Truth and The Internet and Stories
submitted by: H. Roice Nelson, Jr.
-95.6896873 29.7783265 1987
Remember when Pilate said to Christ, "What is truth?" (John 18:28 ) My second year at The University of Utah I took a philosophy class. We studied William James and his philosophy of truth as being relative. In other words, what is true for me, may not be true for you. This philosophy has come to dominate our modern society. Today truth is relative and seldom absolute. As a scientist who studies gravity, magnetics, electromagnetic ties to lightning strikes, seismic response, the velocity of sound in the earth, and other geophysical characteristics, I am convinced this approach is wrong. There are absolute truths.
Certainly, you will each agree with me there are scientific truths. Where it is easy to get lost is the fact these scientific truths extend to social sciences and to religion. I am writing about truths, which - like geology and geophysics - are independent of me or of you, and independent of ancient times, or of modern times. And given there are eternal truths, I echo the apostle John, stressing "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth." (3 John 1:4 ) Even accepting premise there are eternal truths, things outside of me and outside of you and outside of everything else, things which are never false, the question still is, "What is truth?" At the personal interaction level, I believe we each know what is truth and what is a false witness. And yet there remains the philosophical issue surrounding the word truth.
We have so much information available to us today. I could write for hours about the Internet. After all, I invented it, even before Al Gore did. Is that statement truth? Actually, Dr. Roger N. Anderson at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York City introduced me to the Internet. It was sometime before 1988 and we were starting the GBRN (Global Basin Research Network), which included Roger and Albert Boulanger at Lamont, Dr. Larry Cathless at Cornell, Dr. Jean Whelan at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Dr. Jeff Nunn at Louisiana State University, myself at Landmark Graphics, and others. I remember the evening Larry, Roger, and I sat around a white board in Roger's New York apartment and drew out the plans for the GBRN, based largely on my experiences at the University of Houston's SAL (Seismic Acoustics Laboratory). This was probably my first of about four visits to New York City. I do not see what folks find so exciting about New York City.
Those of us involved in the GBRN communicated via the Internet. I needed access to the Internet to send and receive e-mails. The only Internet connection in Houston was at Rice University. Landmark was starting to make money, and I was able to get Landmark to pay to run a dedicated line from Rice University out to Cypress Run in about 1987. Landmark Graphics Corporation was the first business Internet connection in Houston. And it wasn't too much later I got a T-3 line to the house, so we had Internet at 1307 Emerald Green Lane.
How does the Internet relate to truth? For the most part, 35 years after starting to work with the Internet, there is little relationship between truth and the Internet. There is a lot of data on the Internet. Much of this data is true and accurate. Especially if data are actual instances of specific meanings occurring in the real world. However, the information foam on the internet, derived from this data, too often has an agenda. Information is meant to be data n context, related to a specific purpose. The issue is whether the specific purpose is to inform or to persuade, to teach or to indoctrinate, to share or to propagandize, or to lead or to control.
One of the reasons the Southwestern Heritage Center Historical Society (swhchs.org) chose to start collecting stories and to make those stories available on the Internet is to provide a way to see through the foam surrounding information now and in the future to be available on the Internet. Stories describe the personal experiences of someone. The stories are colored and sometimes masked by the life experiences and the cultural surroundings in which the story occurred. However, a real story is a truthful expression of what happened to an individual. The story is their view of what happened to them at a specific time and specific place and under specific circumstances. The story is their capture of truth. By reading real stories written by real people about real events that happened in their lives, we start to see through the foam of agenda and politics and bias and belief systems and the foam surrounding taking a lot of data and giving that data a biased context.
The more real stories children and adults read, the better we are able to see through the fog and foam of the modern world and find absolute truths, truths which do not change with a new administration, a new friend, a new neighborhood, a new time, or a new circumstance. As we progressively gather bits of experience, along the links which associate disparate parts into a unified whole, we find knowledge. This knowledge helps us become significant contributors to society. Information is cumulative data. The capture and dissemination of data maximizes information. Knowledge is cumulative experience. Experience can be gained the hard way, by making mistakes, or it can be gained by learning from the stories (experience) of others. Capture and dissemination of experience maximizes knowledge. And knowledge is immediately useful.
Knowledge increases our intelligence. Intelligence is the capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and having an aptitude to grasp truth, relationships, facts, meanings, patterns, etc. Wisdom is knowledge of what is true or right, coupled with good judgment, and is embodied in those who remember the recipe and can tell the stories.
We start real life by reading and learning stories. This takes us into jungles of data. As we learn the process of sorting and organizing this data we gain files of information. The use of this information to make life choices leads us to halls of knowledge, and the identification of best practices. Applying best practices brings us to buildings of intelligence. Every once and a while we get an insight, and these cumulative insights can lead us to cities of wisdom.
In the past society had an uneducated workforce that mostly did manual labor with their hands and needed direction. Stories help us build an educated workforce, doing intellectual labor with our brains, and creating independent thinkers. In the future society will have learning organizations which accumulate knowledge in teams with a shared vision. There is hope beyond the froth of the Internet and computer games, and this hope is based on absolute truths.