This Whole #$*@! Notion of Truth

I should have known I was in for it when my first thought of the week was,  There is still so much we don’t know about the brain.  What if what people see is actually filtered through a part of our brains that is unique from person to person?  And therefore, what if even though we assume we are all seeing something the same way (for example, the same colours in the same way), our experiences are completely different?  What if what I define as “green” and what each other person defines as “green” isn’t actually the same at all?  What if someone else is calling something “green” but they are actually seeing what I would call “orange”?  What if, in fact, we are only seeing similar shapes and sharing labels based on completely varied interpretations of colour? On and on the list of questions continued.

When I observe a mature douglas fir, I see a ruddy textured trunk that I label brown, perhaps even chocolatey brown or brown with a hint of orange.  I see pointy needles of various lengths that I might label minty or lime green if they are young, or when fully developed I may determine them comparable to fern green or hunter green (whatever that is, other than a man-made name for a 1994 vinage set of queen-sized Ralph Lauren sheets).  You may agree with my labeled-interpretation.  You may even offer an alternate labeled-interpretation that I completely agree with.  But still, we don’t know with absolute certainty that our perceptions match.  It seems to me that language has only become a marker of our limitations.

I doesn’t sound like much.  I know, it seems ridiculous to even waste time thinking about it.  But, I’m back in school, and damn-it I’m paying good money (uh, I *will* be paying good money when the government forces me to begin paying off my loans again) to think about whatever the hell I feel like.  So a few days ago, bright and early and mildly hungover, the impossibility of accounting for certain assumed “Truths” challenged me to a staring contest.

Now, I love the idea of being able, truly, to embrace ambiguity as it presents itself, and so to be able to fully engage in every moment.  However, when it comes right down to it, that’s a loaded ideal that I am not remotely ready to live up to.  I like clarity.  I prefer succinct explanations.  I insist on actively digging deeper until I find any answer I happen to be looking for.  For whatever reason, I need to know that the the facts are absolutely before I can, in good conscience, incorporate an assertion into my belief system.  and I prefer to be the guardian of all the answers.  All in all, I resist ambiguity instead of doing what I know is right (at least sometimes): surrendering to it.

And so, this idea that the way in which each individual  “seer” (by “seer” I mean a sighted individual who has not been identified with a disability such as colour blindness) interprets our shared physical surroundings could be entirely different from the interpretation of every other individual “seer”, but that science may never be able to confirm or disprove an absolute truth in the matter, to put it in layman’s terms, is driving me nuts.  I am not a scientist.  In fact, one day I may find that scientists cleared the air on this issue long ago–by all means, please direct me to the appropriate resources if there are answers available of which I am unaware–In the meantime, I am going to continue exploring this idea that some questions simply may be unanswerable.  Some hypotheses can not be proven or disproven.  I guess at some point black and white are in and of themselves an ambiguous shade of grey.

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