Truth in the Age of Technology

"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?"

This question is usually asked before testifying in court. It's personally very interesting, considering it implies all the ways one could lie in court.

We have, of course, straight up telling factual lies. Irrefutable, unfailing lies, or what we would call, 'not the rational truth'. Calling the sky green, saying 2+2=5, and writing about how the moon is made of cheese and rainbow sprinkles, these are things that are provably, objectively false—but are they really?

Once you start digging deeper, you realize that it might be hard to even define what a 'rational truth' might entail, especially if you compare it with its 'opposite'—what one would call an 'empirical truth'.

Empirical truths, simply put, are truths that are verified through experience. This means that it is subjective, or that it can be different for everyone involved.

The facts I have relayed above seem like factual, immutable truths, but there are some senses in which we can say that they're subjective. Is the sky always not green? Color is just how humans interpret the wavelengths of light, and there isn't even a guarantee that my blue is the same as your blue—the concept of qualia.

You might say that 2+2=5 is mathematically wrong, but even math was defined on axioms, rules that mathematicians set themselves to make sure that all computations remain consistent. Axioms are arbitrary, so would that mean they are factual or empirical? We even have an axiom, the axiom of choice, that is not used by default even if it proves a lot of theorems solely because it does not play nice with other axioms.

Does setting your own rules count as 'experience'?

Going back to the court oath, another way to lie is implied by 'the whole truth', which prevents what we normally call 'lying by omission'. It's a more complex way to lie, because technically you can say you never told a lie, but withholding facts can still paint an incomplete picture that would not be helpful to anyone.

Related to these are 'half truths', lies that have a hint of truth to them—exaggerations, red herrings, and understatements.

With all these different ways to lie, what even is the truth?

This is most prevalent in today's situation, with how social media and the Internet have made it easier for news to spread. It's why we call this era the Information Age. With all the different ways to lie as mentioned above, though, it can also be called the Disinformation Age, as these tend to be weaponized to further a certain agenda, to twist history, and to spread discord.

A lot of these problems tend to stem from the fact that people keep assuming that things they see on the Internet are objective, factual truths. This goes doubly so for people with strong beliefs in something, misconstruing their subjective truth as a rational truth and using what they find in the Internet as 'evidence'.

The main quality that perpetuates this is intangibility. It's what makes history easily revised—it is not experienced by many, so the facts surrounding it can get warped into a half-truth, a lie. The same goes for the things spread through the Internet, as most of the news are not personally experienced by its users.

With that lack of experience, people are forced to believe or not to believe, which allows their irrational ideas to bias them towards a specific conclusion.

All this is only expedited by the introduction of generative AI, which allowed bots to masquerade as human users, and which allowed photos to be fabricated and voice clips to be faked. They come hand in hand with the lack of rationality that comes with disinformation campaigns.

In the end, the only way we could discern the truth, in or out of the Internet, is to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism and rationality when presented with either facts or 'facts'.

Of course, you reap what you sow, so to help the informational environment recover, you must not only be willing to see the truth, but also tell the truth.