Is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit?
If you haven’t been asked this question, the answer may seem obvious to you.
If you have been asked this question, you know that it’s counterintuitive:
Tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables.
It’s a common misconception and that’s why it’s an equally common trick question used by quizmasters.
Except, it’s not true.
Or at least, not entirely.
Yes, tomatoes are fruits.
But they’re vegetables too.
At least, conceptually. Because in reality, they’re neither.
A tomato is what a tomato is.
Reality doesn’t care if we call it fruit or vegetable, it will still be the same tomato.
But concepts do care. Which is why the clever quizmaster will say, “Wrong! Tomatoes are fruits. They fit the requirements for plants that map to the concept “fruit”, not “vegetable”.”
Concepts have to care about these things because that’s what makes them work:
Concepts are filters we use to be able to point at an isolated aspect of reality. And this only works when we create linear rules about what is and isn’t the concept.
…except, those rules change depending on the context.
In Myanmar, “adult” means a person over 15. In Mississippi, it means a person over 21.
In a legal context, anyone over those ages of the country they’re in is an adult.
But in a developmental context, many people over 30 are still not considered adults.
In all cases, “adult” still refers to the same context: a person who has reached independence and the ability to behave responsibly towards themselves and others.
But the context changes the meaning of all content within it.
What this means is, whenever we’re debating concepts, people can be debating about things that point to entirely different realities.
In a culinary context, tomato is a vegetable due its savory flavor profile and low fructose content.
In a botanical context, tomato is a fruit. Because it is the ripened ovary of a flowering plant that contains seed.
In a quiz, it’s whatever answer Chat-GPT told the quizmaster was right.
So if a chef was arguing with a botanist about where to classify the tomato, it could go on forever.
(And if you tried to argue with the quizmaster that your answer “vegetable” was, in fact, correct, it might go on forever too. Because the purpose of the question was identifying how many people knew tomatoes are a fruit, not who had the answer closest to the truth.)
This is of course, a—pun intended—trivial example, but the mechanics of it can deeply affect your relationships.
Since we’re talking about truth, why not look at the concept of lying?
- “I never lied about it, I just decided not to tell them unless they’d ask.”
- “You liar! You said you’d be here at 6PM and you arrived 15 minutes later.”
- “I don’t plan surprise parties because I’m really bad at lying.”
Each of these 3 phrases has a different understanding of the concept of lying, because the context changes the meaning of it.
But if this was an real conflict, that could lead to major issues.
Actually, it doesn’t even have to be a conflict.
Imagine that the main “agreement” in your marriage is that you’ll never lie to each other! If you keep thinking of lying as a concept, these situations can get really messy.
Because as a concept, most people understand “lying” as “intentionally saying something untruthful”.
But the reality it points to is a type of energetic move, which—let’s be honest—we all know when it happens.
Lying as a concept is the kind of stuff you can debate about till the cows come home.
Lying as an energetic move is intuitively understood.
Here are some examples to illustrate what I mean:
Is telling your kids that Santa Claus brings them presents lying?
Conceptually, yes. Energetically, no.
Is omitting crucial information a lie?
Conceptually, no. Energetically, yes.
Is it lying when a journalist intentionally cherry-picks accurate data and uses it to convince the reader of their ideological point of view?
Conceptually, no. It’s 100% truthful.
Energetically, you’d immediately know you were lied to if you found out they did this un purpose.
This means it’s possible to lie while remaining 100% truthful—and it’s possible to be honest while speaking technical falsehoods.
For example: The sun is not a ball of fire. That’s 100% false.
Yet, a teacher may have told you that at some point.
Were they lying?
No, they were using low-bitrate communication to teach you something true. Because a 3yo doesn’t know what to do with the phrase “the sun is a dense sphere of plasma (primarily hydrogen and helium) powered by nuclear fusion”.
If we say “ball of fire”, they’ll understand it’s roundish and emits incredible amounts of heat and light, and can later update the details of their understanding.
Going through all these examples, my assumption is that for most of you, the distinction between “lying” and “not speaking the truth” is pretty easy to spot.
But since they are clearly not the same—or even mutually replaceable—then what is lying, actually?
Lying is the intention to isolate a person from access to certain parts of reality which you know exists, as a means of attempting to control their behavior.
(It’s, essentially, managing their map as a form of manipulation.)
So what separates lying from being untruthful (and why it’s possible to lie while speaking the truth) is the intentional attempt to isolate from reality.
If we know that revealing certain information might cause our spouse to leave us, it doesn’t matter if we always speak the truth: Not revealing it is lying, because our reason for not revealing it is to isolate them from reality as it is—to stop them from collaborating with it.
Whereas, telling kids the sun is a ball of fire is the exact opposite! It’s being untruthful to help them see more of reality and collaborate to some degree with parts they otherwise couldn’t.
If a politician consciously cherry-picks statistics to gather votes for their campaign, we know that is a form of lying even if they’re speaking the whole truth. Because it was an attempt to isolate us from aspects of reality that might make us vote against them.
If a comedian is telling us a story that is 100% false but hilarious, and they tell it as if it is true, we wouldn’t consider them a liar. They’re just a jester, being untruthful to entertain. You may even have friends like this. Endless bullshitters, but they would never misrepresent the truth about something that matters to you.
We also know, intuitively that if the comedian was caught being untruthful in their greatest joke, it wouldn’t feel like they lied to us.
Because what the comedian uses their words for is casting spells of fun.
What the liar uses their words for is casting spells of illusion to attempt mind-control.
We teach each other that lying is bad, because we know that lying is a form of dark magic. Only to be used when doing the loving thing in a situation truly demands it (like hiding Jews from the Gestapo).
Even the smallest lies carry a hint of this intention. For example, as a kid, I would pretend to have watched a movie I hadn’t watched, just so I could stay in the conversation when all the kids were talking about them.
Nothing evil or harmful about it. Same energetic blueprint: Creating a false reality for others to attempt to control their responses.
So whenever you wonder: Am I lying? Are they being honest?
This energetic is the litmus test:
Was there a conscious attempt to create a false reality for others, so that they were more likely to respond a certain way? Or was there something else at play?
This will get you closer to the truth than any amount of debate about what was technically true or wasn’t.