Know

The world is a mess; formless, shifting, flowing in and through our own attempts to understand it.  To adapt to this, to move through the world and exist in it, we develop perspectives on the mess, much as art critics do on their favorite pastime; up versus down, near vs. far, dark vs. light, good vs. bad, me vs. not me.  Later, as our appreciation of the world becomes more complex, such dualisms incorporate more elaborate systems to satisfy our increased ability to speculate on them; up vs. down expands and deepens into a complicated relationship with gravity; near vs. far into systems of measurement, first linear and later confusing; me vs. not me into constantly evolving social and societal models of interpersonal relationships, from family and neighbors to governments and nations.  As evolution continues, and with the empowerment of our holy imagination, fantasies are needed to bring order to these otherwise randomly scattered qualities of the world.  We believe, then, that the whole was assembled of parts, that gravity has some relationship to distance, distance something to do with family.  We seek out patterns, any patterns at all, and declare them significant.

But lo!, our observations are not all in accord with one another.  These patterns we've derived from the world, and so the perspectives we've used them to justify, often contradict one another.  The mountain smokes and the ground rumbles, releasing fifty different prophets with fifty different gods to give the credit, Hades to Tectonic Shift to Crab People.

And so a new perspective is needed, one to account for all these disparate perspectives! The spiritual perspective will survey among one's options for the most obviously true explanation; the scientific will do the same, but place its premium on simplicity.  These are only two examples of a class of perspectives which I imagine may potentially include others, giving priority to perspectives which are most interesting or some such, but my interest here will be limited to a consequence of the first two, scientific and spiritual, arising from the rather complicated relationship between what is obvious and what is simple. For, as stated above, as our ability to form complex perspectives grows stronger, our desire to do so grows in tandem; as we concoct systems to account for observations which are no longer obvious, like the workings of the cosmic, microscopic, mental, etc., the simplest such perspective is no longer even potentially an obvious one.

Thus do the spiritual and scientific represent conflicting drives of our evolution; the former toward forming knowledge, or stable explanations for the world, for use in it; the latter toward flexing our growing imaginative muscles, to finding new patterns among new relationships, thus overthrowing old perspectives by necessarily forming new ones to account for the previously unknown and unknowable.

A certain cynicism is necessarily born of this conflict for, as belief system after belief system is eaten away at by our mindless impulse to learn without any object but more learning, trust in our beliefs, the very perspectives that let us navigate the world at all, is weakened.  Without this trust in our judgement, perspectives become academic, purely speculative; useless.  That's where we entered this conversation, remember: the use of perspectives.  These are tools, more or less effective at producing a meaningful experience of the world as the case may be, but necessary for doing so at all.

The presumed refusal to make use of such tools, to form and believe in ideas about how things are, is commonly known as skepticism, less commonly as indeterminacy.  It is, in a woefully inadequate nutshell, a perspective on perspectives which suggests that they don't account for their own mutability; that the untrustworthy nature of perspectives is in fact a new relationship in the world which any trustworthy perspective must account for, and that this contradiction precludes the reliability, and thus utility, of any perspective whatsoever.  You can never really know anything, you know.

But wait, we know things all the time, great glorious things!  Huge and beautiful and wonderful things pass through our imaginations into the known and are accepted as truth, however time may crumble them down the line.  Even if we can't really know, we still do, because the usage of the verb "to know" is very deceptive: it suggests, not just conviction, but that such conviction is justified.  That perspectives should be stable and that, if they aren't, they can be of no use in determining Truth, since Truth, whatever it is, is plainly set and immutable.  Right?

It is my belief, my perspective on this relationship between science, skepticism, and spirituality, that the question of which best pursues Truth is the wrong one to ask, since they bring the nature of Truth itself into question by their mutual existence; Truth itself is academic at this point, since contemplating it as an object in which it might presumably be included, or which may just as well include itself, precludes any hope of reaching a stable definition of what is True; without such a definition, pursuing Truth ceases to be about any such goal and constitutes nothing more than the pursuit itself.  One doesn't run in circles to get somewhere, or at least not anywhere the circle goes.

The nature of this pursuit, this journey or process, is the consequence of our choice of perspective; what we do with our time is ultimately the only choice we have, and the only reason we bother forming conclusions about the world at all. We may seek out patterns to account for what is painful or what is beautiful, what is new or what is old, or a hundred other long-since accepted "realities" of life I could list for the desire to do so.  This choice isn't necessarily one we make ourselves (enough digressions for one post!), but I think it must be one very fundamental to who we are as people.  After all, those parts of the world we choose to focus on must inevitably be the basis for our evaluation of it, and thus all subsequent choices we make for how to live in it.  And what else can we hope to call ourselves, if not the way we live our lives?