The Paradox of Truth
Why life demand paradoxes
My last post got me thinking about a book I read long ago, Gödel Escher Bach, so I dug it up to look through. I realized just two or three pages into the text two seemingly contradictory phenomena:
I forgot about 90% of the book.
The key precepts of the book are engrained in all my thinking.
How is it possible, you might wonder, that a person can incorporate a book’s content into his constant thinking but doesn’t remember the book? My hypothesis is that the brain discards (or buries) what it doesn’t need. Gödel Escher Bach became embedded in my mental operating system, so its details were no longer needed. Do you keep assembly instructions for things you’ll never take apart? You might, but why? I can see keeping instructions for, say, a lawnmower because the assembly instructions will be important when you go to repair the lawnmower or replace parts. For machines and structures with an expected maintenance routine, holding onto the instructions makes sense, at least until you’ve memorized the process. Watches—keep the manual. Outdoor furniture? Probably not.
For example, you can probably do basic mathematics operations, like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, but do you remember the text of your first math book? No. 1 + 1 =2 has become embedded in your operating system. (My first math book was red, I think, and that’s all remember about it—and that detail might be remembered incorrectly!)
Thus, re-reading Gödel Escher Bach is like reading anew with the added benefit of finding an affirmation of my default thinking on almost every page. Plus, I’m picking up a conversational familiarity with some deeper concepts that are central to artificial intelligence is far more useful now than it was in 2001 when I read the book the first time. Moreover, I’m discovering some new concepts that I must have read 23 years ago, but they did not embed themselves in my brain, and my brain did not carefully store the assembly instructions. (The instructions are probably still in there, but my filing system is just too disorganized to retrieve them at will. Likely, I will stumble across them whilst looking for something else, or in the cold shower.)
One of those ideas newly discovered (or recovered) I summarized in my notebook thus:
Attempts to outlaw or eliminate paradoxes are artificial and limiting. [Such attempts effectively] outlaw truth and, therefore frustrate intuition. People will eventually rise and overthrow any system that attempts to outlaw truth.
As with the X post referenced in my previous post, this scribbled note was stream of consciousness, as shown by the bracketed edit in the above quote. So, I wasn’t trying to make some profound assertion but deciphering in my mind—synthesizing, if you will—the passages of the book I had just consumed. My mind insisted on working out on paper those ideas just presented to it. It also wanted to memorialize this synthesis forming. At the time, I had no idea what my brain was thinking, but here I am writing about it 72 hours later. Part of my brain must have said, “hey, there’s blog post in there,” just not loud enough for me to hear.
The paragraph, in form, looks like syllogism. Blur your eyes a bit and you’ll see the pattern. It’s not a syllogism—not even close, but the form looks like one. It’s with the axiom and ends with conclusion, but the middle part does not turn on the axiom. Something else is needed to get from a to c.
a. Outlawing paradoxes are artificial.
b. ???
c. Therefore, people will eventually rise up and overthrow any system that attempts to outlaw truth.
Yeah, I don’t think I’m clever enough to bridge the gap between a and c. But I might be able to insert a new b after an and form a syllogism from that. Lets’ see.
Now we have:
a. Outlawing paradoxes are artificial.
b. Truth is opposed to artificial.
c. Therefore, [Such attempts effectively] outlaw truth.
Not good, but closer. Close enough to spend the rest of this post considering—a consideration that, if done well, will lead to prove the last part, now part d: People will overthrow systems that attempt to abolish paradoxes because they have an innate love of truth.
First, we should probably explain what a paradox is. A paradox is a self-contradictory statement or situation. The classic example Hoffstadter uses in Gödel Escher Bach is the statement: “This sentence is false.” Have fun with that. If the sentence is true, then it is false. But, if it’s false, it’s true. Or, my favorite, “I am lying.” If I’m lying, the sentence is true, but for the sentence to be true, I must be lying.
Going beyond Hoffstadter, I would argue that both statements are true and false. Not partly true, but completely true. At the same time, they’re completely false. And I don’t accept alternating outcomes. The sentences are not interpreted as true, which turns them false, which turns them true, ad infinitum. Rather, they are simultaneously true and false. If you ponder it a few minutes, you will agree. Try it.
And, even if you can’t accept that the sentences are simultaneously true and false, I may not need to prove that to complete the syllogism. My axiom, outlawing paradoxes is artificial, does not require a finding of falsity. Rather, it asserts that a world without paradoxes is artificial. Such a world is not false, just fake, counterfeit, synthetic, plastic, bogus, and, yes, artificial. Artificial is not false. A paradox-free world is true, it’s just fake.
Consider LED lights, the highest-quality of which produce only about 94% of the visible light spectrum. Those missing colors are true, though you cannot see them. The world you can see is fake, though you can plainly see it. What you see under LED lighting is not what it is. Under sunlight, it would be different. And, yet, it would not be different, except, perhaps in enough time, more tan. The type or intensity of light does not change the essence of something, but its essence does you no good if you can’t see it. So, under LED lights, your vision of the thing is true because it is really there, but it’s also artificial because it is not what you see. To the degree your vision lacks fidelity with the true visual appearance of the object, your vision is false because it is artificial, just as a supermarket fruit is inorganic because its growth and appearance relied on artificial chemicals.
Summarizing that last paragraph, then, artificiality obscures truth, and truth obscured is like justice delayed. Artificiality hides the truth, approximating falsity. So, the difference between artificiality and falsity are rather meaningless. The presence of either denies us access to truth.
You might be asking what do LED lights and all these other things have to do with the beginning of this post, which talks about paradoxes and such? Well, this entire post is paradoxical, and LED lights are the most paradoxical product you have ever been compelled to buy. They make light, but hide the truth. They let see while making things invisible. They are simultaneously light and darkness, revelation and concealment, visible and invisible. (Or, as we say in the Mass of the Ages, “Visibilium et invisibilium,” which is much more fun to say, especially if you enunciate those beautiful Latin vowels!) Paradoxes separate man from, not only lower beasts, but from all artificial systems. Artificial systems cannot tolerate paradoxes, but people can. People actually seek out paradoxes because we intuit the ultimate paradoxes of the universe:
The is one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
God became Man—whole God, and whole man, simultaneously creator and created.
Those are aspects of the sacred mystery, but they are, simultaneously, paradoxes.
Man is a paradox-seeking machine because man seeks God and God is a paradox and God is Truth itself. Therefore, to banish paradoxes is to banish Truth which man intuits and desires and man will, by his nature, will always demand and obtain recourse to the Truth.