Epistemology: Two Truths, Still a Lie

I don't know what's going on and neither do you, maybe we can talk about it and pretend like we actually do. Hey! Existing Existentially, a podcast of philosophies by Joey Degnan. Fake news has taken over our country. Earlier this month, Prospect Editorial released an article that cited two-thirds of Americans as unable to distinguish true journalism from false information. What's even more scary is that it's not just journalism that has raised doubt from the public. Despite being considered the ultimate truth, science is being questioned by the public extensively, an issue brought into the limelight with the COVID-19 pandemic. But has the truth always been this hard to find? Moreover, what even defines the truth? To understand how we determine the truth, we first must understand how we think and what it is we base our thinking on. Descartes introduced the method of doubt in 1641. The 1600s in Europe were the age of science, so academics were questioning everything. And this allowed Descartes to challenge the very basis of truth as he knew it. As a rationalist, Descartes established that true knowledge can only be acquired through internal reason alone, as opposed to experience we gain out in the world. The idea is rooted in Descartes' bottom line. I think, therefore I am. I believe that humans are born with ideas about God, the mind, and the body that are undeniable truths of our existence, but they're the only undeniable truths. To put this into perspective, say I were to have all of my senses taken away so that I had no idea where I was or what was real, and the only thing that I could be completely certain of is that I'm thinking about my current situation. Even if all the connecting links between my consciousness and the external world were severed, I would still be a thinking thing who had awareness of my existence, my mind, and the body or whatever it was that housed my mind. Therefore, according to Descartes, thinking about anything is the only way to determine the truth. Locke did not like this. In an essay concerning human understanding from 1689, he asserted his belief in empiricism, or the idea that the only certain thing we know is what we experience with our senses. We are not born with any ideas in our head, but gain them as we experience sensation and reflect on those experiences. To Locke, the truth comes from combining ideas we have gained through what we have witnessed, then deducing them from one another, and finally using reason to determine which is true. So, we all know about knowledge and the alleged truth is... So, all we know about knowledge and the alleged truth is that in order to find it, we apparently need to come to its conclusion through our own reasoning, or have a personal experience that makes us believe in it. So how does scientists who did the research firsthand and know the truth convince others of its validity? I talked to Dr. Mina Johnson, an Associate Research Professor at ASU who focuses on emerging technologies in psychology, about her approach to the pandemic and how knowledge remains a debated topic in science today. Based on the COVID-19 modeling simulation that you created in 2020, can you tell me what that application was and the purpose behind it? Yeah. I think I'll start with just the genesis of it, like the idea of it, why we wanted to do that. I mean, as you all, as we remember, you know, March happened and suddenly everything shut down and like there was so much anxiety and angst in the air and people didn't know how it was being transmitted and so it seemed important to me to like maybe show how it was transmitted and then things that we could do as a community to combat that. And my lab really rallied around that. It was nice because I had a bunch of developers and I had some artistic people and just, you know, we seemed to have the skill set to build a game. The first game we built was really a dud and we wanted to use AR, augmented reality. And so that's where you put a digital overlay on the real world. So imagine like you have your phone and you're aiming it at the desk, the camera, and then on top of the desk shows up a gray or a red little avatar digital person walking on the desk. And so we were trying to show rate of transmission. So that person would be red if they were infected or gray if they were not. And then if the infected person got closer to the other gray people, they would become infected. And so we were trying to show R-naught. Do you remember that? R-naught, the rate of transmission. Yeah. And you know what? We did it and it was so boring. Like after a while it was like, okay, people are turning red. What does that mean? And why do I care? And it would happen too fast and you couldn't track what was going on an individual level. And it just wasn't a good lesson. It sounded good on paper, right? And as I describe it, it sounds interesting. But it just wasn't a good lesson. And so we had to throw that away and go to another format. And that's the one that you saw. That's the one that's online now at the embodied-games.com website. That's called COVID Classroom. And it's the one you play on a browser. So it has no AR components. None of that, you know, sexy overlay stuff. It's just like a classic 2-D game, click on things. You play as a student. You know, if you're role-playing, you're like a student at a school, a big school, and you're making decisions about how to keep yourself safe. Like do I take the stairs or do I take the elevator? And that was sort of new at the time, right? People weren't sure. Yeah. So what's the purpose of teaching this information within this format specifically? Why games? Why don't they just read a packet of information? And that's traditionally how public health announcements have been made. But we know it's more engaging to play a game. And a game allows you to sort of practice the thinking, to simulate the thinking in your mind about what you might do. And so it just gives you a way to practice making better decisions before you're up against that task itself. The new game we're working on is like mosquito breeding place eradication. So imagine like a dog bowl that's left outside after a rain. That's a place where mosquitoes will larvae, mosquito larvae will breed in a bowl like that. So we're teaching people how to like clean up their backyards after rains and what to do with old children's toys, old tires that are in the backyard, things like that. Very cool. Very, very cool. What originally got you into exploring educational games? I am moderately dyslexic. And so growing up I was like, wow, how can it be that like I'm really gifted in math, but I struggle to read. I'm such a slow reader and I can't spell worth anything. So, you know, what is that about? And that's why I went into cognitive psychology to understand how people can have strengths and weaknesses within the same brain. And so once I understood that, look, I'm not a great reader. I have great curiosity and I'm able to learn, but what are other ways to learn besides just using that decoding of words signal? What's another way? And so that's why. Another reason I like to make STEM content is because I didn't have good STEM growing up and these concepts are so fascinating, right? The electromagnetic field. It's 3D. The electromagnetic field around you in three dimensions. And so that's one of the reasons I got into using VR because I want to show phenomena that are multidimensional in a multidimensional space. So we have something we've built where you can, you know, put on the headset and then see vectors that represent the electromagnetic field around you in real time. Like what does it look like now? Actually we have an augmented reality one as well that you tap on your phone and see the vectors here in Phoenix and in this office right now I could show you that. That is really, really cool. Oh, my gosh. So shifting a little bit to when it comes to knowledge in general because with cognitive psychology, obviously, I'm sure you've done a lot of research and you have a lot of experience understanding different types of knowledge and how people gain it. Would you say from a scientific viewpoint, what do you consider is knowledge? When are you justified in saying, I know this? That's a very deep question. And for someone like me who's very, yeah, I am scientific and mathematical, I think of knowledge as a structure in your mind, right? So imagine you have Lego blocks in your mind of certain content areas, right? So I understand how a vector measures magnitude and distance and I understand there's this thing called the magnetic field around me and I can place a vector there and that shows me at that one instance the field. Like that's a pretty sophisticated Lego structure for someone to have. But before I got this tutoring from a physicist who's a friend, I only had like one or two Lego blocks. I only understood that, oh, a vector has a length, but I didn't know what the length meant. So there's one Lego block and then I got more and more on top and so now I have what's called a structure. I have a mental model of how electromagnetic fields work. And so that to me is knowledge. Another way to think of it besides these abstract Lego blocks is really morphosyntactic and that is literally the neurons in the brain. And the more you learn, you can see there's more connections but at the ends of the neurons there's more axonal connection when you have a more sophisticated knowledge structure. There's many levels to think about what knowledge is and so you can think about it at the cellular, like at that brain cellular level, chemical level even, or you can think about it, pull back the lens and think about community knowledge like groups of people. What do they understand? Absolutely, yeah. And going into that community knowledge and related back to COVID-19 when we did see an upsurge of people doubting this pandemic that was being supported by various previously respected institutions. When it comes to understanding, how do we get the truth across or how do we get the information that we've gained scientifically, empirically through the research? How do we convince people that that research is true if they didn't do it themselves? I have spent a lot of time the past year or two thinking about what does it mean to be a disbeliever, to be a conspiracy theorist? I have a couple of those in my family and they're not stupid people and so why is this? How does this happen? Some of it's the erosion of trust in institutions that's been going down over time in America and some of it's the thrill of knowing something that no one else doesn't know. I think there's something that people get excited about like, oh, I know, I just heard this thing about Bill Gates and why he was behind COVID and this is some special knowledge that I have that I can share with you to show you how smart I am or I can, it's titillating, it's exciting and so there's something about that as well that people like to feel like they possess some special knowledge that you don't have and it's very, it can be dangerous or it can be interesting, new, real stuff but when it's not real, why does it spread and hang on so long? That I don't quite understand. Absolutely, yeah, that's interesting. I'd never consider that perspective of the realization, that rush you get when you have, oh, I get it now. Wow, that is really interesting. I think it's, yeah, it's tricky because how do we define truth? You know, like when it comes to the science that, when you're doing research and experiments, how do you ensure that no biases is being involved in what you're recording? Well, I like that you stayed away from the word prove. So you didn't say the dreaded verb. How do you know you proved it? Because, you know, as we tell our students in psychology, you can't prove a hypothesis. You can support it or reject it. And so I'm always careful to use that language of supporting. Well, I've done six experiments thus far that support that when I space out material at an appropriate length of time, people learn more. Did I prove that spacing is the only way to go for learning? No, but I've supported it a lot. Now it's a theory. So, yeah, you know, we're very anal about how we talk about theories and truth in science and welcome a little bit of skepticism, right? Because that's how we make our theories better, testing out new ideas. Oh, biases. Yes, how do we make sure biases are introduced? You just can't. You just have to realize that you come with biases. That's the way the world works. I ran a study a couple years ago comparing a 2D laptop condition to virtual reality, and I came at it with the bias that VR is going to be better. You're going to learn more in VR. It's more engaging. It's more immersive. You're going to learn more. That's what I thought. That was my bias. But I designed a tight study that would get at that. I randomly assigned 200 participants to the multiple conditions, and lo and behold, in the end, it was not necessarily that VR was better. If it was better designed, it was better. But if it was a poorly designed VR environment, it wasn't better. It was worse than the laptop. So it's an intricate story. It's a nuanced story. Science is often nuanced. And that's another thing. People have a hard time dealing with nuances. Do you believe that certainty exists? Can it? I know. You're really making me think on a Friday afternoon. Oh, my God. I'm ready for happy hours. We're close. I promise. Do I think that certainty exists? Oh, my gosh. I'm just going to say probably for certain phenomena, it does. I am certain that the sun will come up tomorrow. And I'm certain there's going to be an eclipse next month. But am I certain that 50% of America will vote in the fall? No. There's so much uncertainty. Do I ever believe anything can be 100% certain? I guess I'll just have to say no. Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. Is there a right or wrong answer to this? No. And that's the beauty of these questions, right, is that it's, you know, everything is subjective, especially when it comes to understanding the way that we function. It's, you know, I think that and what I mean by that is everybody has a different perspective on big questions in life. And it's just like what you said, how a hypothesis can be supported or nullified. You know, it can't be proven. Nothing is certain. That's my opinion as well. But we'll see what, you know, the next person says about it. But some things are certain, right? Like really, it's pretty certain that the sun's going to come up tomorrow. Or rather the earth will spin and the sun will appear to come up. Like that's, I don't know. Yeah, so that's actually, that's an interesting point. I believe it's David Hume, he actually attacked this issue with his epistemological arguments. In the 19th, 18th, 19th century. And what he was arguing is we are basing that ideology that the sun will come up tomorrow off of past experience. Right. But because we cannot experience the future ourselves, we cannot be certain of it. And so even though past experience has been consistent, we can't project ourselves into a time and space where experiencing the certainty of that event like happens. Like we can't experience the certainty of that event in this moment, therefore we can't be certain of it. No matter how much repetition an event has or a truth has, unless it's happening right now and you're currently experiencing it, you're currently knowing it. Do you really know it? Yeah, I think it's good to question that, to question your senses. Like just because you're seeing it, does that make it true? Like maybe it's not. I mean, I guess everyone has to live with a degree of uncertainty in their life. And some people are better at that than others. Some people are better equipped to do that than others. You know, like children with autism spectrum, like they need a lot of sameness and routine in their lives. And, you know, everyone has different degrees of comfort with the unknowingness. And so, you know, my husband, he really needs to know things and what his job's going to be and what he's going to make next year. It's hard for him to be a tenured professor, right? Because you know what your job is going to be for 40 years. And that's what he did. Exactly. You know, I'm always impressed with people who are like artists, that independent contractor. Like you don't know where your next paycheck's coming from. So those are people who can handle a lot more uncertainty. Knowledge takes on many forms. And while the definition of what knowledge is remains up in the air, it always requires one constant, belief. Although we all learn and understand in our own ways, our differing beliefs can sometimes lead us away from the truth. But like all aspects of our existence, knowledge is ultimately subjective. So I guess you decide. Over and out.