💡if a tree falls in the woods....

[kesbeacon]

Is there really no point in calling things real or fake?

Every so often you see this take: we live in a post-truth era, we’ve gone beyond the dichotomy of real and fake, there’s no way to tell anymore. Most recently I came across it on Logged On’s interview about cuteness, which had some interesting takes and some that I am pretty sure I either strongly agree or strongly disagree with but don’t have the brain to deconstruct.¹

And every time, I wonder when the person having the take last went outside and stared really hard at something really tiny. Or up at the stars.

Look. I’m not here to argue that misinformation isn’t a problem; that AI generated fakery isn’t a thing; that many people don’t fake things online and IRL; etc. I’m also not here to say that there are not huge numbers of conflicting narratives about certain things; that within their own arguments postmodern scholars are invalid²; that there is such a thing as objectivity; that online is just fake; that any one person or body can arbitrate truth; etc. But I absolutely do not accept that this constitutes a post-truth world, a world with no boundaries between real and fake.

You know that entry-level ‘whoa’ question: if a tree falls in the woods with nobody to hear, does it still make a sound? Fundamentally, that’s answerable. Something is always there to hear it; the tree itself; its neighbours; the organisms living on and around it; the particles that its movement vibrates. The only way this can be in question is if you think of ‘the woods’ as an undifferentiated, disconnected, inanimate mass. (Like they might be, for instance, when procedurally generated for set dressing in a digital environment.)

Reality is a web. It’s connections. Tug on one thing, and the next follows it. You can make up a story about it, but someone else can come along and find enough evidence to interrogate that story. You can bury the evidence; that burial still testifies.

What happens online is real. That AI image is a real image, created by a very complicated machine using very complicated technology, using very real circuits and rare earth elements and water and electricity. The person who posts it and says ‘this really happened’ is lying. That lie is real. It’s still a lie.

So what’s fake? Fake is the world that one extrapolates from incorrect or fraudulent evidence. If we are asking, ‘could this fact I’ve been presented with result in the world as it exists?’, then fake is the alternate world created if the answer is no.

A conspiracy theory is a real thing that wants you to replace your belief in a real world with one in the fake world that it creates. An incorrect theory is a real thing that has mistaken a fake world for a real one. A polite lie is a real thing that aims to avoid disrupting the appearance of a fake world. A guess is a real thing that hopes that the real world will turn out to be like the fake world it creates. A novel is a real thing that invites you to believe in a fake world for a little while.

Once a fake world is created, it then cannot help but interact with the real one. Sometimes it’s an easy interaction; we know it’s fake, we take whatever we want from it and move on.

None of us are objective. Everyone thinks the world is slightly different from what it is, and most of the time you can get by. If it’s a step, it’s only a couple millimetres higher than I think it is, and I can easily clear that without even noticing. But if you get really invested in that not being a step but a flat surface, you’re going to come a-cropper.

Being able to say ‘that surface isn’t flat, it’s a step’ is important. Going out there with a stick and poking it, theorising about if it’s a step or a rock, getting a ruler and trying to measure it, is important. Even if we don’t agree.

And even if every single one of us decides it’s a flat surface and we just keep tripping over it over and over again³, there’s still a step there, and an ant crawling up it wondering why the hell the earth shakes constantly here.

So yeah, we’re not post-truth. Because that ant really doesn’t care if we’ve invented AI that can perfectly hallucinate a world in which no ants exist, if we have decided that ‘ant’ as a taxonomic category shouldn’t exist, if we have a conspiracy theory that all ants are just tenth-dimensional objects or something. It’s wildly self-centred to assume that we as a species are the only thing that can experience truth (or create fakes!) and that therefore we can destroy reality as a coherent concept. We and other animals and organisms and objects and particles will always be interacting with something.

¹ One day I’m going to actually deconstruct my opinions about cuteness. One day.

² For one thing, I simply don’t remember everything I once knew about the philosophical basis of these various postmodern, post-truth theories. So here I’m dealing strictly with the way these concepts have filtered out into the public zeitgeist.

³ Policy makers about COVID.