Truth Units: a Simple Picture of Unfathomable Reality
“It’s better than where we used to live”
Tim Andersen, Ph.D. recently published “Comment on my Aeon essay: All Possible Worlds.” This article (and some of the comments on it) contain surprisingly deep and articulate insights into the nature of reality.
“Truth Units: a new theory of truth for our ‘post-truth’ world” published earlier this month, is based on a “theory of reality” very much in sync with Dr. Andersen’s remarks — some of the best I’ve read on Medium.
That said, the “truth units theory of reality” is a simpler way of framing the same concepts — because the theory’s semantic ‘elements’ are less abstract and ambiguous. Being “simpler” facilitates a better understanding of what Dr. Andersen and others (e.g., Benjamin Cain, Walt McLaughlin) are saying.
Diving in…
First we need to define the theory’s three semantic elements — what you might call an ontology— before we discuss how they interact, their relationship with each other. They are:
· Reality
· Consciousness
· Experience
Reality is what exists separate from our consciousness. Most people understand and agree with that definition. One could describe it as “the world we live in” or “the physical world” to indicate it is a “something” outside our consciousness.
Reality is the something, comprising everything outside our consciousness — be it the physical universe, a pantheistic cosmos, God, or whatever is the substrate for string theory, quantum mechanics, etc. All these things are mysteries to human cognition. We have never gotten to the “bottom” of science, mysticism, spiritualism and religion — and maybe never will.
Consciousness is what we experience. This includes sensory perceptions, thoughts, intuitions, emotions, memories, dreams, imaginings, etc.
Imagine watching a movie. The movie is so engaging you are lost in it — it’s as if the rest of the world is forgotten. However, there are still at least a few things going on in your mind — things you are still aware of — including the awareness that you are watching the movie. The movie and whatever is going on in your mind (awareness, thought, emotion, etc) is consciousness.
Experience is the content of our consciousness. As phenomenologists say, “consciousness is always consciousness of something.” The “somethings” of your consciousness are all defined as experiences in truth units theory. Parmenides said your experience is one unified thing, which Martin Heidegger called “Being.” Heraclitus said your experience is an infinity of things — “you can never step into the same river twice.” Either way, if you ‘point’ to, focus on, or behold anything — a process referred to as “intentionality” in phenomenology — that anything is an experience.
These elements represent an ontology, in that absolutely everything we can imagine — whatever we imagine — fits into one of these three elements: reality, consciousness and experience.
Do you beg to differ?
You might define these elements differently. For instance, you could say your consciousness is reality — that there is no reality outside of your consciousness. You could say your perceptions, emotions or intuitions are more than experiences — that they are intrusions of reality into your consciousness — that they reflect reality in one way or another.
Distinctions like that are valid and ancillary to the idea that anything you imagine falls into the “buckets” of reality, consciousness and experience. The potential argument is how these buckets relate to one another. The “truth units theory of reality” is one such way — and the relationships between them are simpler than you might think.
Where rubber meets road
As Tim Andersen concisely says:
“There is nothing true about a rock unless it is said… That doesn’t mean rocks don’t exist. It means we cannot say what a rock is, or is not, apart from its linguistic representation.”
Here Dr. Andersen is framing the reality/consciousness/experience ontology as two pieces — reality and linguistic representation. Linguistic representation rests on the substrate of experience. That experience in the truth units theory of reality includes:
· The belief in “other minds” (a philosophical term)
· Language (which we learn through experience)
Our awareness of rocks — our experience of rocks — is in our consciousness. Yet in the above quote, it sounds like the rocks themselves are outside of our minds — that they are part of reality. This is the part I think a lot of people struggle with. How we can we “talk” about a rock as a real thing when everything we talk about is just talk? As Tim Andersen further concisely says:
“Language cannot refer to anything in the real world, only itself…When I talk about a rock, I am referring not to the reality of the rock itself but of how humans work together with things that we identify as rocks.”
A thought experiment
A good theory of reality explains how we get from the rock to our talk of the rock.
In the “truth units theory of reality” we bridge the chasm between rock and talk with a thought experiment, as follows.
Below are two “pieces” of writing, one in English and one in (I think) Chinese:
If you are English-literate, you can read the words in the English piece. If you are not Chinese-literate, you cannot read the words in the Chinese piece. And vice versa.
If you (like me) are English-literate and not Chinese-literate, you cannot see the English piece as anything other than English words, and you cannot see the Chinese piece as anything but graphic entities.
Speaking for myself, it is virtually impossible to see the English piece as graphic entities. I just see words. If I push myself, I can look at certain letters in isolation, like “l” and “o” by themselves, and see a line and a circle respectively. But that kind of interpretation for me is totally lost when they are among other letters (like “e” and “a”).
How “perception” works
The way we see a rock as a rock is the same way we see the English piece as English words. If we could “see” the rock as it is in reality, it would be as meaningless to us as the Chinese characters. In fact, we wouldn’t even separate the rock from the rest of the objects around it.
Why then do we experience ourselves “seeing” the rock in the first place? Our “seeing” it is based on experiences. Our experience teaches us, lesson after lesson, so that we see a rock the way we see words. It gets wired into us. The process is automatic, subconscious.
Imagine yourself as a just-born baby. You don’t “see” rocks at that stage in your development.
This really struck home for me reading a quote from Helen Keller. (I wish I could find where I saw it.) She essentially said that before she was taught to communicate there was nothing. She seemed to say that while she had consciousness, there was nothing in her consciousness.
You can “test” the truth units theory of reality for yourself with various “optical illusions.” If you see a stick emerging from water, it looks like two separate pieces, even though you know it is one stick.
In a nutshell, the truth units theory of reality says the only reason you see one pencil is because you’ve trained yourself to see it. Without that training, you would see two separate pencil halves.
Further, without “training” (and your brain’s innate programming) you wouldn’t see a transparent glass holding transparent water. Just as this photo is composed of pixels, your brain translates “data” from the retina of your eye into “pixels” for your consciousness.
The big question
So how would the world look, if I could see it without experience? According to the truth units theory of reality you’d have to be a just-born baby or like Helen Keller — in which case, the world would not look like anything — it’d be a void. In your mind you would see nothing. You wouldn’t have had the experiences to “see” anything, even if it was right on front of you — even though there was something (“reality”) right in front of you.
Personally, I don’t see this as remarkable or disturbing in any way. That’s simply how we are as humans. Light rays hit our eyes, our minds interpret them, and we see our interpretations. There must be something “real” about our interpretations, since we — as a species and individually — have survived and been alive this long. Look at how well the “system” works — most of the time, anyway.
In the Monty Python sketch “Flats Built By Hypnosis” journalist Michael Palin interviews tenant Eric Idle, asking him “You don’t mind living in a figment of another man’s imagination?” He replied “No, it’s much better than where we used to live.”
Given we’re currently alive, I’m happy to go with that.
Where to go from here
“Truth Units: a new theory of truth for our ‘post-truth’ world” is about how “atoms” of experience assemble themselves into the Pythonesque “apartments” we call life — and from there, into the “truths” we put on pedestals in our minds. When we take a “truth units” perspective, we can see those “truths” as just chains of experience — as just truth units, open to our inspection. This can be a good way to understand and accept ourselves and others, since despite our differences, our worlds are all ultimately just chains of our experience.
Seeing “truth” as chains of truth units takes the elusive, frustrating mystery out of truth. (Perhaps to a place better than where we’ve been living so far.)
Thank you for reading. Please comment! Your questions and critiques are appreciated.
Learn more about truth units:
