Things You Can think

The reason why some of the information we encounter is false is easy to understand: it simply doesn’t provide a true reflection of the objects, events, and circumstances in existence. However, the potential explanations for why information may be misleading can be more subtle; it can result from misrepresentations that can be either inadvertent or deliberate, and these may arise from 1) viewing available information from a perspective that omits, truncates, or inappropriately emphasizes particular elements of context, or 2) ignoring or suppressing additional information that would provide further clarity or reduce the tendency toward unwarranted intimation and insinuation. When either of these happen, it routinely leads to apparent contradictions, misunderstandings, and confusion—both in terms of our own internal thought processes as well as discussions about the information with other people. Confirming the truth of information is crucial: the potential consequence of not doing so is that we can be led down a path from one point of confusion to the next without even having the ability to identify the errors that accumulate. This type of outcome arising from false and misleading information was summarized most succinctly by the renowned seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who wrote in a personal correspondence to Hugo Boxel in 1674: “We must take care not to admit as true anything that is only probable. For when one falsity has been let in, infinite others follow.” However, there are two issues that routinely limit our ability to be certain of what we can conclude from the information we have in our possession: (I) We can never have complete information about everything, so we do not know what we don’t know or the ways that it might change the conclusions we’ve drawn from the available information we have. (II) At a practical level, we must depend on other sources of information besides ourselves for what we cannot access or do not experience firsthand (for example, the information coming from a machine designed to detect neutrinos, or coming from a government official with a top-level security clearance who is questioned at a press conference). In the first case, we must decide when we possess enough information to have a sufficient degree of confidence to draw a secure conclusion from what we possess versus when we need to continue to seek more. The decision is often based on the volume and consistency of the information we have, with those being necessary but insufficient criteria. In general, a good indicator is to ask the question, How much additional information would be necessary to change my determination of the truth? If a tremendous amount of discordant information would be needed, then there is probably enough to rely on and more would be of only marginal benefit. In the second case, we must decide when we can view a secondhand source of information as legitimate and trustworthy, which is a particularly challenging task. Often, the calculus employed depends on the prior experience with the source concerning the veracity of the information that came through it previously, but this is limited to sources that have been encountered before as well as a belief that past experience is an adequate and faithful predictor of future reliability. Both these issues are difficult to address, and the criteria to adjudicate them are ultimately subjective. To further elucidate these points, consider a statement that many people in Western societies might agree with: “You are a free person—you can do anything you choose.” Is it true? The answer depends largely on the definitions of the words free and choose: what, exactly, is encompassed by the concepts they are meant to convey, and what is the context in which the ideas of freedom and choice are meant to apply? If we assume that the notion of choice is embodied in (that is, conceptually contained within) the idea of freedom, it is a true statement—at least as far as it goes. However, there are some key contextual elements omitted from the statement that make it suspect. For example, you may decide that exerting freedom (in an absolute sense) is not something you want to do once you possess sufficient information to have a true understanding of your circumstances. That is because if you possess a sufficient amount of true information together with the analytic abilities to evaluate it properly, it will provide you with the capacity to predict the most likely consequences of your potential actions, some of which will meet your desires and expectations better than others. That will make some choices appear more attractive to you than other alternatives, thereby exerting a constraining effect on your freedom when viewed from the perspective of your getting what you want; so even though you could do a wide variety of things, with sufficient information you would view some of those actions as counterproductive (at least relative to other choices), and you would be predisposed to doing otherwise. What about the wider effects of your actions that you cannot appreciate at a local level or over short periods of time (that is, the full array of consequences over the expanse of the complete context where we exist)? Importantly, because we are not isolated from our surroundings, whatever actions you choose to take—or not take—have an impact on everything else, including other people, both now and in the future, and locally as well as at more distant places and times; this is due to the ripple effects that will propagate outward in all directions and throughout time as a consequence of your actions. Since you cannot know what the full effects of your actions will be through all of space and time with any degree of certainty—because you do not have access to all information, nor do you have a flawless capacity to evaluate it—it behooves you to constrain your choices to a narrower range at every decision point to maximize the probability of the favorable outcomes you would like to see occur.