Every once and awhile, we turn on a radio program, pick up a book or newspaper, get a text, and right there waiting in the headline or title or first line is information relevant to a question or concern we were wrestling with. This happened to me yesterday.
I was reading a book of essays by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli called There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy, and the World. I’ve been reading the book on and off for a month or so, and it keeps sparking insights. I wrote about buying the book as a gift to myself in a previous blog. The latest chapter I read is called “Bruno de Finetti: Uncertainty Is Not the Enemy.”
Bruno de Finetti was a relatively little known Italian probabilistic statistician, college lecturer, and philosopher of science. The chapter discusses the impossibility of having absolute knowledge and certainty. Uncertainty is a critical element of reality.
This is not news. We might think we have absolute answers, think we know what’s true. But all we really have, and many of us somewhere know this, is a subjective notion of what might probably be true.
We can, says Rovelli and de Finetti, diminish uncertainly. We can develop, through rigorous examination, justified and credible convictions that are shared by others who have rigorously studied the subject. But we can’t make uncertainty disappear. All we can hope for is reliable probability.
And uncertainty can be a positive lifelong companion, says Rovelli. If there were no unknowns, there would be no possibilities. It makes life interesting. Yet, how often do we pray for it to be otherwise?
Although it can lead to debilitating worry and anxiety, it can also energize us to prepare, and learn more about ourselves and a situation. So much depends on our response. Do we try to hide from any awareness of our feelings and limitations, or study and utilize that awareness? Because we don’t have complete knowledge, we can and need to continuously learn. Adapt. Listen to other beings.
At night, the dark makes the borders between almost everything more indeterminate, returning almost everything to the realm of what’s unknown. That realization, and the stories dreams weave in us about our lives, help us wake in the morning to a fresh, new world. Uncertainty can do the same for our time in the light.
Yet, we know too well that such intellectual realizations, no matter how insightful, are not enough. The intellect can point out a path but not walk it for us. We need to learn additional skills and a different sort of rigor, one of the body and emotions, to check on our reasoning. We can learn to better self-reflect on our thinking by using a sustained, moment-by-moment, kindly attention, to feelings, sensations, thoughts, and inclinations to act.
By doing so, we bring our perception of things closer to what they truly are. We mindfully pay closer attention to the details of our lives and world, and to what we can reliably conclude about any of it. This awareness is not what de Finetti and Rovelli talked about in the chapter but can help us apply their insights.
We face a pandemic that can kill us, or maybe different pandemics. There’s still COVID, of course. But there’s also a pandemic of demands for absolute truths by those who most publicly and politically lie. Those who depend most on lies demand the most absolute acceptance of their authority. They replace a religion of a perfect deity with the deification of themselves ⎼ or their volk, group, or leader. Their words become God’s.
They treat those who contradict their words as evil, sinners, and threaten hell and violence upon such sinners. Their rigidity, delusion, and self-aggrandizement could too easily bring environmental and social hell upon us all.
Back in 1977, Rovelli himself, along with de Finetti, was accused, in Italy, of inciting criminal acts for speaking publicly of the limits of knowledge. One of de Finetti’s books, titled The Invention of Truth, was written in Italy in 1934. It was buried until 2006, because the wartime fascists would not allow any doubts about what they considered truth. Likewise, the fascists of today are banning books that speak of truths they want buried.
After the chapter in Rovelli’s book on uncertainty, there is one titled “Does Science Need Philosophy?” The word philosophy itself comes to us from Plato, the Greek philosopher who used the word to refer to educating and developing knowledge in the young. The roots of the word are philos, a type of love, and sophos, wisdom ⎼ a love of wisdom.
Although our knowledge is by nature always incomplete, it is, or can be, constantly growing. Every bit we have, or think we have, influences every other bit.
But to perceive this, says Rovelli, requires we love knowledge, or wisdom. It requires that we not cover our eyes with the mask of absolutes and easy answers or get addicted to lies and delusions. To advance knowledge through science or otherwise, we must love wisdom, particularly the wisdom to know how much we don’t know.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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