“How To” Find Truth in Your Life

Solving Life’s Foundational Problem

This essay is an attempt to solve the following problem:

Finding truths that apply to your life that are founded on something more solid than ‘your truth’.

Why is this a worthwhile problem?

Because only when acting from a place of truth do you gain ownership of your actions.

And anxiety is the feeling of a lack of control — the feeling that you don’t control your reality, that external forces determine your actions and fate.

You can’t control what you don’t understand. For instance your mind: you attain momentary peace, but with a slight shift of circumstances, you are swept into a world of turmoil.

This is why people talk about “empowerment.” People want to understand their reality so they don’t have to rely unnecessarily on anyone else to help them get through life.

Why is it difficult to find the truth?

Because:

• You are the only person who is invested in you finding the truth. Everyone else would prefer you needed them for something
• The human mind is a creative being. It isn’t naturally interested in seeing reality for what it is.
• Humans love to imitate each other. Imitating is non-truth since you can imitate the effect but not the cause.

What Is Reality?

Some believe that there is no reality outside the human mind. Their reasoning is: that everything outside cannot be verified, since it can only arrive at our awareness by indirect means. One can say “I think, therefore I am” since consciousness by definition cannot be an illusion. Relatedly, one can truthfully say “this hurts” or “I’m hungry” since these are also subjective statements.

But according to this view, you can’t say ‘that’s a table’ because your mind could be playing a trick on you.

The philosopher Bishop Berkeley used to hold this view. When the great writer Samuel Johnson was told about it, he responded by kicking a rock while declaring, “I refute it thus.” He could know that the rock existed because it “kicked back.” It made its presence felt in a way that was best explained by saying that the rock did in fact exist.

Anything that can make its presence felt and is independently complex (i.e. the explanation ‘it's an apparition’ leaves something unexplained and it can’t be fully accounted for by something else that exists) can be said to exist because if it meets those criteria it might as well exist by any useful definition of ‘exist’.

For example, suppose you have a mental illness that makes you hallucinate that people are following you around. The people in the hallucinations were not independently complex and therefore did not exist. If a drug cured the hallucinations, or the person with the mental illness died, all traces would be removed of those people. Whereas if people were actually following you into your house, there would be evidence of their presence that could not be explained away as hallucinations: footsteps outside your house, the sound of a door banging, extra food in the pantry.

How Does a Scientist Find Truth?

The scientist creates a theory in her mind, also called a ‘conjecture’ to try to explain something she finds surprising. The best conjectures provide explanations of the situation which are hard to vary while being comprehensive. Each detail in a good explanation needs to be there for the theory to work, and if it were falsified by experimental evidence the theory would not survive. This prevents people from making adjustments to keep the theory alive after it’s proven wrong.

For instance, if I said that 1Kg of grass cures common cold, and you return saying you’ve tried it and it didn’t work, I could respond that it’s actually 2 Kg because I haven’t explained how the cure works. Endless amounts of time can and have been wasted on theories that have this too-flexible quality. If on the other hand, I make my theory stick its neck out with narrow, falsifiable predictions, then its survival against falsification actually means something.

The reason that we use falsification as the criterion was outlined by Karl Popper in “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”:

“My proposal (of falsifiability) is based upon an asymmetry which results from the logical form of universal statements. For these are never derivable from singular statements, but can be contradicted by singular statements.”

You can’t logically use the statement ‘Socrates is mortal’ to prove that ‘all men are mortal’. But it can disprove the statement ‘all men are immortal’. Anything “true” can be disproven tomorrow, but once you’ve proven something false it tends to stay false.

Personal Truth

Falsification is the link between personal and scientific truth. We can’t be as robust as scientists in knowing that personal experience has ‘falsified’ a belief we held. We rarely have enough time or intelligence to reduce our beliefs to their purest logical form, from where they could be precisely falsified. But since life is an experience and not a concept, we don’t need the same precision.

What we might call a ‘moment or truth’ is the moment where a belief or hope we had become attached to ends up being fruitless or wrong. Perhaps a spouse is unfaithful or it becomes resoundingly clear we don’t have the talent to be a pro athlete or singer. It dawns on us that people don’t spend their days suspending their own interests and wondering at our intrinsic qualities.

Truth is the experience or the revelation of a clash between what we think and what is really there.

“How To” Find Truth

Summarizing the process of scientific discovery:

Encounter a problem ➜ creative conjecture of an explanation ➜ decide with reference to existing knowledge whether your explanation is worth testing ➜ make a prediction which logically follows from your explanation ➜ test it ➜ rejects your theory in favor of a competing explanation if the prediction is falsified ➜ repeat.

Why the emphasis on ‘creative conjecture?’

Because in this context a ‘problem’ by definition is something you don’t yet have the knowledge to answer. So you have to imagine the solution.

‘How to find the truth is therefore a contradiction in terms. ‘How to’ implies you can apply pre-existing knowledge in a logical sequence. But since in most situations you don’t have all the knowledge, the words ‘how to have a profoundly limited application to human life. I would go so far as to claim that the source of all joy is the creative engagement with incomplete information.

Put another way, the source of all boredom is the complete understanding of the situation you find yourself in.

So humans will never arrive at a final solution. That is utopian thinking; a prosperous life is spent in perpetual creative engagement with uncertainty. One lifelong experiment, voluntarily.

Don’t take my word for it though. You can’t run an experiment on someone else’s advice. If you do that, it means you don’t understand the idea you were testing. This means you can never have a ‘moment of truth.’

You can’t let go of what you never had.