Truth and Facts - Doorway to Freedom

What do facts and truth have to do with personal growth?

Many books have been written and dance around this topic.  I’ll cover a lot of ground quickly and give you the key points to help you escape what I call the Truth Trap.  Give me some time, and put aside your doubts while your reading.  Understanding the nature of what is in your head is worth the investment of your time and mind.  In the end, keep what you like, discard what you don’t.

Our brains are wired to examine our surroundings, draw conclusions, repeat the decisions that work, and replace those that don’t.  Early learning, memorization, experience wit h the world, along with our brain’s tendencies, combine to create the fact-based brain.  Our schools impart essential shared “knowledge” that is necessary to function well as a society.  In an effort to live socially and standardize, we face correct/incorrect, right/wrong, and true/false perspectives constantly.  All of this reinforces a fact-based ecosystem of thought.  From this environment and the wiring tendency in our brain, we form the basis of the absolute real world in our head.  We learn to treat almost everything in our minds as either facts in principal or quasi-facts that serve the same role in practice.  We conversationally attest to uncertainty and openness, but we think and act as though our minds are stuffed with immutable facts.

I’ve had to completely rewire my own brain, as I once believed in facts.  In very abbreviated form, I held the philosophical view that knowledge is fully possible, since if even one piece of the universe cannot be known, it leads to a problem that nothing can be truly known.  I recognized that in practice, much was unknowable, but placed high value on that which I thought I knew.  I believed in principal everything could be logically snapped together, even if the logic would be fuzzy in some areas.  This perspective seemed more than reasonable at the time.

That view now seems naive and inverted.   This prior perspective suggested that human consciousness can, in principle, know anything, and that the universe at a basic level is somehow constrained by what humans can conceive and “know.”  Since everything we “know” is constrained by how humans think, it may not be obvious that human thought has no access to facts.

At many levels, from quantum mechanics to psychology, we can see there is much we clearly cannot know, even in principle.

At a physical level, we start with the uncertainty principle and a universe that seems to be a mixture of statistical possibilities that often conflict.  Even the direction of time and causality are not well defined in an absolute sense.  It seems physics may suggest a future that “causes” the past or the other way around, which is different than our common assumption of a past that “causes” the future.  It may be neither or both.

At a psychological level, our sense of certainty is an emotional, boredom-avoidance response, rather than something that indicates logical conclusiveness.  There is no internal signal for logical completeness or conclusiveness.  The certainty that grows with thought, or appears from nowhere, is an emotional, not logical, signal.

It is assumed in the foundations of logic that its usefulness only extends to the assumptions we make, not reality itself.  Logic is a powerful tool in human thought, but not necessarily a feature of our universe.

Since few road-signs tell you where these limits on reality or thought apply, everything becomes a fuzzy approximation at best.

To get the value from these points, I suggest strongly that you devalue the power of facts in your mind.  The “Truth Trap” is believing that what is in your head is factual, preventing you from having a more effective and flexible view of your world.  Your actions become constrained by these “facts” in your head.  As a result, you go through life with outcomes that are modulated and constrained by the “facts” you hold on to.  You continually reinforce your “facts,” since the world evolves roughly consistent with your inner world — though mostly the result of your choices and actions, not the facts themselves.

You can keep thoughts in your head at the level of facts for the physical world.  This should be done with prudence, as it is easy for the fact network to spread beyond its usefulness.  I actually go much farther in my own mind, believing the concept of “fact” and a single view of reality itself is as real as a unicorn. I do find  many observations and patterns are relatively stable, but not because they are facts in any absolute sense.  None of this fact-like stuff occurs in the realm of personality,  interpersonal relations, or success in life.

Consider for a while that NO FACTS ARE IN YOUR HEAD.  I’m not trying to challenge your religious faith or your love for your family.  These are choices, not facts.  I’m saying your so called knowledge about the world, yourself, your spouse, your friends, your motives, their motives, are all choices, NOT FACTS.  Our minds surf through these assumptions and choices, or quasi-facts, trying to stay “coherent.”  Our minds will reduce obvious contradictions where possible, often by ignoring “irrelevant” information or treating it as minor exceptions, and occasionally updating the world view itself.

Our brains spend far more time matching the world of perception to our world view and facts than it spends determining “facts” that match the world.  We mostly decide then rationalize, rather than rationally decide.  We think we update our “facts” when reason prevails, when we predominantly rationalize new conflicting information as flawed, irrelevant, or special case exceptions.

I’m pointing out two separate issues here.  The first, facts are an invented concept that don’t exist in the real world, even approximately, in the realms that matter most in our lives.  The second, our brains don’t even treat the relatively repeatable fact-like observations of the world with precision, but rather shape the perception and rationalization to generally maintain its chosen point of view.

To gain the most freedom and power in your life, it is necessary to let go of trust in facts.  This is necessary both at the philosophical level, believing facts are out there, and at the internal level, believing your mind faithfully captures and rationalizes from observations.  Both of these are myths.  You can trust yourself, trust others, but that trust is built on integrity and commitment,  not the seeming “rightness” or “correctness” that you experience from time to time in your brain.

Even if you move to accept that maybe “facts” and “truth” don’t exist in an absolutely certain, necessary in principle sense, it is still easy to operate as if they exist in practice.  After all, chances are that a wall will always be solid, gravity will work the same through our lifetimes, the sun will remain hot, and so on.  None of these “facts” or approximations affect our day to day success.  This benign nature does not extend to operating in a world of facts in the social, personal, and interpersonal realm, where we live our day to day lives.

The most pernicious “facts” in our head are the millions of decisions about everyone and everything in your life.  Without diligent practice to the contrary, and even then, we take our guesses about motives, consequences, and meanings as if they were as factual as the sun being hot.  We string these quasi facts together in complex webs that run our lives and undermine our growth and success.  We aren’t constrained so much by others and how they view us, but rather by our decisions and expectations about how they view and react to us.

There are two particularly notable people in history that changed science and thought, in great part by their deep awareness that there are no facts, only theories of varying usefulness and elegance.  I’m sure there are many, many more, but these stand out in my recollection.

Isaac Newton wrote, in a religious work later in life, that creating classical mechanics was not finding a particular theory, but rather, like walking on a beach filled with seashells and choosing the one that seemed the most attractive to him.  He was empowered by the realization that the world may not work in one particular way that fits our concepts of knowledge, but rather sees many possible explanations for our experience.

Albert Einstein is credited with stating that we have no more ability to know the true nature of the universe than a blind watchmaker who hears the clicking and feels the hands of a watch move, but can never, even in principle, open the watch.  He can only make theories about the watch, and has no access to how it really operates, only observations about seemingly predictable movements.  This realization and operating principle, that the universe isn’t one particular way, but rather a set of observations from which we try to find elegant compact theories, allowed him to break out of entrenched paradigms that rippled through physics before he arrived on the scene.

To further complicate things, everyone thinks they are intellectually open, ready to explore information, change their mind when evidence warrants, all in reasonable harmony with the real world.  Unless your brain isn’t human, it doesn’t work this way.  Your brain treats most of its contents as facts that are kept in place until blatant evidence to the contrary is observed, and maybe even beyond that.  It is expensive, in an energy sense, for your brain to think deeply or change its wiring.  Such changes seem to be reserved for cases that are deeply motivated and accepted.  Our brains are wired more to make quick judgments and cast them in stone if not quickly repudiated.  Although the brain can easily shift its thinking, even on a broad scale, it doesn’t do so without a high degree of openness and motivation to seek more effective thought patterns.

Our brains jump to conclusions, transform the conclusions into concrete, build super highways from the concrete, and then gradually morph memories to match our conclusions and world view, all while seeming to perform almost perfectly and rationally in the world of our internal experience.

So what does this have to do with personal growth?  Well, the personal certainty we hold at the psychological level impedes our brain’s ability to rapidly rewire itself and generate new perspectives.  If you believe at many levels that most of what is in your head consists of facts, or suitably close approximations, you are reinforcing the pattern of keeping existing perspectives firmly in place.  When you let go of the factual world and train yourself to joyfully swim in the soup of uncertainty, you become infinitely more fluid and flexible.  Although our brains conserve energy by reusing existing wiring, speed automatic thought by myelination of pathways, they also have extraordinary ability to rewire the connections when a decision to do so is made at a deep level.

Certainty and Facts create a self-inflicted stress sentence.
Be very careful of what you believe with certainty, it metastasizes rapidly.

At a more practical level, letting go of stress, navigating personal situations, achieving success in most realms, all require that we shift our thinking from time to time.  Sometimes a dramatic change in our thinking is what’s needed to achieve results or have a breakthrough.  A paradigm shift is, strictly speaking, a new way of thinking about something, but not necessarily a change in the “observations” or “facts” themselves.  In practice, paradigm shifts require you to at least temporarily abandon strongly held facts, conclusions, and truths.  Usually, many of the “facts” and “conclusions” become casualties of a successful paradigm shift in your thought.  The result can lead to astonishing changes in your happiness and success in life.  If you can rewire your brain to treat its contents as mostly useful guesses and choices, rather than facts and certainties, you will open up new avenues of transformation, relatedness, and creativity.