Originally posted on 05-25-07:
My first-thing-in-the-morning inspiration these days comes from re-reading Robert Anton Wilson’s, “Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You & Your World,” which I mentioned here on May 19th. The passage that struck me today is, “Aristotelian dogmatic habit… reinforces and gets reinforced by ancient mammalian territorial imperatives. Wild primates, like other vertebrates, claim physical territories; domesticated primates (humans) claim ‘mental’ territories–Ideologies and Religions.”(p. 77)
By this point in the book, Wilson has intensively discussed Aristotelian thinking, and how it has shaped our habitual ways of looking at the world and ourselves. We have learned a lot since Aristotle, despite the distortions he promulgated, and the more we have learned, the more obvious those distortions have become, particularly to the scientific community–Wilson’s use of “Quantum” in the title is not accidental. His aim is to present the inadequacies of Aristotelian thought to a more general audience, and to point out the conflict and suffering they have engendered. It is the certainty with which our beliefs are held which leads to our willingness to sacrifice ourselves and others in their behalf, and that certainty is ill-founded.
Aristotelian logic and its followers have promoted the idea that certainty is possible, that there are rules we can follow that guarantee certainty. I think there is more to the appeal of this idea than mammalian territorial acquisition and defense.
One of our great assets is our ability to anticipate and forecast events, and there has been a huge evolutionary advantage in improving those abilities. Predicting the movement of animals, the ripening of fruit, and the changing of the seasons, among myriad other things, have greatly improved our chances of survival. The rewards of certainty in these matters are substantial, and many ruling hierarchies have been based on the ability to predict astronomical events, seasonal changes, etc.
So we have incentives to be certain in our uncertain world, and our achievements in prediction would astonish our ancestors–how about putting people on the moon, for example. But as our quest has continued and the world grown more complex, the future has become more difficult to predict. In many matters of vital interest, the best we can do is calculate the odds of something happening.
In fact, it turns out that when we scrutinize our underlying assumptions in light of improved understanding, all our certainties are matters of statistical probability. The probabilities of some events are so great that we are safe in assuming certainty–the earth will almost certainly continue to turn until the sun is revealed tomorrow morning, and we can be equally certain that everyone alive for that event today will not be alive then.
The odds of other events are negligibly small, and can be safely ignored. Wilson gives the example of “…the thermodynamic fact that the probability of air remaining approximately evenly distributed around this room never reaches 100%. The probability that all the air will suddenly rush to one corner and leave me to die in a vacuum has been calculated as greater than 0% and much, much less than 0.001%, but I refuse to get anxious about it.”(p. 66)
In between these lie less certain probabilities that cause much of our day-to-day grief: will the market go up or down, will my company succeed or fail, is my job secure or not, will my health improve or decline, etc.
It is the failure to appreciate the varying probabilities of everything that has led to some of our more acute difficulties, from the certainty that we are right and our spouse or neighbor are wrong, to the certainty that one ideology or religion is true and worth killing and dying for.
Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe