Questioning Truth

 

I’m thinking this morning about truth and deception, and how they relate to competing narratives about reality.

Think about something that you’re so certain of, that you think that anything who even entertains a contrary idea is a fool. I don’t mean something you acknowledge is controversial, but that you have strong opinions about anyway. I mean the sort of thing you think is obvious to everyone, and that the only sort of people who don’t are fringe kooks who are probably conspiracy theorists or cult members. I’m talking about statements like:

-        Earth is roughly spherical--not flat and not hollow with another civilization living inside.

-        The moon exists and astronauts have been there

-        People need to eat food to stay alive

-        Drilling a hole in your head is generally a bad idea

-        Humans are not reptiles from another planet

-        Molesting children is bad

You with me? I’m guessing that for most people reading this, no matter how diverse your social sphere is, you probably don’t expect any sane, non-evil person that you know—even ones you dislike—to disagree with any of these statements.

I’m not going to play the philosopher’s game of delving into how we know these things (at least for now). I just want you to get a grasp on what sort of beliefs I’m talking about—things that you know. You’re aware of them, you know they’re correct, and you don’t for a moment question that they’re correct, because you’ve never seen any evidence to the contrary that actually holds up.

Okay, you know what it is to know something that’s unquestionably true to the point that you have to question the sanity of anyone who disagrees. So what do you think is going on in the minds of people who do disagree?

Well, I’ll tell you one thing—they don’t doubt themselves any more than you doubt yourself. They’re convinced that they’re right and you’re wrong. The see themselves as part of an elite who’s privy to a great secret. They think you’re a mindless sheep who’s eyes just haven’t been opened by “the red pill” yet. They think that your arguments defending your point of view are just a defense mechanism protecting your fallacious belief system.

They’re also probably schizophrenic, schizotypal, or bipolar. This is why you can’t argue someone out of a delusion. To them, the experience was real, and that simply throws all contrary evidence into question.

I watched a documentary last night about fungi. Paul Stamets was in it, of course, along with Michael Pollan and a bunch of others. They spent some time showing pretty pictures and paying lip service to the role of mycelia in the ecosystem (overstating it a tad, in my opinion), and then they moved into talk of psychedelics. (If you’re not aware, Michael Pollan, of “Omnivore’s Dilemma” fame, also got really into using hallucinogens and wrote a book about that a few years ago, so that was his interest in this project—not teaching us how to sautee mushrooms).

Stamets didn’t actually use the word “symbiote,” but there was a theme running through what he and other speakers—all of whom claimed to have gone through profound transformations after having an experience of spiritual awakening on some kind of hallucinogenic (usually psilocybin)—that humans aren’t really a complete, stand-alone species in themselves. They seemed to think that the only way humans could really thrive and be complete was if they became one with the mushrooms, taking them into their bodies and letting it rewire their brains to the optimal state that we can’t achieve without the help of the fungi.

And hearing it, I thought of that fungus that infect ants and makes them climb to a high place before the mushroom erupts from the ant’s head and spreads its spores. Or how Toxoplasma gondi controls the behavior of its host—say, making infected mice fearless of cats so the parasite can spread from mouse to cat.

How do we know that’s not what’s going on here? Maybe these “entheogens” are simply reprogramming the people who take them to believe it’s a good thing and to persuade others to take them. If humans are destroying fungi’s habitat, maybe this is the fungi’s strategy for making us stop—it gives us a religious experience that makes us feel as one with it, and then sets us off to preach to the other people to infect themselves as well.

That’s a very strange thing to believe, but so is the idea that humans are incomplete without entangling ourselves with species of fungi. Which one’s right?

Stamets obviously believes he’s found the truth. But maybe that’s just spiritual madness induced by the mushrooms.

I’ve always eschewed drugs that weren’t medically necessary to treat a disease. I’ve always held that, uninfected and operating normally, the human body is in its ideal state and doesn’t need any outside help to improve. Obviously we need nutrients and hydration, but I’m saying that drugs throw your system out of whack, and then your body goes through a withdrawal trying to correct the imbalance. You can avoid that whole unnecessary see-saw effect by just not throwing off your homeostasis in the first place. Don’t put anything in you that doesn’t belong there.

Stamets’ argument is that these plants and mushrooms do belong there, and that by isolating ourselves from them, we’re harming ourselves.

At least one of us is very, very wrong, with potentially harmful consequences.

So how do we determine which of us that is?

One thing you don’t want to do in deciding who’s right about something is to put your faith with the person who seems more confident. A scientist can express all sorts of doubt and ignorance about how the Big Bang happened, because he honestly doesn’t know. That doesn’t make the Creationist who bangs on about Genesis correct. It doesn’t matter how certain you are of the facts if your facts are all wrong.

My bias is to think that people who ingest substances, experience a mystical ecstasy, and then think that they’ve got all the answers and that the rest of us are blind are not the correct ones. I think they’re suffering a delusion caused by direct chemical alteration of their brain chemistry. I think this even if they haven’t taken any substances. It’s sad, because when people experience this kind of “eye-opening, awareness-expanding” event, they feel so convinced that they’re the ones who are right and everyone else is just deficient.

It's down to a question of whether the red pill or the blue pill is the one that shows you the truth. In The Matrix, they knew, and it was simply an informed choice between disturbing awareness or contented blindness. But in real life, we don’t really know which one is which, and both the red-pill-takers and the blue-pill-takers say that they are right and the other is wrong.