The Jelly Roll of Truth
What do elephants have to do with cakes...? Mary Midgley has the answer
“Slicing the world in different directions reveals different patterns. Swiss rolls (or Jelly rolls), sliced downward, have a spiral structure. Sliced across, they have stripes. Stripes are not reducible to spirals, nor vice versa, and will not become so by further analysis. Both are real, and the two patterns can be related if we understand the relation between the two slicing angles.”
- Mary Midgley, Beast and Man
If ever there was a perfect image of how irreconcilable differences between our worlds might transpire to be the result of circumstances rather than substantial errors, it is Mary Midgley's ‘jelly roll of truth’. As a Brit, I prefer to use the term ‘Swiss roll’ for this baked confectionary, but I’m mindful that ‘jelly roll’ might be the more widely travelled name. Either way, the elegance of this metaphor is that it immediately conveys that sense of the underlying rationality capable of uniting two observations that at first glance seem to be utterly incompatible.
Of course, the precedents behind this image are far older. The Hindu traditions were the first to speak of the blind seers and the elephant, although the Sufi poet Rumi remarks fondly upon this tale, and plenty of other traditions have found the wisdom in it. If you have somehow managed to avoid this parable, the essence is that since they have never seen an elephant, each thinks it is something different. The one grabbing its tail believes it to be like a snake, the one grabbing its tusk believes it to be like a spear and so on and so forth. The Discordians have an amusing take on this tale in which blind elephants, feeling the world with their massive feet, conclude that humans are like pancakes.
However, Midgley’s ‘jelly roll of truth’ not only captures the wisdom in the Hindu folk tale, it takes it in a novel direction. Key to the tale of the blind seers and the elephant is that none of those touching have ever seen an elephant, and therefore they can only guess at what it might be like. The jelly roll, however, conveys this ancient wisdom as well as a fresh philosophical perspective highly pertinent to a world where scientific investigation has (in principle, at least) been given especial importance.
If we take one piece of evidence and jump to a conclusion, we risk being misled. We are equally likely to be mistaken if we take two pieces of evidence that contradict each other and assume that one must be correct while the other is false. As Midgley suggests, you cannot reduce spirals to straight lines nor vice versa. What is required to relate the two apparently conflicting observations is an understanding of the structure of the jelly roll. Only when we have this can we understand how it all fits together - and also, when we have that conception correctly worked out, the fact that it can reconcile the conflicting observations is a key part of how we validate the interpretation.
In my correspondence with Mary Midgley, I often remarked upon the apparently effortless way that she managed to come up with such simple shorthand ways of getting at deep truths, something I have strived for in my own philosophical work. But of course, the apparent effortless of these metaphors is deceiving, for it is the willingness to try other, less successful representations that paves the way for those that succeed in their intentions. This is a lesson that applies to all fields of human endeavour - the simple solutions are not necessarily the quickest to develop. It is especially true of the art of interpreting scientific data.
There are many mistakes that flow from the unique ways each of our worlds slices the ‘jelly roll of truth’. We could take the fact we see spirals as proof that the truth is spiral-shaped. We might even slice again and again, convincing ourselves that it can only be spiral-shaped, since no other shape appears! Yet somebody somewhere is looking at straight lines, and every slice they make comes back with straight lines! The lesson of the elephant is that we cannot trust our impressions of what we have not truly seen. Midgley’s lesson is that if we want to get anywhere close to the truth, we simply cannot afford to leap to a conclusion that is half-baked.
Yes. Absolutely. Of Course.
One of the motivations for my late-in-life forays into philosophy is a conviction that human civilization is in a period of existential crisis. [1] I think that humankind will either work through this crisis and create the Second Worldwide Civilization, or it will fail. Failure will be disastrous. Failure could leave humankind on a devastated planet that may not be capable of the biological and social evolution necessary for the creation of a non-primitive civilization.
I’m a fan of civilization. My view is that if there is any purpose in the creation and unfolding of the universe, it is in the creation of evermore complex and evermore inquisitive and creative life-forms on our own planet and elsewhere. I recognize that my convictions are a form of religion.
Chris concludes this piece with an assertion and an exhortation:
_1) “we cannot trust our impressions of what we have not truly seen”
_2) “if we want to get anywhere close to the truth we simply cannot afford to leap” to half-backed conclusions.
In as far as I understand them, I think the above two statements are true. My remarks will just attempt to point to why they should be taken to heart.
Of the approximately eight billion humans presently alive on this planet, only a tiny few care about knowing objective truth. Most of humanity is content to live within the boundaries of their own subjective truth. The few of us that do wish to comprehend a bit of objective truth need to understand that given the nature of the bodies that evolution has given us, it is impossible for us to know the truth about objective reality in any absolute sense The best we can do is achieve partial agreement that the mental models we construct about what’s-out-there are close enough to what is that any actions we take do not result in catastrophe.
How can we do this? First we need to start with a consensus that any assertion we wish to accept as true must fit into the multi-dimensional mosaic of other assertions that we currently accept as true. Second, we need a consensus that unemotional, rational, good faith discourse is the best tool we have for approximating truth. [2] What our mythical Hindu seers need to do is (1) accept the report of each seer as true, (2) construct a mental model in which each seer’s observation can be true, and (3) from this mental model logically construct other assertions that should be true and can be tested by evidence.
Midgley’s jelly rolls can provide a useful example. Suppose we take additional “downward slices” at 20, 30, 40, 50 degrees off the perpendicular. Now we have a series of patterns in which the spirals start to lengthen out and approach straight lines.
Notes
[1] This conviction is based on my understanding of various social reality entities. By nature, in any healthy civilization there will always be some level of discord. Presently we are not only experiencing very high levels of discord, but our fundamental notions, and behavior, of civility diminish daily.
[2] Often an individual mind is the first to propose a truth. Usually such a proposition is preceded by discourse with other individuals. And usually all true propositions are later modified or extended.