Incongruent Truths

“Sphere, or flat?”, we ask. “Yes,” the universe answers.

We’ve been spoiled in the modern world by an understanding of reality which has become reliably clear and frighteningly powerful. We can communicate with one another instantaneously from anywhere to anywhere, split atoms, and launch ourselves into the heavens. Compared to our cave-dwelling ancestors, clutching spears for protection and huddled closely around the fire, we are as gods.

And indeed, we do owe that power to the so-called “language of God”: mathematics.

One of the insights I’ve learned from teaching mathematics for so long is that sometimes there is no clear solution. Sometimes there are no elegant proofs. Sometimes you get nowhere by following the classical rules, as we know them to be. You simply have to go out on a limb to cut your own way forward through the dark jungle of endless possibilities. Brute force. Trial and error.

At this point in history, we have two models for describing and predicting reality. Quantum Theory for the subatomic scale, and General Relativity at large scale. They both work perfectly and reliably for making accurate predictions. That is to say, both of these theories are true.

But there’s a problem. These two theories — both of which know to be true — are irreconcilable with one another.

How can that contradiction be?

For a hundred years, frustrated by that question, physicists and mathematicians have been trying with only limited success to unite these two fragments of truth into one single, unified Theory of Everything.

Curse of the Binary Paradigm

Meanwhile, in computer science, the binary logic of “true or false”, underwrites the complete transformation that has taken place in our society during the computer age. The code on which you read this article, like everything else in the digital world, is ultimately reduceable to combinations of 0’s and 1’s, which billions of tiny switches in your phone or computer are able to read.

While the power and benefit of the binary dichotomy are obvious and undeniable, it has limits and liabilities.

One limitation is how the paradigm of binary choices seeps into our politics. In the United States, we have no real alternatives to the two main parties: Democrat or Republican. They often preach polar opposite narratives of many events.

We The People are presently unable to unify our national story into a single, universally agreed-upon canon.

Confoundingly, the tales the two parties tell are often both based in “truth” (I use that word loosely… this is politics after all). That is to say, two different and conflicting interpretations of the same story can both contain references to true facts. The stories may conflict on what to emphasize or downplay, but each has a point. It certainly frustrates open-minded people who are trying to really figure out what’s going on.

Not unlike the problem facing theorists who try to unify physics, We The People are presently unable to unify our national story into a single, universally agreed-upon canon.

A striking example of what I mean is the New York Times 1619 Project, juxtaposed with a counterweight of the free course The Great American Story: A Land of Hope by Hillsdale College on its online platform. I haven’t examined either one in-depth yet, as Hillsdale isn’t even finished producing the course, but I expect that each will be filled with verifiable, factual accounts and materials created by eminent scholars whose rigor is beyond reproach.

Still, they will surely tell very different stories about America, leaving the student with very different emotions and impressions.

This is fundamentally the limitation of binary thinking because Truth often isn’t limited to just one or the other. It can be both. Just because what one side says is true, that doesn’t necessarily mean what the contradictory side says is false, and vice versa.

“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.” ― Yuval Noah Harari

It was like that long before computers, of course. But what if the sciences can once again liberate our minds, and expand how we see ourselves and our society in every way, including politically?

“Yes”, “No”, and… “Both”

It isn’t yet available for commercial use, but a new kind of computing is emerging called quantum computing. It relies on not just the binary choice of 0’s and 1’s, but something called qubits which could represent a 0, or 1, or both at the same time. It is less stable but is orders of magnitude more powerful than the strongest binary supercomputer.

You can think of this leap in tech as being like a jump from a conventional bomb to a nuclear one. The advance is so significant that a single quantum computer could, conceivably, crack the encryption of most of humanity’s existing cybersecurity infrastructure.

Similarly, imagine the next level strength our nation could achieve if we could move beyond the political binary of Left and Right, and think in terms of Both.

This is at the core of Andrew Yang’s campaign of “Not Left, Not Right, Forward”, and is a major part of why he significantly overperformed for a previously unknown candidate. Yang understands the power of “Both”.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of our time is to resolve the differences between internationalist Globalism, and isolationist Nationalism. Perhaps no one has made more progress on that project than the historian Yuval Noah Hirari, the acclaimed author of Sapiens.

In my own less impactful, but no less sincere way, I’m also trying to forward the effort at finding a synthesis or unity through the group I created called Resurgent.Us, which you can read about here.

At this stage in our knowledge, it seems that the best way to resolve irreconcilable truths is to not become overly sentimental to either one side or to the other but to recognize that each perspective may have a context where it fits well.

Much in the same way that we use the General Theory of Relativity at the very large scale when gravity is the primarily relevant force, we might want to run ideas through the filter of Social Justice for the large scale national interest.

Moreover, just as we use Quantum Theory for the subatomic scale where gravity is a negligible force, we may want to focus on something more like Stoicism at the level of decisionmaking for ourselves as individual citizens.

Again, however weird this may seem to those of us who are trained in the limited realm of Boolean Algebra, here in the real world two things can be true even if they seem contradictory.