Check Your Bias #1 - A Few Musings on the Current “Reality” of Human Thought

"I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." - J. B. S. Haldane

The future is never fully knowable and educated guesses with degrees of certainty are as good as we can get. Why should you believe any of these educated guesses, whether it’s from an “expert” or even from within? The emotions you’ve attached to the person, or method of analysis is the usual and understandable, if somewhat unreliable metric that most humans use. Can we improve this faulty and error prone strategy of perceiving and reacting to the world? In my opinion that is what the long march of human history has attempted to do. Humans have lurched through cycles, with sometimes extreme degrees of variance, in the methods of experimentation we’ve used to overcome our primordial and ingrained systems of understanding reality. What is real and what is not, is solely a matter of our intentions manifesting themselves within our local physical space. Even our intentions are inscrutable beyond a certain point, so it stands to reason we can only improve upon those educated guesses we do trust, with varying levels of precision and accuracy. Only those humans who have first taken the time to search within, are then able to admit that, no one is equipped to fully understand reality. From that point they can then begin to improve their judgement of how accurate even the most educated guess could be. It all ultimately boils down to properly assessing to what degree any single, particular fact is indeed a true representation of the universe. Data and evidence are the first places to start, while always acknowledging that these tools can be misused, intentionally or otherwise, even by those claiming the exact opposite. Striving to find more data about each recorded fact, and even searching for conflicting bits of evidence, is why science needed to eventually be developed. Since the basic assumptions of the scientific method where laid out, this process has evolved into relying on an ever increasing amount of data, which has reached the point where not even the entirety of biological humans can begin to process it all without assistance. This has had the unfortunate side effect of creating doubt around all facts, and the insidious problem of “fake news.” There is no single trusted source of truth, and a rapidly increasing percentage of humanity is waking up to this sobering reality. Reality is too complex for a single human to understand, and as more of us have lost faith in that personal ability, we relied on charismatic individuals and institutions to do it for us, and now even that is being eroded. So whatever shall we do? Can faith in our own perceptions be restored? Is there a surefire way to stop “fake new”? Maybe, once we first accept that all news is at least partial fake, then we can begin to assess, to varying degree of certainty, how fake or true a fact actually is. Life is about trusting our own intentions and the intuitions of others, which then allows us to make decisions at the most opportune time we are able to. Improving what intentions we have and scrutinizing whose intuitions we trust, is by no means easy, but that is all we have in the face of a future that will forever remain, at least partially unknowable. Reasoning from first principles is cognitively taxing, and physically impossible most of the time, particularly when first principles in physics, ab initio, are themselves built from human observations of physical laws. However, despite it sometimes feeling futile when we attempt to truly understand the universe, we must start with the hope that we can at least experience some small piece of reality. Human thought is dynamic and extremely malleable so well-reasoned assessment, at regular intervals is how new data is discovered, and over a long enough time scale we can at least begin to approach an accurate perception of reality. Start with your own thoughts, reason as best you can, seek guidance, then constantly review where you came from, and where you intend to go. Repeat that cycle at predetermined intervals, then ask yourself, right now is there a better path to bridge that gap?