Understanding Truth

Absolute truth is a curious subject, because it either exists or it doesn't. On the one hand, we would like to think there is an absolute Truth, because we want to be able to justify our beliefs. But on the other, we like to think it doesn't exist, because there are so many candidates vying for the title of absolute Truth, and we would like to think they all have a chance of being right. After all, who are we, as subjective human beings, to suppose we know which of these candidates is the real thing?

But there is an even bigger problem if such an absolute truth doesn't exist. We not only cannot justify our beliefs, but we cannot justify our actions. There are some actions which are a matter of instinct and which we don't, on some level, control. These are not the actions I am talking about. I am referring to the actions that we have time to think about and contemplate. Or the actions we think of as ideal. These actions fit into a belief structure and are a consequence of it. What we think about the world, our world view, gives us ideals and tells us what is immoral. If we each lived alone and did not interact with one other, a justification for our actions would not be necessary, because our particular beliefs would affect only ourselves. But of course, this is not the way things are. Inevitably, there is an interaction between people, and these interactions require us to make choices that affect other people. It is this way that our beliefs interact and are forced into conflict.

To settle these conflicts, we must appeal to some outside source of judgment. Because, as each of us is subjective, we cannot hope to be the objective judge of our disagreements. Immediately, this poses a problem. If some absolute Truth does not exist, then what do we use as a guide toward resolution? How are we to all agree that the resolution is fair and just?

The implications of a Truth-less world are quite astounding. Each person would be free and justified to do what they wished and there would be no possible way to judge them. All of the vices of the world, stealing, killing, rape would be acceptable. What could we possibly use to justify it is wrong? If a particular person's own understanding of the world included murder as acceptable, then there would be no outside entity upon which to escape, because a condemnation of murder would require use of some moral philosophy applying not just to the murderer, but to everyone. The very act of judging is a profession of faith in some absolute Truth.

I emphasize the idea of Truth because it permeates our lives. We must, at some point, latch on to a concept of what is good and right in the world. And, whatever is good, we must believe in it. We must believe that it is reality and this reality applies to everyone. To muddle up this point would be to undermine your beliefs.

Here is where we must confront my objection above, that, although such a Truth might exist, we cannot distinguish it from many, often conflicting, candidate Truths. How are we to pick from the alternatives? The answer to this question is difficult, of course. But let me propose a different, perhaps easier, question. From which alternatives should we not pick?

As I have explained above, justification is of absolute importance and is one of the most important implications of Truth. So we must make sure that, whatever source of Truth we believe is right, it is capable of justifying itself. The last part is critical. Although we may posses a particular source of Truth, if that source does not objectively justify itself, we are not done. We must seek toward the essence of its justification.

Let me be clear with an example. Suppose we were to write down a set of Truth statements:

1. This sentence and the next sentence are true.
2. The above sentence is not true.

This set of truth statements presents a paradox, because it is positively unstable. This mean that as you move down the statements positively (from 1. to 2.) you are presented with a statement bringing you out of the set. The second statement justifies itself by the first, but yet nullifies the first statement's truth claim. This would be a poor choice of a source of Truth.

Consider a different set of Truth statements:

1. The next sentence is true.
2. The above sentence is true.


This set is stable, because once you decide they contain truth, there is no way to get out. The first sentence finds its justification from the second, and vice versa. Although these set of Truths are poor (they have no application outside themselves), at the very least, you don't find yourself in a paradox.

There is a third set of Truth statements that can be proposed. These are negatively unstable, and result from an incomplete set, such as:

1. The next sentence is true.
2. This is a sentence about truth.

The second sentence might indeed be about truth. For this question, we see the first sentence. But then we ask, why is the first sentence true? There is no way to tell. For this, we need some higher sentence giving justification to the whole set, but we find it doesn't exist. As we move backward (this time from 2. to 1.) we are brought out of the set, searching for the prime argument. Negatively unstable Truths are sets of possible truths, because although they might contain truth, they cannot justify themselves. We must seek on.

With this in mind, consider these truth statements:

1. Anything that is true must have physical, verifiable evidence.
2. The sun is a star.
3. Gravity is a force between bodies of matter.
4. Diseases are caused by microbes
...

And so on. We could put all of science inside this set if we had the space. Any of the truths inside this set are easily justifiable by the first. We know the sun is a star and not some other ball of light because we have physical evidence. The whole idea of science depends upon physical evidence. But how do we justify the first sentence? We cannot use it to justify itself because there is no physical, verifiable way to show that everything that is true has physical evidence. Indeed, this set of statements is negatively unstable.

This is the great fallacy of scientific atheism (or scientism), the particular brand of atheism that supposes God is not a possibility because there is no evidence. It sets itself up for instantaneous error. No doubt the draw of atheism is that it relieves all questions about which Truth is right and puts judgments in the highest realm of human achievement, namely science. Simultaneously, however, atheists cannot justify their actions. They may appeal to science and evidence, but it doesn't matter. Why do their judgements apply to anyone else? Why do I have to listen to what they say? There is no answer for these questions.

The objection to the claim of negative instability must be about sentence 1. Not that science can somehow justify itself, because it can't, but that it is self-evident. In other words, of course if we have evidence for something it is true! But this is not the case, because evidence does not interpret itself. Data does not fall off of trees to become facts. Science is a human endeavor in which humans participate together to form some consensus. It is this consesus we call facts, but we do not have a method of justifying why a particular consensus is True. Scientists, although it might not always be apparant, are people too. Even in groups.

How scientific atheism continues, I do not know. I understand the draw of it, because I was wrapped up in it myself for a long period of time. But ultimately, it cannot satisfy. Atheism is a world without justification, and this is why I had to reject it. It is only through the power of God that science takes on any life. God is the zeroth statement. He provides the justification for why we, as humans, might be able to understand the world at all.

It was this thought process that led me to the Catholic faith. Although I cannot prove that Catholism is, in fact, the Truth, its particular brand of philosophy and theology at least has the property that it is stable. Catholicism can always justify itself because the Church, the living presence of God in the world, constantly affirms that it is the source of Truth. But that is not enough to explain my conversion, because Catholicism also simply makes sense of the world in a way that corresponds to reality. Morality, love, humanity itself all make sense through Catholicism in a way I did not think was possible.

But of course the other implication of Truth is that if it is real, you must align yourself with it. It is foolish to believe in a particular Truth and then to ignore it, however frightening embracing it might be. This is my journey now, as I come to understand and integrate this Truth into my life.

A Review of Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life

Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life by John Adams

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
It is common practice to compare a composer's prose with his music. Milton Babbitt essays are just as thorny as his music. Subordinate clauses intermingle together until the true meaning of his sentences are lost. Morton Feldman composed music of amazing quiet and solitude, yet he was notoriously loud and extroverted in person. And somehow his writings allows these two personalities to coexist, so that his absurd and clever humor somehow touches you deeply. John Cage's writings are almost more important than his music. Elliott Carter speaks and writes with immense practicality, even though he writes some of the most impractically difficult music around. In short, a composer's own words can tell you a lot or nothing at all. I was anxious to read John Adams' memoir for these reasons.



I am a devout follower of John Adams career ever since I picked up Harmonium in the late 90's. Here was music that appealed to both sides of my brain, and it contained something that was distinctly American. It was new music, but yet it seemed so obviously derivative. Part of me suspected that Adams is a genius, but another part thought the music was inevitable. Someone was bound to meld the modern and minimalist. But Adams did it in a way only an American could, and for that he deserves his place as composer laureate.



Adams starts with the usual stories of childhood. They are typically American. He has the immigrant grandfather, the mother from the broken home, the parents who met at a dance, and the bohemian search for the American dream. These stories are told with color and insight. Who would have thought that Adams plopped down next to Duke Ellington in the middle of a dance set? He tells us that he learned orchestral warhorses by air conducting and he is unashamed of being a clarinet prodigy.



His time at Harvard is equally interesting. He expresses the often heard struggle of being trapped in a modernist world, yet yearning to compose accessible music. He even tells us of his adventures in taking acid (he seems to remember the details of his trips almost too well). But these stories seem typical of any composer of the time. He led certain student ensembles and conducted certain operas. Sometimes a particular piece of music would teach him something. Even a mediocre composer can tell you stories like these. Between the lines, however, there is a sense that he was up to something. He seemed to be leading the best student orchestras and conducting the hardest music. Adams was determined to become great. When he explains his experiments with tape and early synthesizers, he lets us know that he was a singular figure.



The most famous moment of Adams career is his trek across the continent. Even the shortest biography of Adams must include that he was trained on the east and, unsatisfied, made the journey in his beat up VW to the west in search of artistic freedom. For a composer who has weaved the coastal artistic dogmas so well, how could anything seem more appropriate? But it was Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise who first let us on to the reality of this journey. Adams, unemployed and having read Cage's Silence, decided to go to California not to change the world, but to leave his own. Ironically this great American sojourn westward was made via Canada. Adams seemed as likely to become a washup as the next great composer.



These transformative years of Adams' life are what really interested me. We get to understand why he gave up modernism, why he took up minimalism, and then why he ultimately become unsatisfied. He gives us most of the details. He describes writing his early experimental music and his first mature pieces Phrygian Gates, Wavemaker and Shaker Loops. But by this time he already sounds like Adams. I am left disappointed. Where did this voice come from?



The rest of the chapters are typical composer fair, sort of extended liner notes. Some of the them are more interesting than others, particularly his chapter of The Death of Klinghoffer. This opera eluded me prior to reading his comments; I had been unaware of the great poetry present in the work. No doubt different chapters may speak to others in this way. He goes into specific detail about Harmonielehre, Nixon, the Violin Concerto, the Chamber Symphony, El Nino, Doctor Atomic and his latest opera, A Flowering Tree. Some of these pieces get full chapters. Other pieces, most curiously Hallelujah Junction, are left out completely. Adams mentions Slonimsky and his earbox concept in passing, but we will never know about Slonimsky's Earbox.



Reading, it is obvious that Adams, the jetset composer/conductor, wrote these chapters in short bursts. Chapters are self-contained and seldom refer to each other. Often Adams repeats himself, telling us the same story twice. This usually works against the book, except in the case of one of the later chapters. Adams writes a full chapter on his use of electronics, and he speaks will real authority, as a composer who has taken advantage of the medium. I never quite understood why he was so obsessed with synthesizers until now.



So Adams, as one of the most loved living composers, has done us a real service with a memior. Before this there wasn't a real biography of his life (so far), except for the patchwork of Thomas May's book. I am glad to have read it, and I will admit that my appreciation for him has only grown.


View all my reviews.

The Unschedule

In a previous post, I talked about how procrastinators don't know how to tell time. Their internal clock is often skewed toward perfect circumstances. And it is remarkable how long, in real time, tasks can take. But even knowing how long things take doesn't fully solve the problem.

The trouble is that to most procrastinators, work is life. When they are not working, they feel guilty. They shouldn't be checking their email, they should be writing. Going out to the movies is impossibly painful, they have work to do! Life's pleasures are experienced, but not enjoyed. In other words, they can smell the roses, but good luck getting them to stop. The overwhelming guilt, however, can be eliminated, but the cure is counterintuitive. Procrastinators feel guilty when they should be having fun because they were having "fun" when they should have been working. Work time eats into play time. So the cure is to treat play time the way you treat work time.

When a procrastinator looks at his schedule, all he sees is work. Meeting at 5pm. Write paper. Cook dinner. Take out garbage. The schedule becomes overwhelming as the procrastinator wonders, "When am I going to have time to play?". The solution, then, is often "NOW!". He undoubtedly thinks his future self will be a miserable wreck with all that work, so why shouldn't he take a little break now? This is the rationalization of procrastination.

But consider, instead, a schedule filled only with play. Watch movie. Go for a walk. Read book. Take a nap. The procrastinator might look at that schedule and scratch his head. "When am I going to get work done?" The answer is precisely when he is not watching the movie or taking the walk. The trick is to schedule fun things and then stick to it. If a procrastinator, who naturally waits until the last minute, wants to watch a 2 hr movie and sees that he only has 2 hrs to finish instead of 4, then that pressure to finish comes sooner. And if he gets done before the movie, then he can watch in peace.

This technique, known as the Unschedule, has helped me immensely. I would not be writing this blog post if I didn't take the time to schedule it. Before the week starts, I take the time to make sure I have fun things scattered throughout. I never schedule work, I just know when I have to do it.

Relaxing, when done right, is just as important as working.

Letting Go

Procrastinators feel like they need to do more. There is an overwhelming urge that something is being left undone. Perfectionism can often be at fault, because tasks are never completely finished if they must be perfect.

Often, though, this feeling seeps into other's tasks as well. Perfectionists love to judge others to make themselves feel adequate about their own imperfections. They'll shout out anytime someone cuts them off on the highway, they'll scoff at another's attempt to give a speech, or they look callously down as some imbecile tries to file the papers the wrong way. Whatever the task, they know how to do it, not just better, but the best way.

Procrastination in my own life has been shaded by these feelings. I often get upset as I look on at other people, who, for whatever reason, are doing their job poorly. I have an innate need to tell them how to do their job better. Usually my sensibilities get the better of me and I keep my mouth shut, but I know that these thoughts color my conversations, and it is hard for me to delegate tasks to others and trust they will be done without my help. These feelings create much of the needless stress in my life.

Without realizing it, I came across my own solution. For a moment, while walking to work, I glimpsed the world in a different way. Instead of seeing myself as a virtual center of the world around me, I saw myself as a little cog in a huge machine of life. Cars flew by me. People walked on their way to some destination. A delivery man carried boxes into a door. Someone was mowing the lawn across the street. A lady pulled her dog close by and out of the bushes. The world was happening all around me, and for the first time I felt comfortable not knowing how it happened. I only needed to concern myself with my destination and anything that happened directly to me along the way. I could trust the world that if I did my job I could trust it.

But then the feeling was gone. Why was he mowing the lawn like that?

It was enough, however, to let me know how to get to that good place again. When I am feeling overwhelmed, I am astonished how much better I feel when I just tell myself to let go and concern myself with only my personal responsibilities.

I have taken this idea and worked it into my routine. I am much more realistic about what I can and cannot do in a day and I limit myself to only those pursuits that will truly benefit me directly, not so that I can try to change the world.

The 4th Dimension

An often easy way to tell if someone is a procrastinator is by comparing the amount of time he thinks he will take to complete a task with the real completion time. Invariably procrastinators underestimate the time needed. The report just takes an hour. Driving across town just takes 5 minutes. Writing an email just takes a couple seconds. The procrastinators' concept of time has permeated our communication so deeply that when someone tells you he will "only be a minute", we have no firm idea of how much time will elapse. A procrastinator, however, tells this to himself. He consistently shortchanges time in his mind so that he always feels rushed, creating what Neil Fiore calls the "Sorry I'm Late" syndrome.

Like many causes of procrastination, perfectionism is at the heart of the expected vs. actual time disjoint. Perhaps if there is no traffic and you never hit a red light, you can make it across town in 5 minutes. Or if you are inspired and don't run into any distractions, the report will only take an hour. In other words, if the stars align and the world miraculously achieves the right circumstances, then the perfectionist could achieve his goal in the expected time. The perfectionist lives in an idealized world in which everything is centered around him.

If you are a procrastinator, the first step to overcoming the time disjoint is to measure yourself and see how long you really spend on your tasks. The difference between expected time and actual time can be astounding. It is very important to gain an intuition into your personal work and play habits. As you become more aware, you will notice that you start earlier because, almost always, the world isn't perfect.

Simply knowing how long your tasks take, however, is only part of the solution. Usually coupled with an unrealistic idea of completion time is an unrealistic idea of available time. I will address this problem specifically in a future post and its solution, the Unschedule.

Burn out recovery

It was bound to happen.

I have been on a journey to eliminate procrastination and increase productivity in my life. Initially it was very easy to push myself and get work done. In fact, there were points when I had to make myself stop working. Counting only focused, uninterrupted time, in one week I had worked over 20 hours. Last semester, however, I was proud of myself for working only a few hours a day. Obviously I had gone through a paradigm shift in work ethic, but it was too much too soon.

This past week I worked about 10 good hours. I was horribly tired almost all the time. I made it worse with multiple cups of coffee, so that I was both anxious and drowsy. I simply couldn't work. I made myself go to the gym, but it physically hurt to ride the stationary bike or work out on the elliptical machine. I almost lost consciousness when I tried to lift weights. I decided to skip the gym but overslept until the afternoon.

I had all the signs; I was exhausted.

For the next few days, I uncontrollably went into recovery mode. I didn't care about getting work done, watching what I ate, working out, or accomplishing anything. I slept and pigged out all day, ending up five pounds heavier. In retrospect, I can see it was like a vacation from myself, revisiting the person I used to be. If I let myself go, I would gain five pounds a week and get nothing done. I was scared I would be unable to get back to a healthy, productive life.

Luckily I have safety nets to help me get back on track. Even though I ate poorly, I logged all of my foods. This helped me see that I couldn't hide what I was eating. I also discovered I was running away from work because I had to accept some of my research had failed. Realizing, however, that I can only move forward, I identified the first step I could take in a new direction and made a plan of the goals I want to accomplish. Suddenly, the burden was lifted.

One of my goals now is to take it easy and focus on integrating productivity into my life, not by wildly flailing myself into work, but by taking small steps. I want to evaluate more often what is working. I can change my plan if it seems too rough. Then, hopefully, I can catch burn out before it happens.

"Time Management"

With the news today of the death of Tim Russert, it reminds me of an amazing story I recently read about. Randy Pausch is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who is documenting his fight against cancer. He has a best selling book called The Last Lecture which is his last testament to young children based upon a lecture he gave about lessons on life.

But he is most proud of his lecture called "Time Management". As a man who will die young, he has a unique perspective on living life to its fullest.