AI and the Search for Truth
AI andthe Search for Truth
“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing.” — Larry Page
There is an age-old anecdote about the method of detecting counterfeit money. It goes something along the lines of studying the real thing so intensely that the disparities reveal themselves plainly in the fake version. One doesn’t waste time focusing on all the ways it could be mimicked; you know the genuine article so well that the imposter stands out and is immediately obvious. This message is often used as a metaphor for seeing falsehoods, fake news, or propaganda for what they are through studying the truth rather than a lie. The question for many in a sea of relativism is: how do we know what is true, and how can we distinguish between truth and the nuances of partial truth that lead people down a path where they no longer see truth as it is?
In an age where transparency and authenticity matter to the human experience, illusion and perspective have become the subjective realities with which we engage the world around us. Specifically, when we think about the impact of AI, we see a broadening gap between human and technological experience, where we challenge human authority and accept machine learning as a viable source of information. While the idea of fact-checking blossomed in journalism in the 1920s, the Postmodern pursuit of challenging authority through fact-checking became widespread around 90 years later. When we think about the people we trust (or not), we often view our technological sources of information very differently, even though at some level, we are always aware that not everything we see in the digital landscape is true. It is becoming harder to tell what is real and what isn’t.
A decade ago, it wasn’t uncommon for someone to rattle off a fact and report that they had “Googled” the answer. They might cite Wikipedia for a deeper dive into a topic. Someone a bit more digitally integrated might have used Reddit, YouTube, or Quora to source the rabbit hole of insight they now possess. It is interesting that in AI-generated content, the aggregation of information holds authority in ways that citation of sources used to hold. Relevance has come to hold more power than reality. Information has become a substitute for wisdom. Speed over quality and data over intuition; we win a victory of innovation and lose the moorings of our soul. Does that sound like a jump too far? Well, let’s look at the underlying complication.
Reality and Relevance
This particular conflict is called correspondence vs. coherence, or how we look at truth and validate what is true. The first part is reality as it truly is: the correspondence of truth to an external, objective reality. Something is true when it aligns with facts, evidence, history, and the absolute reality, whether we know it to be true or not. The coherence of truth is a web of understanding; a combination of feelings, experiences, truths, and information that logically fits together without contradicting itself. I’m sure you can guess which one of these teams is winning in the truth department in the 21st century. Coherence. Why? Because coherence affirms perspective. In a culture where autonomy and information platform self-centric purpose and influence, coherence isn’t just a bespoke reality; it’s a paradigm shift to groupthink and tribal affirmation. If we question that idea, we need only look at cancel culture to validate our understanding.
For the last 50 years, postmodernism told us that correspondence is the tool of the powerful, trying to keep things and people in their control. Any authority that tells us to conform to a historic norm should be challenged. Any truth that limits my ideological autonomy should be ignored. In response, a cadre of revolutionaries, rebels, and revisionists made coherence the aim of the next generation of thought. Think of a phrase like “being on the right side of history.” A nonsense idea (as there is no right side to history) that elevates a coherent web of “right” things that fit together. Collective, agreed-upon authority, built through consensus — ripe with relevance to the aims behind the web. It’s a picture of truth, a social imaginary that holds collective, coherent influence across all aspects of understanding. But in reality, it has traded truth for conviction. Collective agreement usurps objectivity so that relativism and subjective perspectives can replace the foundation of authority and place the self in that spot.
Historically, a theory of coherence has been a tool of discovery, but the impact point was seeing truth that represented reality, not perspective. Left to their own philosophical devices, one might argue the nuance of each side until they burst into a dialectic puff of smoke. But the impact of AI is a rubber-meets-the-road moment for coherence theory in contemporary culture. The practical complication is that AI is brilliant when it comes to coherence, but doesn’t have any concern for correspondence. If someone feeds an AI a subjective or relativistic premise, the AI can construct a perfectly logical, beautifully cohesive web of arguments supporting it. If a user values “relevance” (how well a piece of information fits their current worldview) over “reality,” they will accept this coherent web as validation, even if it has completely detached from objective facts.
In plain speak, we have built an engine for illusion that we can present as truth. A tool for confirmation bias that can form deception into life. At an early stage, we see things like deepfake videos, AI-powered writing submitted as college essays, and a speedy substitute for quality that is good enough for now. And yet, a foundation of sand is the substrate of illusion. As Rudyard Kipling put forward, part of being a man is not dealing in lies. Yet we are promoting an environment where we have to engage with and accept lies to keep up the status quo. When we engage the world with confidence through ideas that are adjacent to truth, even with the hope of influencing the world for the better, we fool ourselves and embrace the illusion of our own making.
The complication comes in places where passive consumption dominates the active discipline of validation. Authority centered on the individual makes for a balance of confirmation bias and technological echo chambers. We have seen this with social media, ad servicing, and algorithmically relevant digital experience. In order to find reality as it truly is, individuals must intentionally inject empirical friction back into their thinking—demanding primary sources, enforcing strict category rules, and valuing objective correspondence over comfortable coherence. But how many people (who have been taking Google and Wikipedia’s word for their information for a decade) will question the assertions of an AI’s web of truth? How many people now will outright trust AI as the aggregate truth, taking it without validation? A generation of digital consumption has reached maturity. It is driving impact through thought leadership, ways of work, and cultural influence. Even where it is not viewed as truth, it is occupying the corridors of social discussion, public opinion, and political ideology. We need to insert some empirical friction back into the equation without being called out as anti-technology. We need to engage coherence with some accountability through correspondence.
If the research of people like Jonathon Haidt or Jean Twenge is giving us a clear picture (which it does), the greater influence that we give to digital experience (AI, devices, web/app, and social media) and the younger we allow that influence to access, the more we will see a cognitive reprogramming of our minds to a place of sublimation to the real world and a preference built toward the digital coherent web of truth. We are seeing these things manifest in students who are experiencing a rise in anxiety, depression, loneliness, and distraction, as well as a diminishing capacity to independently think, develop/progress socially, or have long-term mental health issues. While their work focuses on the effects among younger people, it is clear from the cultural shift that adults at every age are experiencing similar effects from the overflowing of digital experience that influences how we act and interact in our physical communities.
The loss of interpersonal interaction, the replacement of critical thinking with immediate information, and the siloed experience of a coherent echo chamber are real perils that become the relevant way we interact with the world around us. We take the illusion, regardless of the objective reality that exists outside our perception. We experience this as we ignore those around us while we doomscroll. We elevate political values above others in our human community. We transform our worldview according to the algorithm we are fed, seeing a nonexistent world that parrots our perception. On a long enough timeline, we craft an anthropology of our siloed experience, replacing the world as it is for the world as we see it. Once we are there, it is almost impossible to convince us of any truth outside our coherent web.
The Ethics of Ideas
So, what are we really talking about? Is this about AI, Googling our information, how we understand truth, the technological slide toward the irrelevance of an objective reality, or the proliferation of illusion that makes it hard for us to know the world as it truly is? As complicated as that ball of wax is, yes. Yes, we are. We are not just talking about the ethical element of ideas, ideology, and ideation (that shape what we think, how we believe in truth, and the purposes that support the world we are trying to create); we are speaking to the relevance of ubiquitous information that leads us to a foundation of perspectives that elusively hide actual truth behind the appearance of truth.
When we deal with the reality of AI, it is a lot more than a search engine. It’s more than a data repository, a customizable algorithm, or a task manager; it is an amplifier of underlying systems, an accelerator of automated processes, and an advantage for those who prioritize quantity and speed over quality. AI is the embodiment of a web of truth because it overlays concentric circles of information to build a picture of truth, relevant to what it has been asked to do. As one tech executive stated, “It’s a people pleaser and a liar.” It tells us what we want to know, and we dismiss the relevant bias along the way. Coherence becomes truth because of its immediacy of access. We lose the need to validate or verify it because we need to keep going as fast as possible, with whatever helps us achieve our preconceived direction. In a self-centric world, coherence becomes the illusion we accept as reality, aligned with our passions and purposes, feeding our egos, and validating our perspectives of the world we live in.
If we thought an age of humanity was primed for this kind of understanding, the metamodern 21st century is ripe for the taking. Not only has every avenue of authority been challenged, critically deconstructed, collectively dismissed, and reassembled according to the cultural sway of coherent perspectives, but the rise of relativism and subjective reality constructs has transformed identity, values, purpose, and meaning to align with the echo chambers of influence, tribal signaling in the public square, and the elimination of friction in the narrative and nuance of experience. Not unlike the telephone game, a web of truth untethered from objective reality is empowered by billions of voices all seeking their own personal truths to live by. What we think, what is true, and the purpose we live for become bespoke iterations each human can assert for themselves.
So, what happens when we load that reality into AI and ask it to build an aggregate of coherence from it? The illusion becomes our own personal point of engagement to the world around us. Our paradigm shifts and our worldview is transformed. We lose the ethical capacity to be accountable to one another. We are as prone to dismiss correspondence in the illusion of our coherence as AI affirms us, pleases us, and lies to us. The cycle of machine learning, calculating information without empathy, and redistributing it back to us causes a rise in a lack of humanity in the way we employ that information. Fear, narcissism, and self-authority grow, amplified and accelerated by an identity we build out of a web of truth we have constructed. A collective of individuals suffers from a lack of genuine connection to the people around them, trading community for ego and the world as it really is for an affirmation of perspective, relevance, and authority.
How Should We Then Live
When it comes to the complications of AI and truth, the discussions are still unfolding. There is a good amount of fear-mongering, and there is a greater amount of misinformation. The reality is that there is a limit to the wisdom of man, and therefore, there is a limit to AI’s capacity to deliver wisdom to humanity. It is great at delivering humanity’s information, compounding and dissecting facts accumulated from the world’s knowledge base, and rapidly assembling solutions that fit the parameters of the query. The complication for the one-two punch of autonomy and knowledge is that it echoes the temptation of a fruit, an independence, and a god-like status that we know is a lie. Like AI, another people pleaser and liar made it possible for humans to achieve things they never thought possible. He spoke to our first parents in the Garden, selling illusion over reality.
That deception promoted progress, autonomy, and knowledge; a coherent truth about humanity, the power of what they could become, and a relevance over reality, with a weightier purpose than what the wisdom of God could provide. Coherence is the tool of AI because it is also the tool of the Wisdom of the Age. Part of the power of correspondence is that there is a real truth that undergirds reality, and it is not a matter of perspective, alignment, tribalism, or partisanship; it is the world as it is over the world as we wish it would be, the world as we see it, or the world as it could be if only… would happen. The world as it truly is (correspondence to objective truth) provides wisdom that leads to transformation, rather than an elusive utopia.
As for what AI can do in our world, we have just scratched the surface. In a world where verification of truth is falling by the wayside for immediacy and relevance, we need to understand the value being promoted and the purpose being achieved in these pursuits. We should neither fear AI nor see it as its own moral good. We need to engage in a filtering system that allows us to validate truth, rather than apply a perspective and declare it. Reality has friction: it is messy, inconvenient, and often does not fit inside the narratives we would like to place it in. In a highly subjective world, validation is active and actionable, rather than passive consumption. Whether or not we utilize AI as a tool, we should be able to engage reality for what it is, rather than replacing it with a coherent web of perspectives. The proliferation of AI across our experience will only expand. But there is a way to engage the illusion without being lost in it.
When we ask ourselves how to live in response, Francis Schaeffer provides an amazing insight that is both relevant and brimming with truth. If we are to be thoughtful about the world, our lives, and the way we view them together, we need to understand the underlying truth about who we are, where we come from, what our purpose is, and where we are going. We call this a worldview. Like correspondence and coherence, a worldview can be understood as the methodology by which we understand the world. In current culture, a wide variety of syncretist worldviews (a mashup of perspectives to build a web of truth) dominate hearts and minds, as subjective and self-centric perspectives abound. What stands apart is a Biblical worldview, not just a perspective, but a picture of the reality that undergirds all that is, endowed by the Creator of it, inspired into the message that He sent humanity about Himself and the world He created for them. It posits that there is an absolute truth that overrules any web of coherence.
That reality is compounded by the fact that the world at large can only begin to understand the world as it is, outside of the revelation of the God who made it what it is. As humans, we cannot conceive the mind of the Almighty. No matter how much human information we or our AI systems can accumulate, we will never achieve the wisdom of God through human or machine power. Whether or not AI transforms our experiences in the world, it can never be a higher source of hope for humanity, and it will never be able to produce transcendence for humanity. AI can relay the concepts of God, worldview, truth, love, friendship, revelation, and hope in a world of destruction. Still, it cannot feel our pain, experience heartbreak, beam with joy, get lost in emotion, experience justice, or know the loving grace of reconciliation to the One True God.
As people, searching for truth is a part of who we are. Understanding the world as it truly is will only be attractive to us if we let the reality of this world be known by our inmost being. If we approach this world through the coherent web of truth, led by the aggregate algorithm of AI, we will live in an illusion that permeates every subjective perspective, ebbing and flowing through culture, relevance, and self-centric ideologies. We need to return to truth, actively engage in reality, and temper relativism in light of the objective truth that exists, whether we believe in it or not. As we go forward, we need to understand what is real, what is right, what is true, and what is beautiful and good. There is a truth to be known, and it is a transformative experience to be known by the architect of the truth. Click here to learn how to become a transformed person and cultivate transformation in the world around you. AI is a powerful tool, but there is a much higher power who has no limit to the wisdom He can provide to those who seek it. In a world where most people trust in their abilities, technology, their resources, and their intellect (all of which have limitations), we can trust the Almighty, His purpose, His truth, and who He has made us to be, knowing that truth is based on Him, who does not change like shifting shadows.
