Truth! (I think...)
(0:00) Intro
Hello, welcome to a Grand Reflection. A podcast where we attempt to dive deep into new ideas in order to understand more about the world and more about ourselves. Today’s episode in on truth. I know, this is such a huge topic to go over, and I doubt we'll reach the end of it in just one episode. But I do hope that this will at least create a starting point that we can go off of later. That being said, It's still going to be a lot to go over, so I've created timestamps in the notes that you can click on to jump to different parts of the podcast if you need to. As well as that, at the bottom of the show notes I'll add any outside sources that I've mentioned, as well as some additional resources you can explore if you'd like to.
(1:34) Finding Truth, and Not Still Not Finding It
So, let's get started.
Ok. Truth.
What is truth and how do we find it? Well, we start by suggesting an answer to a question, or by making a statement that we think is correct. Then we continue on by gathering information and taking a look at the data. And finally, we try to be as objective as possible, and use reason in order to come to a conclusion about that data. And, maybe if we're being super diligent about it, we might even get some peer review to confirm our findings. This is the core of the scientific method. Hypothesis, Data collection, Conclusion. Very cut and dry. And, it's not just limited to science. We use this for philosophy too. Form a hypothesis, test it with reason, and form a conclusion, and then you have a new theory. But it even applies to religion. Form a theological question, search the sacred text (or commentary of other scholars), and then form a theological conclusion based on reason.
So it seems that no matter what realm we're seeking truth in, we go through the same process. And it's a pretty cut and dry process, that looks to be extremely straightforward. So then, why is truth so hard to find? Why won't people seem to want to listen to reason? And why, in an age of readily available information do we have a harder time than ever discovering the truth? We obviously need a new way forward. And if this method alone was enough, then I don't think we'd still be arguing so much about everything after all this time. But how can we do it differently? What other way is there?
(4:15) Some Quick Learning About Learning
That’s a hard question to answer, but I think I've discovered some really interesting things that might help us understand it all a little bit better. Now, there's going to be a lot here to wrap our heads around, and I totally get that this might start to feel like a firehose. So, before we get started, let's look quickly at some key concepts from a book about learning. I hope that it'll ease the burden a bit by giving us a little bit different of a way of gaining knowledge that we can work off of.
The book is called Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown. In the book, he talks about how the human brain actually has a very low capacity for memorization. That we can get things to stay in the brain for a short while, such as long enough to take a test, but that "cramming" method of study that we're used to doesn't actually show great long term results. This is why even though we studied super hard to remember all those dates and names in history class, all but a select few of them are completely lost to us now that we're out of school.
Brown argues instead that practice should be spaced out, interleaved with other learning, and varied in order to produce better mastery, longer retention, and more versatility. People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery. So, in light of that, I'm going to start us out by introducing some concepts and models first, and then after that we can circle back and reintroduce them together and connect them to each other, and hopefully, through it all get a bigger picture regarding the nature of truth. During this process, you might see some connections between the concepts right away. And that's good. In fact, I urge you to guess as we go along how I'm going to connect them all at the end of it. Because another part of Brown's theory of learning is that it's helpful to guess answers. Brown says that "Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt."
So, with that in mind, let's get started.
Concepts overview
Here's a quick look that the concepts want to go over. And, again, I'll have them tagged in the notes so that you can jump to whichever one you like whenever you like.
Okay, so, here they are:
We're going to go over The Case Against Reality - Where things aren't as concrete as they seem.
Then there's The Default Mode Network and the task-positive network - Where survival and creativity get at odds with each other.
After that is The Left Brain vs The Right Brain - Where we see that it's a little more nuanced than we were were taught growing up, but that there are differences.
And then we'll go to Integral Theory - Where we see how individual and societal consciousness progresses through time
And after that, we're going to take a look at The Secular World vs The Enchanted World - Where we see how we lost a sense of wonder out of a need to feel safe
And then finally, we're going to talk briefly about The Wisdom Ladder - Where we see how wisdom is gained, and what steps are needed.
(7:33) The Case Against Reality
The Case Against Reality is a book by Donald Hoffman where he puts forth the Interface Theory of perception. He argues that our senses don't actually give us an accurate view of reality, but that they instead work like an advanced computer interface that gives us useful information. And just like if your computer started showing a ton of zeros and ones on the screen you'd be overwhelmed and unable to make sense of the data, he argues that we would have the same problem if we had an unfiltered view of reality. That our senses are more like icons on a desktop than they are pictures of a microchip. and he goes into great detail with this talking about how our senses deceive us, and how even our sense of time or sense of cause and effect are mere icons rather than aspects of reality. He says that it's quicker to click on a shortcut than it is to manually build a program every time you want one. And, speed is needed when it comes to survival. And we evolved to survive. And so, we evolved a fast, but inaccurate view of the world around us. Useful, but not based on truth. What this means is, all of our measurements and observations are a rough shorthand rather than accurate indicators of what's out there.
Okay, Shifting gears.
(10:34) The Default Mode Network vs The Flow State.
The Default Mode Networks is what your brain does when it's doing nothing. Because, as it turns out, your brain is never actually doing nothing. This is the network that's firing up when you're not in the present moment and just sort of mulling over things. As best as we can tell, this is also the activation pattern of the brain that gives us a sense of self. And it gives us a sense of self in two ways: The self in relation to others, and self in relation to time. And this is why when your mind is wandering that it's so easy to get stuck either in the past or future, or stuck on interactions with others. And it has a very specific reason for doing this. Our default is survival, and so our background processes are working to see if there's any threat around. And, it's good to have a strong sense of self in the process so that you have a good sense of what needs to be protected. This network is implicated in a variety of disorders including anxiety and depression. And it's shut down very clearly when we do something like meditate. Which is probably where that sense of peace and oneness comes from. We're shutting off the network of self-obsession and the network of overactive stress response. Conversely, it gets overstimulated when wheres excess of information but not a set goal or task. Such as watching TV or scrolling social media.
And there's something else that shows up exactly when the Default Mode Network isn't active. It's called the Task Positive Network. You might be more familiar with the more casual term for it, which is the "Flow" state. A flow state occurs when we have a task in front of us and are completely in the moment. It's what gets activated when we are totally focused and in the zone, and the sense of time and the sense of self fall away. In this state, creativity is maximized, and new solutions are found. It's not so interested in surviving, but more so in thriving. Creating an excess from a sense of safety and abundance. And it looks like these two networks are at odds with each other. When one increases the other always decreases. You're either in Default Mode, or Task Positive Mode.
(15:33) The Left Brain vs The Right Brain
Ok. Since we're on the topic of brains, I want to take a look at the difference between the left brain and the right brain. I'm sure you're familiar with the classic model of this. The left brain is logic and mathematics, and the right brain is creativity and imagination. This is a pretty well-worn theory, but it deserves a more nuanced update. In the book The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGhilcrist gives a very well researched and nuanced view of the hemispheres. In it, he states that it's not so much split by what tasks, as both hemispheres are involved in most things. It's more about their approach to those tasks. There's structured,narrow, laser like focus on the left. And then there's the broad, fuzzy, bigger picture kind of thinking on the right. Solidifying the established happens on the left, the new and novel takes place on the right. The left takes a bottom-up approach, starting with the detailed. But the right takes a top-down approach, starting with the vague and undefined. The left brain is interested in definitions, and the right brain is interested in connections.
Mcghilcrist tracks this throughout history, showing on one hand, periods of right-brain increase. Periods like Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the Romantic Era where value was placed on the unknown and the transcendent. Where there was a prevalence of new ways of being, new thinking, and new societal structure. And then, on the other hand, he traces other periods where the left brain dominates; Ancient Rome, the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, and The Modern Era... each showing an emphasis on structure and power, and the need to either make known or to conquer.
He argues too that because of the closed thinking of the left brain, it cannot see the value of the right brain. But the right brain always sees the value of both hemispheres. And so, he argues that there's been a slow shift to further and further left-brain dominance. It takes but never gives, which is why today we find ourselves overvaluing data and abstraction and undervaluing people and the world.
(19:50) Integral Theory
Speaking of human consciousness through time, now is a good spot to shift gears and look at Integral Theory. Integral Theory was proposed by Ken Wilbur, and charts the origins of both personal and societal consciousness. In the first stage, the Archaic, there's no self-consciousness and total oneness with the world. Everything experienced as is in the moment. Then consciousness progresses to the Magical, where some sense of self is developed, but there's still a strong sense of wonder and mysticism. Then it progresses to the Mythical, where structures are formed to narratives such as the origins of the gods, and tales of heroes. That gives way to the Mental Stage, where everything is seemingly explained and accounted for. That's where we find ourselves today. He then talks about a stage we haven't yet reached as a whole called the integrative stage.
Wilbur argues that each stage must play itself out and be shown to be inadequate before consciousness can progress to the next stage. He also argues that each stage gets further and further from the origin and sense of oneness and connectedness. This continues all the way until the integral stage is reached, which involves no longer discarding previous stages, but instead integrating them into a bigger whole like pieces of a puzzle. But until then, we're firmly rooted in the known and the seen. And away from the magical and the enchanted.
(23:10) The Secular World vs The Enchanted World
This leads us to Charles Taylor. He wrote a book called The Secular World. Now, this book is crazy long, and I admit it I didn't read all of it. But I did read a book called How [Not] To Be Secular by James KA Smith, which summarizes Taylor's views into a more digestible format. Anyway, the idea is that mankind has progressively lost the sense of the enchanted and the transcendent. He talks of the formation of a buffered self separate from the world rather than a porous being present in the world. What he means by this is the notion that a buffered people primarily influence the world rather than the world influencing them. It's no longer about relationship, but about mastery. He marks the scientific revolution and the protestant reformation as parallel rather than opposing forces, both dealing with a flattening of the transcendent ideals present in the renaissance. They both marked a new focus on the concrete and the measurable, whether that was in the realm of ever-increasing exactness of scientific devices, or ever-increasing adherence to god-given rules and specific wording. It became all about what the self could do, rather than how the self could be changed. He argues that this loss of enchantment is exactly what led to the crisis of meaning present in postmodernism, as well as the ever-shrinking sense of what the self identifies with; down from the world, to the human, to the culture, to the community, to the family, and then finally down to the individual. And that loss is a hole we've been desperately trying to fill. It explains our ever-increasing need of entertainment and stimulation, as well as our ever-increasing sense of loneliness and isolation.
(26:55) The Wisdom ladder
Speaking of the age of information though, this brings us to our last model, which I got from an article written by Maria Popova. She shows the path of wisdom as being a ladder that you have to climb up, with specific steps needed to get there. She argues that information gathering is just the first part of an involved process. After we gather data, we need to sort out the facts. But even that is still just Information. And that information needs to be sorted out too. Once we form out of it an integrated whole, that information becomes knowledge, and we've finally arrived at truth. And truth, if applied properly to our lives, becomes wisdom.
So there we go. Six different models that we can interlink with each other.
(29:39) Breathe it in
Before we continue, I want to sit with it all for a minute. And I know, that was all a lot to take in. But don't worry, there's not a test or anything. So let's just breathe. Pause if you like, and take a break.
Okay, now that we've overloaded our brains a little bit, let's go back to the beginning and reacquaint ourselves with why we started on this in the first place. We ran into limits on the way we usually find truth, and we're hoping to find a new way forward. And, in order to do so, we gathered some new models and explored them a bit. So now, let's get a little creative here and see what parts of our models overlap with each other, and how those overlaps can help us in our search for truth.
(28:58) Extrapolations: The Bad
So, the first thing that's jumping out to me is that it seems like, if anything, we've lost a sense of the world rather than gained it. Integral Theory says that as time goes on we're getting further and further from the source as we progress. Charles Taylor confirms this in his notion of a secular world, and in showing how we have flattened our viewpoint and created a buffered self in order to feel safe. This puts us squarely in the postmodern world, where we're fragmented into the ever more personal and isolated, and ever further away from unity with each other and the world. And when we look at The Master and His Emissary this can all be explained through a left-brain grab for dominance. The left brain carries the ego, and only sees things in terms of utility. And we can't really even argue that it was a good tradeoff, because the Case Against Reality shows us that we're not near as objective as we think we are, no matter how hard we try. But then again, the reasons for that are survival. And, because of our modern world and it's boosting of the Default Mode Network, our survival instincts are kicked into overdrive. The horrible irony here is that the more we are obsessed with being right about something, the more the left brain and DMN activate to defend the sense of self, and the less we're able to find truth because we become both more sure of ourselves and more afraid at the same time. And so, that means that even though we're in an age of a heightened sense of black and white thinking, we're also in an age of a lowered sense of truth. Our ever-increasing want for the objective and measurable over the enchanted and imaginary is leading us to less and less understanding and less and less grounding. So, we become even less objective and more afraid of new ideas. And the left brain tries to fix this by desperately grabbing more information in order to kill the uncertainty. And the excess of information activates the default mode network, which makes us more anxious. And because of that we're caught in a feedback loop of information, and can't progress up the ladder to truth, let alone get ourselves into wisdom.
Our societal structures don't help this in the least bit. Our obsession with money is at its core an obsession with left-brain abstraction. Ratings and statistics within businesses further the data overload. And social media, with its obsession on quantities does the same. Number of likes superceeds depth of engagement.
And meanwhile, most of the threats to our existence aren’t even the types of things the default mode network and the left brain even know how to process. Existential threats that go beyond the immediate threat of the sense of self, such as the coronavirus, or global warming, or deep societal change in general, don't get much notice by the left brain and are often ignored for the sake of the moment to moment issues that often don't matter in the long run.
(34:47) Extrapolations: The Good
So, where's the hope? Well, First off Ken Wilbur says that once you reach the integral stage of consciousness, you begin to integrate all the previous levels consciousness with each other. You begin to see the knowledge and ways of being from that past not as false or naive, but simply as part of a bigger picture. Or put it in terms of the Master and His Emissary, the integrative stage of consciousness involves giving control back up to the right brain, who can better lead because it can better integrate both the wide views coming from itself and the narrow views coming from the left brain. In fact, that's why the book is called The Master and His Emissary in the first place. The left brain makes a great servant, but a poor master, and harmony is only achieved when the Right-brain takes its rightful place as leader.
So back to the question: Where does truth come from?
It's not found in the facts and figures and data. The left brain's bottom-up approach leaves gaps and misconceptions because it doesn't like not having answers. It doesn't like sustaining attention in order to find something new. It tries to make things as small and manageable as possible so that everything can be solved and in its place. It wants numbers to line up and for there to be one unifying answer to everything. The right brain on the other hand, thrives in the unknown, and the unspoken. It finds truth in the spirit of exploration of the unknown. The right brain's bigger picture thinking eliminates fear of new ideas coming from the Default Mode Network, and kickstarts the creative process of a flow state, which uses the whole brain. And the creative process finds new and unexpected solutions that challenge the idea of a static self. It removes the buffer, and lets us be porous again. The right brain knows that there's a relationship between truth and the self, and that we cannot escape unchanged. Because we are not buffered. The world is enchanted and we co-create it as it creates us. But the right brain also knows that this reinvention of the self isn't death. It's a dynamic unfolding, and a continual motion. It knows that letting go of fear of the unknown and exploring with trust and hope leads to becoming more than you were before. And, it sees the even bigger picture, that the individual is connected to the collective. It sees that taking part in this process doesn't just grow the individual. It grows all of humankind. And according to Integral Theory that growth of all of humankind is inevitable anyway. And so, there's no true risk of failure in taking part. There's just stepping into the dance that's already happening. Any moment of failure merely becomes another path to dance on.
Circling back to Make It Stick for a moment, Peter C Brown states that: "Failure underlies the scientific method, which has advanced our understanding of the world we inhabit. The qualities of persistence and resiliency, where failure is seen as useful information, underlie successful innovation in every sphere and lie at the core of nearly all successful learning. Failure points to the need for redoubled effort, or liberates us to try different approaches."
And that's what Science, and Religion, and Philosophy were always all about at their core anyway. They were always about diving deep into the depths of the mystery of existence with confidence, and finding answers that lead to more questions and more awe and more exploration.
But there's still that problem of how we can't see reality clearly. So after the failure of our supposed objectivity, what's our new approach? We can't truly know just how much our left brain is deceiving us and making us think we've solved something or found truth when we haven't. But we can instill such learning and imagination that the spiral of our minds circles ever upward in the direction of the truth that's unfolding before us. Because truth is found from exploring the bigger things and then going into detail. From recognizing the unknown, and then jumping into it. And then mapping it so that we can know where to explore next, and so that we can know what to come back to and see how it's all changed. Because nothing is static. It's all part of the dance. It's all part of the unfolding. And it’s all much too big to understand in one go.
Isaac Newton knew this when he wrote: "To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me."
And speaking of childhood, that's a good place to start. Allowing that childlike wonder to open back up. After all, the question "but why?" is always on a child’s lips, isn’t it? For a child, nothing is taken at face value, and everything is explored. I'm reminded of the last episode where I talked about The Iron Gaint. Hogarth's insistence on wonder and exploration leads him to find the truth where others were blind or afraid. And sometimes, the exploration can seem random just like that episode was. But if we keep looking, things start to connect. And it turns out that nothing is random after all. But those connections aren't something we discover if we simply stick to what’s safe and what’s known and what's quantifiable. It takes a bit of letting go, and it takes a lot of trust that what's out there is actually good. But the wonderful thing is, every time we do reach out past the light of our current understanding, we become a little more bold and a little more well-traveled. And the world continues to become more connected and more wonderful.
(46:06) Applications
So what can we do to hold this mindset? Well, we can keep these models in mind beyond this podcast, and choose to see how they apply to whatever is going on in our own lives. We can step away from constant input so that our right brain can regain the bigger picture. That is to say, we can give time for our minds to climb up the ladder of wisdom. We can create little goals or little conundrums to solve so that our default mode network shuts off, and the task-positive flow state gets activated. We can choose to nurture wonder and Imagination over information and data. We can revisit old ideas and reintegrate them with new ones. We can decide not to assume that we have all the answers, and to seek as much as we can to play devils advocate. But most of all, we can value learning how to have the right questions over learning how to have the right answers.
I hope to model a lot of those things in this podcast itself. One way is to do that is to allow for the Comet Trail episodes. If we truly trust that connections and understanding can be found, then the random isn't truly random. And a passion to explore is a greater driver toward truth than finding a topic that seems to already have a proper place in everything. I also want to allow for things to be wrong sometimes. I fully expect that we will have to return to things for clarification or tweaking later on. And that's okay. This podcast is more of a spiraling upward than it is a linear progression. I also hope to rely on a little bit more of a right-brain top-down approach, where I find things that I intuitively sense are connected to a question, and then flesh them out until the question is closer to having an answer (much like how I did during this episode).
And then finally, I want to allow for experimentation. I want to constantly rethink what this podcast is and what it can be. So if you have any ideas on what you'd like to explore, or what we can change or how to modify things, please don't hesitate to contact me. And especially contact me if there's questions that you have. These questions can be related to what I've talked about, or they can just be random ponderings. Both are good and both lead to exploration and wonder. Email me them at: aaron@agrandreflection.com
The next episode is going to be about love and relationship and community, so stay tuned for that. But for today, I think we're good to just let it all sit for a while. So, Reflect on it and let it reflect off you.
And in the mean time, may your wonder and imagination soar, and may we dance together in this ever-upward spiral. Thanks.
Sources:
The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGhilcrist
How [not] to be Secular by James K. A. Smith
The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman
Integral Meditation by Ken Wilbur
Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown
Further explorations:
Public Opinion by Walter Lipmann
