Truth and Untruth are Not Neutral

Disinformation is not neutral. The untrue is not neutral.

Yesterday I saw this post by @cryptonaturalist on Instagram:

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Who could argue with the idea that this elk’s existence was real and mattered?

Yet it is also true that the elk’s existence would become effectively forgotten to us, rendered “unknown” by us… it has transitioned from signal into noise, to compost. It’s too distant to be perceived.

And yet, the information is there. It must be. Where else could it go?

Information is enduring. However, as a result of the wash of time, the incorporation of information into other forms, and the cognitive filters of salience and relevance, it may be rendered imperceptible.

There’s a reason it costs a lot of noise, effort, resources, to drown out the truth. Why disinformation has to be louder, more aggressive, more persistent and bombarding than truth.

Because truth is almost a low-energy state of the universe. It just is. It exists. And it doesn’t go anywhere easily. It can only be obscured.

Lies and disinformation cannot annihilate the truth. It can only drown it out in noise. It can only mount a ruckus and make a racket to try to obscure truth and subsume it in layers of lies. But it cannot and it does not kill the truth, ultimately. But what it can do is block, and effectively terminate, the route of the information from reaching a person—from crossing over into perception.

Perception is an important capacity we have as sentient beings—it is the threshold through which we contact truth. Interpretation is perception’s complement, and as complex intelligent organisms, our powers of interpretation are vast and wondrous. Yet this layer, interpretation, is also the source of wrong ideas, and the threshold at which our susceptibility to convenient mistruths thrives.

Throughout the billions of years of life’s evolution, information was internalized and passed on through our bodies mostly genetically. Learning took place through our bodies’ forms and movements. Living beings generated conditions for other beings, and the beings’ forms would change shape based on interactions with conditions, at the scale of lifespan and reproductive cycles. Evolution, one form of learning, occurred physically.

According to its nature, life evolved more and more complexity. Wonderfully, minds evolved. Minds have the capacity to contain huge amounts of information in exquisitely elegant space, and thus are a boon to life’s adaptability and evolution. Minds can recall in the present moment past moments, and can dream up the future. Our capacities for interpretation grew into mighty and unbounded imaginations. And so our capacity to adapt to real information in our environments enormously expanded.

It’s why today humans are so evolutionarily advanced, that we can live and propagate ourselves to the exclusion of just about all other species, except those that feed us. We evidently have bypassed a lot of evolutionary limits on how information is passed to the next generation. This unprecedented power of interpretation—taking perceptions and turning them into a working model, held in minds and through the invisible fabric of cultures—gives us extreme evolutionary advantages. So long as our interpretations are reasonably accurate in predicting patterns in the environment. That is, when they are made from sources of good information, adaptive models are generated, yielding outrageous survival advantages. Wondrous innovation!

But you see, our minds are at their best when being used to work with reality. To make and to glean ever more truth. To work with what’s true is to become utterly, holistically, profoundly, adaptive.

When we become inundated with disinformation or misinformation, it is like being cluttered with junk, it is like being laden with pollution, it is like being crushed with noise. Our brain is entrained to the firing signals of emotions and stimulus attached to bad quality information, leaving us vulnerable to improper expenditures of energy and misuse of resources. We are basically wallowing in our own filth, and from evolution’s perspective, that cavalier lifestyle will likely lead to a shortening, a truncating, of viability.

I’m speaking globally, at the “pattern level,” about the dynamics of life and evolution. And yet in practice, that’s not exactly the case for some very successful survival tropes that are based openly on lies and distortions, yet arguably utilize perceptions.

White supremacy is a great example of this. White supremacy is founded on a matrix of lies that manipulate perceptible information about people’s skin colors and origins. But it’s a lie that has traction because of the survival advantages conferred to some people—people who already possessed power, allowing them to maintain and accumulate even more power. At its extremes, white supremacy is quite explicit about its preference for white-skinned offspring to be born, and for non-white people to be killed or exiled from a land base in order to make space for more white-bodied lives. For white people and their progeny, whether conscious of it or not, whether active propagators of white supremacy or not, it is a useful lie, a practical advantage, in that it fuels conditions for their own survival, in spite of its grave costs. A convenient mistruth (as opposed to an inconvenient truth).

We must look at our pervasive biases to see how actually quite bad we are at filtering truth from untruth. Lots of scientific evidence has demonstrated: we are quite poor indeed at it! Especially in an environment saturated with bullshit, where there is an aggressive attention economy. Memes are fighting for your attention, and those which trigger your anger or other stimulating, enjoyable emotions, are going to be the ones that hook into you, and you can become the purveyor of such ideas no mater how toxic they are. Like the equivalent of getting rabies or a virus, and you pass it along without even being conscious you are doing so. Toxic memes propagate in the same manner.

Disinformation is not neutral. It is toxic pollution in the noosphere. The good news is: truth is also not neutral.

Truth is not neutral. Truth is necessary for our liberation.

We must shed, discern and discard disinformation cluttering our lives inner and outer. We must get back in touch with the idea that it can be highly adaptive to believe the least, and to know that you don’t know much at all. To focus on the opportunities in the gap of not-knowing. It can be empowering to come into greater knowing, to rigorously integrate truth, and to lead a life comprised of more insights.

In another 500K years, information will prevail, truth will prevail, because truth endures and is more energy-effective than lies. But consider that the untrue, unintegrated parts of ourselves, the conditioned, unconscious, unhealed, unintegrated parts of ourselves, create a market for mistruth to spread. We are not just casual vectors—some of us (or some parts of us, I should say) rely on convenient mistruths for our identities, for our very feelings of security. We become the medium in which mistruths can thrive. And that’s what we must address. Our willingness to abide mistruths. Our capacity to abide and spread lies and misunderstandings.

I say “unintegrated” parts because I believe that lots of information is actually accumulated in our bodies, and it can either be processed effectively (and thus “integrated” into a worldview or cognitive model), or it can remain unprocessed. This is often the case with trauma. The unprocessed information continues to emerge while remaining unconscious, distorting present-moment perception and interpretation.

In my experience: when a trauma state is occurring for me—defined as a state of contraction, rumination, paralysis, paranoia, obsession, etc.—I can become really certain of what I think I know about a situation. Holistically speaking, we can understand this as a survival state being activated, where information seems to become crisp and clear because I’m focused on sussing out the situation so as to survive it. But in that contracted state, I get very fixated on what I think I know. What I miss is everything I’m not seeing. That’s the irony. The more fixed my ideas, the more fixated my mind gets on some information, the more distorted my interpretation, the more I dismiss evidence and information that exists to the contrary. I filter it out!

And thus, knowledge production is hindered, and instead, I participate in FUELING lies, by giving them my energy, by wanting to believe them. I have a whole other piece I’ll share later on Wanting To Believe and the dangers involved when we conflate the emotional value of belief and the functional value of believing or not believing. We must confront our capacities for willfully buying into bullshit that we think serves us.

A huge component of accomplishing this confrontation is to do the emotional work—to do the processing. Because in a way, emotions are a base layer of our consciousness. They are a “floor” of our sensemaking. And I believe going through emotions, emotions of any kind, is a learning process that can yield immense knowledge. Because the emotions are testifying to unconscious information that has been picked up and is now erupting into consciousness to try to be made sense of. Submitting to a process of grappling-with our unconscious knowledge, through an emotional ordeal, we can actually discover, find and harvest new insights and wisdom. So generally speaking, I’m an advocate for that. Because I think if we neglect the capacity of our emotions to contain a great deal of information, we’re not doing our best as living beings to work with information. We’re falling down on the job.

In our so-called civilized lifestyles, it should be acknowledged, we are kind of protected and insulated from needing to know good information in order to navigate our everyday lives. This differs from most of the extent of human evolution, when we needed good information about our surroundings in order to survive. But in this civilized context, we seemingly don’t need to rely upon good quality information in the same way, because it doesn’t affect us in our ability to purchase food from the grocery story or put money in our bank account. Disinformation, then, can run rampant in this dissociated-from-our-landbase context.

Thus, we must choose to be the living, fierce front in this fight. I believe, and Fractal Praxis is all about, training ourselves as organisms to make the most of what’s true, to do the most with truth, to get the most from life. To in fact partner with life’s praxis, which I argue is sensemaking. Thus we must acknowledge good quality information as food to us, that we are required to metabolize into more powerful, inclusive models of intelligence about our worlds. We must grow the ability to discern good information from bad, just our ancestors learned to discern good food sources from poisonous ones. We are capable of making the most of life through making the most of information we have available to us, through sacred processing.

That’s my stance. I have much more to say about information and disinformation; those may be some of the first pieces I publish after the Moon Dunes Loons series. However for now I want you to enjoy the latest edition in Moon Dunes Loons audio series which is “not knowing is freedom.” In this piece I get into the counterpoint to the idea that knowing, and abiding a place of pure wild intuition within oneself, is freedom. The counterpoint is that not-knowing is a kind of freedom too, and that not-knowing and knowing need each other.

I hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading!  

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