The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part I, Chapter 1: Truth

I want to start with a word that everyone uses and almost no one defines. "True." When somebody tells you something is true, what are they actually saying? When you say something is true, what do you mean?

"Truth begins where inherited beliefs end and the courage to question begins."

I am asking because for most of my life I used this word the way I used the word "tomorrow." I knew roughly what it meant. I never sat with it. And it turns out that almost everything else in this book — and almost everything wrong in the world outside it — comes back to this one word and the assumptions people pile on top of it without ever looking underneath.

So before I could ask what was true, I had to ask what "true" meant. Strange place to start a book. Necessary place.

Here is why it matters in plain terms. When your family says one thing is true, and a family across the world says a different thing is true, and both families are willing to die for what they believe — they are not actually disagreeing about the thing itself. They are disagreeing about what would have to happen for one of them to be wrong. Neither side has ever agreed on that. So the argument goes on for centuries. Children get born into the argument. Whole nations get built around it. None of it has to be this way. The way out is small, slow, and unglamorous. Take the word apart. See what is inside it.

When I started doing that, what I found was that "true" is not one thing. It comes in kinds. Different claims live in different kinds. And once you learn the shape of each kind, you can hear someone make a claim and know almost immediately what sort of thing they are saying—and whether it can be checked, and how.

Let me walk you through them the way I came to see them. Not all at once. One at a time.

The first kind I noticed is the one that only you can see.

You know things about yourself that nobody else knows. You know whether you actually love the person you are with. You know whether you really believe what the people who speak for God in your house told you to believe. You know whether you were hungry when you said you were not. These are real truths. They are real even if you never say them out loud. They live inside one head, and they only matter to one person. Philosophers have a long word for this kind — they call it subjective truth. The word is bigger than the thing. The thing is simple. Some truths have only one witness, and that witness is you.

Most of what runs your inner life is this kind. The trouble is that you cannot show anyone else what you know about yourself. You can describe it, you can write it down, you can cry while telling it — and the listener still has to take your word for it. This is why being honest with yourself, in private, when no one is watching, is one of the few things in a life that nobody else can do for you. The private truth is the only one you have full access to. If you lie to yourself there, the whole life built on top is a lie.

The second kind I noticed is the opposite. It is the kind anyone can check, given enough patience and enough witnesses.

Imagine a courtroom. A man has been killed. The judge cannot have been there when it happened. So the judge listens. Witness after witness. Each one saw a piece. Some pieces fit. Some do not. Some witnesses lie; some are honest but mistaken. The judge sifts and weighs and asks more questions. Slowly, from enough careful eyes looking at enough pieces, something emerges. Whether the man was killed. By whom. With what weapon. At what hour. This is not anybody's opinion. This is what happened.

The witnesses will die. Their memories will fade. The truth of what happened that night will not. The killing happened at a particular hour, in a particular place, with a particular weapon, and no amount of forgetting will move that. The kind of truth that many people can check, in this way, is what philosophers call objective. Public truth. Truth-in-the-world. The world has its own answer regardless of whether anyone is paying attention to it.

Now hold those two side by side for a moment. Whether the man was killed — that is the same truth whether you grew up in a temple, a church, a mosque, or no religion at all. Whether the woman across from you actually loves you — that is the same truth whether you are Hindu, Christian, Muslim, or none of those. These truths do not bend to your upbringing. They are not your truth against somebody else's truth. They are the truth, and they sit there waiting for anyone willing to look.

This is the first thing I want you to feel in your chest, not just understand in your head. Most of the wars between "our God" and "their God" are not actually about God. They are about people claiming a kind of truth that they have never figured out how to check, and refusing to admit they have not figured out how to check it. The moment you see this, the wars start to look smaller. Not less violent. Smaller. Like a thing two confused parties built and could one day take down.

There is another way to slice all this, and it is worth doing because it gives you a different question to ask of any claim someone makes. You can ask: does this hold still, or does it move?

The past does not move. Whatever happened, happened. The killing, if it happened, happened in a particular way, and no priest, no god, no later rewriting can make it have happened any other way. This is what is sometimes called unchanging truth. It is a hard thing for some people to accept. They want to believe a holy enough person, with a holy enough prayer, can reach back and change what already occurred. They cannot. Reality does not let go of what is already in its hand.

The present, on the other hand, can change. The woman who fell out of love with the man may fall back in. The truth last year was that she did not love him. The truth this year is that she does. Both were the truth in their moment. The thing they describe is the thing that has moved. Truth in this sense is not eternal. It is a snapshot of what is the case right now.

This matters because people often confuse the two. They take a snapshot — what someone said two thousand years ago, in a particular place, about a particular problem — and they treat it as if it were unchanging. They forget that the snapshot was always of a present that has long since moved on. The text stayed. The reality the text described kept changing. A great deal of what calls itself unchanging is just an old changing thing with the dust left on.

A few truths sit harder than even unchanging truths. They are the ones that nobody can prove wrong, ever, no matter what they try. Two and two will not become five next Tuesday. Light will not start travelling sideways. These are what people sometimes call absolute. Not many things qualify. Most of what we casually call "true" in life is something softer than this. But when something is absolute, it is bedrock. Nothing you do, nothing anyone says, will move it.

Now there is a third way to slice all this, and this one is where most of daily life lives — and where most of the trouble lives too.

You can ask of any claim: can we work this out, or not?

Some claims you can work out for yourself, today, with the tools you already have. Imagine you are asleep. A sound wakes you. You recognise the sound — it is the tune your phone plays for the alarm, the one you chose yourself. You set the alarm for six. So the sound must be the alarm, and the time must be six, and the alarm means you are supposed to wake up. You did not need anyone to tell you any of this. You took two or three things you already knew, lined them up next to each other, and saw what they added up to. That is the entire trick. We do it hundreds of times a day. It is the most useful kind of thinking there is, and in plain language it does not even need a special name.

Scientists do a more careful version of this. They take observations, line them up, fit them to equations, check the equations against more observations. Slowly, over years and many people, the world gives up some of its answers. Almost everything you carry around in your head as "fact" — about your body, the planet, the stars — came from this kind of patient, ordinary work. Done by people you have never heard of. Over generations.

What makes this kind of truth strong is also what makes it modest. It is always open to being wrong. If tomorrow someone shows you that the sound you thought was your alarm was actually your phone playing a tune that happened to match, the conclusion has to be redone. That is not weakness. That is the strength. The whole human project of finding out what is real runs on the willingness to be wrong. Imagine if scientists had refused to listen to Einstein out of respect for Newton. Your phone would not know where you are. The truth has to be a journey, not a destination. Anyone who hands you a final answer to any important question — anyone, in any robe, holding any book — is, almost always, selling you something else underneath.

I want you to hear this clearly, because it cuts to the centre of everything. The strongest kind of knowledge human beings have ever produced admits it might be wrong. The weakest insists it cannot be. When you hear someone say their truth cannot be questioned, you are hearing the weakest possible thing dressed up as the strongest. The dressing fools many people. It does not have to fool you.

Then there are the truths we cannot work out yet. They may become workable later. They may not. For now, they sit beyond what anyone can check. Philosophers call this kind indeterminate — undecided — and it is where most of the trouble in human history has lived.

I want to slow down here, because this is the part that matters most, and because almost everything that goes wrong in the way humans treat each other starts somewhere in this territory.

A belief is what we call something you have taken to be true without checking it. Some beliefs turn out to be right. Some turn out to be wrong. We know the sun lights the day — if you took the sun away the day would go dark, and you can check this. Someone who thinks the moon lights the night is wrong — the moon only reflects sunlight back at us, and you can check that too. Beliefs are not the enemy. Beliefs are just truths that have not yet been examined. Some of them survive examination and become knowledge. Some don't survive and have to be let go. The work is the examination.

For most of human history, almost everything people thought they knew sat in the unchecked pile. They did not have the tools. They had only the urge to explain. There was a time when nobody knew what lightning was, or what thunder was. And the brain, our brain, the same brain you and I carry around in our heads right now, does not enjoy not knowing. It treats not-knowing as a kind of threat. It will reach for an explanation rather than sit with the silence. So our ancestors reached. They told themselves a story. There must be an angry god, throwing rocks across the sky. And once the story existed, life arranged itself around the story. Their happiness depended on staying on the god's good side—the right sacrifices, the right prayers, the right rituals on the right day. The cost of getting it wrong was lightning. The cost of getting it right was just doing whatever the priest said.

This is the engine, in small, of every religion that has ever existed. An indeterminate truth—one we cannot yet check—combined with a brain that hates uncertainty, equals a story. The stories are different in every place. The mechanism is the same. In the past, when our species was small and scattered, these stories did not threaten our survival. We were too far apart from each other to do any real harm with them. Now we are not scattered, and we are not small, and the stories have grown teeth.

Let me show you how easily this still happens today, with a thought experiment.

Imagine someone tells you, with full confidence, that an asteroid is going to end the world on April the thirteenth, in the year 2036. People who already half-believed something like this would believe it now. They would find each other — they always find each other. They would form a congregation. They would search the old books for a verse that fit, and they would find one, because old books are large and verses are flexible. They would declare the asteroid a prophecy. They would call themselves a new faith. Money would come in. The founder would buy a ranch. Then somebody slightly more hopeful would split off, saying the asteroid was a warning sign, not the end, and the faith would divide. Both halves would keep collecting members. Both would keep collecting donations. The saga would continue. This is not something I am making up. This is what humans do, over and over, with whatever raw material the moment provides.

The asteroid is real, by the way, in case you were wondering. It is called Apophis. There was a stretch of years when its path looked uncertain enough that the date April the thirteenth, 2036 actually came up in the news. The reason the date mattered was that Apophis's orbit might pass, in the year 2029, through what scientists call a gravitational keyhole — a narrow zone where Earth's gravity could bend its path just enough to bring it back round on a closer, more dangerous pass later. Further calculations have since said an impact in the next hundred years is very unlikely.

And even if it happened — Apophis is about three hundred and seventy metres across. The Earth has been struck many times by much larger objects than that. The asteroid that wiped out most of the dinosaurs, tens of millions of years ago, was something like ten kilometres across, and even that one did not end the world. The world continued. Life continued. We are, in the strict biological sense, the descendants of what survived. And we now have the beginnings of the technology to deflect or destroy an asteroid before it reaches us. If a real threat ever comes, the species will work together. It always does, eventually, when the alternative is extinction.

The point of all that was not the asteroid. The point was how easily an unchecked truth — combined with a brain that hates not knowing — becomes a religion. We are wired for it. Without examination, we will do it again, and again, and again.

Now I want to say something a little harder, and I want to say it carefully, because the people who hold the belief I am about to discuss are often kind, and often decent, and often trying very hard to be good.

A lot of what each of us believes was put into us when we were children, long before we had any way of pushing back. You believed Santa Claus brought you presents at Christmas — or some equivalent in your own culture, the tooth fairy, the spirit who watches over the harvest, the ancestor who blesses the new house. To a child, these are not stories. To a child, these are absolute truth, no different in feeling from believing the sun rises. We do not correct children when they believe these things, because a child cannot follow argument anyway, and the stories do them no harm. Children learn through stories — cartoons, fairy tales, the tales their grandparents tell them at night. This is how children's minds work. It is fine.

What is not fine is what happens later. Some of us never wean off the childhood stories. We become adults who still hold beliefs we have never tested, beliefs we were given before we could choose, dressed now in adult clothes but unchanged underneath. The grown-up version of "Santa brings the presents" is most of organised religion. The mechanism is identical. A trusted adult told us. We trusted them. We never asked.

I want to be honest about something here, because if I sound like a man who figured all of this out from above, I will sound dishonest, and you should not trust dishonest writers.

I held some of these beliefs myself for an embarrassingly long time. I held them past the age when I had every tool I needed to take them apart. I held them because they were comfortable. I held them because the people in my life held them. I held them because doubting them out loud would have cost me something I was not yet ready to pay. The first beliefs to go were the easy ones — the obviously silly ones, the ones that contradicted things I had seen with my own eyes. The hard ones to lose were the ones I had loved. Those took years. And the truth is, I am not finished with all of them even now. I notice an old assumption sometimes, still inside me, that I had not seen before. I take it out. I look at it. Most of them, when I look, do not survive the looking.

I am telling you this so you know two things. First — anyone who tells you the work of unlearning is quick is lying to you. It is not quick. It is the slowest work there is. Second — the soil under those beliefs, once the beliefs are gone, is yours. It is the only soil that has ever really been yours. You can grow anything you want in it. That is what makes the work worth the cost.

Stories do not only hurt us in the old religious way. They hurt us in newer ways too. Films, especially. A film about a real war takes some artistic licence — a romance here, a heroic moment there, a character who never existed — and with enough time, the audience begins to remember the film instead of the history. A small example. In 2017 there was a film called Dunkirk, about the British evacuation in the Second World War. Two and a half million Indians volunteered to fight in that war. Not one of them appears in the film. Whether this was deliberate or careless I cannot say. What I can say is that a generation of viewers will carry forward, in their heads, an image of that war with no Indian soldier in it. And the actual men who fought and died there — real men, with mothers and brothers and futures — will become slowly, quietly invisible. That is not nothing. That is one of the ways stories hurt.

But stories can also help. In 1852, a woman called Harriet Beecher Stowe published a novel about an enslaved Black man in America. The novel was called Uncle Tom's Cabin. Historians believe it was one of the things that helped push the United States into the war that would end slavery. Through one fictional life, readers in the north began to feel what the slave system was actually doing to actual people. Their attitudes shifted. The shift contributed, eventually, to the war that ended that system. A story did that. So stories can shape us, for ill and for good. They are not innocent. We have to be careful with them. And we have to teach ourselves, while we are still young enough to learn, to enjoy true things — non-fiction, documentary, history written carefully — and not only the things that are entertaining.

Here is what it comes to, in the end, after all the walking around in this material.

Most of what is in our heads got there by being told to us, by people who were themselves only told, going back as many generations as you care to count. A lot of that material now floats around our societies as if it were knowledge. Some of it is. Some of it isn't. We have to learn the difference. We have to do, for our own minds, what a careful doctor does for a sick patient — look at every symptom, ask what it is doing there, ask whether the medicine on offer is the right one or just the one being prescribed. And we have to be willing to throw out what does not survive the examination, even when it has been with us a long time, even when it feels like family. Especially then.

This is harder now than it has ever been. We live in an age when a lie, repeated often enough, can come to sound more familiar than the truth, and where the lies travel faster than the corrections do. We are truth-seekers by nature — the brain wants the uncertainty to go away — but the very urge that makes us seekers also makes us easy to fool. We reach for whatever explanation is loudest. The work, then, is to slow down. To check. To stay willing to be wrong.

The pandemic at the start of this decade taught us something hard, if we were paying attention. A small virus, badly handled, ran around the world and killed millions of people. Part of why so many died was that the truth about the virus was disputed, for too long, by people who should have known better. The lesson, if we are willing to take it, was that we cannot afford this anymore. We are one species, on one planet, and the time for pretending otherwise has run out.

Some of the truths we cannot work out yet may become workable later. Science keeps moving. What was a mystery in my grandfather's time is now a chapter in a schoolbook. Until each new question is answered, we have to hold our beliefs lightly. We have to be willing to update. That is not weakness. That is what a serious mind looks like.

One more thing before we go on. I do not want you to put this book down thinking the truth is something you can hand over to a smart person and let them sort it out for you. You cannot. Even when two people look at the same thing, they do not see the same thing. The same perfume smells different on different skins. The same painting moves one person and bores another. Each mind brings its own tools to the looking, and the tools are never quite the same twice. This means you should be very careful about pushing your way of seeing on anyone else, and even more careful about letting anyone push their way of seeing on you. People come to the truth through the shape of their own minds. The road is yours to walk. The truth is what everyone is walking toward. The road and the destination are not the same thing — and no one, not me, not your teacher, not the people who speak for God in your house, can do your walking for you.

Before any of us can know what is true, though, we have to look at the thing doing the knowing. What a mind does when it observes. What it adds. What it loses. Where the errors creep in.

That was the next thing I had to figure out.