Absence of certainty, awareness of ignorance

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

The physicist Carlo Rovelli has a beautiful way of talking about science in terms of ignorance and curiosity.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, he writes:

I believe that one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand something. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty. Thanks to the acute awareness of our ignorance, we are open to doubt and can continue to learn and to learn better. This has always been the strength of scientific thinking—thinking born of curiosity, revolt, change.

He wrote almost the same thing almost two decades earlier, in his book The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy:

Science, I believe is a passionate search for always newer ways to conceive the world. Its strength lies not in the certainties it reaches but in a radical awareness of the vastness of our ignorance. This awareness allows us to keep questioning our own knowledge, and, thus, to continue learning. Therefore the scientific quest for knowledge is not nourished by certainty, it is nourished by a radical lack of certainty. Its way is fluid, capable of continuous evolution, and has immense strength and a subtle magic. It is able to overthrow the order of things and reconceive the world time and again.

I think he could also be talking about art.

Filed under: not knowing

David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

Saturday, February 13, 2021

David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives was published in February 2009. I read it in January 2017. (I called it “good pre-dream reading.”) Now I’m writing about it in February 2021. These dates suggest to me that it is a great wintering book, a collection of possibilities (that word will have more relevance later) in a season in which the possibilities feel quite grim: Death, frozen pipes, snow that is white and terrifying like a blank sheet of paper.

There are two afterlives in this book that I think about often.

The first is from the title story, “Sum,” in which you “relive all your experiences, but this time, with the events re-shuffled into a new order,” and “all the moments which share a quality are grouped together.” So you sleep for 30 years, sit on the toilet for 5 years, have sex for 7 months, experience pain for 27 hours, etc. That story is a reminder that “a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces” is a well-designed and endurable one.

The second is the afterlife in “Metamorphosis,” a limbo-esque lobby the dead wait in until every single person on Earth has ceased to remember them. It starts this way: “There are three deaths: the first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

I think of these three deaths whenever a loved one dies. Their first and second death has passed, but their third and final death has not, and the absolute earliest it will is at the moment my brain forgets their name. So, until my own first death, I keep them alive. This is easiest for my favorite musicians: Put on their record, and their voice fills the room.

I can’t remember if this blackout poem was inspired by the book or not…

One question that it didn’t even occur to me to ask when I first read the book: What are Eagleman’s actual religious beliefs? From the 2011 New Yorker profile of Eagleman called “The Possibilian”:

Eagleman was brought up as a secular Jew and became an atheist in his teens. Lately, though, he’d taken to calling himself a Possibilian—a denomination of his own invention. Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, he told me. From the unfathomed complexity of brain tissue—“essentially an alien computational material”—to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism, he said. “And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.” Why not revel in the alternatives? […] “Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time,” he said. “As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”

“I’m not saying here is the answer,” he says. “I’m just celebrating the vastness of our ignorance.” (For more, look to his piece, “Why I am a Possibilian.”)

It’s really of no matter. Sum is like the movie Groundhog Day: it gets at something universal that will be claimed by humans of all walks.

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[PS. The New Yorker profile, which I only read this afternoon, features Eagleman hanging out with one of my heroes, Brian Eno, and hooking drummers up to an EEG monitor while they played. “The question is: do drummers have different brains from the rest of us?” Eno says. “Everyone who has ever worked in a band is sure that they do.” (Eno, an early reader and enthusiast of Sum, wrote some soundscapes to go along with readings, and the composer Max Richter actually turned it into an opera.)]

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Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

Nobody knows anything

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

My friend Alan Jacobs, writing about “the seductions of prediction,” ends with William Goldman’s great line, “Nobody knows anything.”

The line could describe almost everything in life, but here it is in its filmmaking context:

…the single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry:

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

If there is a Roman numeral I to this book, that’s it…

Again, for emphasis—

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess—and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.

That’s from the “Studio Executives” chapter of Goldman’s book, Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting. (Designer Michael Beirut called the book “one of my favorite non-design books that is really about design,” and writes that Goldman was “one of the best writers ever on the day-in, day-out struggles faced by anyone attempting to create good work in a hostile environment.”)

* * *

On our walk this morning, my wife was telling me about the difference between risk and uncertainty that Arthur Brooks brings up in his piece about how to stay calm in the pandemic.

“Uncertainty involves unknown possible outcomes and thus unknowable probabilities,” he writes. “Risk involves known possible outcomes and probabilities that we can estimate.”

Our problem, Brooks says, is that we try to convert uncertainty into risk by bombarding ourselves with information. But, as everybody with half a functioning brainstem knows, looking to social media for help right now is a futile exercise in “wallowing in uncertainty.” (I love that phrase.)

What does Brooks suggest? The same thing that works when there’s not a pandemic going on:

Start by acknowledging that you do not know what is going to happen in this crisis. Next, distinguish between what can and can’t be known right now, and thus recognize that gorging on all the available information will not really resolve your knowledge deficit—you won’t be able to turn uncertainty into risk by spending more hours watching CNN, because the certainty you seek is not attainable. Finally, resolve that while you don’t know what will happen next week or next month, you do know that you are alive and well right now, and refuse to waste the gift of this day. (One more practical suggestion: Limit your consumption of news to half an hour in the morning, and stay off social media except to talk to friends. No cheating!)

I would go farther than Brooks and suggest not starting your morning with the news at all. (I have been reading poetry while lazing about on the couch.)

I’m also sticking with Laurie Anderson’s advice, which begins chapter one of Keep Going:

The world may end. You’re right. But that’s not a reason to be scared. None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it. You know? What are you working for, posterity? We don’t know if there is any posterity.

(Emphasis mine.)

To wonder rather than know

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Mary Ruefle, in a wonderful conversation with David Naimon:

I would rather wonder than know. It makes it more and more difficult to be alive on earth in these times, when your inclination is to wonder rather than to know.

I suppose the example that comes to mind is: it used to be if you were having dinner with people and someone said, “Who’s the fastest animal on earth?” An amazing conversation would ensue. And now someone pops their phone out and looks up the answer. And it breaks my heart….

I really, really don’t like it when people look things up on their iPhones…. I mean, sometimes, of course, I’m no idiot. The encyclopedic nature of the information that’s available is fantastic, but I would still rather wonder than know.

I think wondering is a way of inhabiting and lingering. There seems to be more dwelling. To dwell, inhabit, and linger. I’m interested in those things. And you can do that when you don’t know.

We tend to, as human beings, our impulse is, once we know, once we have the answer, we move on. So we’re constantly moving from one thing to the other. I would rather inhabit the question, or dwell. For me, that is the place I want to live in.

I have an encyclopedia at home. It never occurred to me there was ever anything wrong with it until my friend pointed out it was an Encyclopedia Brittanica from 1910 and it might be a little outdated. I still look things up in it! […]

My oldest son used to ask me questions and when I said I didn’t know the answer, he’d say, “Look it up on the Goggle!” It takes discipline, now, not to look things up immediately, but to sit and wonder…

Then again, when you do look things up, you find more things to wonder about.

Writing to find out what you don’t want to know

Friday, August 2, 2019

“Write what you know,” goes the adage, but you don’t really know what you know until you write about it.

May Sarton: “I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose—to find out what I think, to know where I stand.”

Kathryn Schulz: “For me, the engine of writing is almost always ignorance. I write to figure out what I think.”

Adam Philips: “Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe.”

James Baldwin (it’s his birthday today) went even further: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out.”)

The more I think about it the more it knocks me out.

It’s one thing to write to find out what you don’t know, but to write to find out what you don’t want to know takes guts.

“You’re finding out what you got,” George Saunders says, “and it might not be what you want to have.”