I do not think it makes sense to think of what can be seen in a microscope or telescope as a visualization or a realization: it seems more appropriate to describe what we see as an enlarged object. Looking through a microscope could be said to reveal a previously unknown world teeming with life. But the issue I am addressing here does not center on revelation.
Joel Snyder PhD
University of Chicago
Representation of Truth
May 2005
In a fabulous lecture recently at the Gleacher center of the University of Chicago I was stunned by Professor Joel Snyder, (Professor of Art History at the University) assertion that although images and pictures represent reality accurately, (as we can see on an artistic canvas or photographic plate, or medical sonogram, or X ray), they do not necessarily imply that we can actually get at the truth behind the picture any better because of our accuracy in representing it.
This was a startling revelation for me. It meant that as we get more and more accurate about how we represent reality, the fact is that the representation itself is far from the truth about reality. Representation is based on conventions that we as scientists or artists have agreed upon.
For instance medical sonograms show a baby in the mother?s uterus and one can make out on the screen the head the body and the spine accurately to the point that we can actually diagnose spina bifida or heart disease. However the images we see on the screen are totally artificial and conventional. In reality we are bouncing sound waves off the baby and recording them, until a computer expert designed a convention whereby the sound waves might be reflected on a screen or photo as an X ray might. He was asked to make those images look as similar to routine X-Rays so that radiologists might feel comfortable interpreting them! The programmer used computer-generated conventions to pictorially represent sonographic waves as images. Here we have a case of sound represented, albeit highly accurately, as image. The actual baby looks very different from the shapes and gray images outlined on the screen (Thank heaven!).
So too when I order an MRI on your head or EMG of the arms or legs in order to diagnose a disorder I look to the screen for the images of the brain or the electrical speed of conduction as waves on an oscilloscope. The way we represent pathology and anatomy is highly conventional and agreed upon by scientists and doctors. However the truth i.e. the actual anatomy of the body, the brain itself or the actual nerve that is conduction those impulses are of little clinical value to me. I need accuracy in diagnosis and representation of truth, not truth itself. This is because the representation is what is being correlated with pathology and interventions and evidence-based outcomes, not the actual anatomical gross pathology.
In science and medicine we see reality or pathology only as it is seen with and through the naked eye (rarely these days) or with the telescopes and microscopes and imaging machines we employ. We take photographs of reality and record sounds and pictures. We make a deep assumption however about this reality map. We assume it represents truth out there as it really is whereas Snyder seems to suggest that this far from the truth! We rely actually upon conventions about how we represent truth not truth itself. We rely solely on the tools of these conventions, the way we agree on the computer programs and mathematical formulas by which we calibrate the tools we use to see reality. They alone provide us with the accepted images of reality by which we may make albeit accurate interpretations.
Snyder thus suggests that we actually must split between ACCURACY (and those machines keep getting better and better at what they do!)? And the Truth itself.
In receiving colored images of the cosmos on your MAC screensaver we are dazzled by the sheer beauty of those stellar constellations the blues and purples the reds and greens. However the reality is far from what we actually see. The light wavelengths being recorded by powerful telescopes record only wavelengths that are far beyond the normal spectrum of color. By some computer-generated convention scientists, in their desire to show how accurate we can reflect the myriad images we are receiving from outer space, decided upon a schema whereby red means hotter and nearer and blue means cooler and more distant. The images maybe highly accurate but the stars may not even exist when we get to see their representation on the screen, for by the time in light years the light waves arrive they may already be extinct in reality. Once again highly accurate representations of reality have little to do with the truth of that reality.
We are thus totally dependent upon the instruments of technology that image or record the truth for their accuracy and are blessed when we are able to help patients by providing information about the inner workings of the human body so that they can make more intelligent choices about their healthcare. Nevertheless I realized that this has little to do with the actual truth. We are really not very interested in anything that does not represent the details accurately.
When I the doctor take pictures, X rays and sonograms, blood and spinal fluid analysis and stimulate nerves in an electromyogram I hope to be as accurate as I can about the pathology that has been conventionalized by ever-greater and more accurate machines. However I humbly suggest that I am as far from the actual truth of your reality as the fetus and the sonogram in our first example.
Finally it occurred to me that although TRUTH in and of itself in all its pristine purity, may never be reached, the accuracy of representing the truth MAY! Even beyond science?in my own life!!
The TRUTH of my life and its narrative, my biography my desire to connect with God remains elusive as ever? the inner meaning behind it all, will always remain refractory to discovery in the absolute sense, nevertheless my struggle to approximate the truth with accurate representation of truth using Sacred texts and inner experience as well as the help of Saints (Tzadikim) is entirely possible. Different traditions and texts all struggle to make accurate representations of sense experience, as do literary texts and it seems we are getting more and more accurate as history progresses. We seem to compete with claims about the truth but in reality we are claiming better access codes or representational maps, not truth itself.
As I go through life using different texts to mirror my spiritual state, as I make use of different sub-traditions within my own, I would hope that I am somehow getting closer to approximating accuracy in reflecting the divine within although I have no illusions about seeing the very truth itself.
Maybe this is what Pythagorean sacred science was really all about. Having made secular theorems about the nature of the world and its dimensions Pythagoras then proceeded to correlate the spheres with human experience. So too did Newtown spend most of his life after his famous discoveries in physics attempting to understand and objectify the inner world of the spirit and its correlation with truth and some kind of immutable laws of spirituality.
In the very struggle for meaning in our pain and suffering we may have been given a gift of the human experience of truth and our ability to record accurately that experience however the truth itself remains forever refractory to human grasp.
For instance; whereas in my residency-training program back in the 70's in order to image the brain we used to painfully inject air into the brain to provide better contrast between the brain matter and the contrast dye called a pneumoencephalogram. Later Cat scanning provided a safer and much more accurate definition of normal versus abnormal brain tissue followed by MRI. Today we look at PET and SPECT scans to actually observe brain functioning during mental or physical activity! The accuracy keeps getting better. Each of the above mentioned technologies are based on different physical principles and physics of brain tissue versus fluid and air.