Abandon Certainty!

“He repeated it in a rolling stentorian shout: ‘Abandon certainty! That’s life’s deepest command. That’s what life’s all about. We’re a probe into the unknown, into the uncertain. Why can’t you hear Muad-‘Dib? If certainty is knowing absolutely an absolute future, then that’s only death disguised! Such a future becomes now!” – The Preacher in Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune

This blog came about mainly because I wanted a place to share something cool that happened (see next post) and write about what it meant, or whether it meant anything. I also thought it might be cool to share some things I’ve written in the past and abandoned (see what I did there?). These are largely musings about people, belief systems, metaphysics, etc. and probably only make sense to me, but whatever, that’s what the internet is for.

The above quotation is why I love Dune; it is an example of how Frank Herbert picks things out of the Universe and out of my mind and places them in a science fiction novel so that when I read it all I can do is think to myself “hell yes.” Every time I read it (not as often as LOTR…) I learn something new. The last time, last August, this quotation popped out to me as being so true. Being certain, being sure of something, means being closed, to new experiences, new data, new anything. Certainty means stagnation; living is all about change. Certainty means deciding what things are instead of looking to see what they are. I won’t get into the history of epistemic thought here – and I admit, I really just wanted to use the word “epistemic” so I wrote this pointless sentence – but I find the subject fascinating… how do we obtain knowledge? How do we know what is true?

In science, we have embraced uncertainty. We have abandoned certainty for error measurement and probability theory. The history of science is of proving wrong basic facts that everyone knew were true. Scientists want to know precisely how wrong they are instead of how right, and by collecting data that is less and less wrong they can begin to rule out theories. This has somewhat hurt the acceptance of widely held theories (evolution, global climate change), with very very small “wrongness” levels, because the general public believes theories have less weight than facts, when (in fact) a fact is meaningless on its own and doesn’t tell you anything about how the world works.

I started to write about how religions have embraced certainty and all the troubles that has caused and continues to cause, but I don’t want to end on a downer… let me just end by telling the internet: Abandon Certainty! A filled cup has no room for more! Listen, think, and then decide. Exercise your skepticism and doubt muscles! Maybe you didn’t know as much as you thought, but then, maybe what you know is not who you are.