Claim: Human Beings Exist In Either True Ambiguity / Or False Certainty
Which state of mind do you exist within?
Week Three Discussion: Today’s question is going to be an Epistemological one.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies the parameters of knowledge, itself. How can we know that our knowledge is accumulated by sound means? What are the limits of knowledge? Etc.
In this case, the question is: how can we be certain of what we’re certain? And is there more value in adapting to a world of uncertainty - as is. Rather than trying to accumulate certainty?
If you want to skip to the full set of questions, scroll to the bottom. The background is going to set the stage for three major focal points about certainty.
BACKGROUND: Why Are We Afraid Of Darkness?
I believe that your average person operates on the idea that there are two states of being:
Certainty & confidence (a positive state)
Uncertainty & doubt (a negative state)
But in my experience being a philosopher, there are two other reasonable and predominant human states to exist within:
The state of uncertainty & ambiguity (a neutral state)
And the state of false certainty (a negative state)
By saying this, I’m not implying that 100% of the people who are certain are false.
And I’m not saying that 100% of us should live in a state of doubt.
But I do believe that the more intelligent and rational a human being is, the more ambiguity they will accept in their world.
I feel as if it’s human nature for us to try to edit out the darkness. We erase the feeling of uncertainty, because it gives us discomfort. We take some things that are certain and we enlarge their borders to cover over the nearby ambiguity and uncertainty.
We take things that we feel confident are true and we use it to erase our insecurity and fear about other things we’re less confident are true. And it’s a natural instinct to lean on certainty to give us a sense of security.
But why are we afraid of the things we don’t know? Why are we afraid of the darkness?
Why are we afraid of living in an uncertain or ambiguous world?––Where all meaning isn’t yet 100% assigned. And there are still trillions of pieces of data that are open to interpretation?
Is It Rational To Believe Humans Are Capable Of Knowledge?
In my experience, the more certain a person is that their knowledge is sound and reliable––the more they’re relying on false certainty, rather than an inherent guarantee within the knowledge itself.
But this false certainty doesn’t tell us that their beliefs are true or false. It merely tells us that the average person uses knowledge as a security blanket to help them hide from the darkness.
And if we grew comfortable with ambiguity. If we allowed ourselves to relax and feel safe in what we don’t know… then the parameters of what we do know could remain neutral and in tact.
Uncertainty & ambiguity don’t have to have negative connotions. It doesn’t have to mean that a human being has failed––or that we’re at odds with the knowledge in the universe.
But living in a state of ambiguity or uncertainty also means that we acknowledge the limitations of human subjectivity without cowering at our failures.
There are people who believe that to say that we don’t know everything is an indictment of our failure to live up to human brilliance.
There are people who believe that acknowledging our subjectivity means accusing us of bias. As if we’ve done something wrong by merely having limitations.
And I gotta be frank here––this is a blatantly religious assumption.
It’s only if you believe we were created by some higher power to have knowledge in the first place, that you will be disappointed in our failure to reach that higher knowledge.
If, on the other hand, you believe in evolution––and that we’re all just an animal species with a small amount of progress one step farther than the next most intelligent species on this planet––then there’s no reason to believe human beings ever even had a capability of knowledge.
There is no reason to believe that we are a species with some sort of superior faculty that is somehow supposed to be able to hold all of the mysteries of the universe.
I’ve lived in both a state of false certainty and a state of ambiguity & uncertainty.
And hey, I found false certainty to be very nice and comforting. In fact, sometimes I’ve described my confidence as being higher when I was younger––precisely because I believed so wholeheartedly in the truths I knew to be true.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that uncertainty & ambiguity isn’t just about having humility or an organic intelligence in line with evolution.
It’s also much more sustainable in the long term. And it’s not just because humans are fallible (although we are that too). It’s also because the world we’re trying to understand is constantly in flux. And because the evolution of our personal intelligence makes us able to hold more information the longer we study a topic.
But let me break those three points into their own separate sections:
Human Beings Having Certainty In A Group Doesn’t Make The Certainty Verifiably True
The number one thing you have to understand about human knowledge as a whole is that we are not each other’s evidence that something is true.
Groups of human beings can believe in hundreds of thousands of small pieces of data that turn out to be false. We are gullible as individuals, but even more gullible in groups.
It’s pragmatic, as an indivdiaul, to doubt ourselves or be slightly skeptical of a belief, until there’s more evidence or validation. But as more people agree with us, it can increase our certainty without any evidence at all.
The average person will use other human beings as validation of a truth––without any evidence to confirm it. And if a whole lot of people agree with a truth, most people will take that to mean that it’s verifiably true, regardless of how much empirical evidence supports it.
But it’s not verifiably true if that group had no interest in verifying their truths. If they choose to believe––as a group––in something that has no verifiability in the real world… then it doesn’t matter how many people believe in it. It still won’t be true.
And this doesn’t just apply to beliefs that are far-fetched and counter-culture. In fact, it applies to most of the beliefs that are mainstream. Even scientific ones.
I’ve said this controversially before: that the people who believe in science and the people who believe in religion are a lot like each other. Hear me out: most people believe that because science has evidence and religion doesn’t, that it becomes a superior belief to believe in science.
But the truth is, in religion: people took someone else’s word for it. They didn’t have access to God, themselves, but they assumed someone else had that access––and could tell them what God wanted from them. This means that their belief was based on trust in someone else to find verifiable truth.
The average human also doesn’t have access to scientific data. They’re not performing experiments, themselves. They’re trusting that someone else is performing those experiments in good faith––and they’re believing in their findings without having that empirical evidence before them.
Which means that most people who believe in science didn’t convert to scientists, themselves. They are not performing the Scientific Method to come up with their beliefs. In fact, most people who believe in science remain merely believers.
They’re trusting scientists to find the correct knowledge. And thus, they’re also taking someone else’s word for it. Quite frankly, they’re even assuming that life’s mysteries are accessible to someone in the first place.
If you look back at history, you’ll find that the majority of mainstream views were not verifiably true: they were just more convincing. Most believers have faith in someone. Whether that someone is a religious figure or a scientific figure––the foundation of belief remains in trust––not evidence.
A whole lot of people believing in something or trusting a source doesn’t make that source verifiably true. It only makes that source more convincing.
So yes, human beings have Group Fallibility. Our tendency in groups is to lean on the false certainties of the collective, because we feel secure that if other people confirm something to be true: that their verification is evidence of verifiable truth.
Throughout periods of history––human beings together have believed in false things, because they leaned on each other to secure them from the darkness.
But that’s not the only reason that our false certainty doesn’t have sustainability.
The World Is In Flux
There’s a second reason to lean in to uncertainty and it’s really about the state of the Universe. As the external world moves, it’s constantly fluctuating and changing. There’s a quote we’ve often heard:
“No man steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
This quote is attributed to Heraclitus, but because they’re not his actual words, let’s just say this is our paraphrasing of what he might have meant.
I’ve always loved this quote because it speaks to the flux of the natural world order.
The longer we’re alive, the longer we can observe that ALL of our human world fluctuates and changes constantly and MOST of our natural world changes constantly too.
Time, itself, is ever-moving. Every cell in an organism that’s alive is constantly growing or decaying.
We never exist in a singular permanence. We’re a fluctuating bundle of cells that appear and disappear, that shift and morph between an ascent of growth and a descent into decay.
The body you had at 20 is long gone. The body you’ll decay into by 60 is a new iteration of the same cells.
Nothing we are and nothing we claim for certain is ever truly permanent––even if it was true in a moment.
Thus, all that we understand about a single cell, piece of information, or situation, in a single context, in a single moment in time––can be accurate and brilliant… but it takes only a few seconds for the world to continue turning and the subtle truths to continue shifting and moving––so that we never step in the same “truth” twice.
If the truths could stop fluctuating, then maybe we could permanently describe them. But so long as the world continues to move, the world will continue to have new truths and new accurate descriptions to replace everything we’ve, in good faith, described before.
But there’s one last reason that false certainty isn’t sustainable.
The Human Mind Can Expand To Take In More Data
And it’s that our good faith subjective perception of knowledge itself is constantly evolving. The best and brightest human beings are constantly growing. And their abilities to relate to truth and accumulate data is constantly expanding.
As we, ourselves, evolve, we see nuances about our past truths that we didn’t see before. It doesn’t cancel out the things we thought we knew, but it gives those truths varying detail and a wider breadth and scope.
The problem is, as things become wider and more detailed, they also become more complex and less easy to sum up in a nice and tidy answer.
Thus, our false certainty erodes partially because of the amount of data we now see to be true––and how difficult it is to de-complexify those truths and find simple conclusions (the way we once could).
So, Was False Certainty Ever Sustainable?
If the world is constantly in flux and our knowledge of that world must shift to describe new iterations of the same single cell or the same single piece of data… and if we, ourselves, have constantly evolving capacities to take in new information…
Then all truth is in flux. We’ll never step in the same truth twice.
As we constantly fill our minds with new pieces of information that transform the simple truths into complex layers and nuances––can we so easily sum up these new truths in a single sentence? And describe them to other people?
Isn’t that the burden of all of those Good Faith intelligent people who are trying to share the knowledge they’ve discovered with the world?
It’s my experience as a Philosopher that uncertainty & ambiguity is much more sustainable than false certainty.
It’s sustainable because it acknowledges––in good faith––the flux of existence.
In the humiilty of uncertainty, we have a much more stable and constant relationship or experience of knowledge and truth.
As Heraclitus is believed to have said: the only constant in life is change.
But once you get used to that, it’s also more interesting.
The mysteries that surround us, the sweet layers of nuance that take things we thought we knew and add new texture and character… those are all part of living and existing in a complex world.
Trying to understand this complex world through a complicated and subjective mind is going to be a life-long journey.
So it’s not only sustainable to embrace the idea that no matter how certain you thought you were, you will look at something you’ve seen a thousand times before and one day notice something you never even noticed… it’s also more enjoyable.
QUESTION FOR YOU:
How certain of a world do you exist within?
What state of certainty do you feel all the time?
Are you afraid of the things we don’t know? Do you feel that shadows and darkness are a threat to your security?
Do you believe that most of the scientific or academic truths we know, we know with certainty?
Are there beliefs that we currently accept as a group––because we trust the source––but that source could be fallible?
Do you believe that intelligent people are MORE certain? Or are they MORE certain of uncertainty?
Do you believe that most of the truths that exist are summed up in nice and tidy conclusions––or that most of the truths that exist, exist in complex layers of nuance?
Do you believe that most of our world is certain - and then we just add addendums to those certainties?
Or do you believe that an entire theory is thrown out and created anew, because the details uncovered eradicate those “tidy and neat bows” we once believed in?
If your world is uncertain & ambiguous, is that uncomfortable for you?
Does embracing uncertainty feel absurd or nihilistic? Does it make you feel you live in a world without meaning?
Or… does it feel subtle and nuanced? In that you understand various shades of truth, but they’re more like hints and flirtations, rather than substantive, guaranteed truths?
There is no right answer, but I do believe that this takes some self-honesty and confrontation in order to give a true answer.
Are you honesty with yourself about your relationship to uncertainty, ambiguity, trust in authority, shadows & darkness, and your faith in the concept of something being true?
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See last week’s discussion here:
It seems to me that there is much to know, and more than I can possibly experience directly, and this is the human condition. So language and writing connect us to a wider human knowledge and a longer human tradition than any individual can aspire to on their own. Language, like money is an artefact and medium of the community, and relies on trust to function.
This means there is a moral imperative to speak the truth and repot the results of experiment and experience honestly. Without this, communication cannot happen at all. Trust is necessary between us, even to have this discussion about certainty, and knowledge and faith.
Scientists need to be faithful to the morality of science, to have trust in each other - not complete absolute trust, but fallible ordinary trust. One cannot repeat every experiment, every calculation oneself, but we need also to check and police each other a little.
I trust the electrician to wire the house safely, and the scientist to report honestly, and the shopkeeper to sell uncontaminated food, and so on and on. I get by with a little help from my friends.