Finding Truth In Value

In my previous posts, I have focused on the philosophical underpinnings of radical relativism. I would like, now, to turn to some more practical implications, namely, how the lack of absolute truth in any form would affect decisions about the human condition. If even the things we were taught to be absolutely true are not, then what can we possibly claim to know about that we always knew were subjective? It can seem daunting at first.

In fact, many people dismiss any thought process that calls itself "relativism" for the simple reason that they misconstrue the word to mean anarchy, or even hedonism. If truth is subjective then how can anything one desires be morally wrong? The mistake in this dilemma is in assuming that "subjective" means "whatever I want it to be." Unless you live alone on a deserted island, you are part of some sort of culture and all of us who live in a culture (voluntarily or not) abrogate a part of our autonomy to that culture. It's part of the deal.

There have been lots of attempts to try and simplify the complex relationships between individuals and the societies of which they are a part. More or less, those attempts have all come down to an argument that is sometimes summarized as "my right to swing my arm ends at another person's nose." The gist of this is that, so long as you are not hurting anyone else, you probably ought to have freedoms to do what makes you happy or what feels right. Naturally, societies rarely work this way and, as usual, the devil is in the details.

Let's begin with what it means to hurt someone else. If I don’t know what I know and what I don’t, what do I know about when someone else is harmed? I have talked about so-called objective facts. I have talked about things that we "know" because we can observe them. They supposedly are or are not, as a matter of fact, not because someone has a preference about them. Obviously, I am referring carefully to facts, and objectivity because I have already explained why I do not really think there are such things, but most people at least consider them to be more real than things like feelings, and welfare, and quality, and value, all these subjective things that science mostly stays away from.

So what about those softer things? How do we know that Wagner wrote great opera given that so many people I know cannot stand it? Why am I not justified in declaring with certainty that lima beans taste awful? I am sorry, but they do!

How do we decide that something someone does is right or that something someone does is wrong? Right and wrong. Good and evil. Greed. Lust. Power. Pain. Cruelty. Violence. Death. Terrorism. Genocide. What makes those words so hard to say and to hear? Are we genetically wired to despise those things? Obviously not, because so much of human history has been defined by the pursuit of the deeds those words describe.

If we cannot know anything that is supposedly factual, what prayer do we have to presume to know, for sure, whether a piece of art is beautiful? How can we judge a fine wine; the elegance of a skyscraper; the inspirational quality of a speech; the vileness of an act of cruelty? Ironically, the answer may just be that these things are easier to judge accurately simply because they hold no pretense of objectivity. The only standard that counts in your judgment of the things that affect you is your own set of values, or more properly, the collective set of values you possess jointly with the other subscribers to whatever culture you happen to be a part of.

I need to go off into some realm now that makes some uncomfortable.

What does it mean to like something. Let’s say I have a favorite color. I like red. I have a lot of red things in my house because I like red. Red makes me happy. What does that mean: red makes me happy? Biochemically, I can explain it as, perhaps, the release of a certain dopamine in my brain stimulated by the way my cerebral cortex is wired. Those pattern-matching algorithms up there are just wired to release more of it when I’m around red things perhaps.

But, more metaphysically, what is really happening? Is "happy" really just a convenient shorthand for what I just wrote? Maybe. It could be as simple as that. I have pleasant memories, wired into me from when I was young, perhaps because I had a lot of red toys, or my mother wore red when she comforted me, or whatever. But those explanations still seem to relate to some metaphysical sense of pleasure: I enjoyed playing with those toys. I liked being comforted. Again, those could have just been wired, as instinct, perhaps from some evolutionary survival mechanism. All perfectly plausible.

That, too, though, implies a sort of value, doesn’t it? That humans, or any species, would evolve a technique for survival seems to suggest a value of survival. That to exist is preferable than not to. Of course, one can take a purely rationalistic approach, and say that the way the universe operates simply is, that there is no implied good associated with its particular nature but simply that its nature is that it leads to evolution of these pockets of higher order including living species like us.

Well, that may be true. I will have to admit, though, that I do kind of prefer existence to non-existence. In general, there does seem to be a preference for existence, for a tendency towards these pockets of order that comprise the solar system, our ecosphere and the beings that occupy it. That preference seems wired into the very nature of the universe. So my question is, what is cause and what is effect? Is it that the nature of the universe to favor survival causes us to prefer survival? Or is it our preference for existence that gives the universe that nature?

Now before you accuse me of a god complex, I am not suggesting that I, or you or even all of us together created the universe. First of all, I wouldn’t say such a thing even if I believed it because that would require me to claim to know something. But I am saying that we have no reason to believe that there is any sort of reason to assume that the nature of the universe precedes our fondness for it. If we live in a universe of paradox, where something can be both true and false, maybe we avoid that paradox by choosing which side of it to live on.

Maybe there is a physical universe out there in this metaphysical river that allows knowledge paradox that is an absurdly reduced universe where contradiction happens and every possible proposition is true. Whatever beings might exist there might just prefer it that way. Personally, it sounds boring to me, but I happen to live in a universe that I find much more interesting. I live on the side of the paradox that values consistency over contradiction and existence over non-existence.

It does not really matter whether you believe the nature of the universe causes our preference for survival or the other way around, or whether the nature of the universe and our fondness for it are a happy coincidence. What does matter is that in a universe where to claim we know something forces us to accept paradox it is absolutely reasonable to say that our values and the universe we find ourselves in are closely related. We value survival. It’s programmed into our being, not just at the level of our DNA but at the level of physical laws that caused quarks to form protons and electrons and them to form hydrogen atoms that once collected through gravity until stars combusted in fusion furnaces that created heavier elements that combined to form molecules and coalesced into planets with enough energy and chaos to spawn early amino acids that organized into the first cells that over billions of years evolved into pompous amateur philosophers like me.

We know that there is a part of the universe, over there somewhere, where we know we can’t know anything. But the beauty of paradox is that you only have to look at one side of it at a time, so over here, this side of the universe, where we accept that we can know things, we also accept that we value existence. It’s sort of one of the requirements for membership to the club of knowledgeable entities, that we value existence. There are some things that we all have to value to coexist in this knowing, paradox-avoiding state we choose to live in. Valuing existence requires valuing the laws of nature that allow existence, things like three major dimensions, the forward marching of time, the laws of gravitation, the consistency of math and logic.

These things that science and philosophy tend to treat as absolute truisms are really only true on this side of the knowledge paradox. The knowledge paradox says they are also all false on the other side. If there are living beings able to exist over there I won’t speculate, but it is the kind of beings we are that we value existence and accept the laws of physics. Our shared truth allows our shared universe to exist.

These sorts of basic truths are essentially core values. Some philosophers have tried to derive values from truth, claiming, for instance, that a pursuit of happiness was an inherent quality of existence and therefore that happiness was a sort of absolute value. Of course, those efforts always failed because, in the real world, pursuit of happiness often involves conflict, so you get into questions of whether it is better to value collective happiness over individual happiness which is, itself, a question of value.

So I’m saying something different. I’m not saying that values derive from truth but that value, like truth, is not absolute. Knowledge is paradoxical because you cannot know what you don’t know and so truth is subject to your willingness to accept that you know it. Your willingness to accept that you know something is subject to whether or not you value that knowledge and the truth that is the subject of that knowledge. Truth and value are related, but not the way most people think they are. Truth is subject to value, not the other way around. The reason value is subjective is not because it is unrelated to truth. The reason value is subjective is because truth is subjective.

Some values, those strongly core ones, the ones related to the laws of the universe, seem more absolutely true because they are true for all of us. They have to be for us to exist in the same realm. Other important values, like those that prevent us from stealing and killing and generally lead us to act as civilized people are the most core of the values that we actually recognize as values. They are no more or less absolute than the real core values, but they are less-widely held. There are people who think it’s okay to steal. Different people have different views about when killing is justified. So we recognize that there are values at play there.

But if we accept the knowledge paradox we are given to the conclusion that our acceptance of the universe and its laws are as subjective as our tastes for color or food. It just happens that a taste for universal laws as we understand them is necessary to live here. And just as it is necessary for us to accept physical laws to live in the physical universe, it is also necessary for us to accept certain social laws to live, successfully in the structures of civilization. Now, within our physical universe, even here on our tiny little planet, we’ve managed to allow different civilization structures to exist with different sets of these social laws. Some of the differences are trivial, like whether or not you can turn right on a red light. Others are pretty significant, like whether consumption of alcohol is to be celebrated or punished by death. But, even with these significant differences, we manage, with some difficulty at times, to all survive in the same universe, and, at least for short times, even in each others’ civilizations.

Of course, these differences don’t exist simply between civilization boundaries. Even within our own country, we continue to have ongoing battles over what ought to be our social laws, over whose values should prevail when they conflict. Remember the abortion conflicts back in the ‘90s, when antiabortion activists were bombing abortion clinics and assassinating doctors that performed abortions? Talk about a conflict of values! What these activists were doing was fomenting rebellion. They believed that abortion was morally wrong in an absolute sense. They equated this belief with their belief in gravity. Immutable.

Of course, most people are uncomfortable with abortion. A large majority say either that they would never have an abortion themselves or that they would have one only under extreme circumstances. Yet, as strongly as most people feel, personally, about abortion being wrong, a solid majority also feel it should be legal. Inherently, collectively, as a culture, we seem to accept that personal values should be the arbiter of this very complicated and divisive issue. Not everyone agrees, of course, and the political importance of one’s opinion about abortion is still high.

We engage in a lot of double-think around the topic of morality. Most people seem to believe that there are moral absolutes. They hold their personal values dear and consider others who don’t share them to be backwards, or selfish, or maybe hedonistic. Yet, we live in a country that celebrates that diversity of values. We actively encourage immigration from countries that institutionalize significantly different values about life and sex and education and while we ask, as a condition for their immigration, that they integrate in language and behavior, we never ask them to abandon their values. As strongly as we may feel about our own values, one of our deepest-held values seems to be a respect for others’ different values.

If there are moral absolutes, why wouldn’t we insist on a one-world government that figures out what these absolute moral dictates are and enforce them on everyone? Would that not be the moral thing to do? The difficulties with such an idea are so obvious that I do not even need to discuss them, but as one key point of thought, the people out there who actually advocate for such a thing are some of the scariest people you will ever encounter.

It is tempting, certainly more convenient, to think that the notions of quality, beauty, taste and goodness are somehow written into the fabric of the universe. Countless philosophies and religious traditions have attempted to justify our human values in terms of some metaphysical absolute, from a Ten Commandments to a struggle between order and chaos. But, to date, no one has found a stone tablet, metaphorical or otherwise, that lays out, with credibility that is accepted by even a significant minority of the world’s population, what these absolute values are. Even if we found evidence of absolutes in values, how would we really know we had found them? Even if the evidence was absolutely compelling, though I have to admit that I don’t know by what standard such compulsion would be judged, we are still limited by our knowledge paradox. The absolute best we could ever do would be to place that newfound knowledge in the same category as our knowledge of other physical laws.

Of course, the best reason to believe that will not happen is that it seems necessary for us to agree on physical laws even to exist. Clearly, agreement on moral laws is not, as we seem to exist even without this agreement, and even coexist with those who disagree with us. We value existence more than we value agreement on issues like abortion. Our values allow us to disagree on issues like abortion. They don’t allow us to disagree on physical laws.

Another good reason to believe that we won’t find a credible source of moral absolutes is that our sense of moral absolutes changes over time. Much has been made of the cultural change that occurred during the 17th and 18th centuries when writers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau started writing about equality of men and social contracts and, in so doing, started challenging the conventional social order that allowed for kings to be anointed by God and those in their domain to be essentially their property. The emergence of the American and French revolutions stem directly from the changes that were occurring during that time.

What exactly were these changes?

It is really not a coincidence that this time of Enlightenment was occurring at the same time as the Industrial Revolution. The advancement of science and technology led directly to a broader intellectual class, one that had the ability to reason and think about what ought to be. Up until that time, the values of the people were the values of their king. They were not empowered to think, to develop their own perspective, to consider their own needs and sense of fairness relevant to society. Once that changed, once the people of Europe and the New World had developed that capacity, the cultural change was inevitable.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote of inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence, what he was really talking about was a set of rights that thinking people then demanded because they knew they finally had enough power to obtain them. It is popular amongst the absolutists in this country to claim that the phrase "all men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights" constitutes some religious basis for the country’s laws. Even if Jefferson weren’t on record as denying this, which he was, I would still argue that the idea of inalienable rights and the equality of men came not from a creator, but from the intellectual development of western civilization that was occurring naturally at that time. That development created a new value for freedom, self-government and individual rights.

So if people with different values can coexist and values can change over time, it is a hard case to make that certain of them, the ones some would like to cast with the name "morals," have the same sort of absoluteness that we tend to ascribe to our physical laws. It is important to reiterate, though, that the lack of a stone tablet announcing absolute right and wrong to civilization does not imply a lack of a right and wrong. In fact, if anything, it makes more real and more important our individual sense of integrity to those values that we do hold.

So if we accept that values differ, and there are no easy, stone-written laws to rely on, how can we resolve complicated issues like abortion aand bioethics or even less acute but still murky social issues like gay marriage? Is there a way to get past our different values, respect that people’s values are deeply held, and still move forward on complicated issues like the ones we face today? I believe so.

I think the values surrounding these issues are much more common that we care to admit. We tell ourselves that these questions are mystical, unsolvable by mere mortals, because they deal with questions like the meaning of life and purpose. Why are we here and who are we to mess with the divine plan?

I don’t mean to belittle those questions. They are important. I just do not think they are so hard. You do not really think they are hard either. In fact, I am betting you have some pretty strong feelings about those things.

Let’s take that meaning of life question. Or more precisely, the question of what constitutes life. Or even more precisely still, what constitutes human life? We tend to think of this in pretty binary terms. Look at someone you happen to see in the room with you (or make one up if you are alone). That person is human and, hopefully, appears to be alive. Now look at the chair your are sitting on. It is definitely not a living human. Those are the easy cases. It gets harder when we talk about embryos, fetuses, children, people with severe mental handicaps, people in unrecoverable comas, even soldiers and criminals. The fact of the matter is, we do not consider any of those things to be as human as your (possibly imaginary) friend with you in your room. We will not admit it, but it is true. Just look at the way we treat them.

I submit that the question is not what is a living human and what is not. The question is how much of a living human a thing is. And I would further submit that our test for how much a living human a thing is is this: How free are they to develop their own set of values, independent of those of the people around them. The more we allow them to object to the way their close culture treats them, the more we allow them freedom to move out of it or rebel within that close culture, the more we consider them to be a living human.

Why do I say this? Again, look at how we treat them. We keep babies locked in cribs at night. How cruel is that? We keep dangerous schizophrenics confined to hospitals. We tell our teenagers they can’t have opposite-sex friends in their room in blatant defiance of their hormones. We execute people convicted of capital crimes, but, interestingly enough, only after they have proven they are not really human by having demonstrated that their process for developing their own values has gone awry.

Consider this: we give parents an awful lot of rights when it comes to setting the values of their children as they grow up. Parents take pride, actually, in indoctrinating their kids in their value system. "Look at me, my kid’s a big toothless ignorant hick like me. I’m so pleased!”

Now you may be thinking, “We don’t let parents do whatever they want. We don’t let them to abuse them, for instance."

Why do you suppose that is the case?

“Because it’s cruel to the child,” you might propose.

According to whom? Who’s values are deciding that it was not okay to knock those teeth out of his brat son?

Values? Society deems it wrong. Not the parents. They may well think it is okay to smack their kids whenever they feel like. Hell, they were probably smacked around themselves. The reason we do not let them do it is because, while that child is a part of the close culture of that family, he is also a part of the larger culture of their parents. Their parents have a lot of leeway to instill their values in their children, but only insofar as they don’t violate the inviolable values of the culture of which the whole family is a part. We will let him teach his kid to be a hate-mongering bigot, but we won’t let him teach him that it is okay to hurt those he foments against.

So while we may disagree with those parents about whether it is okay to instill a tolerance for domestic violence, what we all agree with is that the kid is not ready to make up his own mind about those things.

Think about this, too. There are lots of things that we will allow parents to do to their kids that some of us think are, in fact quite cruel, but we will grant the parents’ right to do those things because those things are themselves based in a cultural tradition that, while not sanctioned by all of society, are recognized as legitimate value differences. Like circumcision. I think cutting off a baby’s foreskin only a few minutes after he’s born is an incredibly inhumane thing to do to a living human. I would never inflict that on my children. Various forms of body mutilation of children through various phases of their growth is actually a pretty frequent theme throughout human societies. We let our sons and daughters get their first tattoos and piercings pretty young these days. We let cultural traditions justify parents depriving their children of food in religious rituals.

Where I am going with all this is to point out that the things we do not let them do are not things we think are cruel from the child’s standpoint. The things we do not let them do are things we think are cruel from our standpoint, the standpoint of society, the larger culture of which those families are members. Anyone who stands up and says "I do it for the children" is lying. They are doing it for themselves. Their own sensibilities. Their own values.

Where does that take us? Is an embryo a living human? How about a full-term fetus? We allow abortion under certain circumstances and not others. We let doctors create and destroy embryos under certain circumstances that we deem justifiable and not others. Our decision about when to allow a pre-birth human to be terminated seems to have little to do with our sense of welfare for the pre-birth human. We, society as a whole, clearly place the value of post-birth humans higher. Why is that? Why do we allow some parents to make that choice for themselves? What are we saying to them?

We are saying that society as a whole is unclear on the right ethical stance to take about abortion. In fact, we are terribly divided about it. Since we ca not make up our minds, we are leaving it to you, parent, to make this decision, using your values. As we have seen in my previous examples, we inherently believe that the child of a parent, born or otherwise, is subject to the ethical whims of that parent, so long as those whims do not conflict with the values of society as a whole. We condemn that pre-born human to the fate that parent chooses for it, even if that fate is death, assuming that is the worst outcome from the child’s perspective, since it is fair to point out that it is not always obvious that it is. We will also let a parent make the decision to try to bring a very sick baby into the world even if we are inclined to think abortion might be the more merciful option.

Whatever that parent may think about the humanness of their unborn baby, society has deemed it virtually unhuman by saying it does not have even enough independence of value even to object against its own termination. We consider embryos very inhuman. We consider second trimester fetuses a little more human, as there are more cases where we step in and prevent abortion. We consider it more likely that the fetus, if it were asked, might object. At full term, we are very uncomfortable. I mean it is old enough that you feel like you almost could ask if it would object. And, of course, by the time it takes that first breath, by the time you can hear your baby cry, you’re hearing the objection loud and clear. You hurt your baby then and you are going straight to jail. Circumcise him if you must, but you have to keep him and spend the next twenty years worrying about him.

When is abortion wrong, then? On the one hand, it seems like we can’t decide. But in truth we already have. We have decided that it is wrong in certain specific situations that society has decided it is and – I need to emphasize the and – and when the parents own values tell them it is. Notice I am not saying that we are simply leaving it to the parents to decide when it is wrong. We are saying that it is in fact wrong when the parents decided it is. The values of the fetus are, by definition, the value of the parents because we have deemed that the fetus does not get a vote. Just like the poor little baby boy does not get a vote about his foreskin. Just like the bigot’s son doesn’t get a vote about whether to be bigoted, at least until he grows up and hopefully returns to the real world.

So if some parents believe it is wrong and some do not, who is right? They all are, of course. Remember how we started. There are limits on what we can claim to know, even in the so-called concrete world. It’s utterly impossible to say that we know what God would want. What we can most certainly know, the only thing we can know, is what our conscience tells us about it. If that comes from God, so be it.

What is the right thing to do? Exactly what we are doing. That is why we have a political process, so we have a means of establishing what the compelling societal values are that we feel are necessary to maintain social order. While we dictate those values that we hold collectively to certain who may not like them, we deem them to have agreed to make that sacrifice by remaining a member of that society. Those things we don’t feel we need to dictate collectively we leave to individual conscience, not simply because we ca not agree, but because we believe that what is right is to follow that conscience.

Many of those dissenting voices out there, the ones who claim to speak for some divine order, who say that, say, stem-cell research is equivalent to playing God, while entitled to their say, should be put in perspective. They ca not possibly speak for what is right and wrong for society, but only what is right and wrong for them. They can try to persuade you, but do not let them bully you or scare you into an irrational belief that there might be some horrific consequence because we have offended their particular deity. I may not fully believe in the credibility of rational thought, but I am certain I do not believe in the credibility of irrational ranting like theirs.

Each person's life is lived one instantaneous moment at a time. You can use your sense of knowledge to try and influence the course those experiences take but the only thing you can control with certainty is your reaction to those experiences and that takes your value system, which you are always growing and, hopefully, driving to whatever esteemed state you seek to find.

Philosophical Tail Chasing

I do, perhaps too often, rely on childhood impressions as the beginnings of ideas. Perhaps this is because, only as kids, when we have not yet had imagination about the universe pummeled out of us, do we have the flexibility to accept that the world might be more fanciful than we now believe. Falling back on that imagination, and remembering ideas and impressions that stemmed from it, is one of my most powerful tools for philosophy. It is in that vein that I recall a cartoon I saw, as a kid, in which a vaccuum cleaner sucked itself up and vanished from existence. Though it struck me as physically absurd, even then, the image made an impression on me.

Our understanding of the world is layered in such a way as to avoid self-reference. Things are made of other things even as they comprise greater things. Our brains seem to be wired to understand the world as a big collection of holons (a term coined by Arthur Koestler to describe things that are both parts of something while itself being comprised of smaller things, as an atom is a part of a molecule but is itself comprised of neutrons, protons and electrons, for example). A world in which things were comprised of things that, say, contained the first thing in its own composition would be a difficult world for us to understand. It is tempting to say that our difficulty in understanding a world where, say, an atom could be comprised of molecules, one of which contained said atom, is based on the fact that such a world would be physically absurd, like the vaccuum cleaner sucking itself out of existence.

What has always probably been an inherent quality of human knowledge became explicitly identified in the early part of the 20th century when Bertrand Russell tried to avoid the self-reference that seemed inherent in mathematics. Russell, was reviewing work by Gottlob Frege, a German mathematician, who was trying to use set theory to logically derive all of mathematics. In Frege's work, cardinal numbers became symbols for sets of quantified sets. The number one, for instance, stood for the set that contained all sets with exactly one member. The number two, then, stood for the set of all sets with exactly two members. By defining numbers in this way, he was able to reduce arithmetic to logical operations on these hypothetical sets and derive the standard axioms we now associate with arithmetic. Frege believed, and Russell concurred, that, with (considerable) work, all of mathematics could be associated with logic, and thereby shown to be logically consistent and complete.

The trouble began when Russell, thinking about the idea that sets contain sets, wondered about the consequences of a set containing itself. For example, the set of all sets that contain one member would have to include a set that contained only itself as a member, because that is, by definition, an entity that satisfies the criteria for all sets that contain one member. The consequences of sets containing themselves become odder when you consider all the possible sets that contain themselves as members. They, themselves, constitute a set and, clearly, this set, could contain itself, since, if it did, it would by definition belong to itself. Well, if one is going to talk about the set of all sets that contain themselves, one naturally starts to wonder about the set of all sets that do not contain themselves as members. Or, at least Bertrand Russell did, to the severe detrement of his friend. Would this set contain itself or not? This problem, known now as Russell's Paradox, seemed to be the end of Frege's attempt to reduce mathematics to logic. The paradox, it seemed, was a contradiction. When logic leads one to a contradiction, one typically concludes that the premises are false and the system being derived is invalid.

Russell, though, undaunted, tackled the problem himself and came up with a solution that involved a system of types that would be familiar to any programmer familiar with object-oriented programming. In Russell's system, not all sets are created equal. There are sets of things, and sets of sets, and sets of numbers, and so forth. The concept of a set containing itself is defined away because there was no need, in mathematics, for sets that could be typed in such a way that they could contain themselves. (We now know, that this is not true. Number theory and metamathematics rely heavily on just the sort of self-reference that Russell explained away. But it turns out that the contradiction, while still present, does not invalidate mathematics, just certain previously assumed beliefs about it.)

Russell's solution was to turn sets into holons (even before the term was coined). By ensuring that things could only contain other things that could not contain greater things, self-reference and, thus, paradox were eliminated. To Russell's mechanistic, pre-quantum mechanics style of thinking, the universe was saved. Physics would continue ticking along in its deterministic way and mathematics would always be able to reliably describe it.

But, the more we learn about the world (at least to the extent that we think we do given my contention that there are no certain truths), the weirder it seems to become.

Is our universe, as some of the more "out-there" physicists are proposing, really an 11-dimension membrane in a universe of universes, some of which have stable physical laws and some of which do not (recommended reading on this topic: Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku)? Or, as Hugh Everett proposed, does the universe cleave into other universes at the moment that every quantum event is observed, suggesting that there is a universe in which we actually made every other decision we might have made in this one?

As interesting as all these ideas are, they all suffer from the same ontological problem that any scientific or even religious theories about the universe suffer from: they all require that it is all ultimately contained in something which raises the question of what is outside that thing. If God created the world, who created God? If the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, what was before the Big Bang? If the universe is one of an infinite number of parallel universes in some big-U Universe, how did the big-U Universe come to be? This problem stems directly from our discomfort with paradox. If I proposed a theory that the entire universe was actually located within my right forefinger fingernail, your objection would not be simply based on my arrogance. You would deny the very rationality of the idea. Something small can't hold something big. Something can't be contained in part of itself.

Of all the sins and evils that mankind has invented, nothing appears to be as vilely and universally despised as paradox. We accept the axioms of mathematics and fiinite-state predicate logic because they avoid paradox. Science, which relies on math and logic, accept without question, that a bit of evidence that contradicts a theory automatically invalidates it. Throughout history, people have been branded as witches and heretics for proposing ideas that defied the understood nature of the universe because the ideas posed the paradox that it was impossible for their ideas and the conventional wisdom to both be true. None of this is anything but obvious. But that's my point. We accept it far too easily.

Let's consider a most basic of paradoxes. I propose to define a new kind of finite state logic, one in which I rewrite the law of identity, which in conventional logic states that A = A. There can be no more obvious truth. If something is true, it is true. If it is false it is false. I propose, in my alternate logic, that the opposite is true. A is not equal to A. If something is true, it is really false. If something is false, it is really true. Can you get your minds around this idea?

What does such a thing even mean? In digital electronics, if you build a circuit that loops the output of an inverter into its input you get an oscillator. That is, the state of the inverter alternates between 1 and 0 over and over again at a speed determined by how long it takes the inverter to change its internal state. So that's one possible interpretation of A != A (to use a programming language notation). It could just mean that it's not stable. A may or may not be true depending on when you look. Another way to look at this, though, is to say that A may or not be true depending on ones point of view, which could include the point in time one chooses to look.

We see this all the time in the real world. If you and a friend are looking at a boulder, she from its one side and you from a side perpinduclar to her view, and you both drew a picture of it, odds that either of you would recognize the boulder from the other's picture is pretty remote. Boulders are just not regular objects as a rule. Her view may be of someting long, squarish and tapered to the left, whereas yours might be of something completely round, approximately as tall as it is wide and with big black spots on it. Yet you both drew the same boulder, but from a different point of view. This example is, clearly, not a paradox, per se. But it illustrates one possible way to get ones head around the idea of a paradoxical universe.

Rather than thinking about the universe as being something objective, to be perceived rightly or wrongly, one might simply think of the universe as being perceived, by definition. The ontological problem I described of needing to understand what contains the universe stems from a need to believe that it exists, indeed that we exist at all in some objective, materialistic sense. One's worldview, if you will, is one's world.

I would argue that discovery of a genuine, unavoidable paradox, one which can not be explained away simply by moving away to a more distant context (for example, a more complete theory of the universe), rather than destroying science and human knowledge, would free it. The development of human knowledge becomes, more properly, a development of human tolerance. Rather than fixating on endless dogmatic and fruitless ponderings on the "true" nature of the universe, mankind would be free to explore the more meaningful, if somewhat more mundane truths of life in our actual corner of that universe. Such a process gives us more than just technology and medicine but also greater compassion and tolerance and a reason to build a world with as much in common as necessary to benefit from our mutual existence but without sacrificing those aspects of ourselves that make us unique and make our lives special to us.

So where would one go to find such an unavoidable paradox? We can start with knowledge itself. It has been my assertion that certain knowledge is impossible. Whether it be because of the problem of induction, the fallability of human intelligence or just the simple acceptance that some things are based on inextricable human values, we can know with certainty that certain knowledge is unattainable. Yet, this very statement is a claim of certain knowledge. One could argue (and, at first I did myself) that this is not really a paradox because all we are doing is using the lights of ones own rationality to illustrate that it leads to a contradiction. Yet this argument is an argument of logic -- itself a claim based on a presumption of certainty. At the end of the day, the possibility of certain knowledge can not be resolved using knowledge itself. One has to conclude that whether or not knowledge is certain is a sort of belief. It is based on one's point of view. We live in a world where we rely heavily on our belief in certain knowledge. If you will, our world's existence, indeed that of the universe we try to describe, rests on our acceptance of the certainty of some facts about it. This makes sense if you allow the notion that one's worldview is one's world. Those who are not certain the world exists must live in a dark and lonely place.

One question that might come to mind is. if certainty in the world's existence is so critical to its existence, why would I argue against that certainty. The fact is, I don't. While I argue that, philosophically, absolute certainty is an unattainable goal, I do not claim that one can not be certain enough about the things in one's life not to believe in their own world and existence. Nagarjuna, the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism wrote of the difference between conventional truths and ultimate truths. It is certainty of ultimate truth that I argue is unattainable and, in fact, because said certainty is not even conceivably attainable, I argue that its existence is unnecessary. What is truth without someone to discover it?

Rather than finding some sort of arbitrary conventional certainty, though, I observe that certainty is, itself, a relative thing. I live my life and weigh the choices I face evaluating the world through a lens that can focus more clearly on some things than others, and I take measured risks taking into account all that I do not know. I count fairly firmly on the technology that allows me to fly across country and very little on the likelihood of finding large sums of money lying in the street with a tag identifying me as its new owner. This is all consistent with a relative view of values, ethics and even scientific or mathematical truth.

And to think, I once thought the idea of a vacuum sucking itself out of existence was absurd.

1+1=?

As a kid, I always had a sense that there was something wrong with the way adults talked about the world. They often said things that seemed to me too fantastic to be true. The sun was 93 million miles away and, at it surface was over 10,000 degrees! Well, being a kid, those numbers just sounded too outrageous to be true. But what bothered me more was that anyone would claim to know. I want to see the thermometer they used to take the temperature at the sun, and imagine the sunburn whoever went up there to take it must have gotten.

I was not raised in a religious household (in fact, my parents both seemed to revolt against their own oppressively religious upbringings) so I was not taught the concept of blind faith. My father, in particular, was always challenging the conventional wisdom about things and encouraging me to do the same. It made me just precocious enough to alienate just about everyone.

There was one summer in particular that was pretty pivotal, though, in launching my intellectual pursuit of all things relative. A cousin was visiting who, while religious, did not spend a lot of time talking about religion. I do not remember how the topic came up, but I started asking him about what he believed and why he believed it. It was obvious in the conversation that he believed what he did because he was told to and that was good enough for him. He understood, completely, that it was possible to believe other things, and that other people did, and he did not think those other people stupid, or damned, or, necessarily even wrong. For him, his religious beliefs were where he was at home, philosophically. There was no reason for him to consider anything else because he was comfortable where he was.

This was also one of my first summers where adolescence was really setting in and my first hints of being gay were manifesting themselves in my attempt to keep my attractive and half-naked cousin awake through this conversation so I could keep looking at him. But I digress.

This was, in fact, when I decided that I did not believe in God. Nobody had told me what to believe about this. My mother had always said that she believed in God, though she never talked about it or told me why I should, or even that I should. So it just sort of hung there for me. I would have said I believed in God or that I probably did until that summer when, after my conversation with my cousin and a few other observations (including a late-night talk show guest, neither the name or profession of whom I recall, who declared with considerable authority, that masturbation was a mortal sin, which at that point in my life was potentially very disturbing) that there was no point in believing in such a thing as a god. There was no evidence for a god. I had not heard a single argument that I felt justified such a belief. I had not ruled out the possibility that I might change my mind, but it just seemed to me that if it was so intuitively obvious that God exists (as it seemed to be for everyone else) that everyone would agree on all of the details about him. Clearly they did not, so, even if I were to believe in a god, which one would I believe in?

Sometime later, while discussing my newfound atheism with a friend who was very devoutly Christian, I explained to him why I had decided that I could not believe in God simply because others did. There was no evidence for such a belief, I repeated and asked why one would believe in something so fantastic without any concrete proof.

This friend, who as I recall was named Chris, met my challenge with another. Why, he asked, did I believe in gravity. At first, I thought the question silly.

Because there is evidence for it, of course, I replied. Things fall down. The planets stay in their orbits. The sun continues to fuse hydrogen into helium because of the pressures caused by its gravitational mass.

Why do you believe that's gravity, and not simply God, dictating that those things behave the way they do, Chris continued? Wouldn't God, if he were designing an elegant universe, design it in consistent and harmonious ways that we could predict and count on? That we can describe a mathematical model that allows us to know how the universe behaves says nothing about the cause of that behavior.

I didn't realize, until I was in college, just how important an observation this was. But it stuck with me, anyway. I was not satisfied, of course, that Chris had rebutted my atheism. That believing in gravity is, hypothetically, no more logical than believing in God is not, to me, proof of the existence of God. But it certainly did cause me to question what all I really do believe. Are the only two choices for understanding the universe to believe in absolute physical laws on the one hand or divine providence on the other?

As I studied philosophy and physics in college, I started to frame, more specifically, the sense that I was having about our view of the world. Rene desCartes, trying to reduce all knowledge to its most basic elements, asked how we know that we are not merely disembodied brains, or held in suspended animation in some Matrix-like world, with our brains being fed whatever sensory inputs some malevolent entity wants us to have. With the declaration, Cogito ergo sum, he decided that since he had a consciousness, at least he must surely exist and in an amazing series of following leaps of logic, concluded that God and the world all exist exactly as we have always known them to. David Hume, though believing in an objective material world that obeyed natural laws, admitted that there was no real logical reason to do so and posed several logical problems with his own empiricist beliefs.

The problem with any belief, even those for which we can find supporting evidence, is that it requires a chain of reasoning that winds up being circular. This problem, called the Problem of Induction goes something like this: Gathering evidence about the physical world requires that we interact with it and observe it. This requires reliable senses that actually observe the real world. We believe our senses are reliable because the information that we collect from them seems reliable in that the world we sense is predictable and generally conforms to the expectations we have developed of it from this sensory data. Since our senses have been reliable in the past, we have evidence that they are reliable generally. Now, the data that we gather about the world from our generally reliable senses seems to suggest that the world behaves in predicatable ways. We can abstract from these observations models that reflect physical laws such as gravity, electromagnetism and so on. Since these models, which we call theories, seem, in the past, to have been reliable predictors of the behavior in the world, we have evidence that they will be reliable in the future.

This common theme, that patterns we have experienced in the past are reliable predictors of the future is called induction: generalizing from specific observations (things fall down) to a general law (all things will fall down). However reasonable this may seem, there is actually no logical justification for it. We know, from our own experience, that lucky streaks come to an end, that a stock that has climbed in value for 12 consecutive months can crash without warning or that a previously unbeaten sports team can be upset. The only difference between our belief in a bullish stock and the reliability of gravity is simply a matter of degree. We, to date, have no examples of gravity failing. There is, though, no logical reason to believe that it never will. Only our common sense, whatever that is, tells us that "as far back as humanity can remember" is long enough to believe in gravity's eternal nature.

Believers in Biblical Creation like to point out that evolution "is only a theory." They are correct, of course, but then so are the laws of gravitation. They are theories because they cannot be logically proven, but only shown to be consistent, so far. (And only so far as they go, since, for example, we now know that the laws of gravitation, as written by Sir Isaac Newton, are not exactly correct in all cases. Einstein's theory of general relativity is now believed to be a more complete description of the behavior of the force we call gravity, though scientists still work towards an even more general theory that will, they hope, unify gravity with the other perceived forces of the universe.) Unlike mathematical truisms, like the Pythagorean Theorem, physical laws cannot be proven but only inferred. They are attempts to explain specific phenomenon in terms of general laws, laws which can be shown to be incorrect by a single counterexample, but can never be proven to be correct even if it has never, in the course of history, been shown to be wrong.

So, there's no logical reason to believe anything we think we know about the world we live in. There is no reason to believe that gravity will not stop tomorrow at 1:32 P.M. There is no reason to believe that the strong nuclear force that holds the nuclei of our atoms together will not turn out to be a fortunate fluke that, because of whatever larger realm our universe might happen to be a part of, just lasted for 13.2 billion years but will come to an end along with all matter everywhere sometime next year.

When I came to the realization that there was no logical basis for scientific knowledge, I abandoned my interest in physics and took up computers.

Seriously. Science was messy. Observation required imprecise measurements and statistical models and conflicting results from the same experiment performed multiple times. And, of course, science required induction. Nothing you learned was certain, so what was the point?

Computers, though, were different. You could write a computer program that was certain. If you wrote a program to add 1 and 1, and your program was correct, you knew you would get 2. You knew this, not because you tried it several times and got the right answer, but because you could prove it. The program was its own proof. It was logical.

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, when computers were much simpler than they are today, it was still possible, and even expected, to write bug-free code. Algorithms were simple because the computers were not powerful enough to process the kinds of things computers do today. You could print out all of the software that could fit on one computer onto several hundred pages of greenbar paper and sit down with a handful of programmers who would review it, the same way a mathematician would submit a mathematical proof for peer review. If several smart guys all believed that your code was "clean," it probably was. I liked that. It was logical, predictable and certain.

That being said, it was always still true that software teams would test their code. Since proving that software was correct was hard, it often still fell on a group of people who would run programs through their paces to make sure they did what they were supposed to do. In a sense, these test teams were scientists, testing a theory: the theory that the program was valid. They used a set of random examples of inputs (because the number of possible inputs was infinite, you couldn't simply test them all) and verified the outputs. If any of them turned out to be wrong, you knew you had a bug. But, no matter how many times you ran them with correct results, you could never be certain that it was perfect. Even what I thought was so logical and certain, in the end, turned out not to be.

It was a frustrating realization, but I considered it a minor inconvenience in my thinking. We tested software not because it was impossible to prove it correct, but because it was impractical. Submitting complex software to committees of peer programmers for review would be horrendously expensive and, besides, programmers, as a rule, would rather spend their time writing their own code than reviewing someone else's. So, even though our application of computer technology was less than perfect, the technology itself still had the potential to be more pure than empirical scientific methods of understanding the universe.

And, of course, math was perfect. You could, indeed, know things about math. The Pythagorean Theorem, that the square of the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the sides, is easy to prove. Even a grade-school student can be made to understand why, with certainty, the theorem is true. I might have been interested in math as a career, had there been much call, in the computer age, for professional mathematicians.

Somewhat later in my career, in 1993, I read a remarkable thing on the internet. An obscure mathematical puzzle called Fermat's Last Theorem had apparently been solved. The theorem said that a certain equatiion (expressed in a notation in which x^y means, x, raised to the power of y), a^n + b^n = c^n, is untrue for any whole number value of n greater than 2. This theorem is of no important significance to anyone. There are no practical applications of it that I have ever heard, but what made it interesting was that a 17th-century mathematician, Pierre de Fermat, claimed to have proven it, but no one since had been able to, until, in 1993, a British mathematician, Andrew Wiles announced his own voluminous proof. I remember reading several attempts by mathematicians on the internet to describe the incredibly complex methods Wiles used. Unfortunately, later that year, Wiles had to retract his proof when some serious flaws were discovered. After having spent 7 years working out what he believed to be certain proof of the conjecture, it turned out Wiles was wrong. (Fortunately, he and one of his students were able to spend another year working out the problem and finally publish what is now considered to be a valid proof.)

The point is that, even in mathematics, a field known for its purity and logical certainty, there is still an uncertain element, namely, the brains of the mathematicians that develop it. Like certainty about the physical world requires a belief that because things have reliably been a certain way in the past, they will be that way in the future, certainty about the logical world requires a belief that the past reliability of logic, and those who practice it, is proof that it is valid. We, in fact, induce that our memory will accurately reflect our past experiences. Even our own thoughts, and our thoughts about our thoughts, are suspect.

So where does this leave us? If I cannot beleive in God, or in the real world, or in 1+1=2 or even in my own thoughts, what is the point? Why exist at all (if in fact, we do)?

For now, all I can say is, just because. One of my favorite Confucious quotes is, "To know is to know that you know nothing." To let go of certainty is to let go of arrogance. To stop believing that the world is or ought to be a certain way is to open oneself to the possibilities of what it can be through contribution to and relationship with that world and its other inhabitants.

Only when you let go of the biases that the world has raised you to adopt will you really be able to develop certainty about anything and that is the great paradox of human existence. And it is a paradox I will discuss in more detail on another occassion.

In the meantime, I challenge you to stop claiming to know. Don't do anything stupid. You can still be pretty sure of things you don't absolutely know. I still recommend living a safe, healthful and generous life. But do it questioningly and without unnecessary judgement. The world may just seem a little more open and the possibilities greater.

The Nature of Lane

Like many before me, I have spent a lot of time contemplating my nature, my essence. What is that quality of matter, energy, spirit or other stuff that makes me me? I'm an overly analytical person by nature, so let's use a methodical approach to getting to the bottom of who I am.

Starting at the outermost layer, I am a six-foot, clean-cut, 40-something white male with short dark blonde hair, greenish blue eyes and, alas, a bit of a paunch. I'm gay, in an open relationship with a partner of going on 4 years. I work in the computer field, have interests in more things than I have the time or competence to master, but I tend to express opinions on a lot of those things anyway.

Politically, I tend to have positions that come from a struggle between my head and my heart. I would describe myself as liberal, but also a devout capitalist. I think government can do good, but I think its intentions to do good all too often go awry. I prefer to err on the side of using government power sparingly, as an exception rather than the rule. (Of course, the government disagrees with me.) Obviously, being gay, I am vocal in my support of gay causes, though I don't necessarily agree with every political point of view established by mainstream gay rights groups.

So, at this outer level, I am a person with physical traits, ideas, values and behaviors. Those qualities all seem to distinguish me, in some sense, from other people. I may have many of those traits in common with others, but surely, the particular combination of traits that I might enumerate about myself (the list above being a brief introduction, obviously) make me at least somewhat unique. Yet, none of those feel like me. Even the combination of all those traits, while being recognizable about me, don't feel like they define me. I could grow my hair, lose my weight, start dating women again (doubtful though that might be) or change careers, but I would still be the same person.

Maybe I have to go deeper to find that answer.

Beneath that veneer of traits, ideas, values and behaviors there is an incredible biological machine. Few people have the opportunity to appreciate how absolutely amazing the biology of a human being is. The complexity of its chemistry alone is so breathtaking as to defy comprehension. The design of the circulatory system, in its ability to flawlessly deliver oxygen and nutrients and remove waste products from every one of the trillions of cells in the human body humbles even the most advanced of modern civil engineering projects. The astounding choreography of the thousands of muscles that make possible locomotion, athletics, construction, music, cooking, eating or sex is still only poorly or cheaply imitated by the best robotics. The remarkable acuity of our senses that enable us to revel in the glorious beauty of a sunset, the sound of a symphony, the delight of a fine wine or the warmth of a cuddle with your partner come as close to anything I can imagine to describing the reason to be alive. These senses and muscles are all interconnected by the most sophisticated electronics network ever observed by man as signals are sent to and from the epitome of biological perfection, the human brain.

In all those amazing systems, is there an essence of me? Mostly, they are the same for all of us. I would still be me if I lost a limb or an eye or if I had my liver or heart replaced. There was a woman in France, recently, who had her face surgically replaced as a treatment for a terrible accidental disfigurement. She looked like another person yet, in all other respects, she was still the same person. We are medically unable to transplant a human brain, but one has the sense that doing so would surely cause that person now to be different. All of the thoughts, opinions, memories, values that, in the sense above seemed to make me who I am, are apparently stored, electrochemically in my brain. So, is that it? Am I my brain?

The brain, like the rest of my body is composed of cells which are, biologically, very similar to all of the other cells in my body. Each of my brain cells, like each of my other cells, consists of a cell membrane that holds in its cytoplasm, wherein a collection of mitochondria enable the cell to convert glucose and oxygen to energy and carbon dioxide and a nucleus, which holds 23 pairs of chromosomes, each with bunches of doubly-helical DNA strands and the enzyme machinery to use the information in this DNA to create the proteins necessary to grow and repair it. The specific cells in my brains that contribute to the brain's unique potential to really identify me as me, are the neurons. They are brain cells with the additional capability to collect electrical signals from special sensors called dendrites and, depending on certain electrochemically-programmed rules, occasionally fire electrical signals out the other end from its axons. But since every neuron itself is more or less the same, the magic of the brain's function is in the way these neurons are wired together through synapses, regions that use special substances called neurotransmitters to amplify and conduct signals from one neuron to another. Just as computers rely on their transistors being wired in a certain way, the brain relies on its neurons to be wired in a certain way for the brain to take on its unique personality. (Of course, unlike a computer, who's wiring is fixed the moment it is born, the brain rewires itself on the fly as it learns.)

So, this has some potential to be the essence of me. You can at least see where some of my thoughts, behaviors, even my tastes and values might be, somehow, wired into the configuration of my neurons. Of course, if we were technologically sophisticated enough, we could probably build a machine that performed functions similar to my brain. If we were good, it might be, outwardly, indistinguishable from my brain. If we were really sophisticated, we might even be able to replicate an actual, biochemically perfect copy of my brain. If I had a bad accident, and suffered irreparable brain damage, but happened to have a digital scan of the state of my brain the day before the accident, and they were able to produce a biologically perfect replica of my brain from that scan and transplant my brain to repair the damage caused by my accident (which, it seems to me, would have the additional advantage of removing the memory of the traumatic accident, since those memories wouldn't have existed in that previous day brain), would the recovered patient still be me?

Let's go a little deeper.

My brain (and my hypothetical reconstructed, restored to the most recent backed-up-version brain) are, at the end of the day, made up of stuff that is even more undistinguishing than cells. Each cell membrane, mitochondrium, DNA strand is made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms, which are made up of protons and neutrons and electrons. And space. Lots and lots of space. Most of what we perceive around us, the stuff of the universe, what we call matter, is actually empty space. More, in fact, than 99% of it. The fact that we don't perceive it that way is because we don't perceive matter directly, or anything else for that, er, matter. What we perceive are forces. What we see is electromagnetic radiation stimulating our retinas. What we hear are the electric fields of air molecules interacting with the electric fields of ear drums. What we feel when we press our lips against the lips of our honeys are the electrons of their lips repulsing the electrons of ours, never actually coming completely in contact, even though we are sure that they are.

Our amazing and wonderful senses do us the favor of communicating a beauty about the world around us that, at the subatomic level, isn't actually even there. Our brains, which can only process this information because of the way they are wired interpret a universe that only exists because of the way it is wired. No atom, by itself, has any significance at all. The universe is merely software. A dance of forces between the few bits of actual matter (whatever that means) defines everything we actually experience.

As you dive even deeper, you find that even those subatomic particles are suspect. They might consist, themselves, of quarks, but some scientists are now thinking that they might actually be artifacts of the vibration of minute strings or membranes, abstract entities that don't actually exist in any conventional sense that we could process with our normal biases and expectations about the way the universe works.

If you dive below this, there is, currently, nowhere to go. This might be where one might insert a belief in souls and God, or a pantheon or some other new-age concept. I won't offer an easy answer like that. I don't object to the beliefs that others have in this area and I respect them deeply. But I don't share them. The best god for me is an unknown god. The mystery of existence is its own deity. I don't need anything more. I am here, essentially me, for reasons that I can only speculate about, but, in fact, choose not to. I do believe that I am me in some metaphysically unique way, and, because I believe that my core beliefs are my reality (just as your core beliefs are your reality), I accept that as good enough. Unexplained. Questions unanswered.

You can expect from me a regular dance around any presumption of absolute knowledge about topics, even ones I claim to have expertise in. Among those attributes of me that are, perhaps, most distinguishing, are that I simply don't accept absolute assertions, nor do I make them. I will state opinions, often vehemently, but you will never doubt that they are my opinions. I will justify those opinions using my own clearly declared values, reaching across, where possible to values that I know most of my fellow citizens of the world can relate to, but never presuming that what I believe is factual in any absolute sense.

Humans want answers. When they can't find them, they often make them up. It is part of their nature to want to understand the universe around them. Some understanding, even a comfortably false one, is better than no understanding at all. But you won't find that here. I will, invariably ask more questions than I answer. My aim is, in fact, to teach the value of being satisfied with the lack of certainty that is the single certainty the universe offers.

I don't know if this is a key to happiness, but I know that demanding certain answers to unanswerable questions is a guaranteed path to frustration.

Introducing the Radical Relativism Blog

So begins what I hope will be an entertaining and educational experience for me and hopefully some others as I explore the details and boundaries of a philosophical outlook that I term "radical relativsm." The concept is pretty simple to explain but hard for most people to get their heads around. The essential idea is that there are no absolute truths in the world. It is not just that beauty is in the eye of the beholder or that favorite colors are personal choices or that a taste for liver has to be aqcuired. Nothing in life is certain. There are no religious truths, no scientific truths, no mathematical truths, no logical truths. Everything is a point of view.

I remember, as a kid in the fifth grade being taught what seems pretty obvious to most people, that there is a difference between fact and opinion. It seemed like a clever distinction to me. I adopted the idea as my own and spent most of my life trying to straighten people out when they got their facts and their opinions confused. (Of course, in what can only be described as a preview of what was to come, I got frequently frustrated at the number of people who seemed unable to tell the difference, at least in my view.)

In college, I became fascinated by logic. And I was a master of it, actually. I could prove difficult theorems in multivariable predicate logic more easily than anyone I knew. I was enamored with the idea that there was a system of thought that one could use to take a set of facts and absolutely know, based on that set of facts that another set of facts was true. Imagine the possibilities. Surely this is the closest mankind can come to omniscience.

As I set about trying to apply this newly found wisdom to the real world, I started to have problems. The usefulness of logic as applied to real world thought required certainty in the facts you assume. A syllogism is only as good as its inputs. (I remember a clever play on words that, while not exactly illustrating the point, at least hints at the difficulties: Nothing is better than eternal happiness. A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Therefore, a ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness.)

Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, having seen my problem a couple hundred years before I did, coined the phrase "Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy" to point out the difference between propositions that you know because you can prove them (the analytic propositions) and those that you know because you discover them (the synthetic ones). In my earlier, fifth-grade view of the world, facts were facts, whether it was "ducks have wings" or "1+1=2," they were both facts, obviously true, and there was no need for a difference between them. But knowing that ducks have wings is one thing (even if you stipulate that it's true...has there never once, in the history of the world, been a duck that lost its wings?) but not all facts are that easy to discern. Science is chock full of questions still waiting to be answered, about the origins of life, the nature of matter, even the birth of the universe itself.

So, one might say, there are things that we do not yet know, but that doesn't mean that there are not facts about those things. We simply haven't found them. That is the empiricist's argument. And, fair enough. The problem is, that that observation is, itself, just an opinion. There is no proof that there are objective answers to the questions of science. Moreover, there is no proof that there are objective answers to any questions about the nature of the real world. All so-called facts about the world are based upon observation, analysis and categorization. We know that ducks have wings because every duck we've ever seen has had wings. Notwithstanding congenital defects or accident, we conclude that is the nature of ducks to have wings. We define having wings as an intrinsic feature of duckness. But, what if, on some expedition to some newly discovered island in the south Pacific, we suddenly find a species of duck that has no wings? They are like ducks in every other biological sense. What once was an established certain fact is no longer true.

The empiricists, bent on objective reality will repeat that the fact that we did not know that there were wingless ducks does not change the fact that there objectively were. We now simply adjust our knowledge to reflect the new known facts and move on.

But this misses the point that these synthetic facts are never certain. We can always find a counter example to any fact we believe we know about the world and without this certainty, there is no reason to believe that the facts objectively exist. It is fine to believe that they do, but that does not make it so.

In fact, the argument is reminiscent of the feud between Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr over the validity of Quantum Theory in the early part of the 20th century. An important element of Quantum Theory was the Heisenberg Uncertainty Prinicple which said that it was impossible to simultaneously know the precise location and velocity of an object. The quick and dirty explanation of this is that the process of measuring its location will change its velocity and vice versa. (This only really applies to particles at the atomic level and below. The uncertainty in question is immeasurably small when dealing with larger things like people, because photons just don't have that much impact on those things.)

Einstein, while unable to argue against uncertainty, felt that it was merely a limitation of tools. The fact that we could not know the location and velocity of a particle does not mean that it does not have one. Bohr, and other quantum scientists argued that it was arrogant to assume that an objective reality existed that could not be even theoretically observed. The implications of Quantum Theory included the fact that there were certain things about the world that were nondeterministic, impossible to predict, and caused by things not describable about the universe. Randomness, it seemed, was a built-in feature of the universe. Einstein's famous lament, "God does not play dice," was based on his discomfort with this idea. (Bohr, when even Einstein finally admitted he could not refute Quantum Theory, reportedly told Einstein to stop telling God what to do.)

It was arrogant to assume that an electron, say, has an objective physical state that it was theoretically impossible to determine. I argue that it is just as arrogant to claim that anything has a physical state that it is theoretically impossible to be intellectually certain about. "Ducks have wings" is a statement about the current universe those of us who have observed this tendency occupy. But our lack of certainty that this is true means that it is not an objective fact. It is a belief. The same is true of such statements as "the sky is blue" and "gravity attracts." Our level of certainty may differ for different beliefs, but they are all still beliefs. So, if our so-called knowledge of the universe is uncertain, why do we cling to the insistence that the universe exists, in any objective sense, at all?

Prejudice. Pure and simple. We have lived with these beliefs our whole life (indeed, our whole civilization) and are simply unable to step out of them to see them for what they are. Those who will argue against me (and there will be many, and I will post the most thoughtful of them) will turn themselves blue in anger at my heresy. They will say things like, "Jump off a cliff if you don't believe the world exists. Those rocks your body will crash on aren't really there after all."

So if there are no real facts (I have only talked about the synthetic facts...I will talk about why I think the analytic facts are just beliefs, too, on another occassion), then everything is belief. All we know is just opinion. It is pointless for me to try and convince you that the sky is blue if you see it as red. It is ridiculous for me to tell you that brocolli is delicious if you dislike it. It is utter folly to try and talk you out of your religious beliefs. It is silly to try and change your worldview, not just because you are unwilling to change it but because your worldview is your world. Your beliefs are not wrong if there is no standard truth against which to measure it.

Does this mean that I advocate for chaos and anarchy? That I think everyone should do whatever they want without fear of consequence because, after all, there are not true values? Of course not. After I get done tearing down everything we think we know about the real world, I will put it back together and, when I'm done, it will look largely like it does today. Most of the same things that are wrong today will be wrong then (though, I would argue, not all). Most of the facts we rely on daily will still be facts. But our approach to understanding them, incorporating them into our lives and, most importantly, getting along with others of different point of view will be much expanded and our capacity to tolerate those of a different worldview will hopefully be enhanced.

There is one more thing worth pointing out, before I close my introduction. It is also pointless to try and convince you that even this thesis I am espousing is true. If there are no absolute truths, how can I claim, absolutely, that this is the case? This paradox is, actually, the key to how I build my universe back up after I tear it down.

I will, in my next article, talk a little about myself and then use some "facts" about the universe to turn our understanding of it on its head.

Thanks for reading.

Lane