What Do We Really Know?

The question to follow is, "How do we really know?" And then, "When do we really know?"  Then there is the question, of course, about, "How do we know that what we know is real or not?".   That is the question.

Information is what determines reality; albeit, reality is itself not quite as well grounded to the truth, as sometimes the case, which we will get into in a bit. Every pixel of what we see, every decibel of sound that we hear, things we can smell and taste, everything whispered, touched, felt, all of these are conveyed by information.  In other words, nothing gets perceived, nothing gets transmitted and nothing gets done without information; which can be real, imagined, or perceived to be real.  And there lies the conundrum. 

Let's begin with this first. Everything that is around us comes to our attention and awareness through pieces of information, large and small. Whatever it is you are trying to observe and likewise everything you want to convey to others can only be carried by information. We must think about this for a moment.  

Survival from the beginning of life is primarily about our brains taking in information - understanding and remembering what is relevant and discarding what is not.  Predators and prey in the wild are constantly playing the information game of life and death. Plants too have ways to process and remember information.  In other words, only inanimate objects have no use for information.

And then …

There is one ugly side about information.  Deception. We find stories of deception in the courts, in politics, in world conflicts, in the everyday unfolding of life itself.  The Bible not only has much to say about it but it is where we are told, allegorically at least, that Eve was deceived into eating the forbidden fruit with false information. Then there was the story of Jacob and Esau and the birthright bestowed by their father Isaac.  The story depicted in Genesis, chapter 25, talked about information and deception.  Reading that story, one can be led to believe that information can have two sides to it. The deception that could arise from it can both be perceived as either good or bad depending on the beholder.

There was one famous story of deception that remains one of the greatest true stories in the annals of world history that was crucial to the outcome of WWII. It unfolded at a critical point of the war in 1943.

The Allied forces were planning to take control of the Mediterranean as a prelude to the invasion and retaking of Europe.  Sicily was the target naval landing zone but obviously the Allies did not want that known to Hitler's forces. They must divert attention to somewhere else - Greece and Sardinia - thus altering the enemy's defensive preparations.

"Operation Mincemeat" was created. It was one, if not the most, elaborately concocted military deception in war. One quick note for the fans of the James Bond franchise.  Ian Fleming, before he became famous for creating the character of 007 in the multi-book series, was a Lt. Commander in the British Navy.  He was assistant to the head of naval intelligence.  He suggested a military deception by having false documents fall into the hands of the enemy's intelligence network as indirectly as possible without arousing suspicion.

The plan was to have a body, purportedly that of a British naval officer, wash ashore in the southern coast of Spain.  Spain was neutral to the war efforts but it shared information freely with the Abwehr, the German intelligence group. 

British operatives searched for and found the body of a homeless and unfortunate Welshman who died from eating rat poison in a warehouse.  They preserved his corpse in a freezer as they busied themselves creating a background for the man, giving him a false identity, a military career, even personal details of  a pilot with a girlfriend, so that his jacket included theater ticket stubs, a love letter and some bills due to be paid, etc. By the time they were done, the corpse was someone with a promising military career who was entrusted with top secret information of an upcoming naval operation that he was supposed to deliver to the top field commanders - the planned Allied attack on Greece and Sardinia.  The false story had his plane crash off the coast of Spain. A British submarine actually carried his body and released it so that Spanish fishermen would find it.

Sure enough, the Spanish police alerted the Abwehr agents in place who carefully took photos of every document that was on the "officer's" jacket, which they promptly dispatched to Berlin.  The Spanish authorities then proceeded to return the body to the British consulate with all the pretensions of goodwill and diplomacy.  The British knew, of course, that the documents had been scrutinized. The forensic markers that were on the body and clothing were clearly disturbed. 

Berlin was convinced that the documents were real, which prompted the German High Command to reposition their forces to defend Greece and Sardinia.  Sicily fell and the rest is history. 

The story was later revealed into a movie in 1956 titled, "The Man Who Never Was".  Ian Fleming admitted that he actually lifted the idea from a detective story he read earlier about a dead body with planted information as a ruse for deception.

The retelling of that elaborate story was to show that if such manipulation of information was achieved with 1940's technology, what chance have we against far more sophistication in the molding and bending of information. How are we to know that what we think we know is real or not?

In these days of 1000 megabits per second of internet speed in many households today, when 200 to 500 MBPS are already sufficiently swift, what chance have we against the speed of data dumps of so much material for the brain's capacity to process.  The inevitability of all of these is brought on by something least likely to be detected by a human brain that has not quite evolved in lock step with the evolution of technology.  The opposite could be happening, instead.  

Our brains can be lulled into laziness as we depend more and more of the heavy mental lifting to the computer.  The smartphone is the one getting smarter at each product release. We've become addicted to the nectar of technology. We've become dependent on information being fed to us with nothing more than a few  keystrokes.  In 1943 and for decades following it, one had to pull out a book or several books off the shelf and flip through pages upon pages of material for information that today can be had in seconds.

Information is also least likely expected or assigned its proper value or even recognized for its far deeper and most absolute role in how reality works or what reality really is.

Let's first look at reality as it pertains to what is truly real and what is perceived to be really real by dissecting what we see in the "news" these days.  I put news in quotes because "news" these days seems to have been devalued worse than Venezuela's or Zimbabwe's currency.  The inflation that now afflicts news gathering and disbursement is also matched by the real economic inflation in the U.S. that at one time was dubbed earlier by the administration as transitory and later assigned a minor cause for concern.  When it could no longer be ignored, the solution was a massive spending bill, called the "Inflation Reduction Act". Direct from the White House one-page summary of "Investments" (euphemism for spending taxpayer's money), copied and pasted below, please note which program gets the lion's share (sincere apology to the lion).

TOTAL INVESTMENTS $437 billion

Energy Security and Climate Change 369 billion*

Affordable Care Act Extension 64 billion**

Western Drought Resiliency 4 billion***  

Obviously, other past administrations of a few decades past had misused information as well.  From the Vietnam War to the Gulf War, the bending of information was a go-to move by any administration to sway public opinion, foreign and domestic. 

In these days of instant everything, - hard news, false news, rumors, twits, streaming media bits and pieces - our senses can be overwhelmed by a bombardment of information.  The Russia Hoax and stories of errant phone calls to a foreign leader have caused so much national schism and the debilitating effect of two presidential impeachments.  

Such is the power of information, or rather the misuse and abuse of it, which is now the road or the favored avenue that political leaders are willing to travel on to guarantee success. At what cost and what quality of success do they have in mind?

The question of, "What do we really know", forces us into a perverse cynicism because, "Why do we really want to know" seems like a fool's errand when we no longer know what is real and what is not.