Nature Doesn't Lie

Physical things can't be ‘false’.

If I held something in my hand and said it was false, what would that mean? If it’s fake, then that just means it’s not what others have suggested it is, but the object itself simply is what it is and wasn’t trying to be otherwise.

Things either exist in the physical world, just as they are, or they don’t exist at all. This is a fundamental characteristic of nature, of forces and matter and everything they constitute. The physics might be confusing, complicated or completely unknown, but it can never be wrong.

What then is a lie? We cannot point to something and exclaim “There! Look, it’s a lie!” because, as we’ve just agreed (oh yes we did), lies do not physically exist. Put another way, everything physical is real, and real things can’t be false. This means the only place where lies could exist is in our imagination.

What about thoughts and feelings? I can say I’m relaxed when I’m actually annoyed, or that I’m thinking of an apple when I’m really thinking of an orange. We would generally regard these as lies, which means that being at odds with the physical realm – the only thing that is never wrong – does not capture all lies; we need to expand our definition.

Let’s break this down a little. Firstly, we judge the above responses about feelings and thoughts to be false because they are not an accurate description of my mental state. This implies a hierarchy, in which our experience is primary and our description of it is secondary. So when the description does not match the experience it is the description that is judged to be wrong, not the other way around.

Secondly, in order to be promoted to a lie, the intent must be to insert a falsehood into the space where the truth was expected. So for example, if I’m asked what time it is and reply “apple” then this is unlikely to be considered a lie – even though it is false – because it is too irregular to ‘fit’ the question. It is this sense of fit we are thinking of when we talk about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ lies. A good or bad liar extends this to behaviour (so-called ‘body language’).

If on the other hand the question had been “What’s your favourite fruit?” then “apple” would have been a perfectly acceptable answer. This tells us something obvious but important: words and phrases are not inherently true or false, it is their accuracy (with respect to something else) and purpose (as determined by the person using them) that matters. It is also important to note that implicit within purpose is the criterion that the communicator knows they are being inaccurate.

Putting this all together, a lie is any communication that gives an inaccurate account of a physical event or mental state with the intention that it will be accepted as both relevant and correct. This can be summed up as:

Lie = Falsehood + Intent

This mirrors a principle in criminal law that distinguishes between actus reus, which is some adverse physical action or state, and mens rea, which is the intent of the person behind it. Both are needed to establish criminal intent or, in the context of this essay, the intention to lie.

The accuracy of language

How inaccurate does a communication need to be for it to be considered a lie? This may seem an odd question, but UK members of parliament sometimes spar back and forth about this because they cannot outright accuse each other of lying. This has led to some colourful exchanges:

Lawyers also spend considerable time and effort wrangling over the nuance and intent of a particular piece of language in order to either attach or detach the label of lie to something a witness has said.

However, no account of a physical event or mental state can ever be perfect because it involves translating from the original medium into the entirely different medium of language. To state the obvious, there is no way to describe a tree so completely that it is equivalent to standing next to one. Physical objects and mental experiences can simply never be fully represented in language.

Nevertheless, the reality of the world is constantly unfolding within and around us and we must therefore content ourselves with ‘good enough’ language when talking about it. Sometimes, we can use other media such as poetry, art or music to try to convey or conjure experiences that cannot otherwise be communicated in prose.

At the other end of the spectrum, when language is sufficiently accurate with respect to its subject, it is said to be true. This points to a subtle but important distinction between truth and reality, although the terms are often used interchangeably (including by yours truly, no pun intended). Whereas reality typically refers to the raw state of things as they are, truth is any communication that conveys that reality sufficiently accurately to someone else.

That being said, it is important to bear in mind that the only thing language can be completely accurate about is itself. The sentence “The English word ‘house’ is spelt with the letter sequence h–o–u–s-e.” is 100% accurate. Every other statement about something other than language is liable to some unavoidable loss and/or error in translating from the reality (i.e. the actual thing) to the truth (it’s representation in language).

Even the symbols and syntax of mathematics, the most rigorous language we have, are ultimately representations of our insights and observations, albeit ones that seem uncannily accurate (to the point where some philosophers debate whether mathematics emerges from the universe, or the universe emerges from mathematics).

"The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve."

Eugene Wigner, 1960

The idea that nothing we communicate about the world or ourselves can ever be entirely true - because language can only represent and not replicate the source object or experience - was tested to destruction by some postmodernists in the late 20th century, who argued that since all language about things is (subjective) interpretation then there can be no such thing as (objective) truth.

Although people can of course readily appreciate that the word ‘tree’ is not an actual tree, this sort of distinction between language and object becomes less obvious with social conventions, particularly when the root of the convention is not clearly planted in some physical fact. So for instance, while the label ‘brother’ is rooted in a genetic reality, the label ‘husband’ is not.

Extrapolating this idea, postmodernists set about deconstructing social conventions as artefacts of language that had no legitimate source of truth. Where this line of reasoning went too far however, was when the deconstruction was continued all the way down to the underlying physical root.

As stated earlier, physical reality simply is what it is, impervious to however we might try to represent it in language and convention. Yes social norms can be questioned and yes they can change, but if they are rooted in some physical reality then they can neither be entirely dismissed nor infinitely malleable.

A recent UK Supreme Court ruling that “the terms ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘sex’… refer to biological sex” effectively draws a distinction between the social convention of gender and the underlying biology of sex. The court upheld that a gender recognition certificate cannot cut across this distinction. Although not explicitly stated in the ruling, the same principle could also apply to the conflation of the social conventions ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ with the physical reality of ‘man’ and ‘woman’.

Interestingly, the court also stated that “The practical problems that arise under a certificated sex approach are clear indicators that this interpretation is not correct.” In other words, allowing gender certification to define a person’s sex would not work. Why?

As mentioned in a previous essay (Shadows of Reality), one of the heuristics we use to establish what’s real is the extent to which it works. When developing a product, manufacturers know they must test and refine it in the ‘real world’ because nature is the final arbiter of truth which no amount of design and modelling can replace.

Trying to defy nature takes work. Keeping ice-cream cold or lifting a rock takes energy, and the more energy something takes the more we are going against the natural direction of things.

Faced with the reality of biological issues such as pregnancy and all that entails, the Supreme Court decided that equating gender certification (a legal construct) with sex (the biological reality) created so many real-world impracticalities that it would, in effect, be going against the natural direction of things.

Grains of truth

Returning to the distinction between truth and reality, it is instructive to consider examples from academic research and news media, both of which are expected to be ‘accurate’. If a medication is shown to be effective in one out of five trials and only the positive result is marketed, is that a lie? Or if a smiling celebrity happens to look unflattering for a moment and that becomes the picture on tomorrow’s front page, is that the truth?

These examples highlight an important difference between reality and truth. Reality is continuous at all scales; no matter where or how closely we look, there is no part of something real that is not itself real. Leaving aside the metaphysics for now, as far as we can tell, everything that exists - from the Planck length to galactic superclusters and beyond - retains its ‘realness’ no matter how much it’s subdivided or joined together.

Truth, on the other hand, is discrete. It can easily lose its integrity if parts of it are removed or have something added. For example, let’s assume the statement “All swans in this park are white” is true. If I then remove “in this park” so we’re left with “All swans are white”, we get a statement that is no longer true. Somehow, contained within the original true statement was a false one. We could also have gone in the opposite direction, converting a false statement into the truth by adding “in this park”.

It is this discrete nature of truth that makes context so important. A quote, isolated from its context, may no longer be true even though the words are still correct. This is because the original truth, as determined by the speaker, may be altered if something is added or removed.

In this way, words and statements are like ingredients in a ‘truth recipe’; if you withhold the eggs from a cake mix then you don’t just get less cake, you don’t get a cake at all. And if you only report one drug trial out of five, then although that is a valid ingredient it is not the cake the consumer expected.

"Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?"

So, if all truth is discrete and context-dependent, then how can we avoid the disorienting world of post-truth relativism and its quagmire of ‘your truth’ versus ‘my truth’? Thankfully, the Supreme Court - and, it has to be said, generations of empiricists before them - has thrown us a lifeline, by reminding us that words are not the same as the things they represent.

We must therefore be wary of building artifices of language that fool us into treating them as the truth*, and have the courage to tear them down and start again without losing sight of the underlying reality.

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*DSM-5 anyone?