There are lots of everyday things I believe. I am pretty sure the people I care about love me too. I am confident the world will be there when I wake up in the morning. The 'people are generally good' thing is problematic. I except most people want to be nice most of the time but this is pretty damn milk-toast. I guess I'm trying to explain my personal definition of rational humanism. Still, that's more of a hope than a belief.
After giving the subject more intense consideration than I have in years I come back to one thing; some of the things I believe are false. I am pretty sure that's true. And I think this is a valuable belief. We have to be open minded and be able to let go of ideas. At best we can tentatively accept a principal otherwise we are slaves to ideology. The universe is complex. We understand mostly through modeling and metaphor. We have to know that are models by definition are simplistic and leave out more than they capture.
There is also a point about determinism – the idea that if we knew enough about the universe and how it works we would be able to predict everything that happens forever. See I just don’t think we live in that kind of a universe. Here is an example – a pool table. If you knew the exact position of every ball, the exact size of every hole, every bump, splinter and speck of dust on the table – if you also knew exactly how much energy the ball will absorb when hit vs. how much energy it would carry away. Then if you knew precisely the strength and direction of the stroke, you would be able to calculate the resting position of all the balls after the break. That’s determinism. There are two things about the universe we live in that make the pool table metaphor impossible. One is Chaos theory - you know, the ‘butterfly effect’? The idea is that very tiny differences in initial conditions can make a very large difference in how things turn out. And speaking of tiny differences, that brings me to point two – quantum physics. See, it’s all about the quantum. Ahem. Specifically the Uncertainty Principal. This principal is about the limit of what we can know regarding the location of a particle and how it is moving. It’s not about measuring particles well it is but bear with me: it is about the fundamental limits of the know-ability of the universe. Basically, if we know anything about the speed of a particle that limits what we know about its position.
So at its most granular level, there is no certainty. Chaos theory says even the smallest cause eventually has macro effects.
So ironically, that is the only thing metaphysical thing I am sure of.
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