Motion as an Effective Path to Truth

There are many good reasons that human beings tend to stay in one place. There are simple reasons, like familiarity, which leads to safety (a biological drive), and social consistency - history and biology demonstrate that we are fundamentally social beings. Human civilization and economies are based on geographically static lifestyles. On a personal level, there have most certainly been environments in which I’ve thrived because of static living - most of my life has been spent this way.

Despite this acknowledgement, however, it is invaluably important to also acknowledge the simple fact that human beings can survive, like many other animals, in a state of regular geographic motion. In both an ancient hunter-gatherer framework and an industrialist, globalized framework, it is possible to survive and wake up in a different location every day. Consistent motion seems to be the easiest way to fight the phenomenon of a habitual intellect or consciousness. It is also, perhaps, hard-wired into human evolution - it is a fact often overlooked that our species has been moving much longer than it has been static.

Modern philosophy informs us that the human consciousness – the phenomenon which created broad concepts like “goodness” and “truth” and “beauty” – is incapable of truly objective understanding. Consciousness, in it’s very nature, is fundamentally subjective: a subject is, simply put, a single, distinct, conscious individual. And yet language and society and even biology all point towards some sort of subjective agreement, and I would suggest that the closest we can get to some sort of objective understanding of reality is through this ‘subjective agreement.’

Humans can only communicate with members of their own species. There is no other species on Earth that is capable of providing us with a way to relate to it’s own subjective experience, except perhaps through the expression of pain - but that is a conversation for another day. With this (albeit very anthrocentric) understanding, the search for quasi-objective truth - subjective agreement - is limited to human experience. And yet anyone can point to countless examples of subjective disagreement - even static lifestyles will expose an individual consciousness to a wide variety of unique understandings, a variety which seems to yell ‘there is no truth!’ loud and clear. But the intellect is hungry, and it yearns to believe that when it identifies a concept as ‘true’, that it can be correct in doing so. It would appear, then, that if (with our modern epistemological understanding) the closest we can get to the ‘objective’ is some sort of ‘subjective agreement,’ the objective is something that can only be genuinely pursued by the widest range of exposure to individual subjective experiences. On a very understandable level, this exposure is only remotely possible if an individual pursues motion.

My suggestion, simply put, is that motion is an effective path to truth.

This suggestion is accompanied by the acknowledgement that no human being will ever get close to experiencing even a fraction of the variety of subjective experiences in the world. Even if one were to speak to every conscious being on the planet, the existence of numerous languages and even the various personal connotation of words in a single language point again to the impossibility of realizing a genuine ‘objective’ understanding. Despite this acknowledgement, every day we open our mouths, and every day our intellects thrive on exposure to new data and new subjective experiences, whether they are our own or those communicated by others, and there is a significant, chemical reality to the feeling of mutual understanding.

Since there is at least some sort of emotional validity to words, and since there is a rational connection between motion and the attainment of subjective-agreement objectivity (truth), I’d endeavor to suggest that wisdom is often held by those who have experienced motion. I am young, and certainly do not consider myself a wise individual - but I aspire to this distinction, and my aspirations point me, overwhelmingly, to travel - to motion.