Lunacy by C.P. Henly: 2009-07-26

I started this blog last summer as a reaction to the horror I experienced at the idea that anyone could think Sarah Palin was a serious candidate for a position that might land her in the presidency. I find her endless capacity for re-writing reality to be absolutely stunning, and that doesn't even get us started on her garbled speech. Her strange and melodramatic (not to mention completely incomprehensible!) exit from Alaskan politics (at least for the time being) has only validated all my previous ideas of her. It was my intention to wrote a blog on the subject, by way of fitting tribute to the woman who inspired it in the first place, but Conan O'Brien and William Shatner have provided an un-toppable epitaph (see video below), which I will, therefore, not attempt to top.

Instead, I'll say a few words on the whole subject of reality. I have, in the past year or so, encountered an inordinate number of people--adults out in the real world--who seem to function quite happily (if not successfully) on the unexamined and unstated (and possibly unrecognized) belief that there is no external reality, and that, therefore, whatever they think or believe or say is true in that moment. These people seem to exhibit an astounding capacity for living with different "truths" in different moments, feeling no need whatever to reconcile contradictions. My husband's word to describe the phenomenon is "solipsistic," and I have to agree wholeheartedly. For a pithy and pointed essay on this subject with regard to the absolute lunacy over Barack Obama's citizenship, read this.

Awhile back, I posted an essay I wrote on the greatest threat to science; I would have to say that this, in a nutshell, is it: the refusal, or failure, to believe that in order to live successful lives, in order to be free in any meaningful sense, we must operate on the assumption that there is a reality, that it is knowable, and that we ought to attempt to know it. I teach a course called "Theory of Knowledge" (aka TOK)), the central goal of which, it occurs to me, could be described as being the dissemination of this idea. The course curriculum demands that students start thinking about everything they "know" and everything they hear, and start assessing its validity. It requires students to learn about the strengths and shortcomings of our means of making knowledge and gives them the power to respect reality and our ability to know it. One of the two culminating assignments is an essays. The International Baccalaureate (IB) provides a list of 10 titles for the TOK essay, and students must choose one. I try to write one myself every couple of years as a means of keeping in mind the true demands of the task, and this year I wrote the following essay on the title: "When should we trust our senses to give us truth?"

I think the essay is revealing both in terms of what has been on my mind this year (note the positive assumption in the question--we can and must trust our senses to give us truth--a reaction to the lunacy I see around me!), and in terms of why the IB is the best thing going in education: it expects of students actual knowledge, not just the facsimile of it, a temporary and disposable veneer lasting only until the end-of-course test has been passed.

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I can easily generate a long list of examples of sensory failure—failing to hear my mother call me (this happened on a regular basis when I was a teenager, especially when I was lost inside my current book), thinking I smell gas when no one else can detect any such thing (this experience is actually quite common with me for some reason—perhaps I suffer from some sort of olfactory paranoia), or not being able to feel the ends of my fingers when it gets really cold outside. When I take my glasses off, I can see very little that is further than two feet from me, and the older I get, the less I can hear. When I recently got a new cell phone, and was testing all the ringers, I got to one that made no noise at all. I was just on the verge of complaining that it didn’t work, when I realized that this must be the “mosquito” ring tone that I’ve been hearing about that pretty much no one over a certain age can hear.

Despite all these ready-to-hand examples of sensory failure, it is nevertheless true that our sense perceptions are the ONLY means by which we get any kind of information which can subsequently be adjudged either true or false, and so in some sense, we have no choice BUT to trust our senses. Given the paradox—we can’t trust our senses and we must trust our senses--I conclude that the basic answer to the question as to when we should trust our senses to give us truth is that we should trust our senses to give us truth whenever there is some means to hand of checking our first sensory experience for validity, or whenever we have no other choice but to trust them.

We trust the truth of our senses for thousands of everyday tasks--we perceive that the floor is in a certain place, we put our foot down, and we are capable of walking; we taste the soup, add more salt, and find that it tastes better; we act based on what we heard someone say, and the action achieves the desired result. In myriad everyday cases, not only DO we rely on our senses, we SHOULD rely on them, because if we DIDN’T rely on them, we couldn't function. We should accept as true those things which cohere, at least until we have good reason not to, because if we refuse to do so, then we mire ourselves in a no-man’s-land of permanent stagnation, constantly questioning every “fact” or proposition made to us.

The problem, so far as sense perception goes, is that although we function perfectly well most of the time operating on the assumption that our sense perceptions are correct, there are inevitably those moments when our sense perception presents us with a reality that doesn’t make sense. In those cases, however, we are not left at the mercy of the foibles of our senses. When we experience those “That cannot be right!” moments in which our mind revolts against what our senses seem to be telling us is true, we can, and in fact have already begun to use reason to help us know whether or not to trust our senses and to what extent, in that moment. Monday morning, for example, I heard the grandfather clock downstairs chime 6:00, but because I had been awake awhile and had looked at the alarm clock not long before and had seen that at that time it was 4:30, I reasoned that I must have heard wrong and that the actual time must be 5:00 rather than 6:00. I verified the rational conclusion simply by turning the alarm clock on the bedside stand around so I could see its face; it was, indeed, 5:00 and not 6:00. Had the alarm clock said 6:00, then my sensory perception based on the chiming of the Grandfather clock would have been verified instead, and I would have had to come up with some other explanation for the discordance: perhaps I would conclude that I had fallen back asleep without realizing it, and that, therefore, another hour had gone by without my noticing. Either way, reason and sense perception together would have allowed me to solve the problem, and I would, therefore, have been able to trust that I know what the reality of the situation was.

Sensory data can, is, and should be trusted in the countless moments that constitute our daily living. We also rely on sensory information, however, in more formalized ways within various areas of academic endeavor, and so we have had to work out systems by which we can ensure the reliability of that data for our knowledge-making endeavors. Within the area of Natural Sciences, this process is highly structured. The objective of the Natural Sciences is to determine the physical nature of the universe, which is presumed to exist. If we are trying to find out about something outside ourselves, we must observe it closely. The essential means of making knowledge, then, is empiricism. In order to compensate for failings of our sensory apparatus, scientists have implemented a number of strategies: they build equipment that extends the range of human perception—telescopes, microscopes, sonar, radar, infrared photograph, NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) imaging, and so on. Scientists also rely on replicability to ensure that an observed phenomenon wasn’t either mis-observed, mis-interperted, mis-reported, or anomalous. Finally, since the essential process of knowledge-making in the natural sciences involves falsification and, ultimately, paradigm shift, science functions in essential ways to ensure that “bad” information is constantly weeded out and the structures of science are designed to ensure that we come ever closer in our refinements of our understanding to absolute certainty--to truth. We can, and should, therefore, trust our senses within the realm of the Natural Sciences so long as we are vigilant about identifying and denouncing fraud, and so long as we continue to make every honest effort to adhere to the standard practices of the sciences.

Within the realm of the arts, however, there is no such formalized structure for regulating sensory data. In the era when mimesis was the paramount objective of art, failures of sensory perception would have posed a problem for the artist and viewer similar to the problems that scientists must deal with, because the goal would have been very much the same thing: the accurate depiction of a world external to us. More recently, however, since creation, rather than copying has been the goal of art, empiricism is still the mechanism by which knowledge is conveyed and received, but "errors" in sense perception become irrelevant or even, perhaps, part of the message. With the arts, understanding happens integrally to the sensory experience. I love Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, but I love it because of the sensory experience of it. The lyricism of the horns is almost like flying. I love Frederick Church's painting, Coast Scene: Mount Desert 1863 because of the feeling of being immersed in rich sensory data--in that case, a spectacular sunrise over a sea whose spray is so vivid that the sea almost seems to move. One of the main reasons, then, that art appeals at all is that the direct sensory experience results in rich emotional experience, so whether that sensory data has any factual relationship to the external physical world or not is completely irrelevant.

This is not to say, however, that there is no possibility of the failure sensory experience to provide artistic truth. In a recent, very famous, incident, Susan Boyle, a middle-aged and rather frumpy Scotswoman created an international sensation because, it turned out, she sings with a beauty and power that very few people possess. The universal first impression, largely determined by sight, was that this woman was kidding herself to suggest that she might be another Elaine Paige. That sensory-based judgment, however, turned out to be sensationally wrong. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes a similar failure of senses: he talks about how until conductors agreed to audition classical musicians from behind screens, it was nearly impossible for women to get hired to play in symphony orchestras, but as soon as the screens went up, the number of women hired--even for instruments like trumpet or French horn, long considered the purview of men only--increased dramatically. The sight of the woman actually caused a failure to hear accurately; the suppression of the sight allowed for a truer judgment of the quality of music (Gladwell 248-254). Sense perception, then, can and must be trusted if we are to experience the full power of the arts, but, as with any other field of endeavor, we must remain vigilant that we aren't misled by false or irrelevant information.

Ultimately, sensory learning is as valuable as the learning garnered via any other way of knowing. We should, therefore, trust our senses as much as we trust any of those other ways of knowing. We should go about our business sensing and learning, but we should always be alert to the fact that we could, at any moment, be misled by our senses--just as we can be misled by emotions run amok, by flawed reason, or by misused language. By trusting all the mechanisms by which we come to know, but by trusting them not in isolation, but rather in tandem, we have the best chance of refining our experience to something that comes ever closer to truth.

Works Cited

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005.

NOTE: For further, and quite excellent, commentary on the nature of truth, see Harry Frankfurt's books On Truth, and On Bullshit. (He wrote the former second; you may wish to read them in that order.) These are very short treatises on the nature of truth and the utter disregard of it. I recommend them highly!

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