Confusion

How are you going to make sense of the world?  I would offer to you three alternatives.  

1) Assume no prior knowledge or fiduciary framework within which to base understanding.  Attempt to come to some Cartesian method of deriving meaning by challenging assumption, discovering personal truth, and incorporating the whole into a unified framework of understanding into which everything must fit.  The universe is assumed to ba able to provide all the answers to anybody willing to search for them through the medium of science and deduction.

2) Take on somebody else’s beliefs and assume them for yourself.  Be it your parents, your friends, your colleagues or a religious figure you choose to follow, make the decision to defend their beliefs and take them on by proxy, even if you do not understand them.  Such a stance is that of children who would denounce smoking because their parents tell them it is ‘bad.’

3) Admit that there are certain things we will never understand.  

The first option seems to be the most logical, but in fact it requires a certain degree of faith.  To set out on a reductionistic exploration of the world, sure of the fact that everything is able to be explained eventually requires a considerable degree of trust in the linearity of the universe around us, and of the fact that every law or relationship discovered here holds true for the rest of the universe.  Given as this has already been proven to be false, and that in addition there may possibly be infinite universes even if we work this one out, there really is no way we can ever know for sure whether the way we understand our reality is actually right or not.  We can only know how often it seems to hold true in our immediate experience.  In addition, no one person can ever understand comprehensively the entire picture.  The understanding of modern science is shared collectively between all the minds currently undertaking research, and as such no one person is ever going to have the experience of understanding the whole of the scientific view of the world.  At some point we have to trust that fellow scientists are correct in their practice and their findings.  The problems in using this method to make sense of the world become obvious.

The second option seems like something we should leave behind at childhood, but in fact most of us will do it to some degree for the rest of our lives.  There is a sliding scale of trust in others’ opions, from trusting that the doctor knows more than you do about your body, to dying in a war because somebody in government tells you it is the right thing to do.  Within science, researchers cannot each undertake all the work needed to understand a principle so they must trust each other to the extent that they can base the next level of reseach on a base of research that other people have done.  We must ‘stand on the shoulders of giants,’ scientists do not redo all of the experiements ever performed in the canon of science to satisfy themselves before progressing.  At every point that we interact in society we must decide how much we trust the opinions of those around us, but there is no reason why we should take those opinions as our own unless they happen to be so convincing that for us they constitute the most irresistable truth available to us at that moment.  People who spout second-hand opinions on matters that they do not well understand rightfully end up embarrasing themselves; there can be no shortcut to wisdom.

The third option is of the hardest of all to hold, though it contains elements of the other two paths.  It admits that there is some determinable truth in the world, without believing that everything is necessarily understandable.  It recognises that other people have greater insights into some areas of life than we do, but without blindly accepting their conclusions as our own.  It does not seek to build understanding into the gaps where none is obvious.  It does not have to come to an opinion where one does not naturally present itself.  The third path is one which commits to having integrity through holding no belief for the sake of it, as though there must be a truth or an answer or an opinion somewhere.  It is only possible to truly believe anything is if you come at it without desperately striving, in the same way that you are unlikely to find a meaningful relationship if you are constantly searching for the perfect partner.  Archimedes only solved the problem of the king’s crown, discovering the principle of displacement, when he stopped searching and took a bath, allowing truth and insight to take him by surprise.  Some things are too complex to have an obvious handle for understanding.  We belittle ourselves and the magnitude of the world when we try to pretend we can fit everything into our comparatively tiny minds.