Truth why are we here

But without a proof of the absolute objectivity of scientific truth, we are only in the midst of a long ceasefire. On one side is modern science, the true child of the Copernican Revolution. While his astronomical predecessor, Ptolemy, thought that the sun revolved around the earth, Copernicus contended that the earth revolved around the sun. On the other side, according to Meillassoux, is post-Kantian philosophy. Kant famously declared that his philosophy inaugurated a new Copernican Revolution.

But … this stability must be established as a mind-independent fact if we want to achieve a decisive break with contemporary Ptolemaism. For Meillassoux, mortality is the great symbol of such absolutely objective truth, because to think of the possibility of our own deaths is to think of a world bereft of human consciousness.

With what proposition would we speak of this world not-for-us? But if there is nothing beyond my consciousness, then its ceasing to exist is meaningless. In order to accept the truth of mortality, we must admit that our thinking the possibility of our death accesses a truth independent of our existence. But such a view, Meillassoux replies, should outrage the modern scientific imagination, which he believes is a resolutely materialist one.

Evolution tells us that human beings have only been around for a brief time. And the law of entropy tells us that our staying power is limited. No room for mystery, just for chemicals. But Meillassoux wants to go further. Meillassoux thinks he can. This great outdoors is the world that Galileo, following upon the work of Copernicus, discovered, and which Descartes elaborated.

Galileo, Meillassoux explains, submitted the entire world for the first time to mathematical description. But a century after Descartes wrote, David Hume argued that we can never rationally know the ultimate causes of natural events.

Science can tell us, perhaps, that A causes B, and B causes C, but, Hume explained, it will not be able disclose what caused n — the very first cause that led to C. These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry.

Kant agreed with Hume. Yet, Meillassoux notes ruefully, the inability of science to tell these men the ultimate reason behind the world did not lead either of them to abandon the thought that there had to be an ultimate reason. After Hume, the failure to provide an ultimate reason for the way things are came to be understood as a call for epistemic humility — for the abandonment of the possibility of absolute truth of any sort, not just the true ultimate reason or first cause.

Meillassoux believes that he has freed us, finally, from the lingering metaphysical doubt of Hume and Kant. Meillassoux explains that these questions confuse the stability of the natural world with its necessity.

True, Meillassoux admits, it is possible that at any moment everything in the world could change shape. Unlike deduction, it allows us to draw justified conclusions that go beyond the information contained in the premise. In observing one phenomenon occurring in conjunction with another — an electric current and an induced magnetic field , for instance — I generalise that this will always be so.

I might even create a model, an analogy of the workings of the real world, to explain it - in this case that of particles and fields. This then allows me to predict what future events might occur or to draw implications and create technologies, such as developing an electric motor. And so I inductively scaffold my knowledge, using information I rely upon as a resource for further enquiry.

At no stage do I arrive at deductive certainty, but I do enjoy greater degrees of confidence. Now, there are some philosophical hairs to split here, but my point is not to define exactly what truth is, but rather to say there are differences in how the word can be used, and that ignoring or conflating these uses leads to a misunderstanding of what science is and how it works.

For instance, the lady that said to me it was true for her that ghosts exist was conflating a subjective truth with a truth about the external world. At first she was resistant, but when I asked her if it could be true for her that gravity is repulsive, she was obliging enough to accept my suggestion. Attacking the truth claim is then, if you accept this deceit, equivalent to questioning the genuine subject experience.

It has been a long and painful struggle for science to rise from this cognitive quagmire, separating out subjective experience from inductive methodology. Any attempt to reunite them in the public understanding of science needs immediate attention. Subjective truths and scientific truths are different creatures, and while they sometimes play nicely together, their offspring are not always fertile.

BO: I would say narrative is woven into the universe to the degree that the universe is perceived by consciousness. Narrative is a natural part of consciousness and a natural part of the way the mind works.

It's there in dreams. It's there in unconsciousness. It's there in all the states of living being. We can speak of narrative, even in terms of matter that doesn't have consciousness, the minute something disintegrates: the fall of a rock; the altered movement of a stream; the changing patterns of a wave — they're all elements of narrative.

Narrative is a bad thing because it fools us. Am I hearing that right? BO: Well, everything fools us, let's be clear about that. For one very simple reason: we have no means of knowing what objective reality is — it's just simply not possible.

We have no instrument by which to record the absolute nature of reality. There's no instrument, because whatever instrument that is will at some point be filtered through, or looked through, the lens of consciousness, of us. So as long as that is happening, we are always constantly limiting reality as we perceive it, because any perception of reality that we can have is limited to our senses and our faculties.

So we don't know the absolute nature of reality. So whatever it is we perceive of reality, we're always being deceived. We're always being deceived because we don't have the total picture.

What narrative does… narrative is, I believe, a great neutral power. On the one hand it has this extraordinary power to create patterns, which then become patterns of perception. It bypasses the intelligence. It goes straight to some primal part of us, of our emotion, of our unconscious. It bypasses all of our filters. It's partly because it works through images, through symbols and through the structure by which we perceive reality.

It's a very, very powerful thing. So, on the one hand it does that, but on the other hand it helps us shape reality. It helps us actually grasp what it is that we're experiencing. Without a sense of narrative locked into our DNA, locked into every part of our cells and our minds, reality would be a great mess of nonsense.

We have no way of actually… This conversation would be meaningless without a sense of narrative. David: Do you think science itself has a narrative, which it sometimes thinks it doesn't have? BO: Oh, I think science has a narrative. It's unavoidable. I'll give you a very simple example: the whole idea of a wave and particle. The minute you have images, you already have the beginning of narrative, because you have the beginning of the shaping of the way something can be perceived.

I think those are actually two great poetic ways of perceiving reality: the wave and the particle. With one we perceive reality in its density and with the other we perceive reality in its immeasurability and its dream-like qualities, so that both those two images, which are poetic and a narrative, also, I think, conform to two great ways of looking at the world which you have in in literature.

Ard: I want to ask a slightly different question about narrative and mathematics because I've heard you speak on this. So how are mathematics and narrative similar and how are they different? BO: Well, maths and narrative have quite a few things in common and quite a few divergent elements. They have progression, symmetry, a sense of a journey actually. Mathematicians always speak about the journey of a problem, not only the journey of the solving of a problem, but the journey of a problem through other people having worked through it, worked with it.

I think another similarity is there's an intuitive element to both of them. Mathematicians always speak of the intuitive. Sometimes they arrive at the truth intuitively before they have solved it physically. There's an intuitive element. Where they diverge? There are many areas where they diverge.

Narrative allows for imaginative expansion. Mathematics is more crystalline. Narrative always wears the human flesh. It's always embodied. That's how I always think of mathematics as being very pure in that sense. The truths of maths are absolutely implied in the equations. It has nothing to do with consciousness in that… it has to do with consciousness, in the sense that mathematicians, the human being, is alive, but it is implied in itself, whereas the truth of literature is partly brought by the reader.

It's shared. If it's not shared, it does not exist. A story does not exist if there's no one to hear it. And when a slightly new order of perception comes along we can't see what it is.

So mathematics has a certain austere beauty. I was just curious whether you think that narrative has a different kind of beauty sometimes, or maybe richer forms of beauty than just mathematics. A lot of mathematicians talk about beauty in mathematics, and you've spoken about this as well. Ard: Well, I think I recognise beauty in mathematics, and the interesting thing is we all, all of us mathematically orientated people, tend to agree on the beauty, and we tend to think this is more beautiful than that.

But when you say to me, define it exactly, it's hard to put. I can recognise it without necessarily always being able to define it. BO: Okay, I have a question for you then.

Can the beauty in mathematics, in an equation, can it be there even when the mathematics is wrong? Ard: Sometimes it can be. So sometimes we speak about a very beautiful theory which is ruined by experiment: an ugly fact.

But in general, this is definitely true BO: Because you have quite a few of that in literature. You do. Things are ugly. The first people who read Moby Dick didn't see its beauty. The first set of people who saw Demoiselles d'Avignon didn't see its beauty. We still don't see the beauty in a lot of cubism. A lot of modern music we still think of as being too fractured for us. So sometimes something can seem ugly.

Ard: But there are mathematical things that seemed ugly or seemed trivial at the time but ended up being very profound later, so part of that is just our inability to perceive. Ard: There are mathematicians whose work was forgotten while they were alive, and then after they died we realise there was something unbelievably profound.

BO: I think it's also the nature of perception that we're only capable of seeing that which we've seen before. We're only capable of perceiving that which we've perceived before, and when a slightly new order of perception comes along, we can't see where it diverges. We can't see what it is. And because it doesn't conform to what we've seen before, we think it's either trivial, unimportant, insignificant or not beautiful at all.

You think of the great works that people did not understand at first. You think of something like Waiting for Godot, or you think of many Shakespeare plays that people didn't understand, didn't think beautiful at first, but which we've come to learn to perceive its correct inner beauty. BO: The best poetry and the best novels, the best narrative, absolutely.

You can almost create a divine logic. What you're struck by, more than anything else, is the shocking clarity of thinking. You read Dante and from one line to another there are no absurd leaps. Everything has to come; it has to add up. You can always tell when a writer is faking it because the images don't add up.

The narrative doesn't add up. It makes like sudden leaps that are not prepared for meticulously. Ard: As if it's less beautiful somehow? Is that what you're saying? It's less beautiful, less aesthetic? Or is that the wrong way? BO: It always feels less truthful, and it is. Sometimes something can be wrong in its inner logic and still have beauty, and I think that's because beauty partially transcends logic.

I think it's implied in it. I think beauty is implied in logic. I think that which we find to be beautiful is something which is logical to our aesthetic sense. But it also points to something in us that is greater than what we normally feel, that we haven't shaped.

David: We we've talked to people about the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. What do you think the sublime points at?

That feeling of the sublime? BO: I think the sublime points at this sense of something greater than us that we didn't make. So it's like an hour glass in a way: so the sublime is both that which inspires it, as that which is the feeling of that inspiration.

And that's why the idea of the sublime is so important and why it enlarges us and why it temporises us. At best we're six by two and a half, but the sublime really makes you feel like an inward cathedral. The sublime really brings to the feeling of being human something much greater than being human. That's what's extraordinary about it. I felt it at the foot of mountains.

I've felt it with books. I've felt it with night skies. Ard: And do you think there's something when we respond to the sublime that sometimes makes us afraid? Is terror or fear a part of it? BO: Yes, there's definitely terror as an aspect of the sublime. All truly great things have an age of terror to them. That's where the idea of Pan came from. You could be in the mountains and you have this Pan feeling.

That's where panic comes from. You have this Pan feeling. I had it the other day. I was in the mountains up in South Wolds. I was walking up. There was nobody there. Nothing was going to happen to me, but suddenly I bolted. I literally ran and there was nothing to run away from. Yes, there is an edge of terror and I don't know what that terror is. David: Have you ever felt it in your own creation, where you've felt that something you're creating has touched on it or? I mean, a lot of writers want to be in control of their material.

They want to say, "I shaped this. David: Do you think when you write narrative, or when you read great narrative, is there some discovering of something rather than just completely creating it?

BO: Yes, I think it's a wonderful image and idea, and I think you do discover it. It emerges through the rigor of, for want of a better word, the mathematics of your story. Sometimes a narrative or a poem goes somewhere you did not entirely intend it to go because of its own inner logic.