The Truth is, There's Very Little of It, Part II

 We all seek the truth. What is real? Are facts only what we can experience with our own senses? Can we even trust them? Experiments show that even direct experiences are filtered through our preconceived notions of what to expect.

Is a shared fabrication better than distrust? Maybe.

Throughout history, we have seen absolute facts, such as "there are witches that can perform magic," revert to fiction and back again. Newtonian physics, once the gold standard of science, has proven inadequate in explaining observations.

Then there are the many conspiracy theories about important events. The likelihood that they are all wrong is as silly as believing they are all correct. We are ignorant. We get to directly observe a tiny sliver of the important information we process in a typical day.

The balance of what we believe is gained through "trusted sources." These sources are undoubtedly wrong some of the time. Whether they are intentionally obfuscating what they know to be true or are misinformed themselves, we don't know.

This, then, is how our worldview is built—one story at a time. True or not. WE DON'T KNOW!

What can we do about it? There's no silver bullet here. I prefer rigorous, time-consuming research over experiences and opinions. But I'm also aware that there is plenty of bad research out there. Scientists who are trying to earn a living and accept funding from sources that expect a favorable outcome may not produce valid results. It happens.

Just because an idea has been around for a long time doesn't guarantee its truthfulness, but it helps. The point is, we cannot be certain about most things. Most of what we "know" is only beliefs. Our belief system shapes which new information fits with our existing reality.

When we meet people with different perspectives on reality, it can be an opportunity to defend our own view or explore another's. We get to decide. Two people can agree on the "facts" of an incident, but disagree about the motivations behind it. The context leads us to very different conclusions about the same event. It's difficult to know which one is correct without getting into the heads of the people directly involved, which we rarely have the opportunity to do.

Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy. That is not in dispute. Did he work on behalf of the CIA? Was he a "lone wolf?" Did he work for the mob? The Cubans? Without being in his head and knowing who he spoke with and what about, we can never know for sure.

We stumble through life with insufficient and incorrect information. We do our best to fabricate a reality that works for us. We are wrong a lot of the time. Fortunately, we live in ignorant bliss until we start arguing with someone else about what we believe, even though neither of us knows the truth.