Truth

What is truth and why does truth matter?

I was dining with a very smart engineer in his home not too long ago, when he presented me with a detailed hypothesis on what the European Enlightenment of the late renaissance actually was.

He characterized it as a shift from metaphor to truth. He described the pre-Enlightenment man as a Man of Metaphor, to whom the bird really was, in some sense, Athena, while the post-Enlightenment man was a Man of Truth, conditioned to focus on absolute accuracy, rather than a poetic story which resonated with the human soul.

Truth, after all, is what enables technology. Planes fly, he pointed out, because of truth. And since engineers make representations with absolute accuracy, this means that they make planes fly with the power of truth.

You cannot, he said, write computer programs in metaphors.

This was a fascinating idea, and I loved it.

I immediately disagreed, of course, but I loved it anyway, because it made me think. I like to think.

Being an engineer myself, mostly of the software variety, I understood that ALL computer programs are written entirely in metaphors.

But I didn't belabor the issue, because there were plenty of other things to talk about, and something was nagging at the back of my brain that I didn't fully understand yet.

It was, of course, in the car on my way back to my hotel that I realized what was wrong with his argument, what the Enlightenment actually was, and what the word "truth" actually means.

You see, there is no such thing as an absolutely true representation of anything. Every representation is a metaphor.

If I draw the path of an asteroid on a computer screen, with a diagram of a spacecraft doing a flyby of it, a sketch with some number labels, that is a two-dimensional metaphor for a three-dimensional reality.

Obviously, it's not "true" in the sense of being perfectly accurate.

But it's not a lie, either.

Because it does not deceive.

It is intended to enlighten, not deceive. To make understandable, not to confuse. That diagram is designed as a tradeoff between understandability and accuracy. And if I were to construct a 3d model, in a 3d engine, in software, and simulate the flyby, that would be more accurate, but it would still be a metaphor, because it wouldn't be totally, completely, 100% accurate. It would be made with lots of tiny triangles, and rendered using matrices. Even if I were to use a mathematical equation, treating the asteroid, and the probe, as point-masses... no matter how sophisticated my modeling technique, it would only be a modelling technique.

The only 100% accurate representation of a thing is the thing itself. So with all of our math, and our simulations, and our wind tunnels, and our computerized Monte Carlo methods, we are not Men of Truth. We are still only Men of Metaphor, and that's all we can ever be. The very nature of symbol representation demands it. So if the symbol cannot ever capture the full nature of the thing, because the map is not the territory, what is it about symbols, and representation, that did us any good in the first place.

Because models, and symbols, while they do not capture everything, clearly have some use. They clearly have some power. Planes fly because models work. Even if they don't work perfectly, they work. The metaphors, the symbols, the models, that allow planes to fly must be mostly true even if they can't be all the way true.

So what is this "truth?"

Truth is predictive power. That's why we care about truth. That's why we have models. If our model has enough predictive power, we can build our plane so it will fly, launch our probe so it can reach the same point as the asteroid at the same time. Or close enough to have a look, anyway. When we understand that truth is predictive power, we realize that models aren't either true or false. They are more true, or less true, than other models. And less-true models are often more understandable. The Bohr model of the atom isn't fully accurate. But we teach it to children, because it's easy for them to grasp in terms of what they already know, and it has some truth... it predicts a lot of chemistry. Once they have learned those bits, we can teach them a more accurate model, which predicts more bits. And repeat this up to the most accurate model we have.

Most every easy-to-understand model contains inaccuracies... fails to predict the world in ways that more complicated, harder-to-understand models succeed. A metaphor is never truly useless, a story is never truly a lie, a generalization is never truly an oversimplification, unless it is less true than the understanding it attempts to replace.

Engineers want to deal in the highest level of truth that is available to them. Their culture makes them want to reject anything less accurate as a "lie". But engineers cannot engineer anything without the help of other engineers, and of non-engineers who are needed to build, to support, to finance, and ultimately to use what is created. So there is a need for models with the power of clarity, and the power of persuasion, even if they are "less true."

And this is what the Enlightenment truly was.

Not the creation of a society of absolute truth, but the creation of a society of with high trust. Because if an scientist can trust the conclusions of another scientist, an engineer can trust the calculations of another engineer, living hundreds or thousands of miles away, if they all can share their results freely and openly without guilds or trade secrets or hidden knowledge... If lay workers and builders and financiers can trust that those observations and computations are the best guesses we have, and not a lie intended to aggrandize someone, or keep the Church from burning them at the stake... Then experts can build on each others' work.

And all of us can be smarter than any of us. And we can send rockets to Mars.

Not with the power of absolute truth, but with the power of good enough accuracy.

The history of human advancement is the creation of walled gardens... bounded, guarded, and protected from low-trust conditions and bad actors from outside. A garden, after all, is that which is guarded. Eventually, the technology built in the garden, created with the power of truth, and of trust, can flow out to all the world.

But there will nothing for anyone if you do not tend the walls.