The Tao of Paradox | Part 1: The Only Thing I Know For Sure
Introduction:
For most of my life I have had an unquenchable thirst for an ever deepening understanding of truth... whatever that is! Over the years of searching a few concepts have emerged as ideas worth holding onto, at least for a while. As you make your way through this series, keep in mind that all of these ideas are in continuous use in my life specifically because they give me practical benefits. This isn't philosophy for the sake of making ourselves feel special because we understand complex philosophical things. It's pragmatic. If it's not useful then it isn't worth anything.
What I intend in this series is to write an overview of the key concepts that form an interconnected system of philosophy I refer to as The Tao of Paradox, but before we get to why it's called that, we first need to lay the foundation that all of these philosophical 'beliefs' are built on. As the title of this installment suggests: after all these years there is only found one single philosophical precept that I can be sure of, and it's the foundation stone that everything else is built on.
The Only Thing I Know For Sure Is That I Don't Know Anything For Sure.
As a kid you hear of people claiming to have seen ghosts. You hear of people believing in aliens. On the other hand you also learn Santa and the Easter Bunny aren't real, so you start to wonder what else you're hearing that might not be true.
The inner skeptic is born.
When I was around 12, I clearly remember pondering the question:
'If all these people believe all of these different things (like the paranormal, psychic ability, religion, spirituality, agnosticism, atheism)... what do I believe?'
I didn't know what I believed, but unlike many who just followed along with whatever the culture around them was programming them with, I made a clear decision to remain open to possibility. In my case, my culture was strongly telling me not to believe in ghosts, aliens or the paranormal - but I refused to disbeleive. I also refused to believe.
In essence I even became skeptical about my skepticism.
Something inside me told me that if things like, for example, 'magic' existed then making the choice to not believe might somehow block these things from making contact with me and becoming part of my reality.
I don't ever recall hearing, until adulthood, Roald Dahl's idea 'Those who don't believe in magic will never find it', but somehow, as a kid, I found my self on a similar track. Similar, but not the same. Roald Dahl's version - although he doesn't say it outright - seems to imply that in order to find magic one needs to first believe in it - and this is an idea that which has never sat well with me. Religions inticing me with promises of 'if you first believe, then you will see, but probably not until you die' have never been as appealing as offers of techniques that allow me to first experience and then believe.
So in answer to my original question 'what do I believe?', I simply decided to refrain from believing or disbelieving, instead remaining open to possibility and wait for further evidence around all kinds of things. I must have been 15 when I went through a stage of being a bit obsessed with Bruce Lee, which was my first encounter with someone who considered them self a philosopher, (Lee studied philosophy in San Francisco). His book 'The Art of Jeet Kune Do' contained an idea sometimes attributed to the Buddhist monk Sent-ts’an, from around c. 700 C.E.
“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.”
It was later in life that I discovered that Socrates perhaps said it best when he states (in various ways)"The thing I know for sure is that I know nothing".
The idea that the only thing I know for sure is that I don't know anything for sure has stuck with me throughout my life and served me well. To me, it promotes a certain humility in that nothing I 'believe' is set in stone and there is always an openness to new ideas and an openness to the possibility that I may be wrong.
I now have a final definitive answer to my original question. The only thing I know for sure is that I don't know anything for sure. This is my one and only Belief. All that follows could be considered 'beliefs' with a small b; tentative beliefs, ready to be dropped at a moment's notice.
There are 4 states:
State 1) The Only Thing I Know For Sure Is That I Don't Know Anything For Sure.
State 2) Based on state 1's "emptiness" state in your mind , you start the journey to know Anything's true nature.
State 3) Even you know For Sure Things true nature , but you still not thinking that you know Anything For Sure.
State 4) Based on state 3, you probally have the real chance to know Anything For Sure.
This is more a brain teaser.I am understanding it as more of a stepping up process. I do believe there there is a 5th state or the Ayn Soph the state in which there is complete nothingness; because the first state although empty is still a EURIKA moment. The idea in itself that you don't know anything for sure is still a state of mind.
Insightful view.
Until we are oneness with The Ultimate, maybe we still have Xth state to go , and X could be 6..7..8..9.....99......999999........ -)
So the state 1 is important foundation stone.
I agree, however my point was the state of 0
to me, is the unknowable perhaps that which sits beyond the vail of our lowly perception. Some refer to that as the creator of all :)
Welcome to the paradox. :)
The fact that you can't know anything for sure, should not stop you from inquiring about and comparing the possibilities and likelihoods of different things to be correct.
For instance, the likelihood of the laws of physics we have discovered so far to be correct even if incomplete is quite high as we have gathered piles upon piles of evidence that clearly point in a certain direction. A the current precision of our findings is so great that the GPS satellite networks is adjusted for minuscule time dilations to allow it to pinpoint anybody's location within a few meters. That level of precision is truly extreme as just being a few milliseconds off could lead to errors in the ball park of kilometers/miles. Sure, there is always a chance that we might be off base here, but even in that case, it is safe to say that the probability of special relativity being correct is at least 95%.
You can compare that to a claim of a creator that comes with zero measurable evidence to substantiate it. So even in the most generous of evaluations, you couldn't reasonably give it more than a 50% chance and even that would be absolutely unsubstantiated.
So even if you can't be 100% sure about anything which is in all actuality really the case, you can still compare probabilities and evaluate and compare claims.
We should be open to dropping our assumptions and evaluations of those probabilities at a moments notice as soon as new evidence is put forward to change that, but we should also not ignore all the evidence about reality we have gathered so far and the predictive power scientific theory has to show for.
I agree, it certainly doesn't. It just means that when I arrive at a conclusion, I keep this fundamental core belief, my only actual belief, in mind and don't hold the conclusion so tightly that it can't change in the face of more accurate evidence.
Thomas Kuhn's history of scientific revolutions maps the fact that science repeatedly rejects new worldviews due to biases until finally a dam wall breaks and a new paradigm comes through. I just don't want to be one of the people obstinantly holding back a new way of looking at things whose time has come... if that time comes.
Keeping an open mind is important and I agree that we should strive to do that. It's very important not to view things getting disproven as a personal failure or a failure at all, but as progress and enlighment.
It's also important to note that jumping on the bandwagon of new ideas is not always the reasonable thing to do. Rigorous research takes time and that's why sometimes it takes time for a paradigm to shift, but I think often (especially in modern times) it's not that scientists want to defend the status quo, they just require convincing evidence to accept a proposition and it takes time to gather that evidence through repeatable experiments and so on.
For instance, take the double-slit experiment. It didn't take a lot of time for it to lead to a paradigm shift, but people still needed to verify the data and to repeat the experiment.
It also needs to be pointed out that physics is one of those sciences where evidence is actually easier to measure and quantify which makes it less susceptible to problems with anti-progress predispositions while social sciences have a harder time with evidence, so opinions hold more sway and progress, consensus and agreement might be a bit more problematic.
You mention jumping on the bandwagon.
You might enjoy the following section of this book talking about the bandwagon effect in science. It partially answers the question you had about the speed of light not necessarily being a constant after all, in that it discusses the reason why it may have been presented as a constant.
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=f1BpAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT332&lpg=PT332&dq=intellectual+phase+locking&source=bl&ots=tCCuaVh02t&sig=4esByekk7S5wXlxqSS7R44fKOiU&hl=en&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwiw_uCnq-nUAhXCvbwKHSyoBSsQ6AEIXzAJ#v=onepage&q=intellectual%20phase%20locking&f=false
Also, I'll be addressing the double slit experiemt in future posts in this series, as it's a great example of paradox in action.
Great, I'll keep an eye on that and make sure I won't miss it.
In my opinion, the double slit experiment is really a paradox only in the sense of our intuition and perception. As far as I understand it, it doesn't really involve an internal paradox, it's just a way to show what matter actually is and neither the fact that it's happening, not the math that we use to describe it are intrinsically paradoxical.
Of course, I'm looking forward to reading your take on it and I'm eager to learn what exact paradox you are referring to.
I like that you bring up that there are some sciences that are more quantify than others.
I use this 'i don't know anything for sure' attitude to remain open to possibilities that fall outside what science can currently measure at all.
Germ theory was once preposterous because we didn't have the instruments to measure them.
We can now measuere gamma, xray, infrared, ultraviolet. On a more gross level, dogs can hear things we can't hear.
Again, Carl Sagan's flatland rap is great at pointing out the challenges of being able to experience extradimensional realities.
To reference a comment you make elsewhere, perhaps the reason why unicorns and dragons exist in myths is because some humans have found technologies that allow their consciousness to go into multidimensional realities and come back and report what they have seen.
Just because these things don't exist within our physical reality doesn't rule out the possibility to me that they may exist in other dimensions... dimensions which may have no physicality in the sense that we experience it at all.
I think that should also be the correct scientific attitude and I my personal opinion based on my limited experience is that that's how a great deal of the scientists look at it.
In the end, there is nothing that can be demonstrated with absolute certainty, but the degree of certainty that you might expect from a particular theory should also be taken into account.
Preposterous is a judgment based on intuition. Intuition has a lot of value when hypothesizing, but it should be excluded from the evaluation of correctness.
The more important thing is that when it was proposed, it was not unreasonable to view it as unsubstantiated by evidence as the evidence was not in yet. Keeping in mind that looking at the theories that have survived scrutiny gives you strong selection and confirmation biases.
Look at it this way. When germ theory was initially proposed, there were let's say 9 other theories to explain the same phenomenons that have now been shown to contradict the evidence. But before the evidence was in, you wouldn't have had a good way to distinguish between the 10. So saying that all of them were not substantiated at that time is not at all unreasonable.
Of course, I'm speaking a bit hypothetically here as I'm not actually aware of the exact history of germ theory, I'm talking about the principle.
Additionally, it's always possible, especially if you go further back in history, for particular scientists or even whole scientific communities to have been reluctant to accept new evidence even when it was clearly contradictory to the then accepted theories. My personal opinion is that it is less likely today, but again it is more likely in some branches of science than in others.
Sure, we cannot rule out anything that is untestable, but the question here would be how reasonable would it be for us to base our views on such unfalsifiable claims? There are just too many things that are theoretically possible and if we have no way to peer into them reliably, should we postulate them as reasonable?
Humans might believe in myths because they had technologies to peer into some other reality, but keeping in mind the utter diversity and inconsistency of myth, is it reasonable to assume they did?
I'm curious to know how you feel about the variances in recordings of the speed of light over the years and the strong evidence that it is not a constant after all.
I bring this up as an example of a fundamental variable that was, and still is by many, not considered a variable at all. It's a great example of the importance of holding onto a scientific tenet for only as long as it is not surpassed by more accurate infomation.
That's something I'm not yet aware of, do you have specific source that you might be referring to so I can check it out? Not that I can't google that, I'd just prefer to start with what you have found interesting already.
This is perhaps the most balanced thing I have found to start you off.
Beware, it contains content from Rupert Sheldrake, a figure who if you're not familiar with, ruffles the feathers of skeptics everywhere. ;)
http://www.josephvoelbel.com/blog/rupert-sheldrake-on-the-speed-of-light-and-big-g
keep in mind that i get to hide behind the fact that I don't believe or disbelieve, I allow possibility and wait for further evidence.
When it comes to issues like 'will i fall off this cliff if i take another step?', I err on the side of caution as evidence strongly suggests i will fall, however on issues like this i find it more interesting to hold back and keep exploring the possibilities and the evidence.
I don't see why we should hold out examining the evidence that's in right now to make a tentative judgment of what seems to be the case and what doesn't.
I think this is an utter and very common misconception about science, most scientists especially physicists spend their time testing out theories and questioning our understanding of reality, not defending it. No self-respecting physicist will claim that we have all the answers. The claim is always, we have all this evidence and it seems to entail this and we have this level of certainty based on the amount of data we're gathered. It's never a dogmatic postulation that cannot and should not be challenged.
LOL :P I'll check his claims out. The article you've shared talks about circumstances not substance, but the name looks googlable enough ;)
When it comes to claims of whether God is real, I keep in mind that approximately 95% of the humans on planet earth have some form of spiritual belief. I also want evidence and refuse to believe without it, as you do, however I am not so quick to dismiss the opinion of 95% of the human species. Some might consider this evidence of a kind however I'm not going that far. What I do believe (with a small b) is that all religions have their roots in someone, somewhere having what is commonly described as a personal mystical experience. It's easy to dismiss this and scoff at it, however we must take extra care not to do so out of cultural programming.
Reports of direct personal experiences of mystical experiences can be found throughout human history through to the modern day.
Of course science wants repeatable experiments and empirical evidence, however it could be one of those Carl Sagan 'flatland' type problems. How does a 2D being from flatland describe a 3D being when their only experience is 2D?
My suggestion is for science to look to a chemical produced by the human brain and found throughout nature called 5-MeO-DMT which is reported with extremely high frequency to cause people to experience these mystical states with astounding reliability.
If there is a chemical technology that can be studied to examine the human belief in god then sceinctist who wish to finally dismiss or confirm this endless debate should be looking here.
On god in general, I personally like Carl Sagan's stance of approaching these matters with a respectful tone instead of taking a position of ridicule. Though I've only seen the film, I also love the ending to Contact which depicts a science having personally experienced something unverifiable by science suddenly understanding what it is to KNOW something, and not be able to present any evidence. Carl Sagan exemplifies the fact that compassion, consideration and respect do not have to be left out of science. He demonstrates a clear attempt at understanding the mind of the 'enemy' of science aka religion, without feeling compelled to become reactive and attack it.
I agree that respectfulness is important to any discussion in any topic, but it should also not impede honesty. There are certainly aspects of some major religions that deserve to be confronted like misogyny, homophobia and purposeful misinformation. When religion actively tries to impose itself on society (and it does that on regular basis), it warrants a pushback.
Having the feeling that you know something just inside yourself should not be a sufficient reason to believe it. We could all fall victims to delusions, false memories and hallucinations. It's like the stereotypical institutionalized mental patient that believes themselves to be Napoleon. That's why it's important to not just have faith in your sourceless internal knowledge fueling the "I just know" argument, but to compare notes with reality.
The protagonist of the movie contact does not need to rely solely on her own experiences. The device that she used to travel can be build again and can continue to be tested until there is more conclusive data. Even in the movie's fictional universe, she should not be 100% sure of the truthfulness of her own experience until there is more evidence.
Awesome... I appreciate your quest for knowledge.
I'm going to be following you on your journey :)
“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.”
Excellent quote
Great blog. Based on your post and comments, I think you might like a book I wrote, which you can download for free on Smashwords.com: Why: An Agnostic Perspective on the Meaning of Life. Good luck on your search for truth.
I love your post @jonathan.davis. Thank you for one-upping one of my posts, that's what led me to find your posts.
My thoughts provoked from your post:
We don't know what we don't know; meaning we may know a lot, but there's always something more that we're unconsciously incompetent about.
and... "To know and not to do is not to know." Leo Buscalia