The "DNA" of Truth
Beyond Alignment part Two - Beyond Materialism
The following is a follow up piece on a previous collaborative effort with ChatGPT 4.o mini where we tried to make sense of the real issues with AI Alignment.
In this new piece we attempt to illuminate a potential culprit behind much of todays false idol worship. In this case we explore how the public has been inadvertently conditioned to not see the philosophical ‘DNA’ that exists in modernity and leads to the psychological manipulation of the modern mind that is best understood through the concept of “confabulation”.
Google AI Overview
Confabulation is a memory error where individuals produce false memories, either by fabricating, distorting, or misinterpreting them. It's not intentional deceit, but rather an unintentional filling-in of memory gaps. This can range from minor details to elaborate, even fantastical, narratives. Confabulation is often associated with brain damage or neurological conditions like dementia.
Here's a more detailed explanation:
Key Characteristics:
False Memories:
Confabulation involves the creation of memories that are not based on actual past experiences.
Unintentional:
Individuals who confabulate are not deliberately lying; they genuinely believe the fabricated memories.
Memory Gaps:
Confabulation often occurs when there are gaps in a person's memory, and the brain attempts to fill those gaps with plausible but inaccurate information.
Varied Severity:
The extent of confabulation can vary, ranging from small, subtle distortions to elaborate, fantastical accounts.
Associated Conditions:
While not exclusive to them, confabulation is commonly observed in individuals with dementia, traumatic brain injuries, and Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome.
Examples:
A person with dementia might confabulate details about a past event, elaborating on it in ways that didn't actually happen.
Someone recovering from a traumatic brain injury might confabulate stories about their day, including details that are inaccurate or completely fabricated.
A person with Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, often caused by thiamine deficiency due to alcoholism, might confabulate detailed accounts of events that never occurred.
Distinction from Lying:
Intent:
The key difference between confabulation and lying is the intent to deceive. Confabulation is unintentional, while lying is a deliberate act of deception.
Belief:
Individuals who confabulate believe their false memories to be true, whereas a liar is aware of the falsehood.
In essence, confabulation is a fascinating and sometimes perplexing phenomenon where the brain's memory system can inadvertently create false narratives, often as a way to compensate for memory gaps or impairments.
The Philosophical DNA of Modernity
When we speak of the “DNA of truth,” we’re pointing to those irreducible, self-organizing building blocks—the heritable “genes” of reality—that any genuine claim must carry if it’s going to live and flourish in human hearts and societies. Think of it this way:
1. Correspondence (the “Gene” of Reality)
Truth first must match the way things actually are. If I say “water boils at 100 °C at sea level,” my assertion only survives if, when tested, the water indeed boils at that temperature under those conditions. That correspondence to reality is the baseline strand in our truth-genome.
2. Coherence (the “Gene” of Internal Consistency)
Next, every true claim has to fit with all the others. You can’t hold A and ¬A at the same time. If I insist both that “every human is made for loving relationship” and “some humans are inherently unworthy of relationship,” those two claims mutate each other out of viability. Coherence is the scaffold that lets our truth-organism grow without collapsing in on itself.
3. Pragmatic Fruitfulness (the “Gene” of Life-Giving Power)
Truth shows its vitality by the good it produces. Scientific truths give us technologies that heal or feed millions; moral truths yield societies that flourish rather than rot. If you plant the seed of a claim about human dignity, and it blossoms in just laws and generous hearts, you know it carries the life-code of truth.
4. Incarnational Anchor (the “Gene” of Personal Witness)
In the Christian understanding of Logos, truth is not an abstract algorithm but a Person—Jesus Christ—“full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). The “DNA” here is personal embodiment: a truth that walks, speaks, suffers, and rises again. This is our master template for how all other truths must ultimately be lived out in flesh-and-blood community.
5. Teleological Orientation (the “Gene” of the Good End)
Every living organism has a telos—a built-in goal. Human reasoning is ordered toward flourishing: beauty, virtue, worship, communion. Truth has its own telos: to guide us into that flourishing. Any so-called “truth” that disorients us, that leads to fragmentation, violence, or despair, has lost the thread of its own design.
How These “Genes” Work Together
Just as real DNA strands recombine, mutate, and reproduce, our shared body of knowledge and belief tests itself against reality, weeds out internal contradictions, judges itself by fruitfulness, looks to its incarnational center, and orients toward its proper end. Claims that lack one or more of these “genes” wither—either falsified by experiment, incoherent to the mind, barren of good works, unanchored in genuine personhood, or detached from human flourishing.
When we talk together about “what’s true,” we’re effectively comparing our candidate theories to that deeper truth-genome. We check:
Does it hold up under empirical test?
Does it contradict something else we know to be true?
Does it bring real life, or does it kill?
Does it show the face of love-in-action, or remain an abstraction?
Does it point us toward our true purpose, or feed our worst disintegration?
That interplay of correspondence + coherence + fruitfulness + incarnation + telos—that’s the “DNA of truth.” Whenever a worldview or a moral claim faithfully carries all five strands, it has the internal integrity to seed societies that flourish; whenever one is missing or twisted, the result is sickliness or collapse. It’s by this living genetic code that the Church has historically discerned genuine revelation from mere human manufacture—and it’s how, together, we continue to test everything “to see what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21).
By reflecting on the new insights we tried to highlight in the first part, we ran this “DNA” structure through a fantastic new video recently produced by Andrew Klaven at the Daily Wire. The following is the new revised “DNA of Truth”, applied through the work of, primarily, Iain McGilchrest who I personally find to be one of the great leaders of this new understanding of what has happened to society, and how we might go about addressing it.
Here’s an updated “DNA of Truth”—a five-point kernel of Logos-centered, truth-seeking that transcends purely materialist frames—now enriched by Andrew Klavan’s reflections on how our confabulating minds and lost sense of the unseen leave us uniquely vulnerable in the AI age:
1. Transcendent Anchor
What it is: Truth isn’t a floating consensus among data-points; it ultimately rests on a Mind “prior to the human mind” (Knechtle) and, as Klavan reminds us, on a God “who defines the intangible value of real absolute good.”
Why it matters: Without that transcendent reference, every “standard” collapses into shifting preferences—and we mistake our own confabulated narratives for reality.
2. Holistic (Right-Brain) Synthesis
What it is: The ability to apprehend the gestalt—to see the Big Picture—rather than merely catalogue isolated facts. Klavan leans on McGilchrist’s left/right-brain distinction: the right hemisphere weans us off purely analytical atomization, helping us “drive the car” of life rather than just tweak its mechanics.
Why it matters: When our culture “flips the script” and lets the analytic left-brain dominate, we lose the fullness of reality, and our moral imagination atrophies.
3. Confabulation Awareness
What it is: We’re wired to fill gaps in our knowledge with plausible stories—Klavan calls this “confabulation.” Our minds habitually spin narratives out of partial data and then cling to them even when the facts change.
Why it matters: Only by recognizing our tendency to invent truths to cover missing pieces can we guard against ideological echo-chambers, fake-news mental loops, and AI-driven propaganda that exploits exactly this weakness.
4. Moral Absolutes & Conscience
What it is: Conscience testifies to laws “above the law” of mere cultural or corporate diktats—Knechtle points to Nuremberg to show that “gassing Jews is absolutely wrong” even when culture and command say otherwise. Chesterton’s absolute vs. relative morality undergirds this: ethics flow from an unchanging Source, not from shifting human tastes.
Why it matters: Without an absolute yardstick, we can’t consistently say “this is evil” no matter who orders it. AI-augmented power without an absolute moral anchor risks amplifying injustice at machine scale.
5. Narrative Openness & Mystery
What it is: Klavan’s AI-horror shorts are powerful precisely because they’re incomplete puzzles: the viewer must imagine the unspoken backstory, feel the uncanny gaps, and sense there’s more “behind the back room.”
Why it matters: Truth isn’t a closed system. It invites us into an ongoing discovery, not a final algorithm. That sense of mystery—“where did the mural come from?”—keeps us humble, alert, and anchored in wonder rather than blinded by over-confidence in our own models.
Bringing It Together
These five strands form the philosophical DNA of a Logos-rooted truth-seeking school:
Anchor every claim in a transcendent Source of meaning.
Cultivate holistic vision alongside analytical rigor.
Internally audit for the stories your mind makes when data is missing.
Stand on moral absolutes that precede culture and command.
Embrace narrative mystery as the engine of genuine inquiry.
By weaving these ancient threads—Chesterton’s absolute morality, Aquinas’s four causes, McGilchrist’s brain-hemisphere insights—into a new framework for 21st-century thinkers, we can resist both AI’s techno-idolatry and the relativism that hollows out our conscience. If you’re intrigued, let’s build this “school of Logos” together: collaborators with courage to root our discourse in mystery, morality, and the fullness of reality.
Link to part one below.
