Universal Truth

“History is written by the victors.” -- Winston Churchill

At the moment, our species seems to mostly believe that ‘truth’ is a relative concept. Something is true if enough people believe it. It is false otherwise. This leads us to confusion, conflict and more than a few disasters.

The truthfulness of any given statement is in itself a very interesting discussion, but it's predicated on the underlying definitions of several different words. If we want to get to the ‘truth’, the first thing to do is carefully define the destination.

We’ll start with a thought experiment.

Let’s say that there is an ‘alien’ sitting on the moon right now, watching us. This alien is super-intelligent, and isn’t affected by our normal human biases. It’s asextual so there isn’t a male/female bias, it’s a different species that is extremely logical, but not emotional. It has nifty equipment that allows it to see through walls, hear everything, observe smells, and can focus on whatever interests it at any time, even concurrently. In short, it is the perfect observer.

With all of these capabilities, the alien is able to assert that something did or did not happen at a particular time and location. In that role, it acts as an ‘oracle’ and can be precise.

Was a car packed outside of a specific house at 2pm? The alien knows the answer to this. Who drove that car there? That is also answerable. In particular, the alien can precisely state what occured at a specific instance of time for a bunch of related particles. If it happened, if it didn’t happen, if it happened at a different time and place.

At some higher level abstract sense, it is impossible to say that there is a ‘universal truth’. If something occurred way off deep in the darkest corner of the universe, where no one could have seen it, or confirmed it, then only the universe itself is a witness to it. But the universe isn’t, we think, sentient enough to be able to pass on that knowledge. Our alien, however, while not being able to give us universal truth, would be able to give us a very good, relative to our planet, approximation to universal truth, that we have set up to be nearly indistinguishable from the universal variety.

Getting back to definitions, what we would like to do is that ‘define’ all of that information that is available from the alien as something concrete. So, let's call it ‘facts’. We ask questions, and the alien can give us a set of related facts and we know these are deeply trustworthy. If the alien says a car was driven by a particular individual then that is what happened. And with that frame of reference it is fundamentally 99.9999...% universal truth. It is not 100%, since we got the information from the alien, not from the universe itself, but we are so close to 100% that the infinitesimal difference shouldn’t make any impact in our lives.

If we take that as a definition of ‘facts’ and use it to discount anything that the alien couldn’t answer, we get into a precisely defined set of information that has useful properties. The alien, for example, may be able to say who drove the car to the house, but it cannot explain ‘why’ they did it. The motivations of the driver and their agenda aren’t observable by the alien, just their actions. In that defined sense then, the location of the car is entirely factual, and there is a universal truth associated with it. We may or may not be able to get that confirmation, since the alien is hypothetical, but if enough people here on earth were also witnesses and they were trustworthy enough, then that could be an approximation to the alien’s approximation to the universal truth. So, we could get greater certainty that the car was in that location at that time, and that it was driven by that person.

So, if you’re not lost by the pedantic nature of this discussion, then it says that although we don’t have an alien to explicitly tell us facts, we can arrive at successively better approximations of these facts simply by expanding our set of trustworthy witnesses and evidence, and if we do that in a way that one bad fact can’t corrupt the others, then it seems likely that we can believe that these facts are as close to universal as we’ll even be able to get in our lifetimes.

This, of course, is the bias for scientific discovery and most legal systems, but it can extend beyond those disciplines into all other aspects of our societies. We can theorize about what the alien can answer, and then we can collect together enough relative truths to approximate that.

“Ok, but how is this useful?”

It has often been the case in many of our modern world that various parties have been informing us of what they are trying to convince us is the truth based on their “facts”. But it is frequently the case that for the “facts” discussed, the underlying definition of what a fact is, is so wide and vague that it would be impossible for an alien sitting on the moon to assert what they are saying.

These “incorrect facts” then are more often attempts to kick up the dust, allowing people to propagandize some other agenda. This is unstoppable if truth is really relative, applies to anything, and the only truth that matters is the one that is repeated the most often. And we see that often now. It’s not actual facts in discussion but liternal ‘nonsense’, that is shaped to be easily consumable. The winners are the ones that get their morsels out there the most often.

But as I have shown above, calling this stuff “facts” is incorrect. If someone asserts that it is fact that the driver’s motive was to cause trouble, so they drove their car to the house, we can and should be able to shut down the conversation by pointing out that that is not a “fact” by any reasonable definition. They are not being factually correct, thus any further assertions or theories based on top of this are only personal opinions. We cannot know the motives of the driver, the alien cannot know this.

We can’t stop people from giving us their views, but we can stop them from asserting that their opinions are factual and thus are the truth. They are not, they are just opinions. We do have various rules, laws and regulations in most societies that restrict people or companies from blatantly lying, but they are blunted by poor definitions. If we fixed that, then at bare minimum it would be a means to interfere with any type of propaganda campaign, using some already accepted means in society of proper redress. We’ve already agreed on how to deal with lies, now we just need to move that forward to include these highly questionable “facts”.

If we continue to allow ourselves to base our actions, plans, and institutions on continuously shifting relative truths, then this instability will permeate the fabric and structure of our actions. It prevents us from achieving any of our goals. Long ago, we gained the ability to build up reasonable scientific knowledge, which given our current technological sophistication has made massive improvements to how we live and interact with each other. But we stopped halfway and left the door open to irrational communication. It’s time we revisit that aspect of our societies, and it is time that we fix it in order to further improve our lives. We’ve grown up a lot as a species over the last few hundred years, but there is still a great distance left to travel.