But What Do I Know, Anyway

I was walking up from the library stacks the other day and I realized that at some point, we stopped talking about facts. Somewhere, we stopped talking about things that we know because to say that you know something is difficult. To be certain of anything is almost a joke. At this stage, all the ideas we’re talking about are just that- ideas. Some ideas are more supported than others, some ideas logically lead to others, some ideas are more entrenched than others, but none of them make it into the realm of complete and total confident knowledge. 

So that’s great. 

I mean, everything from here on out is going to be reading about someone’s idea and thinking about someone’s idea and critiquing someone’s idea and coming up with an idea to compliment or contradict or build on someone’s idea. And that’s how things are done, which is the striking bit to me. 

I didn’t ever realize how much I liked experimental science until this moment. It’s not just talking around the issue. You see something interesting, you try to explain it, you do experiments, you get results, and in all of the basic experiments, you learn something. Something is explained. Something can be predicted. Something can be known as true or untrue. 

But then I remember how much we lie to children. We say there are five senses to make the idea of senses easier to grasp, when you really have twenty of them at least. We say there are nine eight planets because explaining the nuances of classification of really big rocks or balls of gases and liquids in space isn’t easy and we’re constantly having to re-evaluate it. There are, what, seven continents, but only because Europe wants to feel special. Most of the things I think I know are actually asterisks all the way down.

 And all of that is just about observable things, things we can see and conceptualize. It doesn’t even touch on the things we feel or believe without physical proof. And maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe those two things should stay separate. No one wants science to tell them what to believe, especially when the science we learned in school was a lie an incomplete picture of what could be conceived of to be true. And no one wants any specific religion directing science, especially since we can all get through our daily lives without needing to appeal to science or religion.

We were walking out of the building after class on Tuesday and talking about some of the ideas that popped up during the discussion, like whether which interpretation of quantum mechanics you choose to adhere to has to change what you believe, theologically. The idea that had come up in class was that you can go about your life either way. Quantum indeterminacy doesn’t have to change anything for you, really. Who thinks about that kind of stuff, anyway? 

And as we talked, we came around to something that I fundamentally believe to be true. I believe that someone needs to be thinking about this. About all of this. Quantum mechanics helps to explain the smallest things in our world, it has direct influences on the technology that we use, and just because I can’t be bothered to be in a lab doesn’t mean someone else shouldn’t be. And the same thing goes for religion. We have these complex belief systems that have sustained people for centuries, millennia even. Shouldn’t someone be thinking about that, asking questions about what we believe and what that means, especially in an age where science has so fundamentally altered how we see the world and think about reality? 

So that’s a motivating factor, if you like. 

I’ve got this impregnable heart and soul but it exists in this world of discovery, and exploration, and interaction with others and that world is unspeakably complex. You can go about your day loving the people you’re going to love, eating the food you’re going to eat, doing the things you’re going to do inside the closed system of our planet and the social structures we’ve built upon it and you never have to ask why or how. But I think somebody has to. I think those are important questions. 

Questions that might not have answers, but important questions nonetheless.