Admiring the garden, wee Katie from two doors down was suddenly alarmed by a flying insect with black and yellow stripes all over its body. But this was not a wasp, it was a fly, eager to gather nectar from the flowers and thereby perform the ‘ecosystem service’ of pollination. It’s set of markings, an effective deception for this harmless fly, is what semiotics specialists call a sign - a sign of danger, that putting it bluntly, was a lie. Misinformation is a very well established strategy in the Darwinian struggle among organisms. Many viruses and cancer cells masquerade as legitimate parts of the body to evade immune defences and we all know the sly deception of cuckoos. Then there are those subordinate male salmon that fein the disinterest of eunuchs, only to surreptitiously fertilise the eggs when dominant males are chivalrously competing for the right to replicate. Deception is literally a way of life.
How can disinformation be detected? The only way is with additional, and truthful, information: the tell-tale signs that you are being deceived are what the deceiver doesn’t want you to know. Lies are revealed by the contradiction - the logical incongruity - between what you are being told and what you already know. Logic is the foundation for objective truth because logic is the the only set of rules that information must obey. Indeed, information is made out of logic: its element, the binary bit, the on and off, the presence and absence, is necessarily a mutually exclusive dichotomy and every kind of information is constructed by combining dichotomies using the basic operations of logic (AND, OR, and NOT). That is true of the information carried in DNA, and in the mind of a philosopher or a traffic warden, not just a computer.
Information matters because it determines the outcome of decisions made by autonomous systems (especially people). An autonomous system is one that can act of its own accord and is therefore a source of causation.
The power of information
The most fundamental kind of decision is one made, unconsciously, thousands of times a second in every living cell (even in bacteria). It is a comparison between the state of affairs perceived (e.g. by chemoreceptors on a cell’s surface) and the ideal, hoped for, optimal state, internally represented as a set-point for homeostasis (where the familiar analogy of a thermostat is relevant). Inside the cell, biochemical signals implement a simple algorithm. < Is it too much ? Then take action to reduce it > (and vice-versa). The comparison is essentially logic: “it is too much” = True and “it is not too much” = False. But truth and false are notions that only make sense in the context of interpretation and interpretation is necessarily the act of an agent. The information that starts as a physical state of affairs (e.g. the pH of the surroundings) and just is; gains a normative value by interpretation (comparison with the set-point). Interpretation by an agent confers to information both value and causal power because a decision depends on it. The element of information is binary and the element of meaning is dichotomy between truth and falsehood. I believe there is a deep intrinsic relationship between these two: the element of information is transformed into the element of meaning by the elemental form of interpretation that is logical comparison [1]. These processes are natural phenomena, as solid as physics.
Denial of information
But then came an extraordinary intellectual movement with a revolutionary claim - that there is no such thing as objective reality, logic is only a ‘tool for the oppressor’ and truth is relative and subjective.
Now, I dare say the original authors of this academic posture were well meaning and careful to delineate the scope of application to philosophical questions on the nature of reality. Originally, they (hypothetically) denied the existence of objective reality to examine an extension of Hume’s radical empiricism -- we do not know anything, we only detect and respond to what seem to be ‘regularities’ in our perceptions. But as so often with an intellectual model, their thought experiment was seised by self-interest groups who made it reality, not a question, but an imperative, applied to the point of absurdity: they have made it a dogma*.
That dogma is postmodernism, a doctrine that says there is no objective truth, only my truth and your truth - everything is relative and subjective. For the fashionable** postmodernist, science is just one point of view, competing with others of equal validity … like spiritualism and superstition. Perhaps they should restrict themselves to medieval medicine and horse transport. In self-contradiction (but remember, they reject logic), postmodernists set themselves up as the impartial critics of all ideologies except their own, claiming they are all equally valid. Let them see how that goes down in Russia and Iran.
Ironically, this creed, brewed in the caldron of left-wing sociology (specifically the Marxist view that the ‘discourse’ prevailing is that which benefits the ruling elite) is now the primary tool of their nemesis: the ‘populist right’. My truth vs. your truth. QAnon conspiracy theories and identity politics are both beneficiaries when rational thought is discarded.
Dissolving civillisation
The appalling spectacle of leading politicians deliberately and emphatically lying to us is not the worst of it. It is not even that the adoption of postmodernism has reached the point where believing in objective truth is downright antisocial and sometimes dangerous. No, the worst consequence of the postmodernist dogma is that the very foundation of civilisation is dissolved by its rejection of objective reality.
That’s quite a claim, but hear me out.
What is civilisation? At its root, just a widespread consent that giving up some autonomy to the collective is beneficial for the individual (consent, meant to exclude the coercion of dictatorships). For such consent to be freely given by rational agents (people like you and I), there must be a benefit - no society can rely solely on altruism. We give up some autonomy by adopting (i.e. internalising) a set of rules about how to behave. We can only do that if we believe that at least most people are doing the same. But how do we know? We have to trust that people are who they say they are, that they behave as they claim to behave and that institutions do what their founding documents say they are meant to do. In a post-truth world, none of that can be taken for granted, especially in the on-line world where (especially younger) people increasingly lead their public lives.
Without objective truth, we cannot be confident of any of the reasons for submitting to civilisation. If truth is whatever we want it to be, then nothing can be trusted and society degenerates into dog-eat-dog. The only way to hold it together will be coercion, either physically through threat of violence, or by the bludgeoning of repeated false information, enforced by crowd pleasing taboos denouncing dissent. Do you think this has already started?
A plea for truth
Objective truth is precious and we cannot afford to jettison it because it sometimes makes us uncomfortable. If everything is relative, then we have no constant reference point to ensure fairness and, counter to the declared intent of postmodernists, the weak will be silenced as we fall into the nightmare of slavery to arbitrary, but self-reinforcing ideologies. I am not puritanically saying we must always tell the truth, only that we should seek the objective truth and believe in it enough to understand the world around us. Then we can see each other’s ideas relative to an objective reference point and offer them the respect we hope to receive ourselves.
Of course, the way we organise society is ours to choose, if it is absurdly self-destructive, we have only ourselves to blame. But the rejection of truth in engineering (faulty signals in control systems) causes aircraft to fall out of the sky and in biology it causes potentially fatal diseases. Accepting objective reality and rejecting all that is not objectively true, enables us to understand the reasons for actions and their failures … and we can forgive that stripy hover fly for its deception.
Footnotes
*The prime example being the highly abstract notion of market equilibrium in economics, turned into dogma, it became the social Darwinism promoted by right-wing neoliberal economics. The simplifying assumptions of infinite greed and pitiless competition, originally just to make the maths easier, turned by dogma into imperatives for human society.
** with some important caveats, Baudrillard offers an honourable exception.
References
[1] Farnsworth, K.D. How Physical Information Underlies Causation and the Emergence of Systems at all Biological Levels. Acta Biotheoretica 73 (2), 6. 2025.
Image credits
Wasp mimicking hoverfly: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos (CC BY-NC, taken from Wikipedia)
Ideological politicians: There would have been a picture, from the BBC website, of Donald Trump and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to illustrate rival ideologies, but copyright for it is owned by Reuters who refused permission unless I paid them. So no picture and instead a comment that the BBC were very good when I sought permission to use their picture, but Reuters were strictly commercial. Also, of relevance here, the BBC is now trapped between the irreconcilable needs to be impartial and also to reflect the attitudes of contemporary society. In my view it is unfairly maligned for failing to do the impossible.
