How to use Truth to Uncover Life’s Meaning (Part 3 - On Structure)
Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Part 3— On the Structure of Truth
In the earlier articles, we discussed why we cannot learn the absolute truth, and why relative truth is worth pursuing. Now we will discuss how to frame that truth. In other words, we will talk about the key structural parts involved in understanding the truth.
Now onwards, when we use the term truth, it will only be referring to relative truth (truth as it relates to human beings), unless otherwise specified.
The Known
To fully understand the truth, it is important to first understand what is known. Depending on the field and how much time human beings in the past have dedicated themselves to delving into this topic, there could be a vast amount of information available.
If you decide to skip this step, the entire process is inefficient because you will only end up rediscovering what was realized previously. In other words, your time will be wasted reinventing the wheel.
We learn from making mistakes, and every mistake needs to be made, until the truth is realized and considered as irrefutable. This means that everything that is known today, was learned from making a mistake in the past.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
~ George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905
Those truths that have survived through time and are considered as obvious today, are the ones that people in the past have tried to prove as false and failed.
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
All the known information is arranged in the form of a hierarchy, which depicts the manner in which they are all related, and also the order in which we value the information.
For example, to speak a language fluently, there is a vast amount of information that needs to be learned first. We have to learn all the letters, words, how the words relate to one another, pronunciations, grammar, sentence structuring, etc. before we can learn how to use it to communicate our thoughts effectively. If you do not put in the time to study it, then you will unnecessarily struggle to use it in a manner that you want.
This is also more commonly referred to as The Order.
The Unknown
The unknown is everything outside of the known.
To learn more than the known truth, you have to first understand where the boundaries exist. It is impossible to gauge the amount of unknown information, because there is an abyss in every direction that you decide to study. In other words, you cannot draw a boundary around what is unknown.
The more you work towards a specific direction or edge of human understanding, more is revealed to you through your mistakes. The reason for this phenomenon is because the more in-depth we study a field of interest, the more likely we are to come across “anomalies”. In other words, we come across things that do not fit our models or theories. When a significant amount of anomalies are found, it challenges the foundational assumptions of the field, and forces us to undergo a paradigm shift i.e. it replaces our previous understanding with a new perspective of the field that is better and more fully encompassing the anomalies.
Every paradigm shift moves us closer to the truth, but takes rigorous testing and understanding of the known information, so as to find these anomalies.
One of the most significant examples of a paradigm shift in history was the emergence of Quantum Mechanics. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, it was assumed that the vast majority of the world could be explained by Newtonian Physics, except for a few anomalies like how light would sometimes behave as a wave and sometimes as a particle. However, attempts to understand this behavior of light, led to the birth of quantum mechanics, which forced physicists to rethink everything they assumed about the entirety of their field. So the value of an unknown is unimaginable, because it can break our foundational assumptions and force us to reformulate a new understanding that incorporates and explains the anomaly.
The Models
Model refers to the mental hierarchical order of the known world, i.e. the perceived order in the world. In other words, it depicts the manner in which we assume things work in the world. It is just the form in which the order of the world is mentally stored.
For example, in the game of basketball, when you are aiming to shoot the ball, you make some assumptions about the weight of the ball, wind resistance, gravity, etc. so that you can score. However, if your assumptions were incorrect, the ball bounces off, and you have to try again with hopefully better assumptions. The more closely your mental model of the world matches with reality, the more likely you are to score.
The better the model of the world, the more it can explain everything, and the better it can be used to predict future outcomes. The opposite is also true, the worse the model — the more exceptions exist for the model, and the less it can predict.
Also the bigger the model (ex: the theory of evolution), the more it tries to explain, and the more easily it can be refuted if it were untrue. The ability to survive through time is also another rigorous test for such “big umbrella” models.