Embracing Uncertainty

All we know for sure is that we don't know for sure.

Over a decade ago, a dear friend gave me a copy of Margaret Wheatley's masterwork, "Leadership and the New Science". I remember reading it for the first time, my mind practically exploding with new ideas - to the point that I could only go for a few pages at a time, and had to stop to reflect on what I had just read.

Facing a long series of plane flights, for some reason I was inspired to find my old copy and bring it along for the trip. I hoped that this second reading, after so much time had passed, would offer some of the thrill of the first. I'm 50 pages in and definitely not disappointed.

One theme of the book is the interplay between "things" and their "relationships". Wheatley characterizes Newtonian thinking as being focused on "materialism and reductionism" - isolating things into discrete elements that can then be examined and described as independent items. She refers to "new science" as that collection of disciplines that represent "... underlying currents [that] are a movement towards holism, toward understanding the system as a system and giving primary value to the relationships that exist among seemingly discrete parts". As an illustration, she shares a quote attributed as an ancient Sufi teaching that "You think that because you understand one you must understand two, because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and".

What I've read so far has made me think a lot about things that appear on the surface to be paradoxes, or dualities, or forces in tension that seem to want to be balanced. Having grown up as an engineer, it's natural for me to look for answers, to seek solutions, to boil things down to distill what appears to be the root truth. But what I've learned is that certainty only comes in stick figure form, that anything that's worth thinking about is too rich to be distilled to simple elements. There is no either/or, no truth to be found at either end of the spectrum. Anything that appears to be forces in tension resolves not in either direction, but in a new vector that points to an unseen and larger force.

In this respect, certainty is not something to be sought out, it is an enemy to be avoided. Seeking answers is a path to insignificance - seeking questions is a journey to be embraced.

May you live in perpetual confusion and disorder, for here all that is beautiful awaits. And here you may find the truths that cannot be known with certainty.

Free Will: Fact or Fiction?

Experiments suggest that conscious choice is an illusion ... what choice will you make as a result?

Interesting article today in the NYTimes Science section entitled:

"Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't"

(subscription may be required)

The article suggests that recent experiments tilt toward the deterministic version of explaining how stuff happens - ie, that ultimately, we're just biological machines whose actions are determined by the chain of events to which we're exposed. And, if you could solve all the equations, you could determine how people would act - thus refuting the idea of free will. My favorite line of the piece says that "... the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control." What a great metaphor!

While the science is intriguing, the bottom line for me stays the same. Maybe free will exists, or maybe it's an illusion. But since we'll never solve all the equations to find out (in my lifetime at least), then it becomes a bit like Pascal's Wager. Which is a better way to lead your life - assuming free will exists, or assuming it doesn't?

For me that's an easy answer - assuming I have free will makes me morally responsible for my actions, and for me, that's a better way to live my life.