Truth

Let us assume truth exists. Some dispute this — but even to deny truth is to make a claim one treats as true. The philosopher Thomas Nagel captured the self-refuting quality of thoroughgoing subjectivism:

“The claim ‘Everything is subjective’ must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false.”

The idea that “everything is subjective” is like an archway standing in an empty field. You can walk through it, but it doesn’t take you anywhere.

The limits of knowledge

Accepting that objective truth exists does not require claiming we can know all of it. Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are the most rigorous demonstration of the limits involved.

The first theorem establishes that no consistent logical system can prove all the truths expressible within it — for any such system, some true statements will exist that the system cannot prove. The second extends this: no system can prove its own consistency using only its own rules.

The practical implications:

1. No source of knowledge can reveal all truth. Biochemistry cannot explain everything — that is why we also have physics, economics, and psychology. The limitations of biochemistry do not make biochemistry false.
2. A system cannot prove that what it produces is true. A textbook can contain truth without being able to demonstrate its own truthfulness. To verify it, you need logic, probability, and the philosophy of science.

These are genuine limits. But proof of limits is not disproof of all possibility. Gödel showed that some things regarding knowledge are impossible, not that knowledge acquisition is futile.

Science as hitting tennis balls at a wall

Science is a method of interacting with reality and learning from what comes back.

Imagine a large wall with an unknown surface. You hit tennis balls at it repeatedly. Each ball returns differently depending on how it was struck, at what angle, and with what force. The returns teach you about the wall’s properties — even though you never directly inspect it. You form hypotheses, run experiments designed to test them, and refine your model.

That is what science does. Reality is the wall. It provides answers when you ask well-formed questions. When the ball returns unexpectedly, that is not failure — it is information. The model was incomplete, and now it is less so.

The process is never finished. But it trends. Each experimental cycle eliminates some possibilities and constrains others. The space of plausible descriptions of reality shrinks over time. That directional movement toward truth is not nothing.

The progressive unification of knowledge

Knowledge grows not only by adding new fields but by unifying existing ones. When the same underlying principles explain two previously separate domains, those principles are capturing something real. The C-axioms that explain both Field-A and Field-B must describe something fundamental about the world — otherwise the coincidence would be inexplicable.

The physicist David Deutsch argues that we are approaching a period where several deep, unifying theories can be woven together into something approaching a Theory of Everything. His candidates are four frameworks with extraordinary explanatory range:

1. Quantum mechanics
2. Evolution
3. Epistemology
4. Computation

“Such deep and diverse connections have been discovered between the basic principles of these four apparently independent subjects that it has become impossible to reach our best understanding of any of them without understanding the other three.” — The Fabric of Reality

You may disagree about which theories belong in that set, or how close we are to genuine unification. But Deutsch’s directional claim is hard to contest: human knowledge deepens as well as broadens, and that deepening reveals increasing structural coherence beneath diverse phenomena. This is what the trend toward objective knowledge looks like in practice.

Trust truth

Many forces work against truth: the argument that it is only a tool of power, the comfort of choosing ideas based on how they feel, the epistemological cowardice of treating all positions as equally valid. None of these are neutral. They erode the standards needed to distinguish better from worse descriptions of reality.

Truth is worth defending. Not the word — the concept: ideas that produce reliably useful outcomes when acted upon, that survive stress-testing, that can be falsified and haven’t been. Maintain high standards for what earns the label.

And alongside declarative truth — the facts about how the world is — keep procedural truth in mind: in any given situation, there is a better and worse thing to do. Getting that right requires the same rigor as getting facts right. Improvement depends on both.

“Understanding is one of the higher functions of the human mind — and a unique one. Many other physical systems can assimilate facts and act upon them. But at present we know of nothing that is capable of understanding an explanation — or of wanting one in the first place — other than a human mind.” — David Deutsch