Determinism and the Nature of Truth

There is often some difficulty in life determining what is true. The most famous examples come from ethics, such as if the statement "living life according to your virtues is the best life to lead" is true. Or, you could even point to the vigorous debates that occurred some years ago over whether or not Pluto should be considered a planet. In that case, the debate was over whether the statement "Pluto is a planet" is true or false. In philosophical circles, these sorts of arguments can oh-so-often lead to a debate which centers around whether the property of truth is inherent or perceived. Basically, if I say "Pluto is a planet," I would be wrong by today's standards, but would I still be wrong if I said that same thing 15 years ago, when many people did in fact consider Pluto to be a planet? Does truth change with our perception of the universe, or are truthfulness and falseness already inherent in everything we say, even if we may not be aware of which property dwells in our words?

Firstly, the knee-jerk reaction would be to say that truth is an inherent property of the universe. Truth doesn't change simply because we have a different view point. However, if we follow this idea to the logical conclusion, we come up with an interesting idea. When making statements concerning the future, such as "I will have oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow," truth as an inherent property would still apply. Either it is true and I will have oatmeal, or it is false and I will not have oatmeal. We may not know what the answer is, but our perception of this statement at this point in time does not affect whether this statement is true or false. The statement already exists in a state of being true or false, and will not change. In short, my breakfast is already determined. And because inherent truth would apply to all possible statements, then all possible things are already determined. This conclusion doesn't necessarily debunk the idea of inherent truth per se, because the debate surrounding determinism is still strong; tying inherent truth to determinism doesn't necessarily prove or disprove either idea.

However, there is still the less popular idea of truth being a perceived quality of the universe. If truth is a perceived quality of the universe, then that means that truth is a construct of our consciousness. Truth doesn't exist beyond our perception of the universe (and the information contained therein). This distinction between "truth" and "information" is important for this side of the argument. Truth lives inside of consciousness as a lens through which we can then perceive information. If you have less information, you may be more inclined to consider different things to be true than if you have more information. This option doesn't affirm or deny determinism, because the conclusion says nothing about how truth can be applied to the future. (It is worth noting, though, that this conclusion can be used as a small building brick in an argument for the idea that there in only a single consciousness that can be proven to actually be a true conscious--you--and everything beyond is impossible to prove--essentially Descartes's First and Second Meditations.)

Overall, it seems to me to make far more sense to make the distinction between information and truth, and to label "information" as inherent and "truth" as an perceived property that simply arises out of how consciousness attempts to experience reality. It makes less assumptions about the possible determinism of the universe, and by Occam's Razor, therefore seems to be the more rational conclusion to take. As such, we can continue on with our scientific method of utilizing testable hypotheses and proving then to be either correct or incorrect without the philosophical conundrum of whether the hypothesis was false before we even proved it to be so.

On Feelings and Emotion

In today's modern society there seems to be an unfortunate amount of disproportionate disdain for feelings and emotions. Unless, of course, those emotions can be commodified. As with anything in an imperfect-capitalistic society, deviations from the norm will be punished unless they are exploitable. Since many emotions have the drawback of allowing people to make irrational decisions, be those financial or social, indulging in these emotive desires is shunned and dismissed as a mixture of weakness and stupidity. Hence, the larger part of society has ignored or turned away from emotions, both in individual situations and on a general level.

However, in dismissing emotion, we can also dismiss a very large part of our collective psyche. The Patriot Act wasn't necessarily passed due to pure and unadulterated reason. It was passed because people were afraid, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The debate surrounding the politics of the Patriot Act aside, the thing to take away from this is the fact that the utilization of fear and other feelings in decision making is prevalent and to ignore such a large sociological motivator would be to cut off both of our intellectual feet. In addition, a case can be made for emotion on the grounds of mental health. The debate surrounding mental health as an issue in today's society focuses largely on how to pay for the care of these people, yet we never seem to recognize that the sociological environment that we have fostered could be an essential factor in cultivating these skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and other illnesses.

The interesting thing is, there is a case to be made for more emphasis on rational thought. Science, for example, is based on reaching the highest level of objectivity that you can whilst observing the world, and one simply can't do that while viewing data through an emotional lens. Science can in turn be said to be largely responsible for the massive amounts of progress we, as a species, have seen in the past several centuries. As such, an expansion of science, and a subsequent reduction of emotion, sounds extremely desirable. But as mentioned before, this still has significant drawbacks in a world that still operates on reality rather than theory.

What we need is a new way of looking at emotion. Today, many people think of emotion as a scalar quantity. That is, it is though of on a scale. Even professional institutions, like hospitals, read emotion and pain on a scale of one to ten. This is completely ludicrous if one accounts for the fact that the very nature of emotion is subjective and how, therefore, any attempt at obtaining quantitative data from a qualitative rating would untrustworthy. And this is where the root problem lies: trying to transition qualitative experience to a quantitative report. A solution should therefore attempt to preserve the qualitative nature of emotion, even as we try to communicate with other people.

I propose an idea: instead of looking at emotion as a scalar quantity, we instead need to recognize that it is instead a vector. That is, it contains both magnitude and direction. This is due to the fact that a large part of how we view the world has to do with the fact that our consciousness exists in liner time. If you are happy, it's not like you're happy at a single point in time. It would be more accurate to say that you feel like things are going well. The general trend you see in your life is a positive one. Of course, shifting your frame of reference to include, say, a week from now when you have a large project due that you haven't finished, you will be then less happy because that assignment then lowers the average of the trend line of you life a little. The same can be said for emotional disorders like depression. It's not a feeling sad all the time, as many people point out. A better way to look at it would be to see it as feeling like things are continuously getting worse. The emotional trend line of your life always seems to be pointing down in some context or another. Understanding that emotions have direction, they have acceleration, is crucial to coming up with a better way to express emotion and incorporate it into the entirety of our lives.