Yep

Via PopOcculture:

...My own argument is leaning more and more in the direction of usefulness over truthfulness. Why?

Well first of all, just how difficult is it to not only find the truth, but to establish it in an indisputable way. Our legal system is even built to accomodate this difficulty. When people are tried for a crime, they are innocent until proven guilty. And when people are proven guilty, it simply means that a group of people become convinced of the truth. It doesn’t mean it’s actually the truth, but simply that the story that the prosecution has told has been more compelling and convincing than that of the defense. Juries don’t have any special monopoly on the truth either - it’s simply a group of random people who have been given the authority by society to determine truth via a group decision...

So how do we find truth in our own lives? Do we rely on a group of people who have socially been granted authority to hand us verdicts on the truth? Or do we try to decide it for ourselves? If a group of random people in an official setting may make mistakes, sending innocent men to jail or causing the guilty to walk free, how much more fallible must our own inner instruments of determining truthfulness be when we’re without the resources of a courtroom, lawyers, judges and teams of investigators? How do we determine truth in the face of the world?

Do we look at the facts? Well, what are facts? Do facts always give us accurate impressions of the truth? The relationship I see between facts and the truth is similar to a snapshot and the person and event being photographed. It is a small slice frozen off from a whole which exists on many more dimensions. Photos may distort how someone looks, may be too dark, too blurry. They may also be accurate physical descriptions of a person, but they don’t really convey the “feel” of that person. Facts may also be fudged and faked like like a photo can be doctored in Photoshop.

Continuing with this photographic analogy, you might be tempted to say that your perceptions at least are more accurate than photos. They don’t fall prey to the same kinds of distortions as a technical device. But is that really true? Don’t moods, states of mind and physiological factors determine what you notice, remember and react to? Is your memory even close to 100% reliable? And in a sense, the instruments which you experience through, your body, your consciousness confine you to as limited a perspective and point of view as a camera, which can only look at an object and capture it from one angle. You can’t see all sides of something, and your perceptions of it are always colored by your inner states and biases.

In the same sense that photographs only tell a limited part of a much more intricate story, I think that language always lies, always distorts. Language, when you get down to it consists of vocal sounds laid out according to socially determined sequences, with socially determined connections (meanings) to “real” events. The first and biggest problem is how can a string of sounds accurately recreate an experience? It can’t. It can simply describe and evoke a mental image, which is fleshed out by the listener’s own experiences. There are two possible breakdowns here: that the listener simply doesn’t understand the sound sequences being transmitted. And two, that the listener’s own experiences don’t match those of the speaker, and thus the details they are filling in to flesh out and imagine the experience being described can never be totally accurate.

So to me, facts simply don’t determine truthfulness, and communication, memory and external recording are fraught with errors and signal degradations. So what do we use to find the truth, intuition? How reliable is that? How can many people coming together find truthfulness using such an intangible, subjective and individual thing as intuition?

I’m not saying that truth doesn’t exist or that people can’t or shouldn’t try to find it. But I am saying that I’m not sure how to find it. To me, truth really is a Holy Grail - a quasi-mythological object which flits in and out of our reality. We expend tremendous energy seeking after it, trying to make ourselves ready to receive it, in the hopes that it might somehow heal us or make us whole. Joseph Campbell used to always say that myths are True, but I wonder if we couldn’t flip that around to say, Truth is a Myth? And I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. I mean that Truth lifts us above and beyond ourselves and our abilities to perceive and know. Is Truth an archetype or a symbol? Does it really exist in a realm of Platonic Ideal Forms?

I find all these questions to be absolutely fascinating, of course. But ultimately a little maddening. How long should I chase after the Truth when I don’t even really know what the truth is or how to get it? This is why I’ve come to the place where I’m beginning to be less concerned with finding out the absolute truth and more concerned with figuring out whether or not the things I come across in my quest are useful to me. It doesn’t mean I should abandon the greater quest, but I do need to make a lot of small seemingly inconsequential decisions about what to pick up and carry with me. Should I pick up and carry with me this broken shield I found in the hopes of getting it repaired, or will it simply weigh me down? Should I help this damsel in distress who I happened across along my way, or should I be worried about sorcery and trickery and distraction away from my true path?

To me, a beautiful and noble truth with no way for me to apply it to my life isn’t worth very much. I may have the satisfaction of having glimpsed the truth, but I suffer the frustration of being unable to use it. Or I may begin to doubt whether it was really the truth at all after I’ve lost sight of it. And thus I’m thrown back once again on figuring out what is useful to me in my life. And it may not be the truth. It may be something very different.