Truth = knowledge + love

This “equation” encapsulates what for me is a tension and longing. “Knowledge” gives a feeling of solidity, reliability and assurance; “love” has overtones of abandonment, ecstasy, the ultimate. Both are in different ways desirable. But to have both ... this sounds like combining safety and danger, perhaps a logical impossibility. And on the other side is “truth” which for me, coming from a Christian tradition, also has paradoxical associations, associated with the strange words ascribed to Jesus in the Gospel of John “I am the truth”, or in a plausible re-translation, “The I AM is the Truth” – words which, uttered by Jesus at his trial, are even more laden with overtones of danger, or of a judgement where Pilate becomes the one being judged.

Still within this religious tradition, one could view the “equation” as an illustration of the last Canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy:

O grace abundant, by which I presumed
To fix my sight upon the Light Eternal,
So that the seeing I consumed therein!
I saw that in its depth far down is lying
Bound up with love together in one volume,
What through the universe in leaves is scattered;
Substance, and accident, and their operations,
All interfused together in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple light.

leading to the final line of the whole epic:

But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars[1].

In the first quotation Dante saw in “the Light Eternal” as it were a book in which the essence of the Aristotelian cosmos is “bound up with love together in one volume”; while in the final lines he no longer speaks of vision, but of joining with “The Love which moves the sun and the other stars”, a phrase that combines “Love” with Aristotle’s “prime mover” – the driving force of the cosmos.[2] The result of this combining of knowledge and love is the I AM, which Jesus names as Truth.

But it is of course self contradictory to try to approach an ultimate mystery through something as narrow as an equation. Rather than restricting these terms to their mathematical slots, we might imagine them as dynamic agents, swirling round and in each other in what the Greek Orthodox church called “perichoresis[3]” (dancing around), referring to the Trinity. “Knowledge” in modern English has a wide range of meanings – there many different “ways of knowing” (see below), not just by logical analysis but also by immediate recognition (the earliest use) or by intuition; “love” is for Dante and many others an appropriate name for the Ultimate, and human love a participation in the divine being; “truth” in English originally meant trustworthiness, but its corresponding meaning in Greek (aletheia) is more like disclosure or revelation[4]. So we might with greater insight write love = knowledge + truth. Or indeed, swirling around further, we might see love as itself a way of knowing: perhaps it is only when you look at a being with the eyes of love (meaning true, deep love that sees with sincerity and truth) that you actually come to know it, so that knowledge = love+truth.

This sort of knowing is a knowing that unites, whereas rational knowing dissects and analyses. This seems close to Dante’s usage, when he compares our normal vision of “What through the universe in leaves is scattered” with the “one book” revealed in the beatific vision. I have a deep love of the woods on Southampton Common where I walk or jog most days, and when I am there I am participating in a single whole. When my eyes fall on one particular tree, it still speaks of the whole. And wood, indeed, speaks of the greater ecosystem of which it is a part.

Knowledge through language and logic, on the other hand, is necessarily sequential. One word follows another, and the sequence matters.

In fact, what concerns me more at this point is not the meaning of words but how we might in our daily lives and as participants in society harmonise the rationality suggested by Truth with the living, creative vitality suggested by Love. The reason why there is a destructive tension between these two lies in our own nervous system. For a long time there has been an awareness of the twofoldness of our mind – St Paul’s “the good that I would do I do not do ...”, Aristotle’s rational soul/animal soul, Jaynes’ bicameral mind, left/right brain ... Most well researched and comprehensive is ICS.

The is a fundamental polarity here (with all the caveats about polarities - but leave that for the moment). This polarity can either be located in the human knower, who then necessarily (in neo-Kantian fashion) sees the world in polar terms, or it can be located in the world and the human then has by natural selection evolved a polar knowing in order to grasp the world.

To return to my favourite way of looking at this – it’s functional rather than neurological – arrived at my looking at times taken to process information, retrieval of memories, psychotherapy experience (PTSD etc) ... Due to Teasdale and Barnard[5]

The mind behaves as if it consisted of several different interacting cognitive subsystems. The main 9 are named (in the blue boxes) in the diagram below. Each subsystem performs the same set of functions (illustrated in the two central blue boxes, but the same in all the others). It has its own memory store (orange boxes); it receives information from other subsystems (green arrows, blue arrows and blue speckled arrows); it can copy this information to its memory (green box); it can retrieve information from its memory by feeding in a related piece of information with causes similar memory records to be retrieved [this isn’t shown on the diagram]; and it can transform information received from one subsystem into a form relevant to another subsystem (other green box) and pass it on to that system.

There is no overall boss system controlling this. Instead, two systems work together to coordinate the mind:

the propositional, concerned with rational thinking, closely linked with the subsystems for language, dealing with distinctly defined concepts, linked with the sense of time

and the implicational concerned with the status of the self, relationships between the self and the world, closely linked with the senses (only this has access to data from the senses and the state of the body), feelings .. there is no time in the implicaional.

The combination of the two is called the “Central engine of cognition”.

The diagram here only shows a few of the links, but importantly the propositional has no direct access to input from the senses such as Acoustic and Visual. If we imagine that we are having a conversation, for instance, the Propositional might form one (rationally formulated) conclusion – e.g. “this is a sensible well spoken chap” - from the linguistic sense of the words, while simultaneously the implicational might form a different (schematically formulated) conclusion – e.g. “whoah!!” – from the tone of voice and the speaker’s visual appearance. These two are then swapped and integrated into both central systems.

What I want to stress here is the notion that all the evidence, including introspective evidence supports the idea that there is a polarity within us.

A good way to think about this in terms of the idea of Ways of Knowing. [6] In terms of the polarity of the mind the broad classification of ways of knowing is Intuitive (implicationally dominated) and Rational (propositionally dominated).

Another classification of ways of knowing is dominant (Masculine, modernist, western, scientific) and subjugated (Feminine, indigenous, traditional). The dominant ways of knowing are highly propositionally dominated. The subjugated ways are more balanced, typically stressing stories which have both propositional and implicationally significant content.

These social classifications illustrate the way the tensions that can occur within the individual when the subsystems are “out of synch” (in some cases, literally) are then played out in society. And, conversely, the dominant ways of knowing in society impinge on the individual and can destabilise them.

What does it mean, to know? Consider these quotations …

My mother would get up early. She would go outside and stand there a long time. Then she would say, “Vehsih yehno nah ha ooh.” That means. “The caribou are just under the mountains over there, and they’re coming.” Everyone would get excited. (Norma Kassi)[7]

Not only do we know more about the universe, but our understanding is deeper, and the questions that we are asking are more profound. Still, our understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe has not yet caught up with what we know about it.
(Wendy L. Freedman )[8]

Then in the distance I began to see … the physical cosmos and the underlying constitutive forces that built the universe and sustain it. … I learned by becoming what I was knowing. I discovered the universe not by knowing it from the outside but by tuning to that level in my being where I was that thing. (Chris Bache)[9]

The sapiential perspective envisages the role of knowledge as the means of deliverance and freedom, of what the Hindu calls moksha. To know is to be delivered. (Seyyed Hossein Nasr)[10]

1. Indigenous.

We don’t know much about this – either in terms internal to Norma’s mother – how would she report what was happening – or in terms of translating it into our scientific way of knowing. We would perhaps classify it as “intuitive”: she probably did not verbally consider a number of separate clues until the weight of evidence told her this, perhaps her internal process was more like “tuning in” until the “signal” was clear. We might recognise this as “being in the flow”

2. Scientific.

(a) A reminder that science has become the dominant way of knowing par excellence.

(b) A reminder that factual knowing and understanding are deeper – there is a sense of the story underlying sscience in “understanding” – a more inuitive way of knowing. (ESP etc still has no story)

3, 4. Participatory.

This, and Nasr’s quote, suggests that the two principle subsystems do not exhaust all the possibilities. It may be possible to go beyond both by going beyond the Self. This links with love, which is an extension of the self. Nasr runs it the other way from Bach: either way transformation and knowledge are linked.

I want now to focus on the scientific WOK

There has been a aspect of arrogance to this. “Science” has become a package of strict Aristotelian logic, materialistic (better: objectivistic) metaphysics, chronological determinism, value-fact separation, observer-independent experimentation. This is Truth in the tradition of imperialistic science. Love doesn’t come into it (except as icing-on-the-cake value or as physical desire) and knowledge is limited to precisely one way of knowing.

We can see the societal conflicts that this produces played out in the battles between atheists and theists. Interestingly, they are as much about the disunity within the individuals as about ways of knowing in society. Dawkins can be eloquent about the role of poetry and intuition and science.

It is more like turf-wars (McGrath, Polkinghorne)

We’ve talked about knowledge, and love ... I now want to talk about the “+” sign. Dante’s vision sees through the eye of love and recognises the unity of the world. Science compartmentalises things and sees the implicational as subsidiary. It totally fails to grasp Nasr’s fourth way of knowing, transformative knowing which comes beyond the integration of rational logic and love. But how is it possible to combine these? Because our need now, as individual human beings and as societies, is to bring our own ways of thinking into closer harmony, and to unite in collaboration the rational and intuitive ways of knowing within society. Only then can we integrate values with rationality – which is what we must achieve if we are to pass through this period of such danger for the human species.

How to combine scientific knowing with love? I think a powerful clue comes from logic. Old-fashioned scientific knowing clings to a notion of truth that just meant facts. At a given time facts are right or wrong, and whether they are right or wrong was a matter of classical logic. Nineteenth century-style scientific truth is about “fact, fact, fact” (Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times). Now there is an intimation that things are changing. There is talk of “both-and” logic, of paradoxical logic.

This is pointing the way towards the sort of synthesis that we need – one in which both visionary, value laden insight and rational analysis can sit side by side. But talking about “both-and logic” doesn’t actually mean anything to the scientist and the logician. What does mean something to them is context dependent logic.

I first encountered this idea in the writings of Valerie Plumwood[11], who studied logic and contributed to a book on context dependent logic with her husband Richard Routley. She saw a close connection between the many dualisms (as opposed to dualities) that tear apart our society - adding the dualism of gender, and the human/nature dualism, and she argued for the adoption of context dependent logic as a way of reintroducing a dynamic flow between these poles, which can turn them into a source of creativity instead of a source of conflict.

Now this is a language that can engage science directly, because context dependent logic is exactly what is now emerging in order to make sense of quantum theory. It is starting to look as though it is this that makes the whole world tick. So far the sceintific way of knowing has been based on Nineteenth century physics (with quantum theory tacked onto the side and ignored as far as possible).

So I now need to talk about quantum theory. Don’t get too carried away by this – we have still no coherent story for quantum theory; there is barely a coherent theory for quantum cosmology, let alone a story. But it’s still important (a) for negative reasons – it severely dents the triumphalism of the dominant 19th-century-based world view; (b) for the hints it gives towards a new story, which will have to come from a genuine rapprochement between the propositional side of science and the implicational, intuitive side of science.

Quick overview of QT

Key actors: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr

Key concepts: Uncertainty, Complementarity, Observation

Key dates: 1905 (Einstein), 1927 (Bohr)

The “old quantum theory” introduced by Einstein was about quanta. It explained increasingly many findings, including the structure of atoms. (Wave-particle duality was around, but not at all understood)

But the devil was in the details: In the spirit of "quanta" the energy of the electron in hydrogen was not continuously variable, but could only take particular values. Unlike the energy of a beam of light, however, the sizes of the steps in energy, the quanta, were not all the same. A formula had to be used in order to specify how the sizes of the quanta varied. There seemed to be something else going on underneath, that determined the varying sizes of the quanta. Physicists started to realise that the old quantum theory was only a stepping stone to this “something else”.

The breakthrough came in 1925. The young German physicist Werner Heisenberg was struck down by severe hay fever, and in order to recover he retreated to the pollen-free island of Heligoland. He devised a set of mathematical rules that enabled him both to work out the sizes of the quanta for the electrons in atoms, and also the uncertainty in the colour of the light that was emitted. He realised that quantum mechanics was not really (as had previously had been thought) about waves versus particles. These were just the two extremes of a trade-off between inherent uncertainties in all physical quantities – in the case of the colour of emitted light it was the uncertainty in the position of an electron and the uncertainty in its momentum: as one decreased, the other increased. Similar trade-offs were responsible for the uncertainty in the colours of emitted light.

Heisenberg publicised his “uncertainty relation” between position and momentum; and a short time later Bohr generalised it into a “complementarity principle” that applied to all physical properties. The was the “new quantum theory” or “quantum mechanics” – no longer to do with quanta. Physical properties didn’t fit together. To shift the metaphor again, the universe was like a flat-pack from Ikea that had more pieces in it than would actually fit together, the “pieces” being the properties that make up what any particular thing is at given moment. A lot of the time you created good furniture, and didn’t need to worry that there was stuff left in the pack. But sometimes you picked up two pieces which obviously didn’t fit together snugly: whatever you did they both wobbled a bit (uncertainty). in Bohr’s (very confusing) terminology, these were “complementary”. A better word would have “incompatible”. Physics had now moved on to the “new quantum theory” or “quantum mechanics”, which became the topic of the next Solvay conference in 1927 at which Bohr argued that the complementarity principle was the key to a new physics, and the phenomenon of quanta was just a by-product that appeared in particular cases. Most of his colleagues couldn’t understand what he was talking about (Ikea, of course, hadn’t been invented then).

To explain how complementarity works, it’s best to go back a couple of years to the particular example that Heisenberg first produced, one of the many “gendanken experiments” (thought experiments) that occupied the physics community in those years, almost more than actual experiments. Heisenberg imagined how one might try to measure two properties of an electron – it’s position and its momentum (the amount of “clout” it would give to another object that it struck) at the same time. These are a particular case of properties that, in his later analysis, he was to realise were “complementary”. One version of his idea is as follows. You would arrange for the electron to go underneath a microscope, and at the appropriate moment you would fire a photon (a particle of light) at it. With luck, the photon would be scattered into the lower lens of the microscope, so that an observer peering through the microscope would observe it’s position; immediately afterwards the electron could strike a suspended weight, and by measuring how far the weight swung one would know the electron’s momentum. Heisenberg then argued that in fact both measurements would inevitably have an error associated with them, which depended on the initial colour of the photon of light: if it was very blue the position would be accurately measured but the momentum of the electron would be randomly altered by the photon’s striking it, while if the photon was very red the reverse situation would hold.

As an argument for the uncertainty principle, the “experiment” is not very convincing, and many were quick to pick holes in it. The real argument for the complementarity lies in the mathematical structure of physical dynamics that Heisenberg had uncovered in Heligoland, and the “microscope” is best regarded as an illustration of the way this structure would play itself out in practice.

The new physics introduced through complementarity and uncertainty started a profound change in physicists’ conceptions of logic and of reality. A feature of this second stage was an emphasis on the process of observation itself. Physicists started to ask, not “what is reality?” but, “how do we observe reality?” Linking reality to particular observations started to bring in the idea that reality depended on the context, as well as the idea that logic depended on the context. (This shift has echoes of the ideas of Kantian, who revolutionised philosophy by making a similar shift of focus from what was “out there” to what we were capable of thinking. I will return to this similarity later.)

This idea had started earlier with another of Einstein's 1905 papers laying the foundations of relativity: the Satellite Navigation device in your car has to take account of this effect whenever it computes your position.

At first the change in thinking introduced by this idea was quite subtle. Before Einstein's work, scientists assumed that their subject matter was the absolute reality of the universe, and their task was to observe it without significant experimental bias and then to understand it. After Einstein, there were still many absolutes (part of Einstein's achievement was to introduce new, more robust, absolutes) but some old absolutes lost their status and became context dependent. Physicists now had to be concerned about both experimental bias (error) away from the "real value" and also context dependence which meant that there was no "real value" to look for.

Einstein's work gave a new focus to the status of observation (which does not need to have a human observer, but can be a machine like a Satellite Navigation unit). Deciding whether an aspect of nature is really absolute is not just a philosophical issue; it also requires a careful study of what methods you might use to measure this aspect, and whether they really are independent of context.

Bohr's approach to quantum theory carried this context dependence to a new level. He realised that at the level of very small objects, context dependence dominated everything. Almost any situation offered a choice of optional contexts, where choosing one context ruled out others because the properties involved were complementary (please remember, this means “incompatible”). You could set up your observation to measure position, and that ruled out measuring momentum, and vice versa.

How does this affect “truth”? It can get us away from the “fact, fact, fact” notion of truth.

In Quantum theory, truth is context dependent. The where-when is part of the context, but there is no essential space or time. (But there is succession) It is a profoundly fluid world.

I need to mention one question hanging over all this, concerning the meaning of observation. When we shift from “what is reality?” to “how do we observe reality?” this sounds at first like an echo of Emanuel Kant. But the situations are very different: for Kant the knower was the human subject, for Bohr the observer is the human subject (assumed to be a physicist) plus her measuring apparatus. There is a real ambiguity here. Is the key part of the observation the apparatus, which is set up to define a context for the object of the observation (e.g. at atom or a flash of light); or is the key part the human subject who originates the choice of context, within which the object of the observation is the combination of the apparatus and the atom being examined (or whatever). And what happens if we are considering ordinary life, where there are no such things as “measuring apparatuses”? Is the brain a quantum system, and if so, does it matter? The arguments around these question are still continuing today, unabated. We can discuss it later if it seems relevant.

Some years later, the mathematician Garrett Birkhoff suggested that the peculiar nature of quantum mechanics implied that it was governed by a different logic from classical physics, and he coined the phrase “quantum logic” for the system that he drew from quantum theory. It gradually became clear, however, that Birkhoff had picked the wrong system. The real logic (as Chris Isham argued) was a much wilder structure called Topos logic[12] that was specifically linked to the context dependence. The universe was to be seen as a network of contexts that differed in the precision with which they took into account different factors. A context (Isham and Butterfield call them “windows”) might survey a wide range of aspects rather roughly, or focus precisely on a very few aspects. Few truths were definite: truth was many-valued, a matter of degree, always subject to refinement or revision.

One could to some extent regain classical logic by taking very coarse measurements of a limited number of apsects – this was classical physics. Or one could allow truth-values to get more and more complex and nuanced until one reached the “truth object” which was a synoptic compilation of all the potentiality present in the universe.

But what does this really imply for our lives?

Contexts accompany the assertions of consciousness – my small “I am” that is a fragment of the One I Am repeatedly, in Hopkins words, “selves”.

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.[13]

Each selving of mine is a creative act that brings into being something of this universal potentiality, within a dynamic interplay between all beings. True creativity is found in love, which is the extending of my selving into a a greater whole with another being or beings. In love we step into an open clearing greater than either one of us, where the context opens out beyond our individual vision. There is no time in this dynamic: the physicist John Wheeler described how the entire structure of the universe is created, from its very start, by the selving of the beings who will be produced by that structure.

The rational logic of the whole, as it manifests in each individual context, defines the possibility for the selving of the associated being – a selving that is fully from the implicational level and transcends all logic.

The eyes of love perceive the value of every beloved, and so my actions, in so far as they are at all based on this discernment, will be actions of justice – in the sense of uniting my own being with the right of an Other to express its own self. As Hopkins continues:

Í say móre: the just man justices;

Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--

Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.