Nexus State Theory

I had ChatGPT help me to generate some stories about the nature of truth.  I think they’re not badly written, although they can be a little bit sappy or glowing.  I thought these stories were appropriate to explain what I have to say in this section.

Story 1: In a quiet village, two old friends, Mira and Elias, stood before a weathered house they had both loved since childhood, now abandoned. Mira, gazing through the front window, saw the sunlit parlor — warm, inviting, filled with dust dancing in golden beams, and declared the house a place of peace, a testament to lives well-lived. Elias, peering through a rear window into the dark kitchen with its broken table and cobwebbed corners, saw sorrow, silence, and the slow decay of forgotten memories. As they shared their impressions, a silence grew, not of disagreement, but of recognition. “It’s the same house,” Elias said at last, “but we’re looking through different windows.” Mira nodded, smiling softly. “And both views are real.

Story 2: A group of blind men encountered an elephant for the first time, each touching a different part to understand what it was. One, feeling the trunk, said the elephant was like a snake; another, touching a leg, insisted it was like a tree; a third, feeling the ear, thought it was like a fan; another, touching the tusk, claimed it was like a spear; one more, pressing against the side, said it was like a wall; and the last, holding the tail, was sure it was like a rope. Each man was convinced of his truth, and they argued, not realizing they were all right — each had touched a part of the same elephant, but none had the whole picture.

Story 3: In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, prisoners are chained inside a dark cave, only able to see shadows projected on a wall by firelight behind them—shadows they believe to be the whole of reality. One prisoner is freed and, after a painful adjustment, emerges from the cave into the blinding sunlight. At first overwhelmed, he gradually sees the world as it truly is, eventually gazing upon the sun, which he realizes is the source of all light, life, and truth. When he returns to the cave to share this revelation, the others mock him and resist, clinging to the familiar shadows. But he cannot return to his previous understanding, even if he wanted to fit in with the others; he cannot unsee the truth.  The sun symbolizes the highest form of knowledge and truth in Plato’s philosophy.

Story 4: In a bustling village, people from all walks of life came together to sew a great communal quilt, each assigned a single square to design. One stitched intricate flowers, certain that beauty was the quilt’s purpose; another embroidered symbols of justice, convinced the message mattered most. A third used only sturdy fabric, proud that theirs would last the longest. As each person worked, they quietly believed their square was the heart of the project, the one that gave it meaning. But when the quilt was finally joined together, they saw that its power came not from any single square, but from the unexpected harmony of all their differences woven side by side.

Quote: “What I told you was true, from a certain point of view .. you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” – Obi-Wan Kenobi, Return of the Jedi.

As I’ve noted, I view truth as always being partial – like the parts of an elephant, a square of a quilt, or the rooms of a house.  How can I say that, as a mathematician?  After all, Newton’s Laws of motion are absolute – they aren’t relative to where you are in the universe.  They’re true in every solar system and in every galaxy.

Perhaps, you will say, the idea of partial truth can be reconciled with Newton’s Laws.  After all, Newton’s Laws are true for classical motion only.  They don’t describe the way electrons move around atomic nuclei – these motions are too small.  And they don’t describe the way objects behave near black holes – these masses are too big.  Newton’s Laws, then, are a partial truth.

That’s true, but that’s not really the kind of partial truth I have in mind.  Yes, Newton’s Laws “only” applies to human-scale objects.  But that’s a lot of objects!  It’s somehow not very compelling to say that Newton’s Laws are relative because they work for baseballs and not electrons.  There are an awful lot of objects like baseballs.  So Newton’s Laws are quite general even if not totally general.  And for that matter, if we want to apply our ideas to electrons, we have only to take another physics course about quantum mechanics.  Newton’s Laws are quite general, but Newton’s Laws plus Schrodinger’s equation (a quantum mechanics equation) are very general.

However, what I have in mind is a much deeper challenge to Newton’s Laws: it is the challenge of relevance.  Do Newton’s Laws matter to you personally?  I don’t mean “does it matter to you that objects fall downward rather than floating away.”  Of course it does, although it’s likely not something you think about.  I mean: what do you gain by learning Newton’s Laws?  Will you use them in your everyday life?  Here, the answer is far less clear.  You might use them occasionally.  It really depends on whether you find it interesting to solve random physics problems about your surroundings – most people don’t.  In fact, I’d guess that most practicing physicists rarely use Newton’s Laws unless they’re in a classroom, since there are so many other equations that are more relevant to cutting-edge research disciplines.

The challenge of relevance explains why Newton’s Laws are a partial truth: they are useful for some purposes and not others.  If you are an engineer or physicist, you might use them all the time – but it depends on the kind of engineer or physicist you happen to be.  If you just took your physics course because it was required, it’s really up to you if you’re interested in ever applying them again.  My guess is that most people who take a physics course won’t think about them too often, if ever.

ChatGPT’s stories (except the one about Plato) show us how truth is partial – like an elephant’s trunk, a quilt square, or the room of a house.

Motivating Stories

In the next section, I will tell a story – a partial truth.  What is the relevance of this story?  In order to motivate myself to engage with the Self-Therapy Exercise, meditation, and contingency, I need a Motivating Story.  My Motivating Story helps to explain how the Value Addiction problem is important and solvable, and therefore why it’s important to use the Self-Therapy Exercise, meditation, and contingency to help me to focus on non-self, present moment values in order to avoid this problem.  I will discuss my Motivating Story (about the history of philosophy) in the next section.  The Motivating Story tells about the Value Addiction Problem in the context of philosophers and religious figures such as Plato, the Buddha, Confucius, and the Hebrew prophets.

However, any Motivating Story is inevitably only a partial truth.  It includes some facts and leaves out others.  It’s relevant in some cases and irrelevant in others.  However excited I may be about it, I don’t want to force it on others.  If I did, the Motivating Story would become my legacy, leading to its own Value Addiction problem.

A philosophy of truth

If we believe that truth is a kind of hard-to-access secret, then attention to the events of the present moment may be futile.  There’s no point attending to any zell from anyone except the wisest of scholars.  But if we believe (as I do) that truth is ubiquitous, then we can attend to anything and anyone – whoever and whatever is present here and now.  If our goal is to access something partial rather than universal, we can attend to our breath, to a tree waving in the breeze, to another person, or to a pebble in our hand.  This requires a particular philosophy of truth:

1. Truth is made up of contradictory insights that cannot be reconciled.
2. It is important to believe all of them.
3. It is important to believe none of them.
4. The insights are like seeing the sun once emerging from Plato’s cave: it is hard to unsee them.  However, there are many caves and many suns.
5. The many suns are like a quilt: each of us has our own quilt square or truth.  We can never possess the whole truth; there is no One Sun, not even this insight.  After all, even Newton’s Laws, however universal they may be, are not relevant in every moment.  Demanding that others conform to our quilt square leads to suffering and conflict.

In the stories, there is one house, one elephant, one sun, or one quilt.  The elephant is often used as a metaphor for God.  It could also represent the universe.  My perspective on it is that I’m not sure there is any One Elephant.  Here, I’m not primarily questioning the oneness of God – I’m questioning the oneness of whatever-there-is: the universe.  Can we really know what the whole universe is like?  Physicists haven’t even decided whether there is one world or many.  If the universe is the universal map, then, as I have argued, its nature is multiple.  The universal map contains many values for each person, and there are billions of people just on Earth.

But perhaps that’s a matter of one’s personal belief.    Is there one house, one elephant, one sun, one quilt?  Is there one universe?  One universal map?  From one perspective, there is.  From another perspective, there isn’t.  For example, when you picture the universe, you might imagine some blackness (space) with little white dots (stars) sprinkled throughout.  But is that the universe, or is it just some white dots?  What good is it to know that there is a universe if your imagining of the universe bears such little resemblance to it?

Imagine that a child says they know that “history” exists, and they visualize it as a small round ball that travels through time.  Does the child’s word “history” correspond with anything at all?  What if our maps for the universe are nearly as poor as that?

This book really contains at least two quilt squares, which are in tension with each other:

• A behavioral science quilt square, where we imagine that we can model or understand humans and their behavior.  We try to analyze the mind and society via Terror Management Theory, the nature of values, and the history of the Axial Age.

• A “zell” quilt square that is about signs and signals, attention, communication, contingency, the “mu” idea, and generalized information.  Here, the question is less why someone is or is not attending or responding and more simply whether one is attending or responding.

When someone points out a Problem that needs to be solved, that Problem is invariably part of one quilt square or another, not the whole quilt.  Or is it?  One could argue that Mortality must be a Problem in all quilt squares, as it is a universal part of the human experience.  (From another point of view, it is never part of the human experience, because no living person has experienced it!) On the other hand, humans’ failure to recognize conditional values as conditional is universal too, and so perhaps the Value Addiction Problem is in all quilt squares – but I don’t think so.  Universal truth is easy to come by, but universal relevance is not.