--- Notes on truth ---

... in matters of action, truth or practical rectitude is not the same for all as to what is particular, but only as to the common principles; [whereas in speculative matters, concerned chiefly with necessary things,] truth is the same for all men, both as to principles and as to conclusions.

Thomas Aquinas

My naive model for truth is what-is-out-there, but when people are talking about "truth" they are generally talking about something that is known. What-is-out-there, would accurately be called, "reality". In other words, if there were no conscious organism, no "knower", then there would still be reality but there would be no truth. So truth is knowledge that happens when what-is-known matches what-is-out-there. Truth is knowledge of reality.

At the surface, that sounds okay but just a little consideration will bring up an immediate problem. How do we know - how can we know - that what we think we know actually matches what-is-out-there. This has always been a problem for philosophers (and scientists, for that matter). If you don't believe it, watch The Matrix and ask yourself, "How do I know that the movie isn't the way things really are?" It can drive you to a real existential crisis.

Descartes tried to resolve this problem. He asked how he could know that what he thought of as reality was not just some sort of delusion caused by a demon. It's at the center of many religions. Hindu and Buddhism both speculate that there is a principle in the world called Maya that creates the delusion that what we perceive is real but that only a universal mind is real. Christian Gnosticism proposed that the material world is a delusion created by an evil demiurge to entrap the spirits of people in a servitude of material existence and that only spirit was real. But Descartes' answer was that, although he could never be sure about the reality of other things, he could nevertheless be sure that, since he was thinking, a thinking agent must at least be real and that, because he was thinking, he must be real.

People quickly noticed the flaw in Descartes' thought. Do character's in an author's mind think? Perhaps we are all just characters in someone else's mind. So how can there be truth if we can't even tell if there is even a what-is-out-there?

The conclusion that I come to is that we can, at least, be certain of a continuity. We have tools to test what we can all convince ourselves is the case and has always been the case as long as we have had records to archive reality. Replication, triangulation, experimental control, historical constancy all allow us to test what we might know to see if it is valid and reliable knowledge. We can at least say that, if what we believe to be the truth is not reality, then we have a common and consistent perception of reality that might as well be truth because it is the only truth we can have and, indeed, it has always served us well for truth and must be relied on to serve us in the future as truth.

It might not be completely satisfying as an answer but I'm not so sure we can do any better. Truth is the truth we have.

--- Notes on language ---

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher.

William James

One of the greatest traps for thinkers is forgetting that words are not the things they refer to. Is language the patterns you see on a page or the concepts they engender in your mind?

Unfortunately, language is both but they are not the same and it's devilishly easy to forget that.

A word like "knowledge" does not have "a" definition. Take a minute and look it up in a dictionary, or just type "define knowledge" into your Internet browser and see what comes up. The very extensive Oxford Dictionary of the English Language will give you plenty to read. If you've never seen it, there is probably one at your local library. Ask your reference librarian about it.

Most words are like that. There is no single definition but a family of definitions - all the definitions are related but there are going to be subtle but important differences. In order to parse out what someone else means in a conversation, you have to figure out, with some precision, how they are using the words they are using, and it is very common that, what you think they mean is not quite, maybe not at all, what they actually  mean.

Language, like philosophy, is an adventure and it can be just as dangerous. In order to understand what others are saying, you have to avoid the natural assumption that you know what they  mean. The devastating thing is that, in order to really understand yourself, you have to let go of the assumption that you know what you mean. If you have ever read Plato's Dialogues, you know that the very heart of most of them is Socrates demonstrating to people that they really don't know what they are talking about. And if you haven't read them, you really should. It's a powerful  medicine to realize that you don't know what you're talking about. That's always the first step toward knowing (as Socrates advised) yourself - "the unexamined life is not worth living."

--- Notes on knowledge ---

Thus the faculties of consciousness, of memory, of external sense, and of reason are all equally the gifts of nature. No good reason can be assigned for receiving the testimony of one of them, which is not of equal force with regard to the others.

Thomas Reid

There is a huge difference between Descartes' epistemology and our epistemology. A lot of our epistemology has drifted from philosophy to science - cognitive science. And science has worked out techniques for research that reduce uncertainty and bridges the gap between what we perceive and what is actually "out there".

Some still are suspicious of "faculties of consciousness" like intuition, emotion, and aesthetic judgment but these abilities developed with our race to take care of situations important to our survival and they are as important today as they ever were. We are often called to make "snap judgments" in situations where there is no time for long deliberation and many of our cognitive abilities are there for those situations.

But it is, nevertheless, important that our "faculties of consciousness" and, also our more respected faculties be trained to work well and to work together. Intuition, for instance, with attention and collaboration with reason can be fine tuned to be an effective and reliable tool for assessing situations that are "fuzzy", open to multiple interpretations, or that require a quick, cool summation.

I still run into people who think that memory is like a video recording in which everything that we've done or perceived is stored in our brains (if only we could get to the recordings). That idea has been disproved over and over by cognitive scientists who know that memories are reconstructions from very summary clues stored in our brains. We reconstruct situations every time we remember them and there is much room for error. But the same cognitive scientists have discovered and developed techniques that help us to reduce that error greatly. Rehearsing memories, associating new memories with salient information, and the use of memory systems greatly empower us to remember accurately and reliably.

At the same time replication, triangulation, and good research design allow scientists to certify that the results of their research actually resembles reality enough to understand and predict the workings of nature.

Nevertheless, we should be careful about "what we know". A little humility is called for because we are still once removed from the world. What we perceive will always be processed through our senses and our brain before we consciously apprehend our world. We will always be stuck with mental models of the way things work but, as long as we keep firmly in mind that they are models, that will be good enough.

No, I don't think we can know with absolute certainty what's really "out there", but we can have a consistent and reliable view of how our world works. If it's not "absolute reality", it's our world. We can't go beyond that - or can we.

The major problem is that we are incapable of directly perceiving the universe. Our sensory organs are limited and our brains are material organs that are limited in their programming to certain patterns. They are linear and time bound. Most of the universe, we can't even grasp, but we know that there are things beyond what we can grasp. What we know - our models - require other things. A physicist told me that the universe isn't made of matter - it's made of fields. We can't perceive fields, but they have to be there or else nothing we know would work.

I've had experiences that my brain can't grasp. That's part of shamanism, and there's another way we can go beyond. We're approaching a time when we can construct artificial intelligences that work qualitatively different from our material brains. They can think things that we can't. Can they open up new areas of the universe for us? I guess the question is, "Do we want them to?"