Defining & Deciphering Truth | P1 of 2

// B.C. | 7/1/2023 | edited 9/19/2024

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"It is precisely the most subjective ideas which, being closest to nature and to the living being, deserve to be called the truest. But what is truth?

WROTE Carl Jung in his seminal 1933 work, Modern Man in Search of Soul.

Jung continues,

"The best that we can achieve is true expression. By true expression I mean an open avowal and a detailed presentation of everything that is subjectively noted… True expression consists in giving form to what is observed."

Determining what is true comes from a subjective viewpoint, fundamentally—that is, giving form to what is observed through the lens of our experience, which is ultimately the only truth each one of us will ever know. The picture above outlines the situation we find ourselves in precisely. The internet and Ai aids but also deeply complicates this.

What I find true, what You find true, and what We find true, are all different from one another but equal in scope and value. Without one, there would be none. If you only see the shadow of the square and I only see the shadow of the circle, and I never come in contact with You to share what I see, then We can never come to construct Truth together.

So join me in this article as I piece together my definition and deciphering of truth, but do keep in mind that I may only be seeing the shadow of the circle or the square.

It takes U to spell truth.

Truth, Together

I created Arsenal Media Incorporated in a time of extreme confusion. Personally, but collectively too, as the last few years have been confusing for every single person on the planet. If you say you're not confused you are perhaps the most confused. Not only is everything about what we thought to be true turning out to be false, but how we come to know what's true has been irrevocably and indefinitely altered with the internet and Ai.

I felt that starting a podcast was the best way I could start to determine what was true. For me, podcasts were and are a great way to stay informed, learn, and explore the complexity and nuance of the world. To be able to talk or listen to informed and inspired people about what they were finding truth-full in their research seemed (and seems) to be the best way to patch together what's true. Before we go any further, let's define truth:

Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality. -Wikipedia

Yes, Wikipedia has had quite a bit of backlash when it comes to what's "true," but bear with me for a moment. It is, or at least the vision for Wikipedia was, crowdsourced knowledge, and for the sake of this piece, let's run with this and refine it.

Fact and reality deserve their own article apiece... but let's let sleeping dogs lie.

"To be in accordance with 'reality' or facts" is truth. If you touch a hot stove it will burn. You will know it's hot. That's true to you. If you touch a hot stove and I don't and you tell me the stove is hot, I can choose to believe you, or not. I won't know until I have an equal subjective experience. From my perspective, the stove is the stove. It is neither hot or cold; it is until observed to be either.

Schrödinger, anyone? Dead cats in boxes? No? Alright. Let's keep this stove analogy going then.

You touch a hot stove. "Ouch!" you exclaim. My back turned away, I turn around and ask, "What happened?" You say, "I touched the stove and it burnt my hand." I respond, "How do you know?"

Baffled, you look at me and say, "Because it burnt my hand, dummy! Look at my hand."

You show me a clear burn mark on your hand. Your burn mark, as true as it is to you, is just secondary evidence to me and my eyes, but also the primary evidence of the incident. It is not a primary source. You are a primary source for your experience, but the primary source is the skin-burning temperature of the hot stove. The secondary evidence, to me, is the condition of your hand. I have to trust your experience.

Me, having never touched or experienced a hot stove in my life, say, "There's no way. Stoves aren't hot, watch." I walk over to the stove and put my hand on it, receiving an immediate scalding from you and the stove. "Told you so!" you say. Turns out stoves are hot, but I had to learn that the hard way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But what if between the time you burnt yourself and tried to explain to me that the stove was hot it had time to cool down? Not believing your experience, I go to touch the stove and it's cold now. To me, you're crazy, the stove is cold. You are faking it or got that burn some other way in my perception. Phoney. You proceed to beat me with the pan.

In this example, what is true and what is truth?

Your experience of touching the stove and receiving a burn and realizing it's on and hot is True. However, equally, my experience of the stove being neither hot nor cold until I touch is also True. The Truth in this situation is the stove is (could be) hot, a true fact of reality in your experience but just something you communicated to me in my mind from you having attempted to explain your experience to me. However, together, we can come to establish Truth.

To refer back to Jung above, the true expression of your subjective experience was a critical piece in constructing a Truth between us. You gave form to what you observed/experienced. Had you not, I might have gone my whole life not knowing stoves that are on are hot until I had the experience myself.

In this scenario, I had to experience the stove myself to understand Your Truth to come to The Truth. Okay, I'll stop beleaguering the stove notion. Hopefully the point is clear now:

Truth is an emergent phenomenon, a process of piecing together facts, information, and/or experiences to form a more coherent idea of what was, is, or could be based on what information is available and present.

I offer the allegory of the hot stove out of simplicity. Surely you can see how complex this can become when there are hundreds of millions of computers, smartphones, and other devices connected to a worldwide web of billions of people sharing their experiences of what's occurring simultaneously?

Especially when there are rogue chaos agents, random and not bots, foreign actors, intelligence agencies, militaries, public relations firms, mainstream media channels, and self-interested demagogues propagating an abundance of mis- and disinformation for their or others personal gain, or, at the least, for your confusion?

And what of artificial intelligence, the continuously shifting information ocean, the constant advancement of technology, and the tyranny of modern propaganda methods? It's insanity!

Hot Stoves Are Hot

Luckily, we can agree hot stoves are hot. Right? Good. I sure hope so. However, there is likely an abundance of things we don't agree on. Why would that be? A plethora of factors contribute, like how we were raised, our implicit biases, our media and information diet, our biology, neurology, psychology, our receptivity to persuasion, and our innate nature.

The picture at the beginning of this piece couldn't be more perfect. The cylinder is Truth, with our equal but different perspectives of either side of the object being True. The cylinder is a third dimensional form, our perspective being only two dimensional.

Truth is a multi-dimensional, unseen, and ever-evolving construct. An "open avowal" of our True Expression contributes to the continuous creation and understanding of this construct.

How are we to discuss something of a different, higher, or even lower dimension when we primarily perceive in a certain, particular dimension, perhaps even with each of us perceiving different dimensions by way of our individuality? Can we? Are we able? Of course.

Everything around us, the computer you're reading this on and the one it was typed on, was a 'higher dimensional' form in thought until it wasn't, e.g., a materialized, physical thing of personal experience. People came together, people who saw only circles, people who only saw squares, and they discussed the 'idea' of a device capable of such feats, something that couldn't be physically seen between any of them but was thought-fully constructed through an "open avowal and a detailed presentation of everything that [was] subjectively noted" in their experience up to that point in their life.

Perhaps the most important part of the statement on truth above is that it is ever-evolving. New information is being made available everyday about any number things. Something that is true today can be proven false tomorrow. For millennia humanity thought that we were the center of all there is and could be, with The Church propagating the geocentric notion.

That is, until heliocentric advocate Galileo Galilei came along and said, "That's not true." Gasp! How could an essential truth that has organized human thought for hundreds of years be untrue? Better yet, who is one man to say otherwise? He was promptly censored and only 359 years later did the church admit they were wrong. He died under house arrest in 1642.

In recent history, very recent history, the FDA wanted to postpone releasing v*x*ne safety data 55 years in response to a FOIA request. Worth contemplating, considering all the people that were banned, censored, and vilified for their open avowal of their subjective experience with an experimental and then unproven medical intervention. Will the nurses, doctors, and proven and accredited medical professionals that were in opposition and resultantly reprimanded receive vindication or an apology of some kind in the future?

How long will that take, 100 years, give or take 50?

Fortunately, hot stoves will always be hot. Right?

Techno-Logic

The internet has liberated and enlightened millions of people in the brief time it's been around. This is indisputable. It could be argued that the internet is perhaps the singular most valuable technological invention in recent history. It's also made things really, really confusing and disrupted every industry imaginable.

If fire gave humanity the ability to cook food, tell stories late at night, keep predators away, and nourish our body and brain, the internet has taken fire from the gods and given us the ability to learn new skills, create magnificently, and most importantly, connect with each other's subjective experience and open avowals unlimitedly.

Maybe a bit too much... "A little bit of everything, all of the time!" comes to mind.

This technology, for the most part, is a tremendous asset to us as a species. Just in writing this article I've explored over a dozen different sources in my research. Surely you've referenced the internet the same amount of times or more today alone.

The point here is the internet gives us more perspectives, more 'True Expressions,' to refer to and utilize in constructing truth(s). The accessibility of the internet with modern devices, computers, smartphones, and tablets has made it easier to express our truth in a variety of media, from Instagram to TikTok, Youtube, Twitter and whatever else. There's quite a lot.

This access allows us to construct truth more fully, as we can connect with just about anyone on the planet and who is also using the internet. If I don't understand something, then I can find someone who can explain it. If someone doesn't agree with something on the mainstream news, they can research on the internet an alternative viewpoint.

Because of the internet, we can each construct our own truth independent of mainstream narratives, allowing unbounded and historically uncommon sovereignty

of mind. However, juxtaposed to this our individual worldviews can be constructed by artificial intelligence or mainstream channels and pigeonhole and silo us into a narrow, myopic, and untrue versions of reality.

This Promethean technology needs to used with tremendous discretion. Every click, swipe, text, phone call, and email is monitored and catalogued to some extent to better serve advertisers or contribute to a digital model of our psychology. This has the potential to reaffirm our cognitive biases and corner us into a fallacious and fictitious fantasy if we remain unaware.

Ai has an opportunity to help us construct fuller, higher resolution Truth with its ability to pull on vast amounts of information repositories and simplify complex aggregated information or abstract numerical sets. To note, though, Ai has been a critical piece of the immense confusion we are experiencing today. Large language models like Siri and chatbots are not the first contact with Ai; search engines, social media, streaming sites, and recommendation algorithms were.

We need to use our technology logically. Don't fall victim to the Orwellian vision of the daily two minutes hate ritual. Use it to communicate, challenge your beliefs, create something uncommon and share it with the world, learn something new, or even laugh.

Dear Truth,

My intention was not to talk about hot stoves. My intention has been to illuminate more fully what truth is and how to find it. Hopefully by this time you have a higher resolution model of what truth is and how to determine it in your own life and how technology contributes to decohering or cohering that.

If anything, please remember it takes U to spell truth.

If you've read this far, thank you for reading. You must be curious too. Curiosity drives creation and the world. You are a truth seeker. If you weren't, you certainly wouldn't have read this far or have been so interested in what Truth Is. Hopefully you found this nuanced definition of truth helpful. Please share it if you did.

And please, don't touch hot stoves.