To Be Or Not To See?

When I was in high school I wrote a short essay on "The Truth". My inchoate, adolescent mind was able to come to two conclusions: it either doesn't exist or we cannot know it. This fleeting entity has humbled human effort for ages. It flunks to no intellect; fractures to no strength; loses to no slight of hand. The Truth is the deceiver of deceivers; it is exclusively the knowledge of God. So why pursue it? Every person I've ever met has surrendered a part of their life to pursuing something unobtainable. What madness! There is no better example of such a person than myself: an aspiring neuroscientist. But maybe it is the pursuit of the truth that gives all fallacy meaning. If, for instance, the absolute nature of an orange was known, then what? It won't matter how the orange tastes, or its color, or its weight, or its origin. All those things will be known to everyone, everywhere, forever. The orange is resolved. And that is boring. I don't want to eat that orange. It is the mystery in an orange's texture and flavor -- the diverse opinions from people that may describe the orange differently -- that allow the orange to be delicious. And it is this type of mystery that oils the sprockets of human purpose. We shall never know The Truth unless we are to be purposeless, or for a more savvy muse, unless we are to be God. But it can also be argued that the truth doesn't exist at all; hence, the orange has no true nature, just fleeting existences. Humans, including myself, have problems with this second perspective. Without The Truth, there can be no pursuit of it, and with no pursuit comes no meaning. So then maybe our lives have no meaning. Obviously this won't settle well either. I have plenty of experiences, people, and places that certainly have meaning to me. In homage to Descartes, we do exist because we can ask if we exist. This ability is truly beautiful; it is God's signature. Our brain -- an organized mass of carbon-based molecules -- knows it exists. But do the mouse neurons I'm culturing in the incubator right now know they exist? If they do not, at what point do they gain "awareness"? On the contrary, if they do know they exist, then must my orange also know that it exists? What madness! Perhaps the only truth we will ever know is that we cannot obtain the truth; to do so would be to know the mind of God. And to know the mind of God is to be God, which we're clearly not. And now I'm back to where I started (how humanly typical!): we know nothing.

No matter your perspective on what The Truth is or isn't, it is imperative to respect The Truth (which is precisely what many cultures have been doing for ages through the lore of deities). Unfortunately, abuse of The Truth is rampant. It is as though our brains have gained some serious evolutionary hangtime as a cost for the launch of our consciousness. We have evolved, are aware, and can now "see," but the sheer glare from the intangible Truth can scare us into believing just about anything so long as we don't have to float in a void of blind pursuit. I've been immensely disappointed in people that are supposedly engaged in the pursuit of The Truth for passion's sake (such as a true [pun not intended!] scientist); yet these same people make perfunctory assumptions to which they prescribe as The Truth. We are all guilty of doing this for time to time, but problems arise when pertinacious acknowledgements are made that "The Truth" has been reached. For example, when I would see dark, black clouds while living in South Dakota, I assumed it was going to rain and acted appropriately -- like finishing my beer in the garage. But I didn't cancel the party because maybe it would not rain despite the ominous sky. In this example I acknowledged the truth as a probability, not as The Truth. Likewise, just because two people are dating doesn't mean they are having sex; just because someone is a beer aficionado doesn't mean they drink too much; just because someone deplores George W. Bush doesn't mean that they are a Democrat; Hence, in the search for meaning, we easily lose it. We cannot, nor shouldn't try to dupe The Truth. It will always have the last word. We must respect that. Just as there are, no doubt, 35 black dots in that image above, the glory -- the meaning -- is in the pursuit, not in the nature of The Truth.