Truth, the 7th Holly Day is the first among my trinity of values that I use to guide my life. I can’t imagine how we can possible make any decent decision about anything without having as many accurate facts as possible facts. Our impression of the world is actually a post facto assembly from a myriad of sense inputs, memories and expectations. Knowing the truth is a much more difficult and noble enterprise than just believing what’s right in front of your eyes, as The Roman Originals Dress meme taught us.
Color Constancy is the ability of the mind to perceive color consistently regardless of lighting and shading. While Sir Issac Newton spend considerable effort trying to understand color from a physics perspective, he never really cracked how we see color. Edmund Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera, came closest to describing the process of our color perception with his Retinex Theory which largely explained the various visual paradoxes that had stumped Newton. He demonstrated that color is created in our minds, with our qualia determined by combining our retina’s perception of the various wavelengths of light it senses with processing in our visual cortex comparing areas in the whole image with their neighboring values to create the various colors we see in an image.
Optical illusions are rich fodder for online memes, but The Dress was different. Most illusions demonstrate one or another well-known visual bias for which cognitive scientists have ready explanations. In the case of The Dress, (which, BTW, is still not fully understood) new and previously unknown biases and individual variations seemed to be at play. It exposed the fact that each of our experiences over time somehow custom tune our interpretation of color. What the The Dress phenomena added to this is that it seems the history of our experience of lighting adjusts the corrections our cortex makes to the image. For instance, folks who have spent more time in fluorescent spaces will interpret color differently from folks who have spent more time in sunlit spaces, regardless of the light illuminating the image they are trying to interpret.
So I put truth first because not only is it the foundation of all knowledge, but also the most difficult value to ascertain. In these intentionally post-truth days, hucksters and opportunists are more thoroughly and successfully warping reality to suit their ends, not only by using the propagandistic techniques of Hitler’s Big Lie neologism, whose effectiveness Roy Cohn learned from Goebbles and then taught to his protege, but even more confounding these days, by the proliferation of generative AI. That the truth is so much harder to recognize makes it all the more valuable for it’s rarity.
Sitting for way too long in an ER waiting room for my son Lando to be seen by the docs, I passed the time by unavoidably eavesdropping on the loud conversation between the other two folks who were escorting an ill member of their family just as I was. The level of misinformation they shared about medicine was stunning and depressing. Both agreed that they refuse to take or give flu vaccines to their children claiming that the vaccines were more likely to make you sick and instead lauded the power of the supplements they relied instead. One had brought her dad from the nursing home where he lived. She excoriated the staff at the home for refusing to treat his “excruciating pain” from some condition in his knee. Outraged she railed against their incompetent callousness in telling her she would have to take him to an outside ER if she wanted him treated. But as the conversation proceeded, she revealed that she had forbidden them from giving him any opiate pain killers, because “you know where that ends up.” It broke my heart. Her father, obviously suffering, was being forced to sit untreated in a strange ER only due to some misapprehension by his daughter from whatever pop culture memes she was absorbing.
I’ve felt my choice to list Truth first was maybe just an aspie quirk. I mean, Truth before Loyalty, Love or Beauty?! Perhaps it was, but I think history may have caught up with my reasoning. Truth is celarly under assault, making one of the most urgent needs we have in modern life. As with almost everything, the Truth is an unattainable limit we can only approach asymptotically — an illusion of perfection, which can and should exist at the least as a target to guide our aim, however unlikely we are to meet it exactly. Question everything, take nothing on faith, except the faith that the Truth will set us free.
Happy Truth & Happy Holly Days
HOLLY DAYS 