True or Not True

First of all, I'm for truth. Even though I will hold here to my contention that Kuhn's paradigm theory is pretty spot-on. (See The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.*) So if we are going to rescue ourselves from those objective types who can't wait to impale the naysayers--the mealy-mouthed who think life is but a dream--with their wagging fingers, we have to make an attempt to define what the truth is. A dream?! Pah! Here's a quick and dirty account.

The issue is seen clearly if we ask ourselves, as we navigate through the network of 'facts' that comprise our own personal narrative, "What are we going to spend our time learning?" Of course we'd rather learn true things, right? We will see that truth is really about interconnected language.

Let's compare two motifs of theory making, or, depending on our level of confidence, learning: We can learn about black people and white people, about race and about groups--anecdotally and through loose conversation. Or we can learn about melanin, eumelanin, pheomelanin, and sociology. Which is framework true? Is it the second, scientific one? If so, why? Remember that very paradigm and all the science that follows from it is a model waiting to be toppled. What ends up determining the amount of truthiness, then, while often scientific, does not lay prostrate before science. (Although I will say that the god of the 21st century has traded in his white robe for a white labcoat, and, as always, those who most fervently believe in his magic are the ones who least understand him.) No. The most we can say of a statement of fact is that its truth depends upon the degree to which that purported fact is interwoven with others. Is fact A an anecdote? A guess? How insular is it? Is it a groundless myth? Or is it instead something rooted in a broad and deep theory, in other facts?

If it is the case that fact A derives from the last in the above list then I dub it "true," and I do so because something very remarkable happens when we buy in to a protracted, thoughtful exercise in the production of thought; it's the same thing that happens when we labour over symphonies or spend hours each day as Coltrane did learning to improvise well--we do good work. This happens because human beings are not unlike the computers we have made in our image. We can "machine learn**" a great number of things, but for the knowledge to be worthwhile it must be predicated upon and presided over by an engine of logic. The better the logic engine and the longer it is allowed to run the better the machine's output in the end. Lousy facts have a way of weeding themselves out; they won't stick with many other facts. For an example, take the musings of a schizophrenic. She might create a very long string of internally consistent delusions, but eventually that consistency runs out and the narrative crumbles. It is no accident, perhaps, that those who suffer from schizophrenia often invent spontaneous words, the least sticky and most disconnected of all linguistic bodies. What has happened, as we sometimes say to one another, is that she's lost logic. (We would do well to always ground ourselves in fact--in logic--lest our ignorance lead to insanity.)

I argue that human logic is internal, and a well-supported fact is precisely what happens the more we think about something, the more we allow our "program" to run. Our internal logic is the only means by which a thought is ever vetted and its appearance is what makes something ultimately true. Still, truth needs to be fully defined before we're done. The game we are playing has not very much to do with the incremental march from the dawn of our ignorance into the historically inevitable light of truth, which is the notion that Kuhn argued against; it has everything instead to do with instances of a priori synthesis***, or as I would have it, linguistic interconnectedness. The more nexus that become linked by strands of logic, the greater the number of ideas fashioned firmly together, the stronger this lattice of language becomes. And so truth at last is a matter of degree; but it is one that depends (perhaps reassuringly) upon a magnitude of connections in a linguistic web that is threaded with logic--the stuff of all dreams.



* Basically, he argues that every scientific model is only a framework that's "truthiness" is really more about efficacy, since our perspective  might change fundamentally, and tomorrow, in support of a totally different theory.
** Machine learning involves teaching a computer to recognize an object based on a preordained set of patterns. And here the analogy breaks down. Though we could try to make comparison between the patterned object and either some type of cultural or semiotic object--something I would tend to to but won't do here--or to neurological pathways. These are two completely different routes for completing the analogy: the first of which I would argue collapses eventually into the second, and the second, in practice at least, has already been preempted by neural networks, a completely different form of AI that attempts to imitate the structure of the human brain.)
*** A shambled two-second definition might be: Kant's word for logic + impressions of the world

Free Will vs. Determinism

There is a fact of particle physics that will be helpful to this debate. I mean to cite those cases in which we can know either the velocity of a particle or we can know its position, but not both—so it is with free will vs. determinism. The two are mutually exclusive, or so the traditional argument goes. Our traditional definitions of freedom and determinism dictate that we can countenance either the presence of free will or the presence of a deterministic, material cause, but not both at the same time. And yet there may be a way that we can paradoxically accommodate both views. (After all, a particle has both a position and a velocity, hence our trouble might be one of perspective.)

If pressed I am first inclined to lean towards determinism,  since if we subscribe, at minimum, to the possible reduction of mental events to material causes then determinism clearly follows; in a materialistic universe there will always be a citable physical cause for any given event. However, if we define free will as a psychological event—the experience of choice—then clearly it exists as well, even if the causes of our choices are material. It is good philosophical practice to mark a delineation between the physical cause of any mental occurrence and the phenomenon of human beings actually undergoing that said occurrence. You can hardly argue that the two are one in the same. (I posit this in full awareness of the thorough and seamless overlaying of consciousness with the activities of the brain; you will find no dualistic theory of mind here.) For example, the cascade of biological events, of electrochemical impulses that account for what we would call amorous feelings, it can hardly be argued, give a full account of what it is like for human beings to experience even a loose approximation of love. A clear difference exists, then, between the utterly material and the unique phenomena experienced by those with cognitive faculties.

There comes a point, I would argue, when we can take the physical cause as so remote with regard to what appear to be autonomous rational decisions that the case for free will becomes that much stronger. Consider first a proximate cause by relating the experience of hunger and the subsequent decision to eat with a sudden drop in blood sugar. Here most of us will be comfortable attributing the experience of “choice” as being, for the most part, false. The material cause of the mental event is plain. If, on the other hand, we behave as Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man and rationalize our behavior in such a way as to attempt freedom from determinism—even if through highly neurotic and abstracted means—it becomes evident that the material cause of our behavior is very remote. (The possibility of psychological determinism, Freudian childhoods, Skinner’s mechanistic account of our desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure—all such objections—are duly noted: yet none rule out the ability to rationalize our own behavior, and it is here, through metacognition, that the purview of choice is expanded.) While all brain states are reducible to material ones, it is worth bearing out that, in fact, many brain states are caused by other brain states; in other words, while many motives are not, certain others are highly rationalized.

This may not completely liberate us from the eventual deterministic explanation of our behavior, but it certainly does make the deterministic cause of that behavior much more distant in some cases, and in this hinterland between cause and effect I find it irresistible to wonder if there might be something very interesting happening here. Too often we forget about matters of degree when discussing such topics. It appears to me that in some cases the material cause is strong, but in other remote cases the influence of clear material causes becomes asymptotic, that is, it never quite reaches zero but the end behavior of the line is such that it becomes negligible. From the living specter of determinism rises the shade of free will.