Embracing Uncertainty

Nothing in life is certain. That truth is disconcerting to many. But it’s uncertainty that forms the foundation of reality that ultimately makes life worth living.

What I read: “Uncertainty isn’t a human flaw, it’s a feature of the world” by Richard C. Sha and Nathan Harshman. Edited by Sam Haselby. Published April 18, 2023.

Uncertainty hasn’t always been my friend. Historically, I’ve been somewhat of a worrier. Despite facts or at least a preponderance of evidence leaning a particular way, my brain has often incessantly entertained the worst of outcomes.

Don’t get me wrong. This hasn’t been an entirely debilitating state. I get things done. My life is rather good all things considered. I’ve experienced a modicum of success in a few realms. My life contains an abundance of love and friendship. Honestly, I have nothing to complain about.

But, still, my old habits of worrying emerge, sometimes at the least helpful of times. At its root, all worry is ultimately about uncertainty.

When I read this article by Richard C. Sha and Nathan Harshman, a part of me let out a breath I’ve been holding in most of my life. Worry is a happiness killer. Constantly wondering about what might happen when all of life includes uncertainty as an inevitable reality seems ridiculous when you think about it. Old habits die hard.

Uncertainty is an uneradicable feature of our physical world.

When you read the article, you’re presented with the troubling conundrum among scientists who place their faith in materialism, that the entirety of existence is certain, when discoveries have proven the specifics of our existence are not at all certain.

When the Higgs boson was discovered, it upended many previous scientific views and brought into more people’s sphere of awareness the notion of quantum field theory in particle physics. That Higgs boson became popularly known as the “God particle” is testament to how groundbreaking a discovery it was.

Sha proposes that the uncertainty represented by such scientific discoveries points to the value and necessity of art and literature. Art often leads the way of human thinking long before scientists and statisticians corroborate that which was conceived first in an artist’s or writer’s mind. Even in the most hardcore of scientific circles, imagination in the form of theories and hypotheses precede the discovery of something. So, why wouldn’t the minds of artists produce truths long before others prove them. Look at how prescient so many science fiction writers have been

But if matter had to be imagined, and if Faraday had to imagine how to prove the magnetic field to be a thing, then both imagination and matter were filled with far more uncertainty than today’s critics imagine.

Science is invaluable in its contributions to humanity. But scientism isn’t the only way to produce useful knowledge. Harshman sees the uncertainties he deals with in his work in physics as tools that blur the line “between epistemology and ontology, between subject and object, and hence uncertainty is again unavoidable.”

Much as I’ve discovered in my own day-to-day life, Sha points out that certainty can be toxic. When I’m unwaveringly certain about something, life often knocks me off my certainty pedestal with a dose of unforeseen reality. Hopefully that’s made me a bit more humble.

Psychologists like Arie Kruglanski suggest that uncertainty is at the root of a lot of bad behaviour: authoritarianism, the intolerance of ambiguity, and dogmatism. Today’s huge levels of uncertainty – climate change, inflation, the nigh-impossibility of shared societal goals, the rampant polarisation making political moderation very difficult – have truly brought out the very worst in us. Yet if uncertainty is a feature of the world, and not just a story about the limits of human knowing, then we’d better find better ways to come to grips with it. Understanding uncertainty as an ineradicable feature of the world, as many physicists do, makes uncertainty not our fault and not just a problem about human knowing. Why should we continue to be threatened by uncertainty when there is no way of getting around it?

Near the end of the article, Sha writes what is now one of my favorite quotations I’m likely to use often in the future.

Without uncertainty, possibility itself is not possible.

Wow. Just wow. When I read that, I stared at my laptop for a few minutes privately dumbfounded at the wisdom those few words contain. Uncertainty and the worry it sometimes elicits in my life isn’t something to be dragged around inside my brain as a burden of existence, but rather it’s simply the manifestation of the inherent uncertainty that is with us from the moment we’re born until we leave this mortal plane.

There’s a certain amount of relief that realization brings with it. At least that’s been the case for me.

At the same time I read this article, another crossed my path. In “The Problem of What Others Think,” Lawrence Yeo writes about the bane of uncertainty from another perspective, what others think of us. The uncertainty of what others think of us lies at the core of many of our woes.

One of the great causes of suffering is this maddening worry about what others think of us.

Yeo writes about how we present different versions of ourselves to different people and in different contexts. There is who we are. Then there is who we present to others, a presentation that will differ considerably from situation to situation. The gap between who we are and who we present to the world is where so many of our problems lie.

Amid all of the constant shifting and positioning we can lose ourselves in a morass of constant worry and unhelpful secondguessing. Our identities become continually challenged to remain constant. We quite literally become different people depending on who we’re with and where we are and it fosters internal confusion.

Yeo’s article is also worth reading in its entirety, but it’s this essential wisdom that stands out.

When you’re worried about what someone thinks of you, it’s rarely about that person’s opinions of you. It’s about your own opinions of yourself.

I don’t really give one iota of what some stranger things about me, but oddly the jostling of my internal and external self when encountering strangers makes me question my own sense of self.

Meditation and self-reflection definitely help me come to grips with reducing “the chances of these undesirable projections from emerging.” Contrary to Yeo’s final paragraph, reading literature does hep me in this regard because it presents a plethora of differing realities, identities, cultures, and situations that require me to contemplate other ways of being and embrace the inevitable uncertainties of life. But Yeo’s contention that the studying of one’s own mind is the result of subtraction and not addition has made me reconsider my stance. I’m still thinking about that.

The truth is nothing is really certain in life except maybe death, and, well, let’s not think about that at the moment despite its inevitability. Instead, embrace uncertainty. Celebrate it. Wallow in it. Honor it.

To use the oft-mentioned technology-inspired turn of words, uncertainty isn’t a bug of life, it’s a feature.

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