Certainty and Uncertainty, Part 1

Nothing is ever certain. We can be reasonably certain of that. There are aspects of our world that baffle us, others that we think we know, and then learn better. The reasonable certainty of our uncertainty is the attitude we've taken in the last few centuries, which has allowed modern science to sprout, grow and flourish. Instead of a liability, uncertainty becomes an asset. Science uses uncertainty as a tool. We look into the chasm of darkness of our ignorance, learn a bit, spread the light, which then intersects with a much more vast realm of ignorance. This is why we are convinced that we are more ignorant than we ever were. Even though we're not.

That uncanny ability of moderns to learn from our own uncertainty is exactly what leads us to discover. The nature of stars and grass and leaders and food and sex. Things that our forebears knew existed, but couldn't explain. So, naturally, they imputed all sorts of magical nonsense to them.

With uncertainty and science to guide us, we pried at mysterious existence and found less mystery and paradoxically more mystery. The universe became a cat's cradle of entanglements, of unknowable complexity, of emergence, often unpredictable, full of unintended consequences to our planned actions. That most of the universe is this way, unplanned, uncreated, unguided, is something that our ancestors had never guessed. This is not a natural thought to us. Not self-evident at all.

We are fooled by our own intentions. Since we have intentions, we had assumed everything else did, too. The river wills its flow to the sea. The lightning wills its blasting. The birds their flocking. The flowers their blossoming. But even amongst ourselves, only but a small portion of organized human life is the successful fulfillment of intention. The flawless production of the craftsman, the organizers of a hunt. And then the fearful, astonishing, happy, desolate, unintended consequence pops up again to bedevil us.

You can think of this as one reason I'm a philosophical agnostic if you wish.