Quote of the Day

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
- HG Wells


This is such a fantastic quote. It kind of reminds me of the quantum measurement problem. There is no way to get any information out of a system without interacting with it, and thus disturbing it. You can't measure something without changing it. There is no objective observation. This quote goes a step further by adding the more philosophical notion of subjectivity of perception. What is truth? Is there objective truth? We tend to think so. We tend to think that if someone has an idea in their head, like say, the moon is made of cheese or that Creationism tells the true history of the earth, that this 'perception is reality' at least for that person, in the sense that truth is just a model of the way things are constructed by the mind. Yet we have a deep intuition that there still is an objective truth "out there," regardless of how people perceive or misperceive it. Your perception may be your reality, but its not the reality. You would be 100% objectively wrong to believe that the moon is made of cheese. This is how we tend to feel about reality. This notion of reality existing objectively: that peceptions may differ but there is only one right answer, is the foundation that our criminal justice system is built on, and it is so almost right, that it is ok to run a society that way.

But this H.G. Wells quote reminds us that the conception of absolute objective truth is utterly inaccessible, at least to physical beings, so there is really no point in talking about it. Anyone who claims to have the correct answer, is just offering his interpretation.

Its like what Wolfgang Pauli said about the uncertainty principle. Einstein argued that just because it is increasingly impossible to measure a particle's speed as the precision of its location is more precisely determined, that doesn't mean that it doesn't still have a definite speed and definite position at all times. Reality is more that the readings on detectors, its more than the sum of all observations at a given moment, Einstein argued. When no one is looking at the moon, the moon is still there. Quantum mechanics, the most precisely accurate physical theory humans have created, tells us that this is the wrong way to think of things. The probability is very high that the moon is there, but there is a small nonzero probability that it is not there when nothing is interacting with it.

Pauli said,
"One should no more rack ones brain about the problem of whether something one cannot know anything about exists all the same, than about the ancient question of how many angels can dance on the point of a needle." If it is impossible to measure both the position and velocity of a particle, then there is no sense is talking about whether it has both a position and a velocity.

There is no sense in talking about objective truth because the only truth we can ever conceive of or interact with is a filtered truth, filtered through the perspective of whoever claims to have it.