Life, or something like it

As I said in an earlier post, I tend to see things in probabilities - potential outcomes for the future based on various measures of likelihood. There are a number of side-effects of this that are sometimes beneficial and sometimes detrimental.

One, however, tends to be harder for most people to grasp: I don't believe in anything.

I mean that pretty literally, and not just in relation to faiths. I don't believe in anything, including the laws of physics or my own existence. And this isn't just semantics of "belief" versus "knowledge": I don't, for example, think that the law of gravity is true in any real sense.

And yet, I don't except to fly out of my chair any time soon. How to reconcile that? Fairly easily, actually, if you remember that I started this talking about probability.

In the absence of absolute fact, the only criteria we have for judgment is a preponderance of evidence. This is, in itself, a judgment based on probability: the evidence we have points to xx as being more likely to be true than yy. This doesn't mean that xx is true, just that it's more likely to be true, or more true if we allow for approximations.

As I said, the law of gravity isn't true. We can pretty much guarantee that - after all, Archimedes was "proven wrong" by Newton, Newton by Einstein, Einstein by quantum theory... It'd be irresponsible - and pretty naive - to assume that this time we've got it right. We likely don't. However, the current description of gravity fits observation to a pretty high degree, so even while it's not true, it's useful. This is heuristic: the map is not the territory. It's functional and practical, just not factual. As a more primitive example, the notion that the sun rises in the east is also heuristic.

In life, I'm willing to accept a large number of things as being potentially true. It's a kind of reserved judgment ackowledging that we really don't know that we know anything about anything: we must assume we just have approximations to various degrees. So, I'm willing to accept something as potentially true until further data presents itself. Often I can work with two completely contradictary models at the same time because both are accepted in potentia and neither has proven unreliable.

To a lot of people - especially to friends I have who are determinists - this kind of "wishy washy" approach ranges from unnerving to downright threatening. "You can't make decisions if you don't know anything," I've been told on numerous occasions, a statement which is, of course, false as evidentiated by pretty much everything.

This kind of thinking goes all they way down to my own existence: I have no evidence to support my own existence. I can come up with multiple potential situations where I could perceive that I'm having experiences without actually having them - "Matrix"-type simulations, brain hallucinations, even being a character in someone else's dream. I can't rule any of these out objectively, but my behavior isn't terribly affected by the lack of knowledge: whether I'm really living or just hallucinating life, I have to act as if it's real simply because the experience includes triggers that at least simulate biological imperatives (like hunger and exhaustion).

The whole approach is a kind of "willing suspension of disbelief", similar to what we do when we watch movies. Only, for me, it's my entire life. Perhaps that's why I mostly dream in movies.

I also tend to annoy friends by answering "probably" instead of "yes" most times. It's not a conscious thing, it's simply the truth - or as close to it as I know.