"I want the truth!" "You can't handle the truth!"

----------------------------------------------------
If I could just speak up, I think I would say
that there is no truth. There is only you
and what you make the truth.
----------------------------------------------------
From Bright Eyes' "don't know when but a day is gonna come" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpBUs7U5FUc)

-------------------------------------------
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that's a tree", pointing to a tree that is near us.  Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him. "This fellow isn't insane.  We are only doing philosophy."
-------------------------------------------
Wittgenstein, from "On Certainty"  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Certainty)

Two quotes today!  The topic of today is on truth, and what it means.

Recently I have been reading about Wittgenstein (I say "reading about" as either a) I'm not smart enough to read and understand his work itself, or b) he wasn't as gifted at communicating as he was at philosophy), and his stance on certainty.  Among many things, he questions how we can say things are 'true' or 'untrue', and how this feeds back into language itself. 

Then, a couple of days ago I watched an excellent animated version of Tim Minchin's "Storm (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U) a comic autobiographical piece about a dinner party featuring Tim, an atheist, sceptic and comic, and "Storm", a new age girl in favour of 'natural remedies' and the like.  Being the person I am, I will always side the scientific sceptic.  However, at one point in the skit, "Storm" comes out with the following - "You can't know anything, knowledge is only opinion".  Of course, Tim smacks it down by wondering why, if she doesn't know anything, she leaves her house from the ground floor instead of the second floor window - implying, apparently, that we must have knowledge for us to interact with the world around us.  However, for once, I didn't completely disagree with what she says - what can we know? 

Indeed, as in the quote from Wittgenstein above - what does "That is a tree" really mean?  To call something a tree, we need knowledge of what a 'tree' is, and to get knowledge of what a tree is, we need a tree (or a description of a tree)! Indeed, what happens when we look at a tree?  We point our eyes at the tree - light from the sun bounces off the tree and into our eyes, are focused by our eye lens onto the back of our eye, creating electrical signals that travel into our brain.  These electric signals, apparently, are somehow analysed by our brain which uses some sort of pattern finding to identify the object as a "tree", from our experiences of other objects in the past that have been observed and to which we have given the linguistic label "tree".  Then I can report my brain's analysis, and say "oh, that's a tree!".  One thing that should be very clear here is that this analysis is internal to my brain, as is everything we interact with in the world.  Does the tree have a 'true' existence outside of my human brain?  Well, as the whole idea for a 'tree' comes from my brain, I can't be so sure about that.  Language helps mankind unite it's linguistic truth concepts, so we can all agree it's a tree, but somehow it doesn't lend the tree any more credibility than one mind on it's own.  Does the tree object have an existence outside of our label?

In mathematics, truth is often qualified with the axioms from which the truth is derived.  Famously, the geometry we learn at school is based on the axioms laid out in Euclid's "Elements" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_geometry#Axioms).  Indeed, we can say that if 1+1 = 2, and 2 + 1 = 3, then 1 + 1 + 1 = 3.   That is, if we make an initial assumption, we can therefore derive truth, but truth which is conditional upon the axioms.

I wonder, then, if for each of us, our respective truths may lie upon some basic axioms which we create ourselves, possibly as we are growing children.  To survive in the world, we must interact with it - to interact with it, we must manipulate the information sent to us from our senses and react.  I see an animal - it has big teeth - I must run away!  I see a tree, I know that trees can be climbed - I use it to escape from the animal with big teeth!  If I was unable to use pattern recognition to understand a tree and have the knowledge that the tree could be climbed, I might be eaten by the animal with big teeth.  Good for him, bad for me!  So, to explain our environment, we must naturally try to understand it logically, in order to be able to react to it in a beneficial way.  As I'm climbing the tree, I see a thick branch and a thin, weak branch - if I can't make the judgement to stand on the thick one, I fall off the tree and get eaten.

To be effective, our brains *must* use logic, and this logic *must* be able to make predictions about the world.  And if it's logic, it must have axioms, or some core ideas, on which it's based, even if we are unaware of them, or if they are hidden deep down in our subconcious!  Most are probably an innate part of being human - when we see one apple being added to a basked with another apple in, we know there's two apples!  What happens when we see something and we don't have a clue what is happening?  Well, know we try to explain it with science!  But think of what a shooting star seemed like to a prehistoric man - it is completely beyond his ability to comprehend with the logical system of his brain!  He doesn't know enough, he can't know enough to understand it.  But our brain thirsts for an answer - if it didn't it wouldn't be doing it's job of understanding circumstances to keep us alive.  Presumably, this is where spiritual belief may come into play - by attributing things to a 'higher power', our brains can accept things that appear to lie outside the logical systems of our brains.  And if there's a 'higher power' which you've already been told about by a nearby adult then all the better!

Anyway, maybe next time you have an argument with the man on the street who is insistent that Jesus died for your sins, maybe it is true, to him.  By disagreeing, you're saying that your logic processing unit has come to a different conclusion than his - the way your mind works makes something else appear as the truth, that there is no such thing as sin.  Changing his mind requires you to change the core beliefs, the axioms upon which his logical system is based -  just think of the amount of suicidal mathematicians there'd be if someone proved a basic axiom that their entire life's work was based on to be false!

In conclusion, I suspect that I've written too little about too much, and that I'll look back at this tomorrow and think the opposite.  I wish life wasn't so damned difficult to understand! I mean - why am I even sitting here thinking about this?  What the fuck!?

Scientific meaning, or, how I learned to stop worrying and embrace the emptiness

"...nothing is clear, all is chaos, all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him" - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

----------------------------

The man from which the above book get its title from, Sisyphus, was a deceitful man, who tricked and schemed his way into power and fame.  For his final trick, he managed to wrangle his way out of the Underworld, returning to the world above to try to cheat death.  As punishment, he was forced for eternity to push a boulder up a hill.  However, before he reaches the top, the boulder slips and rolls back to the bottom.  The only thing for him to do is to return to the bottom, and start again, pushing for the top, pushing with all his being, pushing for nothing.

Indeed, I guess most people, when hearing this story feel at least a bit of resonance with their own lives.  What the hell are we doing?  Why do I wake up every morning at 8.30AM, go into a device that sprays hot water onto my body, wipe my body with 'cleansing' chemicals, then use a sharp blade to cut bits of hair off my face?  Then, why do I go to work (or, whatever passes for work as a PhD student) and spend hours working on some fairly abstract problem in plasma physics that has no obvious value to anyone?  How do we even define value anyway?  Well, maybe this is something to discuss another time.   As a human, as in science, it seems all we can do is start with the complex, and work our way down the ladder of simplicity, a race to understand things as fundamentally as possible before we die.  So, what is the value of science?

When I started getting interested in physics, if someone asked me why, I might have replied something like "I want to understand the universe in a more comprehensive way", or maybe, more simply, "I want the truth".  If you asked me why I'm still interested in it, the best I'd be able to do is "I find it intellectually stimulating", or maybe "It allows me to be around lots of smart people who help develop my mind". 

Why the change of heart?  The main issue facing me is the link between physics, that is a physical model of our world, and the world itself.  Up until the start of the 20th century, humankind had a pretty nice model of how the world worked.  Newton's laws were the cornerstone.  It all 'made sense' - if you push something, it moves, if you jump, you come back down.  That is, it blended in perfectly with our every day observations.  It was, you might say, logically sound.  However, 100 years later, and we know have a completely different view of the way the world works.  The concepts of quantum phenomena and relativity now seem to explain more accurately the way the world works - things that are, on the face of it, much less sensible, but continually come up with the right experimental results, over and over again. There was a sudden paradigm shift in our perspective of the way the world works.

So, why am I not happy with this?  As I alluded to before, physics started at a complexity level matched to what we see in our world around us.  That is, the first thing that physics set out to do was to try to create a model of the way our macroscopic world works.  We are not proving anything - we don't have any basic axioms on which our model is set on, just that it agrees with what we see in the world.  When I write in a scientific paper that the electric field of the laser acts on an electron, what I am really saying is that "it appears as though I can model what happens in the external world, if we say that a piece of energy called an 'electron' interacts with a field of energy called an electric field".  Does the 'electron' actually exist?  Is it a 'true' thing?  Almost certainly not - if there's anything history of science tells us, it's that all we ever have is the approximation of the truth, and however far down the rabbit hole we go, the deeper it gets.  Furthermore, as our predicting model (ie. science) now appears to be at its base, something that doesn't necessary 'make sense' or appeal to our logic as humans, which makes me wonder how much we can trust logic.  If we start doubting that, then we doubt everything.

Perhaps that's another story for another day, though.  It seems a natural thing for a human to look for facts, gain knowledge of a system, and exploit that knowledge.  That's why we're so damn successful.  But what makes a fact?  What can we really believe?  Indeed, what value does believing in something have?  Something tells me I'll be asking these questions till the day I die.