Visual Belief: Truth in a Fabricated World

Synopsis:

Accepting what our senses tell us seems like a core notion of how we understand reality. But how much of what we accept as the reality around us comes now, in this digital era, from our own senses directly, rather than from a representation of one kind or another -- whether in visual media like video, textual descriptions like news articles, or audial communication like a phone call?

We commonly rely on indirect signals to form our concept of what reality is like, intuitively and automatically integrating new information. This process makes sense for most minor items in our daily lives. We constantly make small, reasonable assumptions about how fragments of truthfulness represent reality.

For more complex topics, this default approach is less reasonable. Accepting one version of the news as the most accurate, believing that a certain philosophy has a basis in reality more than another, judging a well-known figure based on what we hear about them: these items are much more difficult to confirm with certainty.

Yet we use these conclusions to inform how we make choices, how we interact with others, and how we vote. Approaching all new information with an open but critical mind can help balance out the burgeoning of misinformation, and applied on a large scale, may achieve a higher degree of harmony within society.