Truth becomes fiction

1. The couplets

In chapter 1 of the truly wonderful eighteenth century novel by Cao Xueqin known as Dream of the Red Chamber, and alternatively as The Story of the Stone, we find this (in the David Hawkes translation):

"Shi-yin took the object from him and saw that it was a clear, beautiful jade on one side of which were carved the words 'Magic Jade'. There were several columns of smaller characters on the back, which Shi-yin was just going to examine more closely when the monk, with a cry of 'Here we are, at the frontier of Illusion', snatched the stone from him and disappeared, with the Taoist, through a big stone archway above which

THE LAND OF ILLUSION

was written in large characters. A couplet in smaller characters was inscribed vertically on either side of the arch:

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;

Real becomes not-real where the unreal's real."

Then in chapter 116 (in the John Minford translation), we go back through the arch.

"On the lintel of the arch were inscribed in large characters the words:

THE PARADISE OF TRUTH

A couplet in smaller characters ran down on either side:

When Fiction departs and Truth appears, Truth prevails;

Though Not-real was once Real, the Real is never unreal."

2. Our enquiry

2.1 This post and the novel

This post takes its rise from the first couplet, and makes brief reference to the second. We shall however not analyse the couplets in their context. A huge amount has been written about Dream of the Red Chamber, to the point where there is a recognised discipline known as Redology. We do not expect to add anything within that discipline. Instead we shall make connections between the first couplet and ideas culled from elsewhere in order to find some philosophical relevance of the couplet to life. We should in any case be wary of relating what we say to the novel itself, because we shall use the English terms "truth", "fiction", "real" and "unreal" without heed to their degree of correspondence with the Chinese terms.

2.2 The relevance to life we seek

On the one hand, we have the natural sciences. These work up from physics and, importantly, keep the human perspective out of their work. Whatever they say should make sense to non-human intelligent beings just as much as to us. That is one aspect of their objectivity. And associated with that, we tend to think of the things identified by them as real.

On the other hand, we have our own experience of life. Thinking about how we live requires that we find places for our self-conception as free agents and for values that we regard as more objective than they would be if they were merely chosen by us. These are not merely moral values. They include values that indicate the nature of human flourishing and aesthetic values.

(In the middle there are the Geisteswissenschaften and the notion of Verstehen. The middle ground would certainly need to be fitted into any complete picture, but we shall not attempt to do so here. We shall concentrate on a single tension between the extremes.)

Free agency and value appear to find no place in the scientific view, except in the etiolated form of observations about the unpredictability of human conduct and about what people say to explain the things they do. Even the use of explanatory language does not on its own make the things of which people speak real in the eyes of science. The words people use may be given meaning by their being or being related to words for scientifically recognised things, or they may derive their meanings from examples of their use in relation to circumstances or conduct and from their places in a linguistic structure, but they are otherwise void of scientifically recognised content.

This is hardly satisfactory. And the problem is not to be dissolved by saying that all we need is a way to talk about our human lives in a way that makes sense to us, and adding that we can make use of all the usual human vocabulary of choice, value and the rest without conflict with our scientific knowledge because it is simply a way of speaking to which no ontological significance need be attached. We need a sense of reality, not just of making sense, in order to give our understanding of our lives the force we need to validate our actions. Non-overlapping magisteria, to borrow Stephen Jay Gould's phrase, are not enough.

Our aim here is to be inspired by the first couplet to identify a way to allow this. Our proposal is imperfect but it may be as good as we can have for now, given that integration with our scientific knowledge still appears to be some way off.

3. Truth and fiction

3.1 Types of truth

Factual truths may be everyday, such as truths about which cities are the capitals of countries. Or they may be sophisticated, such as the truths identified in fundamental physics. Such well-established truths are not liable to become fiction, whatever fiction may be thought true. The closest one gets is when science fiction describes something that violates known laws of physics, but there is no temptation to think that the known laws are fiction. We are conscious that we are being invited to suspend disbelief.

We also speak of statements having truth in them, in the sense that they capture some understanding of how life is for human beings.

While this latter sort of truth closes in on what we want to have correspond to the fiction that becomes true, so that we can make use of the first couplet, we are not quite there. We need to bring truths under this heading into a relationship with straightforward factual truth to reach what we need.

The relationship is this. There are claims about human life that from within such a life seem to be both plainly true and important. And yet straightforward albeit scientifically sophisticated facts seem to be at variance with those claims. The reality of free will and the existence of objective values are leading examples.

It is not that the scientific facts are definitely at variance with these things. There may be modifications of our notions of free will and objective value that remove incompatibilities. Indeed, philosophers have for a long time been busy devising such modifications and testing them in argument. But arguments continue, and we have not yet definitively removed the incompatibilities.

The way forward we shall propose here, in line with the first couplet, is to park the inconvenient scientific truth as though it were fiction in order to allow apparent fictions that are essential to our self-conception and our way of life to be regarded as true, and to allow scientifically dubious features of humanity to be regarded as real.

3.2 Making truth become fiction

The problem with our beliefs in free will and objective value is that we do not yet have an indubitably satisfactory way to integrate these beliefs, and therefore our self-conception, with our scientific knowledge. There is a tantalising prospect that we might one day manage such an integration. But for the time being, we must make do with a way to park those elements of our scientific knowledge that give rise to difficulty.

To see the kind of conflict that is involved, we may take free will as an example. The physical universe seems to offer us only a mixture of determinism and randomness, or maybe only determinism, depending on how one interprets quantum mechanics. And there is every reason to think that our thoughts and actions supervene on the physical. If the physical could not be different, nor could the mental. But from the inside, we have a clear sense that we freely decide what to do. And we need a reasonably strong conception of free will in order to justify our attributions of personal responsibility.

There are responses other than just giving up on free will. One response is to cut down our conception of free will to something less ambitious. This is for example what is done by compatibilists, who favour mere guidance control (Fischer, "Compatibilism"). Another response, which takes the first line of the first couplet as an invitation to treat some physical truths as fiction, is to overlook the causal closure of the physical, the principle that every physical phenomenon that has a sufficient cause has a sufficient physical cause. This is the line taken in Baron, Deliberation and Reason, chapter 2. With some such approach, the fiction of free will can become true.

(The causal closure of the physical is more of a metaphysical principle than a scientific fact, but it is enormously plausible in the light of our scientific knowledge. That knowledge keeps on growing through the identification of sufficient physical causes, and does not suggest any plausible way to find non-physical causes to invoke when there are gaps in our knowledge of physical causes.)

Another example is objective value. We feel uneasy if we are told that our values are optional social constructs that would evaporate if most of us chose to abandon them. And this is so not only for moral values, but also for values that indicate the nature of human flourishing and for aesthetic values. But there is nothing in the physical universe that looks apt to be a foundation for values.

Again, there are philosophical responses. One response is to give up on the idea of values that are independent of what we choose to think. Another response is to say that there are evolutionarily successful principles of conduct, justified by their success and thereby given more solidity than they would get from our merely choosing them. But that would leave us vulnerable to the risk that values we do hold, such as personal freedom, might turn out to be evolutionarily disadvantageous. A third response is to say that while our values may not be objective, we can legitimately regard them as objective. Here we find positions along the lines of quasi-realism. And a fourth response, encouraged by the first couplet, would be to regard as fiction the depressing claim that there was nothing independent of our thoughts on which to found our values. Thus could the fiction of objective value become true.

In pursuing this last approach, we would not need to claim that there was something magical in the physical world. Rather, we would regard as fiction the claim that only the physical and what could be built on it was objective. That claim would be in a similar position to the claim of the causal closure of the physical: not a scientific fact, but a metaphysical claim that was highly plausible in the light of our scientific knowledge. Having said that, it would be plausible for a different reason. Here, the reason would be the fact that the notion of objectivity which motivates the search for a foundation for values includes stability and non-optionality within its content. That which was not deeply embedded in our scientific understanding could all too easily be a figment of our imagination, providing an apparent foundation which would be at constant risk of collapse.

Note that in both examples, we do not actively deny what science seems to tell us. We do not deny the causal closure of the physical, or the lack of anything that looks apt to be a foundation for value. Rather, we overlook these annoying facts. This does mean that we have to allow for a degree of mental dissonance. We know that we are not pursuing all the implications of a view that we have some strong form of free will, or a view that our values have objectivity. And ordinarily, it is good epistemic practice to pursue the implications of one's thoughts in order to see whether any of those thoughts are rendered unacceptable through modus tollens. But this modest dissonance may be the best we can do in order to ensure our mental equilibrium. We shall return to this theme of not pursuing implications in section 4.3.

4. Reality and unreality

4.1 Identifying the real

There is more than one way we could identify the real.

We could take the real to include the referents of our best scientific theories. But then reality would include unobservable entities, and would at least seem to be mutable as our scientific theories evolved. Here lies the debate in the philosophy of science between realism and anti-realism, with structural realism as another option.

We could take the real to include that which we must accept and understand in order to get on in the world, either in order to overcome practical obstacles or in order to discover more about the world. Broadly, the real would include that which demanded that we work with and not against its grain.

We could take reality to be that which existed whether we thought about it or not. Or we could take reality to be that which had its properties regardless of our thoughts about those properties. One special form of this would be to say that reality was that about which we could straightforwardly be mistaken.

So far we have suggested ways to identify the real, with the unreal to form a residual category. And while that would be the correct approach for some purposes, particularly ontology and the philosophy of science when undertaken within the analytic tradition, it is not the way most consonant with the first couplet and its context in the novel. Rather, the couplet and its context encourage us to start with the unreal. So let us now do so.

4.2 Identifying the unreal

The world forces us to recognise some things - shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings. Once we start to do serious science, we are forced to recognise other things - electrons, the cosmic microwave background, the enthalpy of chemical reactions, and metabolic cycles. We do not want to ask whether forced recognition betokens reality. Purported definitions of the real are apt to run into difficulties. And anything that fell short of a definition, such as a list of some examples of real things, would be a disappointment given that one naturally expects the real to be amenable to epistemically robust identification. But we can use the absence of forced recognition to identify an important category of things that we may regard as unreal.

The category we shall identify comprises items which we could coherently consider to be real but can, given our evidence, reasonably consider to be unreal. When we add the principle that good evidence for reality is required in order to recognise anything as real, "can reasonably consider to be unreal" implies "should consider to be unreal". So basing our category on mere permission to consider as unreal does not lead to an improper expansion in the category of the unreal, taking big bites out of the range of scientifically appropriate attributions of reality.

The exclusion of that which could not coherently be considered real keeps our focus on the unreal that might somehow become real, as proposed by the first couplet. We are not concerned with round squares. And the condition based on evidence does mean that we must regard our identification of the unreal as provisional. New evidence might come along. That would however not be the transformation envisaged in the second line of the first couplet.

The identification of this category is not meant as a formal definition. But a formal definition is less needful with the unreal than with the real, as there is no reason to think that the unreal is amenable to epistemically robust identification. And the category picked out has a good prospect of being a reasonably coherent one, not a ragbag of odd examples, because we have a reasonable sense of what it is for something to be a candidate for reality but a failed one. (Our focus on the unreal does not in this respect have an advantage over a focus on the real. Specific categories within the real, such as the physical, are also coherent and are not ragbags of examples.)

4.3 How the real becomes not-real

The real does not become unreal when it happens to suit us. It is a distinctive mark of the real that it does not do so, except by ordinary processes of dissolution over time. And the closing words of the second couplet, "the Real is never unreal", reminds us of this constraint. So to make sense of the first couplet, we must re-interpret the text that is translated as "not-real".

One option would be to say that real things become perceived as unreal. But that would require either the discomfort of knowingly false perception, or a dream-like state that might be what the novelist had in mind but that would place us out of touch with the world to the point where we could not get the kind of result we seek, some reasonably solid status for things that we find are important but for which science finds no place or at best offers no foundation.

Another option, and the one we shall pursue, is to shift from seeing real objects as unreal to seeing as ineffectual the constraints on our thought that the scientific view of the scope and nature of reality imposes. The reality that science offers is to that extent taken to be an ineffectual ghost. And it is the reality itself that is limited in this manner, not just our scientific theories, because those theories tell us about reality and they can only be regarded as losing any of their powers if reality itself is regarded as somehow different. If we did not go that far, we would only manage to stake out territories for non-overlapping magisteria of science and value.

Note that it is reality as a whole that is challenged in this way, rather than particular objects. The scientific view carries the implication that only the physical and what can be built on it can be integrated into reality. (We do here pass over Hempel's dilemma, which points out the difficulty of defining the scope of the physical when the content of science is itself mutable as we advance.) There is a claim of the total closure of the physical, whether in respect of causation or in respect of anything else. That imposes a constraint on what we can see as real. If we overlook the constraint, regarding it as ineffectual, we can find a place for the reality of some things that matter to us, and not merely the convenience of talking in terms that refer to them.

As in section 3.2, this means that we decline to pursue all the implications that it would normally be proper to pursue. If scientific reality is not regarded as imposing certain constraints on our thought, it must be seen as less substantial than it is ordinarily thought to be. And that would be a challenge to what we know about reality. The relevant constraints might be founded on metaphysical principles like the causal closure of the physical or the general closure we have noted, rather than their arising directly out of scientific results, but it would still be a significant step to regard them as ineffectual.

5. Directions of determination

5.1 The real and the unreal

Once we regard constraints as ineffectual, we can see such important things as free will and objective value as real. But when we make this kind of use of the second line of the first couplet, we must not think that it is the unreal's becoming real that makes the real become not-real. Rather, thinking of the real as not-real allows us to think of the unreal as real. Likewise in relation to the first line, truth needs to be regarded as fiction to allow the fiction to be regarded as true. The novelist may have had the opposite direction in mind. Absorption in a fiction can make truth fade to fiction, and encounters with the unreal as real can make the real become not-real. But that is not our direction.

5.2 Reality and truth

In each couplet, the first line concerns truth and fiction while the second line concerns reality and unreality. We are invited to consider the connection between questions of truth and questions of reality.

In the sciences, it is straightforward. The reality was there first, and our thoughts have to tag along or be mistaken. Even anti-realists in the philosophy of science do not maintain that we can make a free choice of theories. To the extent that any discipline allows our ideas of what is true to mould reality to fit, the discipline is unscientific. This does not mean that disciplines which find space for an element of thought-to-world determination are worthless. It is only that they are not science.

It is in the realm of understanding the human condition (as distinct from the scientific understanding of human nature), in art, and in the development of values, that we might expect to find some thought-to-world determination.

What we propose here is however an indirect determination, not a reversal of the direct determination we find in the sciences. Our desire to have certain things true creates pressure for us to see certain features of physical reality as not-real in the sense of being unable effectually to constrain our thoughts, so as to create space for some of the unreal to be real. When we see reality and unreality in that way, it allows us to fulfil our desire that certain claims be seen as true. But perceived reality has to change to allow for these apparent truths, just as in the sciences reality would have to be different for the set of claims that were straightforwardly true to be different. Reality continues to play a crucial active role.

Despite this role for reality, there are two important contrasts with science. First, it is perceived reality, where our perceptions are steered by what matters to us, and not actual reality, that is the proximate determiner of perceived truth. And second, what matters to us plays a role as a distal determiner of perceived truth which it does not have in science. This role is to prompt us to take a certain view of reality.

6. Conclusion

6.1 The frame

We have used the first couplet to open up a space to think about ourselves in a satisfactory manner, with both a strong form of free will and objective values. In the novel it and the second couplet are instead used to frame a story.

 This difference is not only a matter of content. There is also what at first glance appears to be a structural inversion. In the novel, the couplets provide a frame within which mundane and therefore plausibly true action takes place, with the supernatural action outside the frame (although in accord with the mystery of the work the frame is permeable, with some of the mundane outside the couplets and some of the supernatural between them). This location of mundane and comprehensible reality within a frame and the mysterious supernatural story outside it is quite the opposite of what one finds in an art museum, where the free adventure of imagination is within the frame and mundane reality is outside it. We have followed the art museum in that we have used the couplets to create a space within the frame for that which could be argued not to be real because it is not yet indisputably integrated with reality as viewed by the natural sciences. The troublesome parts of physics, which we must take as accurately describing reality, are parked outside the frame. So our structure is the same way round as is found in an art museum.

At second glance, however, this is not an inversion at all. The mundane world within the frame in the novel is the world of life and love, desires, fortune and misfortune. We take all of these to be real and important, yet there is a message from outside the frame that this is an unenlightened path and that we should step above such things (see Levy, Ideal and Actual in the Story of the Stone, chapter 1). To be absorbed in life as we normally think of it, characters in the novel must ignore the message from outside the frame. Similarly, within our frame we find freedom and value, while from outside the frame physics cries that this is all illusion. To honour and be guided by vital elements of our humanity, we must overlook some metaphysical implications of scientific information.

6.2 Our options

There is a way to cope with the inevitable intellectual discomfort. This is to argue that even if we took there to be a frame with an inside and an outside, we should not think that reality was stably on one side and illusion stably on the other. There might in fact be no stable priority of one side over the other. Sometimes the inside would be reality relative to which the outside was illusion, and sometimes it would be the other way round.

One could choose to take either perspective, and give intellectual respectability to the right to choose by borrowing loosely from perspectivism in the philosophy of science. We could add that even if one side was truly superior to the other, both that fact in general and knowledge of which side it was could not be deduced by us. The argument would be that we could only deduce which was reality and which was illusion from some Archimedean point outside both, and that we have no such point. (Nor can we have recourse to Descartes' ever-helpful God, once theism falls by the wayside.) We can only grow into recognising which is the real world, rather than deduce which one it is.

With the options presented in the novel, the world of human passions and the world in which those passions are regarded as foolish errors, a person's growth into recognition of which world is real is intimately bound up with how he or she lives. Someone can grow into either the life of passion or the life of detachment. Indeed at the end of the novel the central character, Jia Baoyu, having grown into the life of passion and desire, makes a different choice and grows into detachment.

With the options we have considered, our choice is not so free. There are people who explicitly or implicitly deny physics in order to accommodate belief in a spirit realm or something of the same ilk, but that cannot be accepted. The denials they require are too close in kind to the affirmations they make, as when they posit physics-like forces with effects on the body without any evidence for those forces or way to make them cohere with physics generally. More broadly, to grow into regarding the world as presented by science as unreal would be to choose a manifestly mistaken path. What we can do is say that we will overlook the more distal implications of physics, sometimes transmitted in the form of metaphysical principles, in order to take the life of passion to be real. And while we do not in fact grow into that approach from a starting point of contemplating the implications of physics, we may grow into taking the life of passion to be real and then notice that we have all our lives been overlooking the more distal implications of physics.

We may however hope that the intellectual discomfort we have identified is only temporary. One day we may be able fully to integrate the scientific view with our understanding of human life from the inside, so that we no longer need to regard any truths implied by the natural sciences as fiction in order to take what currently looks like essential fiction to be true.

References

Baron, Richard. Deliberation and Reason. Leicester, Matador, 2010. https://rbphilo.com/deliberation.html

Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone, translated by David Hawkes and John Minford. London, Penguin, five volumes, 1973-1986.

Fischer, John Martin. "Compatibilism". Chapter 2 of John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom and Manuel Vargas, Four Views on Free Will. Oxford, Blackwell, 2007.

Levy, Dore J. Ideal and Actual in the Story of the Stone. New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 1999.