Is confirmation bias the only way of finding truth?

Or is truth intangible?

Sitting in a railway carriage that is standing in a busy city station, one can happen to find oneself alongside another train. The two trains are awaiting their respective departure times and, when the one releases its brakes to head out of the station, it can take a few seconds for you to realise which of the two trains is actually moving: the adjacent train, or your own.

Image: two adjacent trains at Newton Stewart station in Scotland, circa 1900.

It is other, initially extraneous, factors that will be called upon to confirm or deny your impression that the one train or the other is underway. The only thing that you know for certain in the initial few seconds is that one of you is moving. When the end of the other train comes and your now unrestricted view of the platform it was standing at is unchanged, you know it was the other train that moved. If you feel your own carriage rock over the points, you know it’s you that’s moving. What was previously an extraneous factor, after playing a prime role in your assessment of your situation, recedes back into its realm of extraneousness.

I suppose that serendipitous occurrences, like Newton’s apple falling onto his bonce or Fleming’s mould sparking the idea of penicillin, are moments when the extraneous becomes the core subject of enquiry: why does an apple fall to Earth? Why does this mould attack pathogens? Confirming their passage from extraneousness to intrinsicality can be an arduous journey. Not because, say, society rejects the idea that apples fall from trees; but because society rejects your explanation of why apples fall from trees, which relates more to why the sun rises in the east and sets in the west than to the process by which fruit ripens in the autumn. However, if I were to posit that the habit of trees to throw off their fruits is so intrinsically tied up with the Earth’s passage over 365 days around its orbit of the sun, your conclusion would be one of three: (i) the two are happy coincidences; (ii) trees have adapted so as to flourish best when there is gravity; (iii) the interaction of the two phenomena is proof positive of the existence of God, for only a divine hand could contrive such happy coincidences.

That is, in large measure, the problem with the two railway carriages. The whole reason the confusion arises is because of the passenger’s sensations. Their senses tell them they are not moving, when they are; or that they are moving, when they’re not. And they will reach out to hitherto unimportant factors in order to confirm or deny what it is in fact that they are sensing.

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Galileo was not a rich man: he had impecunious siblings who constituted a burden on his finances: the drive to invent things was great. As is well known, he built a telescope, with which he looked at the heavens; he wrote a book about what he saw up there and his conclusions annoyed the Catholic church, which brought him more problems than even the most impecunious of siblings could have ever wrought.

Galileo’s telescopes were popular among Venetian traders and, if he had limited himself to selling his telescopes just to merchants and seafarers, he’d have courted far less trouble with the church. The ability to look far out to sea and recognise the provenance of ships as they made their way to Venice enabled traders to fix prices before the relevant goods hit the market. It was a matter that Galileo would have viewed as extraneous to his development of telescopes but, if he had gone full-scale into this aspect of his invention, he might have been in safer waters, even if he would not have developed his heliocentric theory of the solar system.

The heliocentric theory says that, instead of, as the church had taught, the Earth being at the centre of the universe, it is in fact the sun that is at the centre (of the solar system), with the Earth and everything else circulating around it. In simple terms, Galileo’s telescope was used to show that, because the sun rises in the east and describes an arc across the sky to the west before setting, the Earth revolves around the sun. He is right: this observation proves that one of the two rotates around the other. But, in and of itself, it doesn’t prove that the Earth goes around the sun because, even if the reverse were true, the observations by a telescope-user actually located on either of the spheres would be exactly the same. At which point, as in the case of the two railway trains, the observer needs to search out extraneous evidence to confirm or deny their suspicions.

Clearly, what we now know as confirmation bias can play a role in this, even when contemplating why it is that we engage in the smallest rites and rituals we go through. Whilst the rationales for washing our hands after visiting the lavatory, fastening our seat belts when driving a car and measuring the baking powder we put in our cake mix are all very present in our minds, we tend to think less of manual hygiene when travelling on an escalator, less about why we shouldn’t release our seat belts on aircraft before the terminal has been reached, or why it’s less important to weigh the carrots you put into a stew.

Just how crassly one person’s view of their confirmed world can come up against another’s is offered in the film The Aviator, Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrayal of Howard Hughes. At one point he visits a bathroom in a public place and carefully washes his hands, being, as he was, a germophobe. When he turns to exit, he sees that the door is fitted not with a handle but with a knob, and opens inwards. Virtual panic enters the man’s mind as he finds that his phobia has trapped him in the bathroom. His quandary is resolved after a minute, when another gentleman enters the bathroom, helpfully opening the door for Hughes in so doing.

In the above post from a couple of years ago, I mused on the former belief by American First Nations that a photograph encapsulated a part of their soul. Some say the belief of First Nations was simply a silly superstition. One can perhaps understand how the fact of seeing oneself as one is, but frozen in time in a snapshot, quickly led those unfamiliar with the technology to the conclusion that, “If this piece of paper shows me, as I am, then I, as I am, must be contained in this piece of paper. How else can it be?”Nonetheless, the concept of incorporating animate life within an inanimate object is not so outlandish as one might at first think (human beings are the classic and most obvious example—absent animate life, we are, in the end, inanimate). However, to begin with, the indigenous peoples of America will have been as wary of—to them—incomprehensible technologies as we ourselves are in the modern world (escalators or driverless cars are cases in point), so, aside from deeper belief, who can blame them?

I was once given a medallion of Saint Thomas More, and, I’m reliably assured, it has been blessed by the Pope. Why, I wonder? Why was it blessed and why was it sold to the man who gifted me it as having been blessed by the Pope? Will it confer greater saintly protection for having been blessed, or will that augmented protection come only from my knowing it has been blessed? Is a blest medallion of more worth than an unblest one? Or is it like sugar in your tea: would you like a blessing with that, sir?

I also have a flagon of water from Lourdes, also gifted to me, which, again, I am assured, will never fade in colour or taste. If my faith in God can really make this water perform something that defies scientific rationality (i.e. miraculous), would these miracles be absent if my faith were less strong? Is water from Lourdes like, say, water from Perrier: c’est fou!

I have heard talk of Haitian vodou rites that involve similar or comparable symbolism. Perhaps even symbolism that extends beyond the idea of a token representation (such as a statue of Saint Peter might be viewed) to the notion of a vessel capable of acting as a receptacle for man’s hopes and desires, and maybe even influencing them outwith his own volition.

Those who take communion in the Catholic church receive the body and blood of Christ, which trans-substantiates within their bodies as they consume them. This fundamental part of the catechism constitutes a ground to at least ask whether the existence of a belief in the mind of another person is ground enough to admit of its reality in fact; because there is always something that each and every one of us cannot explain except by bias towards a confirmation, which, like it or not, we shroud in a cape of indisputability, rationality, truth.

In the 1992 film A Few Good Men, we have the classic courtroom confrontation between Tom Cruise, as prosecuting counsel Kaffee, and Jack Nicolson, as the witness Jessup. Kaffee asks Jessup why, if orders are always followed in the marine corps (otherwise men get killed), and if Jessup had ordered that no harm should come to Santiago (the victim of the crime in question), the officer had ordered Santiago to be moved off base, since an order not to harm the man would arguably be followed to the letter, by Jessup’s way of thinking. In response to Kaffee’s challenge of I want the truth, Jessup famously barks out, “You can’t handle the truth!”

Words like truth and lies are bandied about on a daily basis, and the truth is that no one can handle the truth, not even Mr Jessup, because the truth is elusive and cannot be grasped, let alone handled. In courts of law, we don’t seek truth, we seek enough truth. So, if we can admit of a belief in something intangible that is inherently unprovable, and hold to it as a truth despite being unprovable, the only evidence that will persuade us one way or the other is that which we ourselves see as central to our assessment (and which, by extension, no end of others will confirm as being simply extraneous). Accordingly, there is no truth that can even be achieved, let alone handled; and if there is no truth, there is then no lie, at least none that remains untainted by our own inexorable capacity to lie, most effectively to ourselves in defining the basis on which we evaluate our world and those around us. To dismiss American First Nations as uneducated, on the grounds that they may have believed in this theft of their souls within photography’s camera obscura is to halt our enquiry of the insubstantial aspects of our world at their very threshold. Uneducated was perhaps what the First Nations were; but unknowing?

The notion that water from a holy shrine in the town of Lourdes holds miraculous powers is far from outlandish, therefore. For, at what point does a symbol transmute into a talisman? And at what point into a thing invested with its own life? After all, vampire slayers set great store in the repellent qualities of garlic and crosses (or are these simply outward expressions of inner, steadfast belief? Is miraculous power in fact a product of belief, and of belief alone?)

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Incidentally, we live in an age when the right to protest peacefully requires to be fought for from behind an anonymising mask: because of the presence of photography. Which is why the right to protest needs to be fought for.