The Truth
Aemula Writer Spotlight - 4.10.25
“For a dollar, you may not even get an armful of candy, but for a dollar or less people expect reality/representations of truth to fall into their laps.”
— Walter Lippmann
What is the truth? We all share the same reality, so it would seem there must be some objective truth we can all accept. Yet, we continually find ourselves in disagreement over what is true or false. Why has truth become so elusive?
Reality is inherently more complex than we can comprehend. To effectively navigate our world, we depend on abstractions and heuristics — simplified mental models that help us interpret the overwhelming complexity around us. Unfortunately, these models are fundamentally flawed. They are merely representations of reality, filtered through our fallible minds and limited by the information we perceive, process, and store in memory.
With these constraints, is it even possible for us to know the universal truth? As individuals, we may have insight into some particular truths, but it is physically impossible for us to comprehend the entirety of all objective reality.
Yet, this limitation is purely human. The advancement of AI systems is accelerating at an astonishing pace. Could an advanced AI system act as a monolithic oracle capable of determining objective truths for us all? Such a system, free from human subjectivity, could potentially offer us a glimpse into the universal truth.
However, this proposition faces profound practical challenges. To achieve a complete understanding, the system would need to know every detail of a reality that is fundamentally chaotic and uncertain. What level of processing power is required for such a system to truly process everything? While an AI could make better approximations, exact predictions seem out of reach. Are we searching for some omniscient determinism? To generate a complete understanding of universal truth, would a computer’s model need to account for the interactions of every elementary particle? At what point does the simulation itself become indistinguishable from reality?
Given these inherent limitations - both human and technological - we must rethink our strategy for discovering the truth. Traditional news outlets and media organizations often claim to only report the truth. Yet, we are currently unable to determine the complete objective truth. Instead, we are left to our own subjective realities as shaped by our personal experiences and intersubjective knowledge. Rather than chasing the unattainable, we are better off focusing our efforts on collectively constructing a more accurate and useful approximation of reality.
At Aemula, we understand that absolute truth is unattainable. Instead, our goal is to provide the infrastructure that allows individuals to collaborate, communicate, and continuously refine their own understanding. From these individual realities, a broader consensus can emerge. By efficiently communicating our diverse experiences and knowledge, we can collectively approximate a consensus truth — our current best guess at what is really happening.
Yet, even consensus truths cannot simply be imposed on everyone. Diverse experiences and competing ideologies mean there will always be dissent. At some level, debate and disagreement are healthy mechanisms to update our beliefs. Truth may seem to imply finality, but our understanding of the world remains dynamic, evolving continuously. Rather than pushing a single consensus narrative, it is essential to meet individuals where they are in their existing beliefs, empowering them to freely explore new perspectives and independently iterate on those beliefs.
By supporting each of our individual quests for knowledge, we can more effectively update our collective understanding of the knowledge worth sharing and promoting. With this approach, we can better distinguish signal from noise, creating a robust framework for approximating broad consensus while respecting individual liberty in the pursuit of knowledge.
This week, we spotlight a piece from Conspicuous Cognition, which examines an explanatory inversion of why people believe true things — rather than why they believe misinformation or conspiracies. We encourage you to explore this piece and other work by Conspicuous Cognition, and consider supporting them directly.
Conspicuous Cognition
Written by Dan Williams, an academic philosopher with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, a lecturer at the University of Sussex, and an associate fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.
“Think of the economy, society-wide crime trends, vaccines, history, climate change, or any other possible focus of “public opinion.” Not only is the truth about such topics typically complex, ambiguous, and counter-intuitive, but almost everything you believe about them is based on information you acquired from others—from the claims, gossip, reports, books, remarks, opinion pieces, teaching, images, video clips, and so on that other people communicated to you.
Moreover, to organise all that socially acquired information, you relied on simplifying categories, schema, and explanatory models that reduce reality's complexity to a tractable, low-resolution mental model.
In this heavily mediated process, there are countless sources of error and distortion. This is true even if you are ideally rational. But of course, you are not; you are human. Not only is the construction of your pseudo-environment twisted and distorted by prescientific intuitions and innumerable cognitive biases, but you are not a disinterested truth seeker. Instead, your beliefs are biased by motives and interests like self-aggrandisement, status-seeking, tribalism, and social conformity.
Just as importantly, the people from whom you have acquired your information about the world are similarly flawed, fallible, and biased. In some cases, they were outright liars and propagandists, but most were simply influenced by the same mundane sources of motivated reasoning as you.”
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