VI. Truth or the Water Heater

Well, these ideas just keep popping into my head. Then they roll around for a while and come back out. Sometimes, they smooth out, like those bits of turquoise I would put in a tumble polisher when I lived in Colorado. I suppose they'll all get smooth over time. Some just take longer than others because of their size or hardness.

The water heater is a lot simpler than the truth; though you will see that that idea can go lots of interesting places and get quite complicated, too. Still, I figured that I would save that for another day.

People have been obsessed with truth (or TRUTH, as the case may be) for a very long time. Ancient philosophers from many traditions have contemplated this concept. There are many ancient symbols from different cultures that symbolize the truth. Where I went to graduate school the motto is “VERITAS” (NOTICE ALL CAPITAL LETTERS). This is a one-word statement. It doesn't state whether it is good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or what one might do with “it” if one had “it.” Is this Mysterious? Or maybe they just haven't gotten around to thinking it through quite yet.

When I teach epidemiology I make a point of going over the Criteria for Judging Causality as originally proposed by Bradford Hill in 1953 (Hill AB. Observation and Experiment. N Engl J Med 1953;248:3-9.) and popularized in the 1964 Surgeon General's on Smoking and Health (U.S. Department of Health Education and Welfare. Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Services. 1964; P.H.S. Publ. No. 1103, Washington, DC.). This is all about discerning the “signal” of truth from all the “noise” of error, confusion, and the deliberate intention of some to mislead.

Of the six criteria listed in the 1964 Surgeon General's report, biological plausibility is listed last. It is interesting that this is the obsession of most “basic” scientists I know. In this sense, the obsession is much more consistent with Western philosophy in which truth is seen as transcendent. On the other hand, putting it last (after things like the strength of the association and consistency of the findings from different kinds of studies), is much more consistent with the view of Eastern philosophy in which truth is seen as imminent. This is pretty much the case throughout Asia, not just in India.

The reality is that the scientific method, in which we test whether or not something works (and the question of "how " usually transcends our experiment), is much more consistent with the Eastern view of reality in which truth is constantly being revealed. The Western view posits that there is some grand story that transcends the daily experiences of our senses.

Oh, those inscrutable Westerners.