Humans grope for absolute understanding,
unmindful of the a priori mystery
which inherently precludes
absolute understanding.
Unaware that their groping
does not signify personal deficiency,
and ignorant of the scientific disclosure
of fundamentally inherent mystery,
they try to “cover up” their ignorance
by asserting that no fundamental mystery exists.
[R. Buckminster Fuller, Intuition, p 51]
She realized that although Mr. Valmik depicted life as a series of accidents, there was nothing accidental about his expert narration. His sentences poured out like perfect seams, holding the garment of his story together without calling attention to the stitches. Was he aware of ordering the events for her? Perhaps not—perhaps the very act of telling created a natural design. Perhaps it was a knack that humans had, for cleaning up their untidy existences—a hidden survival weapon, like antibodies in the bloodstream.
[Rohintron Mistry, A Fine Balance, p 737]
"[A]ccording to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do?"
[Richard P. Feynmann, quoted in James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, p 137]
An essential part of being human is the desire to understand our experience, to explain it, learn from it, profit from it. Our survival as a species has depended on our ability to weave our observations and memories and imaginings into theories, that is, stories which explain our observations and experiences.
Animals do this too, of course. “When I do this, that happens—doing this makes that happen, so I'll do it again!”—the process of learning from experience. By the 21st century, because we have language and writing and more or less instant communication with one another, we have developed many elaborate networks of such theories until no one human being can know all of them, even within a small area of human endeavor. They are impressive—but they are all stories, just the same. Each one presumes that the way we have seen things happen is the way they will continue to happen, and that words can tell it all.
What do we know to be true, that is, believe to be true based on our own experience, not on something someone else has told us? Relatively little. And paradoxically, some of the things we know most deeply do not lend themselves to theorizing.
Our opinions and attitudes, our choices and our actions, are all affected by the stories we believe, and we must believe a set of stories in order to function. When it is discovered that a story is not true, the intelligent thing to do is to modify it, or to make an entirely new story. But often one has a vested interest in the old story—it justifies pleasurable behavior, or increases profits, or makes us feel comfortable, or virtuous, or important. At the same time, when we believe a story long enough, and strongly enough, it comes to seem like part of ourselves, and any questioning of it is experienced as a threat to ourselves. Our stories give us an illusion of security: “I know who I am. I'm a person who believes this or that,” or, “I know who I am. I'm a person who is always up-to-date with the latest story.”
Powerful stories make observing and thinking in the present moment, which requires full attention, seem unnecessary, even though giving full attention is clearly the only way to function efficiently in response to actual present reality. Why is this important? As the Dhammapada tells us in its magisterial opening lines, “Our thoughts shape our actions. All that we are is the result of what we have thought. With our thoughts we make the world.” What we believe to be true—about ourselves and the universe—directly affects our actions, and all our actions, layered and piled one on another, produce our lives and the lives of those who come after us, and the world as it is and will be. We should remind ourselves frequently that all our opinions, our theories, beliefs—are stories. Some may be true: many are not. Surely this goes without saying? Of course we know it, deep down. But our minds are attic rooms, filled with ideas and opinions brought to us by a multitude of experts of various kinds.
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Nowadays, the stories people believe most automatically are those told by scientists. Scientists make careful observations and measurements of the world around them, and construct theories to explain the phenomena they observe. Now and then the proof in the real world of a theory arrived at purely mathematically is not seen until some time later, when instruments of detection and measurement have improved—and an existing theory, proven or not, may enable us to understand what our instruments are telling us. Much of what scientists conclude is necessarily based on the theories of other scientists, since by now so much information has been accumulated that new work has to build on old. This is all very sensible. But most of us find it impossible to follow scientific thought very far. We can't even understand the real language of science, which is advanced mathematics; the stories scientists tell us are translations into words from mathematics, an act of translation more risky than any between verbal languages. At the same time, the areas investigated by our “hard” sciences have become increasingly removed from everyday experience, and conclusions are increasingly founded on esoteric concepts only fully expressible in a language incomprehensible to most of us. We must take the information (however garbled by our lack of understanding) on faith, and generally we do.
Ultimately, however, the real value of science may lie in uncertainty. The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is very important. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty—about some of them we are mostly unsure, some are nearly certain, none are absolutely certain. We scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes that this is true.… If we want to solve the problems that face us, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.
[Richard Feynman, Harper’s magazine, August 1999, p 20]
In fact, theorists in many and various areas of human study have been scrambling with increasingly unseemly determination to shelter their opinions under some imitation of the “certainties” of the physical sciences ever since the 18th century—in Aesthetics, in Sociology, in Philosophy and even, most recently and most ridiculously, in Literature and the other arts.
In following Science as best one can in the popular press one sees that, in fact, scientific theories come and go. But how rarely does any scientist or science writer refer, even obliquely, to the vast remaining mysteries! Scientists are routinely described by journalists as the “father of” some discovered attribute or aspect of the world rather than as, more factually, its “discoverer” or “the author of the most widely-accepted theory relating to it.” We want to feel that someone is in control, even though we ourselves are not. Scientists themselves appear to be divided into two groups: those who think all unknowns will sooner or later be revealed (by science), and those who think that there are certain mysteries which will be forever beyond us. The latter group can be said to be to some degree religious, since to say that there is a mystery which can never be solved is in some sense a religious statement. But in fact 20th century scientific discoveries point to grave difficulties in the way of our ambition to Know All.
[T]here is a fundamental limitation on what Nature allows us to observe, regardless of the sensitivity of our instruments.… To ‘see’ something, we need to expose it to light of wavelength similar to its size: thus, small objects require small wavelengths of light, which have high frequencies and energies of vibration; these are most able to perturb the system under investigation. This Catch-22 situation is expressed by the famous Uncertainty Principle first discovered by Werner Heisenberg. It states that we cannot simultaneously measure the position of something to ever-increasing accuracy, no matter how perfect our instruments.
[John D. Barrow, The Artful Universe: The Cosmic Source of Human Creativity, p 52]
Science is interested in solutions; it picks away at the great mysteries, solving them piece by piece. Increasingly, its successes have given us an illusion of control over the natural world, and a gratifying sense of the power and grandeur of our species. We accept the stories scientists tell us—about the origin of the universe, about its future, about our own physical and psychological makeup and functioning, as “gospel,” on faith, even though some of the stories change from decade to decade, and even from month to month—and of course scientists very often disagree among themselves.
Recently, recognition of this phenomenon has led some people to debunk the discoveries of science as being merely other stories, containing their own inevitable inherent distortions and prejudices. After all, the scientists doing the measuring and evaluating are human beings, with built-in weaknesses, biases, and enthusiasms, and today only studies which are funded can be investigated. Nevertheless science is, so far, our most efficient and trustworthy means of discovering facts about the physical world.
[W]e stress the methodological continuity between scientific knowledge and everyday knowledge.… But it would be naive to push this connection too far. Science—particularly fundamental physics—introduces concepts that are hard to grasp intuitively or to connect directly to common-sense notions. (For example: forces acting instantaneously throughout the universe in Newtonian mechanics, electromagnetic fields “vibrating” in vacuum in Maxwell’s theory, curved space-time in Einstein’s general relativity).… Instrumentalists [those who believe that ideas are instruments of action, and that their usefulness determines their truth] may want to claim either that we have no way of knowing whether “unobservable” theoretical entities really exist, or that their meaning is defined solely through measurable quantities; but this does not imply that they regard such entities as “subjective” in the sense that their meaning would be significantly influenced by extra-scientific factors (such as the personality of the individual scientist or the social characteristics of the group to which she belongs). Indeed, instrumentalists may regard our scientific theories as, quite simply, the most satisfactory way that the human mind, with its inherent logical limitations, is capable of understanding the world.
[Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsens: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science., p 56 fn.]
The assumption is that our understanding is definitively limited by the boundaries of logical thought, that an understanding of “the world” is possible only as that world is accessible to human logic. But there are vital essentials of the experience of the world brought to all of us by our senses or available within our own minds and bodies, “everyday knowledge,” which are not in fact measureable; they are thus, at least so far, obdurately resistant to scientific investigation.
Science has turned out to be unsatisfactory as a substitute for religion and myth. Despite its remarkable achievements in labor-saving and life-saving (and death-dealing) technology it has not provided stories that can make human life reasonable and bearable in an unsympathetic universe. It has failed to tell us how to live so as to avoid psychic pain and misery, how to get along with one another, even how to exist happily inside our own skins. Philosophy and religion do a much better job of this, but they are currently banished from our science-focused intellectual fashion. This means only that we have asked too much of science, not that it is not a respectable and useful activity, its stories worth telling and knowing.
Since the 17th century, western culture has hoped that science would eventually be able to discover everything, and would, by measuring carefully and thinking logically and clearly, solve the fundamental problems of human life in the universe. This hope has now begun to collapse, though it is the only hope available to a completely secular culture. As physicist Richard Feynman pointed out, even though most scientists think about difficult social problems from time to time, “we don’t put full-time effort into them, because we know that social problems are very much harder than scientific ones…I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy….” Feynman goes on to say that scientific knowledge enables us to do and make all kinds of things, both good and bad, and the good things “are to the credit not only of science but also of the moral choice that led us to do good work.” At the same time, he wishes that the beauty of scientific ideas were more widely recognized:
Intellectual enjoyment, which some people get from learning and thinking about science and which others get from working in science, is clearly valuable as well. Science has led us to imagine all sorts of things that are infinitely more marvellous than the imaginings of the poets and dreamers of the past. Science teaches us that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. Consider how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck—half of us upside down—by a mysterious attraction to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported by a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.
[Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman]
The fact that “the imagination of nature is far far greater than the imagination of man” was surely obvious to the first human being, but this is only a reminder that what is now called “scientific” interest in the world is, and has always been, a fundamental human attribute. Feynman is comparing stories, and expressing a personal preference for the scientific story, which is, as a rule, markedly less poetic than many others. However he goes on:
We find that thrill of discovery whenever we look into any scientific problem. Knowledge serves only to deepen the mysteries of nature, which lure us on to more discoveries. It is true that few unscientific people have this particular type of religious experience. Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray it. I don’t know why. Is nobody inspired by our present picture of the universe? The value of science remains unsung; ours is not yet a scientific age.
[Ibid.]
Mysteries that appear unsolvable arouse our innate religious sense. If we order our story of the world and universe so that there are no mysteries in it, or only mysteries that will surely be solved by science in the future, of course we are not in any way religious, other than as believers in the religion of science. To embrace and support such a story system requires that we ignore a great deal, far more than we are commonly encouraged to recognize.
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To the man who is pure at heart I believe that everything is as clear as a bell, even the most esoteric scripts. For such a man there is always mystery, but the mystery is not mysterious, it is logical, natural, ordained, and implicitly accepted. Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it. I would like my words to flow along in the way that the world flows along, a serpentine movement through incalculable dimensions, axes, latitudes, climates, conditions. I accept a priori my inability to realize such an ideal…. Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
[Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart]
What I am proposing here is yet another story, an attempt to bring together ideas which in contemporary culture are not generally seen to be related, and to remember profound mysteries encountered every day. It is based first of all on my own experience in art-making, but also on the testimony of artists of various kinds, as well as upon the observations of critics and scientists, children and mystics and athletes. The validity of it, its usefulness as a tool for understanding, must be tested by the reader's own experience, both past and future.
The story is founded on a mystery.