Sorting out truth from fiction has never been easy, and today it’s harder than ever. The proliferation of disinformation, political propaganda, shameless self-promotion, and outright deception makes it very difficult to know what’s true. Lies are often more interesting, too. But what is truth, or rather, what are its constituents, and is there absolute truth?
For human beings, truth is experienced in different forms: as conditioned reflex, cognitive belief system and necessity. Let’s examine these one by one.
Truth as the result of a conditioned reflex is a matter of experience. For a pet dog, for example, the sights and sounds of food being put into a bowl comprises the truth that it will be fed. This reflex response is called Pavlovian, after the scientist who trained dogs to begin salivating at the sound of bell. For people, the Pavlovian effect works just as well. We judge reality as truthful based upon our conditioning. When the bell tower chimes at noon it’s time for lunch.
Truth as the result of a cognitive belief system is common as well. So powerful is the power of belief that even the non-evidentiary supernatural is often considered truth. This is not so for pet dogs; unlike people, dogs know the world only through their direct experience not through stories they tell themselves or that they’ve heard. The stories we tell, both to others and ourselves, are often products of imagination and to be believed must be taken on faith. To accept a story as true absent any confirming experience or consistent verification, opens the door to an imaginary realm of human make believe where all and everything goes, up to and including total fabrication, and we behave in full accordance. The poet Charles Bukowski named this condition “ordinary madness.”
This brings us to necessary truth, those unavoidable circumstances that nature readily provides. Such truth needs no elaborate verification; direct experience is proof enough. It is necessary to breathe, for example. If we stop breathing, our life ends. If we cut our skin, we bleed, and if it’s a deep enough injury, we’ll bleed to death. So it goes. If absolute truth exists, it is the truth of necessity, the a priori conditions of our living existence. Necessary truth has a connection to scientific truth in which by repeated testing under controlled conditions, the scientific method seeks to verify, at minimum, what is absolutely false. Scientific truth is also a truth of direct experience, not storytelling, although science seeks truth through theory, which until it is verified through tests of direct experience, essentially remains a belief system story.
Inevitably, our human experience is a blend of all three modes of truth; call them conditioned, contingent, and direct. Although they frequently come into conflict with each other, we have no choice but to rely upon their combination; this is a human predicament. Woven tightly through each other like the warp and woof of fabric, these threads of truth create a crazy quilt of human reality, what we Buddhists call Samsara. It’s no coincidence that the Three Fates of Ancient Greece were envisioned as spinning and weaving yarns. That humanity bounces between such realities, sometimes veering beyond ordinary madness into outright psychopathy, is not surprising; that we’ve survived this long while doing so, well, is nothing short of miraculous. A dog’s life, as I’ve noted, is far less complicated: no warp, just woof.
