True Lie

It's interesting that constructing a self-consistent system of falsehood bears many similarities to the pursuit of truth.

Did you notice that two theories of truth were employed to build the lie? In establishing how to lie, I made two statements:

1. You need to create a system in which everything coheres.


2. Your lies need to be consistent with what apparent reality.

The first was the coherence theory of truth, which basically means that what you say needs to agree with other stuff that you say. In other words, you should stick to your story. To take a straightforward example, you can't say that you're wearing a size eight dress and then later talk about shopping for twelves. In order to do so you need to be quite careful that you formulate a credible story, or explanation for things. It has to be likely to agree with other things that you would tend to say, and with other things that you have established.

The second is the correspondence theory of truth. This means that the proposition you make has to correspond to a factual reality. Like what I said before, in order to lie successfully, your story has to agree with certain witnessed facts. This will make it much more believable, because once someone knows that some things you say are true, and if your story tends to make logical sense, people will tend to believe you.

The third thing that I mentioned was Ockham's razor. In other words, keep your attempts at explanations as simple as possible, given all the accepted facts. In the case of a lie it's more believable. In the case of truth, it's more likely to be true. We only need to look at the elegance of physics formulae to see this case in point.

It would seem as if truth were intrinsically linked in falsehood. But wait, you say. You disagree, similarities extend only up to the fact that you want to make the lie as truthful as possible in order to be believable. Yet when we look at the way knowledge is discovered, we can only admit that we are as good as our best guess. The only difference between truth and prevarication, as we know it, is that in a lie, we know something that the other person does not, and attempt not to include that fact in our explanation.

When we attempt to discover the truth, we first take into consideration the preexisting conditions. We imagine the situation from various angles and make guesses as to the most likely explanation. Indeed, until we have rigorously tested our theories, we can hardly claim them to be more than conjectures, or propositions that we would like you to believe. We might even go as far as to say that until they are proven true, they might be considered to be lies. The ability to lie comes from these same skills.

Not to mention, so-called accepted "truths" have often proved false. There is the infamous, and over-used example of the ancient belief that the earth was the center of the universe, or that the earth was flat. We now know that this is not so. However, they made claims that best fit the situational evidence. Although some data was not perfectly in agreement with the claims, one can hardly say that in the past, the great thinkers of the era were lying to us, or falsifying fact.

I'm not saying that deliberate lying is morally acceptable. Rather, I put it to you that the line between truth and lie comes not so much a clear-cut distinction, but as the fuzzy intersection between two polarly opposite, yet infinitesimally different sets. It is this dichotomisation which knowledge depends on, like cells, to go forth, be fruitful, and multiply.

Which makes me wonder whether Adam and Eve's biggest sin was to taste of the forbidden fruit, or deny it (as you might have guessed, my next post in the theme will be on denial).

Class act

It's finally dawned on me (I saw dawned on me as opposed to something like hit me because I am rather slow, and I don't think any of my thoughts would move fast enough to hit me) that language is the human way of classifying things. Classifying objects, people, ideas. Everything. We classify to communicate. Golly gee, right now, I am classifying!

It's a rather strange realisation, when you think about it. Everything we are saying is a classification. We understand things only through classification. Definition, explanation, organisation all stem from classification.

You may argue, how can that be? The only way I can reasonably continue my own argument is by defining my concept of classification, which is really just classifying the word using more classifications. Anyway, just for the record, my definition of classifcation is putting everything into some sort of category, or place, such that it will be potentially easier, or more convenient for us to grasp.

Maybe, the reason we will never be able to understand our universe is not because it is inifinite. Or at least, not just because of that. Maybe the reason we won't be able to understand it is because we cannot classify it. Perhaps a better statement might be: maybe the universe isn't meant to be understood. Because to understand it, or at least to understand it in a way in which it is possible for us to share our understanding, we must classify it. And we can't classify it because perhaps the universe just won't fit into our classifications. Just like some organisms won't fit properly into our plant and animal kingdoms, planting a foot into the plant kingdom, and another into the animal kingdom, our universe will never be able to fit nicely in whatever classifications, however evolved they may become, neatly.

It feels weird to think that all this time I've just been classifying...

It's the heart that matters most

For a long time I have been searching for the Truth; irrefutable proof that the Christian God exists. I've always known, deep down in my heart, that the Christian God is the truest God of all, but I wanted to prove it was true through foolproof argument and irrefutable logic.

For this entire semester I have been almost bogged down by this. I spent most of my quality time with myself in the shower mulling over the issue.

Then, someone asked me how I would want God/Jesus to prove that He was who He claimed to be. My answer was that God/Jesus would tell me something so wise and true that I would know immediately that he was who he claimed to be. But this raised the question, how would I know that what was said was a Great Truth of Life? Perhaps it could be because it was so obvious, yet so unreachable by leaps of mortal logic. Perhaps I would know because I would feel it with my heart.

Then, I realised what a grave error I had made. I should have trusted my heart, in the same way I woud trust my heart to recognise a Truth when I heard it. There is plenty of evidence that the Christian God is true, but no human evidence or understanding can be complete. In the end, I have to use my heart to tell me what's right and good and true.

[Edit (28/11/2011): Now I've realised that God indeed did talk to us through His Word.  Jesus himself spoke many home truths that revealed His deep understanding of the world, and how we are to live in it.]

Where does a circle start?

Do you ever wonder how, if sickness is passed from one to another, it even starts in the first place. Go to any sick person now, and they'll say, so and so passed this to me. So, who starts it? Or what starts it?

[Edit: studying to be a doctor, I realise that sickness is generally caused by invading pathogens, but that doesn't really answer the question, which is really, where does it all begin?]

Newton's third law states that every action has a reaction, and an equal and opposite one at that. If God created that law, then he must have known that once he had started the world, it would never really end. I mean, think about it, if in the end, the Solar System expands further and further until the Earth is so far away from the Sun it goes all cold and dead, that would lead to a reaction. I can't say what it is. But the reaction would then become an action and lead to another reaction. Excuse me if I've taken the law into the wrong context, but it seem to me that there would be an unbroken chain of action-reaction things occuring, and it would be impossible to break the chain.

To illustrate this point I'll go back to the spark which got the fire going. To get the spark, there had to be someone who lit the match or something. The person did it as a reaction to coldness. This is caused by a change in the weather. And so on and so forth. To continue the fire incident onward, the person would probably roast marshmellows over the fire to make good use of the heat, and because the person was hungry, and then eat the marshmellows, and from there you can either follow the path of digestion, or say that the person felt sleepy after eating, so he went to sleep, and of course he had to wake up. And so on and so forth...

So as far as I can see, all God had to do was set off the right reaction (which probably wasn't easy), and he would start the mechanisms to get the clock moving. I think one of the first things he must have done was to invent the action-reaction law. From there, everything under the sun and otherwise, would start itself.

Addendum: If God created the world, who created God? Logically (or perhaps illogically) speaking, God should be an action as well as a reaction to something that happened before him. If there was no spark to get the fire going, then...this wouldn't even exist. The concept of existence wouldn't even exist.

[Edit: There are two possible conclusions to make: 1) So there is no God, although this does not answer the question of how the chain-reaction of life started. We are left to question. 2) That God, if He exists, exists beyond the laws of this universe, and to the extent that He has properties that are beyond this universe, cannot be understood. In a way, this seems logical, but requires a bit of a feat of mental agility to grasp; up to the limits of logic, it is possible to glimpse God, but there is only so far that logic can take us, beyond which we can only depend on God for divine revelation of himself to us.]