Truth & Experience: With A Name Like "McGurk," It's Got To Be Good

Susan R., long-time friend and RipChurch deaconess, writes:

A request for a future Riparian Church topic? Explore the relationship between truth and experience. 

Sure, we can square that away for you... no problem... Two thousand five hundred years of philosophy should be easy to sum up.

This question forms one of the major stress-points for people of faith, simply because there's a really valid and real question out there that asks, "So is your god, whom you claim to experience, 'real' in any meaningful sense?"

Let's start with a few basic concepts.

We experience life as sensory input.  Lots and lots of it.

The mind processes that material in more or less orderly ways, arranging it for storage and recall and analysis in complicated ways that involve memory, imagination, and language.  Some of it is suppressed or forgotten.  Other parts of our experience fragment and recombine in odd ways in the mind, taking on their own reality: from basilisk to manticore to cherub to seraph to dragon to sphinx, the strange monsters of myth and dream are the broken and reconfigured experiences of people who lived close to the earth.

We're hardwired to order our experiences.  But how we do it seems to be heavily influenced by culture.  In our own culture, for instance, we place an enormous premium on consensus.  That is, if I say that flies generate from rotting meat, we gather our witnesses, we share our data, we practice induction, and we conclude that my impressions of the world are false.  

Depending on its nuances, this habit of relying on consensus is called "empiricism," or "materialism," or "positivism" of some sort.  Speaking very broadly, here, what we're trained to value is the "fact," the durable objective reality as it is confirmed by consensus.  And we are generally obliged to call that "truth," since any truth that fails the test of consensus cannot guard itself against the charge of being delusional.

And lots of habits in the human mind oblige us to guard against delusion:

We perceive patterns spontaneously, which is called apophenia, perhaps noticing series of numbers that crop up in our day-to-day lives or seeing coincidences as having exaggerated importance or design.  

We exaggerate vague or nonexistent "patterns" until we perceive them as distinct and obvious, which is called pareidolia, for instance seeing the shape of Jesus in the burn-marks on a piece of bread.

[Note in passing that both apophenia and pareidolia are exaggerations of survival techniques, evolutionary adaptations that fit us for survival.  If we weren't pattern-perceivers, we could not order the world to build a tool or to make fire.]

Our brains confuse (or do they?) the signals that come from outside ourselves, in a rather striking phenomenon called The McGurk Effect: see the following short video.

It's worth noting the enormous degree to which the mind makes the world, I think.   If one test-subject hears the word "Bah" in the McGurk test even when he sees a distinct dental action, he is running against the consensus of perceivers: but if all but one test-subject perceive the syllable as "Fah," who is "insane," or "delusional," or "hallucinating"?

The way that a culture's (or an evolutionary stage's) experiences are ordered will have huge effects on how they perceive "truth."  The truth is that we're hearing the syllable "fah," because our brains said so, and that's all we have to go on.

And since religious experiences as well as a majority of paradigm shifts that later lead to consensus frequently challenge the current consensus, we have a major epistemological problem: does consensus really mean anything?

if 500 witnesses say they saw a dead man resurrected, was it so?  Were they delusional or hysterical?  Were they perceiving beyond some extenuation of the McGurk effect?  Are they liars?

It'd be foolish to throw out consensus as the strongest hand at the table, here, and not merely because of the dangers of faulty perception or delusion.

Simply put, consensus works in the real world.

It's clear from observation and consensus how the laws of gravity work, more or less, or the basics of microbiology.  At least they work well enough to launch a man to the moon and to inoculate a kid against smallpox, or build a television or to make computers do the things we're doing right now. 

All that comes from stripping human perception of things that are not "true" according to consensus.

So I guess what it comes down to is this: 

Is there a truth that lies outside the realm of consensus? 

And the consensus is, "Yes," because if it ever ceased to be "Yes," science would grind to a halt.

Science aims to know and to test those regions of truth that still lie in our blind-spots, using consensus to separate pareidolia from patterns that are real; apophenia from real connections that do exist in nature; and maybe most of all, sorting out what to say about the one person in a hundred thousand who escapes the McGurk Effect, who hears what he hears truly.

Comments

[Rachel]

You said:

And we are generally obliged to call that "truth," since any truth that fails the test of consensus cannot guard itself against the charge of being delusional.

and

Science aims to know and to test those regions of truth that still lie in our blind-spots, using consensus to separate pareidolia from patterns that are real; apophenia from real connections that do exist in nature; and maybe most of all, sorting out what to say about the one person in a hundred thousand who escapes the McGurk Effect, who hears what he hears truly.

So what about that person who does escape the Effect? What is left for him when personal intellectual honesty and consensus collide? He may be "right" and "true", but outside the groupthink, does right and true have any meaning? "Truth" seems to be "that which is recognized by us as being accurate".

So, when you say:

Is there a truth that lies outside the realm of consensus?

And the consensus is, "Yes," because if it ever ceased to be "Yes," science would grind to a halt.

I tend to get a little confused. Because it would seem that there _isn't_ truth outside the realm of consensus. And if something appears that is outside of the realm of consensus, it isn't accepted as truth until it is recognized by consensus. There is _potential_ for truth that the consensus is unaware of, but all truth seems to be declared such by consensus.

Then again, I've always been a little off, and this is my first foray into epistemology, so maybe I should just go to bed.

[Otter]

Rachel, perceptive questions.

If one can falsify a claim about something ("You say you were healed, but in fact you weren't even sick") or one can cast significant doubt on it ("You say you were healed but there is no medical evidence that you were sick"), you can at least increase the probability that a person is just a little whack.

But then there are the claims where that cannot be done, or where the available evidence of reputable witnesses tends to confirm or at least not falsify a claim.

In that event, you have a new and strange thing: a challenge to the "groupthink," as you call it, that might not be true, but at least is not dismissible on easy grounds.

Then it has a claim to at least sit at the table with the current consensus.

Which sometimes puts it to death. Other times, it puts it to the test.

[Susan R]

Two thousand five hundred years of philosophy should be easy to sum up.

Maybe a three-part series, then? :)

I hadn't been thinking of the group-consensus angle; that was unexpected and interesting, and critical to understanding one of the ways we wrestle with truth and how to "know" it.

That video puts my in mind somehow of that passage in the Gospels where a voice from heaven speaks, and some in the crowd hear only thunder, and some hear an angel. What does a truth-seeking individual do when various groups/subcultures have competing truth-claims—when they have, in fact, competing perceptions of the SAME experience?

It never ceases to amaze (and amuse) me to hear how the different circles I run in process political information, for example. My "inner circle"--the folks I am most likely to process information with--are mostly political Independents, but I have some staunchly Republican family and some staunchly Democratic friends, and each group tends to reference their core political assumptions as if they were common knowledge. It's disorienting at times, and can make discussions a little laborious. President Obama is either the great white hope of the nation or he’s carrying us all to hell in a hand-basket, and that’s the filter through which all other information is processed—but no one wants to go back and demonstrate the validity of that filter. (Although I suspect that it’s not so much that no one wants to; it’s more that there is no perceived need to do so.) Each political event provides further proof of the (opposing) truth claims of each camp--as citizens we share national experiences, but the perception and interpretation of the experience differs so dramatically based on the fundamental assumptions that it is as if we are having quite distinct experiences.

Two more suggested follow-up questions for the Truth and Experience Series (a.k.a., your mission, should you choose to accept it):

Compare and contrast the claims of science with the claims of faith/religion.
When an individual’s experience is at odds with the experience of the larger culture, by what process can he “know” when he should cling to truth as he experiences it, and when to submit to the consensual understanding of truth?