World Without StructureRiding and Writing in South America

Until a couple weeks ago, I didn’t even know this road existed. It’s called the Transoceanic Highway; it’s a joint venture between Peru and Brazil connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific. It was inaugurated in the 70’s, but abandoned until recently, and officially completed in 2012 or 2013. The final section connects Cusco to the Brazilian border. That was the section I mentioned at the end of my last post. It took me out of the Andes and into the Amazon. The highest pass was over 16,000 feet, and I think the road had 16,000 curves. It's listed on a website of the curviest roads in the world, which is certainly subjective, but not something I’m inclined to disagree with. The best thing about this spectacular road was how it descended through eco-systems so rapidly.

So I didn’t really intend to be in the jungle. I thought the Amazon was too remote and too ambitious for this trip, but with this new road it was actually the most convenient route from one side of the continent to the other. The alternative was to cross Bolivia, but that would have meant more time at high altitude, and I was ready to descend to the level of mortals. Moreover, when I compared options on the map, I preferred the nice circle drawn ‘round the heart of the continent by the Amazon route.

So coming to the jungle wasn’t on the agenda, and I didn’t even know about the road. One might suspect that I had planned the route for this trip rather poorly, but one would be wrong because you can’t blame me for doing poorly that which I didn’t do at all. Seven years ago I planned a route from Houston through Central America all the way to Ushuaia at the Southern tip of Argentina. That was to be an eight month journey down the West coast and up the East; eight month trips require planning. This was only three months, I figured I could wing it. Thanks to a little last minute road building on behalf of the Peruvians, things have worked out quite well. (Perhaps those same Peruvians could spend some time on a little road between Chivay and Caylioma.)

I didn’t actually plan to come to the jungle, but I was immediately glad I did. Turns out I like a little vegetation. The desert was too dry, the mountains were too high, and as a result I haven’t hardly seen a tree in six weeks. I like trees.

Though I never thought I'd be in the jungle, I’ve already ridden over 1500 miles here, and I’ve got so many incompletely processed images and ideas in my head that I don’t know where to begin. There’s no coherent sequence to my experiences. I’m just going to spit them out:

1) I have loved this highway; I am morally obliged to repudiate this highway. Roads through the Amazon destroy the Amazon. Virtually every place I’ve been the jungle had been cleared for at least a quarter mile on both sides, and sometimes as far as you can see. The jungle has been replaced by cows, white brahma cattle for miles on end. The magnitude of the destruction is disturbing; the purpose of the destruction is sickening. I’ve never felt so strongly that I was witness to the end of the planet. The Amazon isn’t merely a bunch of trees and vines, it’s the richest ecosystem on the planet and it plays a fundamental role in the health of the climate. We’re burning it down for cows. This is so deeply shortsighted it counts as immoral; our children will pay the cost.

2) Even as it is, the landscape has beauty. Even among the cows you recognize that you’re not in Kansas (or Texas or Argentina). Spindly trees and towering palms dot the terrain, and there is nearly always ribbons of jungle on the horizon. Meanwhile, patches of jumbly brush sprout wherever they get the chance.

3) One morning I realized that the devastated jungle looks much like the landscape of early Neanderthal golf courses. The fairways are somewhat uneven, but this wasn’t a problem in the early days before the invention of the ball. The original version of golf only used clubs; it was more violent than the modern game. The goal was to make it from tee to flag receiving the fewest clubbings from opponents (thus the origin of “low score wins”). The victor of each round received a chicken. Neanderthal golf made great television.

4) The Brazilians have let roads deteriorate into obsolescence before. For the better of the Amazon and the worse of my motorcycle, the road from the Peruvian border to Rio Branco is already half way there. It’s one of the older parts of the Transoceanic highway and it’s so pocked with potholes it turns driving into weaving. All the traffic zigs and zags from one lane to the other searching for a smooth bit of pavement. The first few times you see oncoming traffic lurch into your lane it’s disconcerting, but once you get the hang of it, it’s all kind of funny, though dreadfully slow. I was surprised at how slowly even the SUVs pick their way through the obstacles, but it occurred to me that anyone who lives on this road has probably paid college tuition for the children of an auto mechanic.

5) I’m so sick of hearing how everyone is so dangerous. A Brazilian told me he couldn’t recommend the Amazon because it’s too dangerous; those terrible people in the Amazon! Yeah, OK, no doubt there are dangerous people here, and if you go hang out in bars in the bad part of town in the middle of the night you might even find them. But riding during day light hours between gas stations and hotels and restaurants and plazas and markets and all the other numerous places that normal people go, you find normal people, doing normal things, in the standard friendly normal way that people do. These so-called "frontier towns" in the Amazon feel as dangerous as small town America.

6) To be fair, I didn’t venture off the highway looking for the newest outposts of humanity; there may be havens of iniquity hidden in the dark recesses of the jungle. In fact, on the new road in Peru there were a couple sketchy stretches. Peruvian MOUNTAIN towns are made of stone and cinder blocks, and look like they’ve been in a state of perpetual disrepair from the dawn of time; Peruvian JUNGLE towns are made of wood, and look as though they were slapped together last weekend during a thunderstorm. I rode through a few of the latter on a Sunday afternoon while the markets were in full swing. There was one I won’t forget. It felt like I was in the old west during a hoedown. I thought it was a small taste of the insanity I was expecting in Brazil so I didn’t even stop to take a picture; I regret that. Everything I’ve seen in Brazil is tame by comparison.

7) Similarly, of all the larger towns in the jungle, Puerto Maldonado (in Peru) was the least refined, and the most interesting. The traffic is 70% motorcycles, 20% three-wheeled cabs, and 10% cars. It was like a 24 hour motorcycle rally. I had the biggest motorcycle on the street so I was king. The motorcyclists in yellow vests are taxis. For 30 cents you can climb on back and they will take you anywhere in the city, or kill you. I left the city at 7am surrounded by yellow vested motorcyclists all carrying children in school uniforms.

8) I do see that people in the jungle are different than people in the mountains. The mountain folk are friendly, but reserved. They don’t speak first to strangers, and they wouldn’t dream of touching you. The jungle folk are gregarious. They’re friendly and they want you to know it. They ask lots of questions, shake hands repeatedly, and pat you on the back. This is what you read about Brazilians and its true. And I can see that this is dangerous. When the shirtless guy at the roadside cafe greets you with this sort of open-hearted enthusiasm at 10am in the morning just imagine the raging inferno he can turn into at 10pm full of cheap wine (which he sold for a few dollars a gallon). But I gave hime a big smile and a hearty handshake, and he didn’t kill me, or steal my motorcycle, or even tease me about my beard.

9) Peru’s food museums were so uninteresting I didn’t even bother to mention them. But my congratulations to Brazil for its performance in this category. I have visited two food museums in the Amazon; both were large, brightly lit, well-organized, neatly stocked, colorful and full of interesting products. They did not have security guards lurking in the aisles, and they stocked mayonnaise in a jar, where it belongs. The weakest section in the store was candy where there was neither licorice nor anything I didn’t recognize, which meant I had to buy fruit.

10) I don’t want to have to be the one who points this out, but the Brazilian flag is hideous. Yellow, green and blue? I like monkeys, but I wouldn’t let them design my national flag.

As I may have mentioned, I didn’t know that I would be in the Amazon.

Truth and Reality

There is no way that I can fill in all the details of the outline included in my last post in the next few weeks. So instead of trying to do that I’m going to make some side comments that may help to fill out my views. I’m going to sketch a story about truth and reality.

As with most words, we use “truth” and “reality” in lots of different ways. And I’m not going to claim that there is one unique, right way to use these terms, but I’m going to provide a simple, useful way of thinking about them. First of all, I want to say that reality is the way things are, and I want to reserve the word “truth” to apply to sentences that conform to reality.

As a first simple example, we might say that in reality I am in Brazil, and that’s why the sentence “I am in Brazil,” is a true sentence. So again, reality is how things are, and “true” is an adjective we apply to sentences that get reality right.

Next, I want to claim that no sentences are ever absolutely true. The reason for this is that no sentence can ever fully conform to reality. And this follows because reality is always more complex than any possible sentence. I am using the term “conform” intentionally, and I intend for it to conjure the idea that for a sentence to be absolutely true it would need to fit reality as though molded around it. We tend to imagine that language corresponds to reality quite easily. I just gave an example that seems plausible: I am in Brazil, and the sentence "I am in Brazil” conforms to that reality. But if you think about it, I’ve just cheated horribly. I used a linguistic description of reality in place of reality itself, so no surprise that there is a sentence which conforms to the linguistic description.

The reality of my being in Brazil is composed of my physical presence in the physical country. This reality is enormously, monstrously, hideously complex. The string of words “I am in Brazil,” in no way literally conforms to the reality. The sentence is four lousy words; they cannot possibly conform to the richness and subtlety (not to mention the indeterminacy) of reality.

When you see the point I'm making, it's not deep nor even controversial, words cannot possibly fully conform to reality. You can't rap a Christmas present in tubes of toothpaste, and you can't get language to fully conform to the complexity of reality.

Let me note that words are themselves in reality. Thus one might say that for 2500 years philosophers have been trying to get one part of reality, namely words, to create a perfect model of the entirety of the rest of reality. There is a certain respect in which this project is nonsense, and it’s the core reason that Rorty and others have railed against it. And yet, we can’t exist without a web of beliefs, and a web of beliefs is in large part a linguistic fabrication, and thus we must go forward doing our best to embrace appropriate sentences whether they can fully conform to reality or not. Among the beliefs we should hold is that none of our beliefs can be strictly true.

The first, most obvious objection to what I've said is that “conformity” to reality is an absurdly high bar as a definition of truth. I’ve basically defined truth out of existence! But I think my definition is actually rather close to our intuitions. At the very least, it helps to make sense of the common contemporary intuition that nothing is absolutely true. My model is the contextualist understanding of the term “know.” There’s a huge literature about knowledge, and there’s no reason for most people to care about it, but allow a digression to explain some details:

Do you KNOW anything at all? Descartes raised this question in the mid-1600’s searching for a secure foundation for knowledge. Descartes points out that you might be dreaming, and if so, you might not actually be reading these words. Once you’re aware of the general worry, how can you EVER trust knowledge from the senses? But even worse, what if there’s a being as powerful as God, but evil, and he deceives us about everything just because he can. If you can’t rule out the existence of such a being, then perhaps you cannot know anything at all, except, famously, that you exist. “I think therefore I am.”

Descartes opens a serious can of worms which he tries to close by proving that there is a God, and since God wouldn’t want to deceive us we can trust our faculties as long as we are careful. Unfortunately, Descartes’ worries were much more successful than his solutions. The radical skeptical he loosed on the world has haunted philosophy ever since. How can we claim to know anything?!

Surprisingly, there’s something like an emerging consensus within analytic philosophy that the solution to the puzzle involves understanding how the term “know” actually works. The word is always relative to a context. Peter Unger explained the important parts of the idea by comparison to the word “flat.” Strictly speaking there probably aren’t any completely flat surfaces in existence; at some level of magnification every surface exhibits deformities and crevices, until at great enough magnification it no longer makes sense to talk about the “surface” at all. And yet, it’s obvious that some things are flat and others are not. There’s no deep mystery here; we call things flat relative to a context and the relevant purposes for which we would like to use that surface. A field may be flat in a context where it’s intended for “fútbol” without being flat the purpose of putting a golf ball. But if you stand in front of a flat field, and point out that it's not TRULY flat, everyone will agree with you. You've switched contexts and raised the standards of flatness. To be obnoxious you can point out that NOTHING is TRULY flat, and no one can prove you wrong.

Similarly, I know that I am in a hotel in Cuiabá, Brazil, and I know that my motorcycle is out front. Sitting here writing I am in a context in which it is reasonable for me to say that I know these things. But if you tell me there has been a rash of motorcycle thefts in Cuiabá, and that they have been targeting BMW’s, suddenly you’ve changed the context, and I can’t claim to KNOW that the motorcycle is outside. In fact, just thinking about this makes me want to get up and check. Now if you start raising questions about the metaphysical structure of existence, and raise Cartesian questions about dreaming and evil demons that I can’t rule out, then I may have to admit that there is an extreme sense of “know,” just like the extreme sense of “flat,” in accord with which I do not KNOW anything at all.

If you’ve followed this, then you might guess that all I’m doing is saying that “truth” works the same way. A sentence is true in a standard context when it conforms to reality well enough for the purposes of that context. But from within the extreme context, the context that’s relevant for philosophy and metaphysics, truth is full conformity, and that doesn’t exist.

For those trained in standard logic, the idea that truth is bivalent will get in the way of appreciating my definition. The bivalent view of truth is that every sentence has to be either true or false, and it assumes there is only one context. Thus according to standard logic "it is raining at time t, at location l" has to be either true or false for every given time and place. But on the conformity definition of truth, truth at a place and time is always relative to a context, and when that context is raised to the philosophical extreme no sentences count as true. One of the features of my definition is that it does not mean that some sentences are not more false than others. "I am in Brazil” is not absolutely true on the conformity definition of truth, but it’s far more true, than “I am in Japan.”

I have always found the contextualist literature about knowledge somewhat annoying because it appears to conflate the analysis of how the word “know” works with the deep questions about our relationship to reality, and what can actually be known. Thus I have no intention of stopping here. To my mind, the contextualist analysis of how the word “know” works is excellent, but what is left is to explain the significance of the extreme philosophical context, the one in which we cannot know anything. There are some few philosophers (and quite a few philosophy students) who seem so astonished by this epistemic gap, that they can never move forward. They stare into the abyss as one would into the grand canyon. Many will accuse me of being similarly bedazzled by unknowing. On the other hand, there are also philosophers who imagine that the extreme cases of unknowing are largely uninteresting and artificial, revealing nothing special about our metaphysical position in the world. That we can imagine a malevolent demon who deceives us, is merely a philosopher’s parlor trick. Stop imagining him and he’ll go away. Let us raise the standards of knowledge only as high as the standards of science, and let us move forward. Mysteries solved.

And yet, even in the sciences we are haunted by unknowing, for science is always potentially revisable precisely because we can never absolutely know that we have the truth. Why? How are we positioned in the world such that we can never achieve absolute truth? What does this positioning say about the nature of reality itself?

These are questions worth addressing, and that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to present a picture of how reality is in itself, and in an odd way I'm working both ends of the puzzle at once: I'm trying to explain our lack of absolute knowledge and truth, and simultaneously to use the lack of absolutes to illuminate our understanding of reality.

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My intent was to include a section on reality here as well, but that section still needs much work. Hopefully it will be ready for next post.

The Amazon river basin includes all the area that drains into the Amazon river. By and large it would all be jungle if it were not burned down for cows. I have been riding through the Southern edge of this basin, even including a tiny corner of the Brazilian state called Amazonas. But as you can probably tell from what I’ve written, it was rare that I was actually within any sort of jungle. To get the full jungle experience tourists are supposed to fly into Manaus or Iquitos, take a boat down a river and spend a night or two in a cabin listening to the howler monkeys. I’m sure that’s a wonderful thing to do, but it involves guides and no motorcycles. So instead, I stopped at an Eco Resort along the highway outside Porto Velho. Here, one of the cattle barons has preserved a piece of jungle and built a little paradise. Turns out its mainly visited by Brazilians with money, and they’re more concerned about the paradise than the jungle, which was fine with me.

My first day at lunch the owner came and sat with me. He said he had heard there was an American on a motorcycle, and he wanted to be sure that I visited the jungle. I assured him that was my intent. After lunch I borrowed the worst bike I have ever ridden and pedaled my way down the dirt road to the jungle. According to all my guidebooks you should always enter the jungle by yourself in shorts and tennis shoes... Actually, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. It was a real jungle. It was awesome, and it was a little bit intimidating. There was a trail, but it was covered in dead leaves and branches, and blocked here and there by vines and fallen trees. I was unlikely to encounter jaguars or man-eating plants, or undiscovered tribes of indigenous cannibals, but there might be snakes, and venomous spiders, and snakes, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and snakes.

In fact, did you know that almost everything in the jungle looks exactly like a snake?

It was a great hike in the jungle, especially after I decided that my socks would probably prevent most snakes from inserting sufficient venom to incapacitate me, and that even if this were false, dying from snake bite might be a reasonable way to go. I saw a group of monkeys, and they saw me. We watched each other until they got bored. I wondered what it meant that they got bored with me before I got bored with them. Do they have short attention spans? Or should I have been more interesting? I saw dozens of butterflies including two bright blue ones larger than my hand. I saw a leaf-shaped bug that was bigger than it needed to be in my opinion. I saw ants in all the standard sizes and colors. I also stepped on ants, and I leaned against ants, and ants crawled up my legs, and ants fell out of the sky. It made me wonder where the cannibals have picnics.

I was in the jungle for about four hours, but I didn’t actually go very far, maybe half a mile. I quickly realized that it wasn’t especially important to go far; I could have just walked back and forth over the same 50 feet and been equally astonished. It’s like clicking on the Mandlebrot set; every scene is infinitely complex. I was sad to leave the jungle, partially because it meant I had to ride that crappy bicycle again, but mainly because it seemed like there was magic I hadn't fully grasped.

I made it back to civilization, and I probably don’t even have malaria.

Five hotels, five free breakfasts, and at every one of them: Chocolate Cake. I’ve never seen such a blatant disrespect for the principles of civilized breakfast. Argentinians and Chileans are far too reserved for such public displays of inappropriate indulgence, and I doubt Peruvians even know what chocolate cake is. This is a clear sign of a culture out of control. Yes, I have had coffee cake for breakfast, and I can imagine that in some too-liberal regions of the Unites States they might occasionally dabble with chocolatey versions of coffee cake, but this is not coffee cake. Right out in the open, at 6am in the morning, it’s full-blown chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. It’s a deep, rich brown with a velvety texture in a shiny thick frosting. It’s as though Brazilians think every damn morning is a birthday party.

To be sure, what can you expect from a country with a murder rate five times higher than its neighbors? When you know that every day could be your last, you are prone to imprudent behavior. Nonetheless, I am shocked, and appalled… and tempted. A person can only be so strong. I have resisted the chocolate cake every morning this week. I turn away and fill my plate with slices of papaya and pineapple and fruity looking things I cannot always identify. I have scrambled eggs and a piece of dry toast. Occasionally I partake of the granola. But as if drawn by a dark force, my gaze returns to the chocolate cake… It’s true, I could be murdered today. If I lay dying in a puddle of my own blood I would not want my last thought to be a regret: I could have had the chocolate cake… No! This is how they pull you in! Next thing you know you’re waist deep in the carefree jungle culture, wearing flip-flops and speedos, and experimenting with the hose attached to the toilet. I don’t even know what that hose is for. Can men use it?

The chocolate cake stares at me. I turn away. I must ride.

Talking to these Brazilians is like talking to a bunch of rocks. You try Spanish and then English, and they stare at you like you’re speaking gibberish…

This is Portugal’s fault. Portugal is a tiny little country completely surrounded by Spain; it didn’t need to have its own language. Moreover, from what I can tell, Portuguese isn’t really a language. At least half of it is misspelled Spanish, and the other half is just stuff somebody made up. Worse, they use odd diacritical marks that I cannot type and diphthongs my mouth cannot articulate. I think the Portuguese must be extremely arrogant and self-centered people to require their own language.

I subscribe to the principle that everyone has the right to do whatever they want as long as it does not harm another, but by speaking Portuguese the Brazilians are causing me significant inconvenience. I object. If they want to think in Portuguese, that’s their business, but when it comes to informing me of the options for dinner, they ought to have the moral decency to use a more appropriate language.

Being so ignorant of the language is hard, though it does make me appreciate my Spanish. I hope I don’t need anything other than beer and gas for the next two weeks because those are the only two words of Portuguese I’ve learned. That’s a slight exaggeration, but not much. Last night I made a list of common words I thought I should know. I forgot “bathroom." In the restaurant outside Rio Branco I couldn’t find the bathroom. I don’t know what the waitress could imagine I was looking for, but she recognized none of the common names in Spanish or English. Sometimes you can pantomime your meaning, but I’m not going to pantomime peeing right in the middle of the restaurant. I try rubbing my hands together to demonstrate hand washing, but she just stares at me. So I hold it, and I end up peeing on the side of the road. Yeah, I’ll bet she’s still laughing.

I suppose I’ll muddle through. Excuse me while I visit the banheiro.

(Several days after writing this I go to enter a bathroom next to a gas station. As is sometimes the case, there is an attendant in front collecting money. It’s a young girl. I reach for my wallet to pay, but the girl gestures that it’s not necessary. I point to the sign that says “2 Reales,” but she still refuses the money. Noting my quizzical expression she says something I don’t understand, and then she stands up and pantomimes peeing with full sound effects. Her body language asks, “That’s what you’re doing, right?" Yes, I nod, and enter. Apparently peeing is free. I’m not certain what they charge for. Maybe it involves the hose.)

I’m still looking for washcloths, thirty some hotels in four countries and not a single wash cloth. The dirtier I get, the more I wonder about this.

Before I left I worried a bit that my new jacket was too clean and shiny. I was looking forward to the time when it would show a little wear. It’s interesting how that time creeps up on you and snowballs. At this point pretty much everything I own looks like it’s been on the road for two months. That little jaunt through the mud in the Peruvian high plains didn’t help, nor did the broken bottle of wine in the top case on the motorcycle.

Up next: The Pantanal