After reading Nietzsche and Lehrer, I couldn't resist putting a clip of The Matrix in here. I feel like the best way to describe these two readings is with the help of this particular movie. I used this particular clip because Nietzsche posed a similar question in his article titled On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense when he said, "What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding." (4).
Another quote from Nietzsche that really struck me was when he said, "The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real." So to compare it to the clip, the matrix itself, also known as the liar, uses its very essence as a computer program in feeding electrical signals, also known as valid designations or words, to people's brains in order to make what is unreal appear real, thereby providing these people with the illusion of truth. So if we were to go off of what both Nietzsche and The Matrix are displaying for us, how do we determine truth from illusion?
Nietzsche answers this question in saying that "nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us" (4). In other words, nature is truth in perfect form. However, I would like to point out that while nature may be truth, how we perceive it is illusion, as our perceptions of the things around us dilute the essence of something pure. Nietzsche touches on this when he continues in saying, "Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions" (4). These illusions include the words we use to describe the world around us. Which brings me to Lehrer's reading.
Throughout his article The Truth Wears Off, Lehrer writes to persuade his readers that what may be actual truth at first eventually gets disproved as illusion. As a scientist, Lehrer mentioned that any and all case studies carried out after the initial study has been completed will end up with similar results, but with sharply declining numbers. So the "truth" that one scientist may have found could have been nothing more than a perceived truth or illusion that another scientist doing the same case study brings to attention.
The best example of this decline effect can be found in test studies on the latest medications out there said to help fight off some of the devastating diseases our elderly face today. What drugs seemed to initially work now seem to be showing fewer positive results. Could this be because the drugs never were the true answer to treating certain ailments? Or could this be because the test subjects were building up a resistance to the drugs being given to them? Where else besides the scientific world do we see this decline effect?
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