> Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.
— Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense
Are we living in a lie?
I look out of my window and see two orange trees.
Orange trees: one concept, two entities.
In reality, they're not the same.
One has 203 leaves and the other 106.
One has roots that run 6 ft deep and the other 3.
One has many branches and the other only a few, yet we call them the same tree.
We simplify the world into useful concepts and fictions: instead of seeing 100 different
trees, we see a single forest.
We live in a world of illusions that allow us to survive and thrive.
We never see our family, friends, and loved ones as they really are; we only see illusions
of them.
Everyone I know is deeply complex.
I say that John is kind and intelligent.
But, John is *mostly* kind.
He's unkind if he hasn't eaten for a long time.
He's very skilled at mathematics but a terrible writer.
Yet, I simplify him into the concepts of kind and intelligent because that's useful for
me.
To know John better, I would need way more concepts, but even then, it's unlikely that
I'd ever fully exhaust who he is.
The mind uses concepts to give a meaningful order to the chaotic world, but order is just
a useful fantasy—a pretty lie.
Whether we use science, philosophy, theology, or art, the fantasies we construct help us
interact with the world.
In other words, they give us more power.
Let's return to the orange trees and experience them as the separate entities they really
are.
Let's notice how one smells better than the other, how the bark of one is smoother and
how the fruits of one are larger.
Reality seems more complex than our illusion.
But even if we updated our illusions—if we increased the words and concepts we could
use to describe the tree—does being aware of the details matter?
If you're a farmer, maybe.
I think that's what Nietzsche wanted us to think about when he said
Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?
— Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil
Unless you're a farmer, ignorance might be preferable to the detailed truth.
Maybe, we only care about truth in so far as it empowers us: knowing and thinking about
all of the details of every orange tree would just be a psychological burden.
But—I can't help but ask—is it possible that the mind is actually accessing a deeper
kind of truth?
Maybe, the mind is separating the signal from the noise.
But, what constitutes signal versus noise?
Our values.
A farmer that values knowing all the details of an orange tree will view it differently
than a regular person.
Well, where do our values come from?
Here's Nietzsche's view from Beyond Good and Evil:
Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or,
more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life.
— Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil
For Nietzsche, our values come from our physiological demands, and what does our physiology demand?
Power.
It wants to survive and thrive.
What does it mean to thrive?
To imagine the world a certain way and to be able to make that illusion a reality.
Someone could challenge this idea by saying that they don't seek power or want to thrive:
they won't eat or drink anything to prove this point.
But, they would *still* be seeking a kind of power: they imagine a world in which they
prove the idea wrong and they seek to bring *that* world into fruition—even at their
own expense.
For Nietzsche, everything we do is an expression of our will to power.
We construct illusions to empower us, and we only care about truth in so far as it helps
us achieve that goal.
To the extent that an idea doesn't empower us, we should question the degree to which
that idea is true.
For Nietzsche, something isn't simply true or false: truth contains multiple degrees
and dimensions.
Nietzsche is not saying that truth doesn't exist but only that it's complicated.
We might say that the truth of gravity's existence remains constant whether we believe it or
not.
But, does it?
Is there any reason that gravity couldn't just reverse in the next moment?
We predict that it's unlikely based on our past experience, but what's really stopping
it from happening in the end?
And so, we're brought back to the quote I started the video with
Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.
— Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense
Our understanding of trees, friends, gravity, and the world, like all conscious understanding,
are illusions that we've created to give us power.
And sometimes, they're illusions that hold up for long enough that we forget that
they're illusions.