We’ll Never Know the Full Truth—But That’s OK

Hey folks, welcome back. In my previous post, I dropped the line that we’ll never know the Big-T Truth. You know, the capital-T kind that’s supposed to encompass everything from how many angels can dance on the head of a pin to whether the entire universe is just some colossal simulation. Lots of philosophers, scientists, and random people on Twitter have debated this. But there’s a deeper history here—this idea goes back at least to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” You might remember the gist: we’re stuck in a cave, chained up, watching flickering shadows of what’s really out there. Everything we see, feel, or think? Shadows on the wall. It’s not the real thing—just illusions cast by forms we can’t directly perceive.

Now, mix that ancient allegory with modern quantum physics, and we get something even wilder. Way back when, we thought atoms were tiny little billiard balls. Then we peeked closer and realized these “things” are more like energy waves that don’t have a definite position until we measure them. On top of that, matter is mostly empty space, held together by forces we’re still working hard to understand. And as if that’s not weird enough, time and space can twist, bend, and warp under the right conditions. Basically, our neat mental picture of “solid stuff existing in a box of time and space” starts looking more and more like an approximation—a user-friendly interface our brains create to help us navigate daily life.

That’s the real kicker: our brains evolved to help us survive on the Serengeti, not to unravel the fine details of quantum states or higher-dimensional geometry. Our sensory equipment (eyes, ears, taste buds, etc.) is designed to give us a working model of our local environment—enough to find food, avoid predators, and maybe locate an affordable apartment. We didn’t evolve to see subatomic particles or to parse exactly how the laws of nature tick. When you step beyond those survival constraints, the “picture” of reality we see quickly becomes incomplete or even misleading.

Think of it like using a roadmap. It’s a scaled-down version of the territory; certain details are omitted because that’s how a map stays useful. You get roads, you get major landmarks, you get place names. But you don’t get every pebble in your driveway. Likewise, our concepts—whether they’re religion, ideologies, or even scientific theories—are all maps. They’re helpful for certain tasks, but none of them is the final, perfect depiction of the actual territory.

And let’s be honest, there’s a certain danger in letting any map become your final and unshakable Truth. Throughout history, every time someone declared some grand ideology or belief system as the Ultimate Explanation, things have gotten messy, to say the least. You can probably conjure up your own examples: wars, oppression, crusades, genocides—some of humanity’s biggest horrors have sprung from being too certain, too “this is the only real truth.” Those oversimplifications might unify people for a while, but eventually they cause conflict because, well, they’re just not true in any universal, all-encompassing sense.

So, as a wise cave-dweller might say: embrace the uncertainty. We’re all running around with incomplete maps and limited viewpoints, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do some amazing stuff in the process. Human progress has come from exploring those pockets of the unknown—poking at shadows on the wall to see if they reveal something new. Being OK with “never fully knowing” can actually drive us to keep learning. It’s a pretty powerful motivator.

In other words, we will never know the real, deep-down, cosmic-level Truth. But our partial truths, our mental models, and our collaborative attempts to refine them can still give us plenty of mileage. Just don’t turn those partial truths into unshakeable dogmas, or you risk confusing that roadmap for the territory itself. Keep an open mind, keep poking, and see what new shadows you can cast. Because hey, there might be a brighter light lurking just around the corner.