I saw a thin book at the library by Werner Hertzog, The Future of Truth, that caught my eye and spent a few hours today reading it. It’s not really a coherent book: it’s a series of reflections an anecdotes, often interesting and occasionally provocative, that are loosely about “truth” as we move into the age of AI. I enjoyed reading it and found it time well spent.
It reminded me a bit of the first class in philosophy I ever took. (Note that Werner very specifically denies his is a book of philosophy). The professor of my undergraduate philosophy class asked us to write similar undirected essays, however. I really struggled with the class during the first half of the semester. I had no idea what to write. I was used to writing to achieve some purpose and with no direction I wasn’t sure what to write. I definitely failing the class at that point. But then I discovered what to do: I could just write bullshit. I started writing a torrent of bullshit and turning it in. The professor was ecstatic. In the end, I think I got a C in the class. It probably was as useful as any class I took as an undergraduate, though I can’t point to any other really specific thing I learned in the class.
Actually, that’s not true. He also clued me into the importance of feelings. As a child of a scientist, I had a tendency to think of empirical science as the best source of truth about the world. My father, when he was teaching introductory biology would ask his students about to undertake the dissection of a cat to determine the sex of their specimen. When they asked how to do that, he put the questions back to them, “How should we decide? Should we vote? Why don’t you have everyone in your group vote.” Then he would direct them to dissect the cat and inspect whether it had testes or ovaries, as a lesson in empirically finding things out, rather than other means. But, of course, as a society we do use voting — for example, on juries — to determine truth. And feelings, as broad integrators of how we weigh up all of the evidence, end up being key.
When I was a doctoral student, I took another philosophy class. I was really ready for it then and immersed myself in the history of philosophy of science. It was taught by a young woman who had been a practicing, tenured biochemist. She decided to leave it all behind and went back and got another PhD in philosophy and was starting over to get tenure again. (Tragically, she passed away from breast cancer scant years later). Her office was at the other end of the hall from my office, so I would walk down frequently to chat with her. One day, I told her about my brother’s friend who liked to read the bible. He said it was important because it contained the true words of Jesus as well as a bunch of other nonsense. But that he could tell which were the things that Jesus actually said. She applauded my use of this rhetorical device. But I assured her that, no, this person actually existed.
The book is a bit uneven. One chapter is a single page about a pig that got stuck in drain. Another chapter is a single paragraph of two sentences. It meanders through history and personal experience, from opera to film, from America to Europe, from Rome to Potempkin Villages. From fraud to ChatGPT.
A lot is about people’s intentions and goals. He describes many instances of people using small lies to reveal a greater truth, which he distinguishes from people deceiving themselves or seeking to deceive others.
I had an undergraduate student once who couldn’t understand students not knowing what they wanted to do. He knew exactly what he wanted to do and had been striving toward it for his whole university career. I pointed out that it required a lot of courage to really pursue your dreams. Some students might know what they wanted to do, but be too afraid to actually try because, if they failed, they would have lost their dream. If they never really tried, they could go through their life telling themselves they really could have been an astronaut or whatever, if they’d really tried. He thought that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. In the end, rather than doing the thing he’d always wanted to do, he found a completely different kind of profession and seemed very happy.
Toward the end, Werner looks at the implications of generative AI and deepfakes on our growing inability to distinguish truth from falsehood. He tries to balance the amazing things that AI can do in specialized domains with it’s undermining our ability to distinguish fact from fiction.
In the end, his main conclusion is that truth ultimately isn’t something that can be apprehended by people. But the striving for it is essential. He advocates spending more time walking on foot, out in the world. And reading books — like his no doubt. No lie there.
