertainty.

Different Notions of Truth

Enlightenment and scientific notions of objective truth are often the only way we are taught to conceive of truth in school and university. This can cloud our understanding and keep us from considering other ways of conceiving of truth.

Truth from a scientific perspective could perhaps be defined as “a set of facts that are derivable from materialistic reductionism”.4 Some ideas, however, are outside the realm of facts capable of verification in this manner, yet appear in practice to be no less true. In many ways, they seem to be more true. The American Pragmatist school of philosophy offers a way of evaluating the veracity of such ideas. It teaches that we should determine the truth of an idea by examining its practical consequences. For example, on the question of God, William James said “[o]n pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, then it is ‘true’.”5

Following the Pragmatist line, Professor Jordan Peterson defines truth in Darwinian terms, arguing that fundamental truth is that which guides you to action and allows you to survive and reproduce, or more broadly, that which ensures viability across the broadest domain of time.6 He argues that truth in the Darwinian sense is that which is uniquely useful and valuable, as opposed to the Newtonian notion that only what is objectively observable is real.7

Finding truth can thus mean not only seeking greater understanding about the “world as a place of things”, but also about the “world as a forum for action”.8 Whereas Newtonian or scientific truths teach us facts about the material world, lessons about the world as a forum for action teach us moral truths: truths about values and how we should act in the world—human truths about being and meaning.

These moral truths have usually been passed down to us in stories. Our problem now is that many, if not most, of our traditional narratives have been proved historically and cosmologically inaccurate. Just because the stories are not factually true, however, does not necessarily mean that the moral claims embedded in them are also untrue. As the Fourth Century Roman writer Sallust said of the Romans’ pagan myths: “Now these things never happened, but always are.”9 When he wrote that, paganism was already on the decline and would soon collapse, in spite of his efforts (and those of the final pagan Roman Emperor, Julian).10 His justification for the myths was not enough to salvage belief in stories in which ever-growing numbers of people had lost confidence.

But as we discussed in the last chapter, it is getting harder and harder to rely just on our faith in the stories passed down to us. What is the answer, then, as we seek truths about the world as a forum for action—truths about acting, being, and meaning? Perhaps we need new stories, or a new way of using our old ones. The Triple Path’s main purpose is to move to a solution to this problem. We have already discussed how it takes as many as possible of the ingredients available from traditional religion and bakes them into something new and nourishing and more resilient, but it does something else too. It calls for each individual to get better at learning how to find truth, especially moral truths, and then having more faith in the moral truths themselves, and in their Source.

There are many such truths to be discovered, or re-discovered. In the fourth chapter of the The Triple Path, we discuss these questions of morality and ethics in more detail. In part two of this series, we will focus on the methods we can use to discover truth.

 

Footnotes

1. Lisa Yount, Modern Astronomy: Expanding the Universe, 2005, p. 36.

2. John Webb, “Are the laws of nature changing with time?” Physics World, April 2003, pp. 33-38; Michael R. Wilczynska1, et. al., “Four direct measurements of the fine-structure constant 13 billion years ago”, Science Advances, Vol. 6, No. 17, April 24, 2020.

3. While dreaming, most people do not notice the inconsistencies in their perceptions and usually do not even notice they are dreaming—within the context of the dream, the inconsistencies appear perfectly natural. This raises the question: is anything like this happening while we are awake? If so, how could we tell? Psychology research in recent decades into the phenomena of change blindness and inattention blindness suggest that, even when we are awake, we do not perceive such changes very well. See, e.g., Daniel J. Simons and Daniel T. Le­vin, “Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction”, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1998, 644-649; Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla, 2010.

4. Jordan Peterson, July 5, 2018, https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/st atus/1014983453173878784.

5. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, “Lecture 8: Pragmatism and Religion”, 1907.

6. Jordan Peterson, Podcast 4: Religion, Myth, Science, Truth, 32:00, 1:12:00, and 1:13:50.

7. Id. at 1:37:00.

8. Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, 1999, pp. 15 (page numbers from 2002 PDF version).

9. Sallust, On the Gods and the Cosmos, ca. 360.

10. See Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 2015.