Ambiguity, Uncertainty, Incompleteness: Linguistic, Material, Abstract
Humanity, like anything seeking to battle against the second law of thermodynamics, is compelled to understand. This purpose of understanding is twofold: a) survive in a Darwinian sense through the ability to make insight or good judgments of the future and b) attain a sense of fulfillment by answering the question ‘Why?’. Thus a parallel is born between the pragmatist and the theoretician: each striving to bring a greater sense of peace to his physical or psychological disposition through an increase in the resolution of his map-territory relation: wisdom.
This quest for understanding led to the creation of systems to help mankind digest information from his environment, contextualize it, create a model, and empirically test that model against reality to further refine it. To carry out this task of abstract relation formation in our universe we rely on symmetries and comparison. Philosophers, that is lovers of wisdom, sought to formulate basic modalities of how to generate these models. This is known as the process of axiom schema ie. a notation for a set of statements that are taken to be true from first principles. Causality or the reason why things happen is the axiom most familiar to human experience.
Aristotle, the youngest of those 3 most famous bearded Greeks, proposed the concept of the "four causes" as a framework for understanding the nature of things and their existence. These causes provide different perspectives or explanations for why something exists or occurs. Material, formal, efficient, and final cause provide a comprehensive framework for analyzing and understanding the reasons for the existence of phenomena in the world. Causal principles form the basis of Western logos. The two most important of which are the Principle of Identity: everything is the same as itself and different from others and the Principle of Non-Contradiction: something cannot be both true and false simultaneously to avoid infinite regression or paradoxical oscillations. So for humanity to understand we need these to ensure that causality as a principle holds. For causality to as a principle to hold, consistency and non-paradoxical statements must hold. Enter ambiguity.
The work of Mattias Desmet explores the ramifications of this inconsistency to the realm of psychology. Anyone with any communication experience is well aware of its ambiguity and indeterminism. Linguistic pragmatism is built upon the idea that each word acquires meaning through another word or series of words. In addition, those next words in the causal sequence will further rely on ever more words. There is always a word[s] missing to encompass the full meaning of the thought or feeling that inspired it. This linguistic uncertainty means that we are never able to completely convey our messages to one another. To convey ourselves unambiguously and express ourselves definitely would require completeness. Perhaps more disturbing than realizing that we will never be able to be fully understood by others, lies in the implication of incompleteness extended to the comprehension of ourselves.
The idea of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is a principal suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus individuals' languages determine or shape their perceptions of the world. Language, just like mathematics as a rational system, is left intrinsically lacking the structure necessary to provide completeness.
In 1927 Werner Heisenberg posited the uncertainty principle. A fundamental concept in quantum mechanics, and the subject of many popularized discussions on the strangeness of the most empirically tested of all human theories with a 5σ standard, states that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously precisely determined. The uncertainty principle emerges from the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, where the act of measuring one property inherently disturbs the other. Similarly to the nature of linguistic indeterminism, the deep philosophical notion of inherent unknowability finally bled its way back into the material world. So we’ve lost language, we’ve lost matter what else can be left?
Pure mathematics is the language of comparison. It is the system by which we communicate causality and underpins every model we have of experience. In the early 20th century David Hilbert’s program sought to provide secure foundations for all mathematics in the hope of gaining a complete understanding of the structure of causality. The belief was that once a formal set of axioms for all mathematics could be defined, humanity could continue its quest to come up with a final map of our territory. Disturbingly this proved to be impossible.
In 1931, Gödel's first incompleteness theorem proved that there are certain consistent bodies of propositions with no recursive axiomatization, and his second shows that any consistent theory powerful enough to encode the addition and multiplication of integers cannot prove its consistency. And there it was: the hole at the bottom of logic itself. The unsettling nature of inconsistency plagued Kurt’s psyche throughout the remainder of his life. His refusal to eat led ultimately to his death and burial in the Princeton Cemetery. Oh boy, now running this vein it’s pretty apparent why the ‘human condition’ is so infused with anxiety. It is not just that we are inconsistent, incomplete, or unresolved - it's the way we understand the universe itself.
Many intuitionists were able to grapple with incompleteness more durably than Kurt: Plato and his cave, Immanuel Kant in his "phenomena" and "noumena”, all sorts of people who can empathize with any form of existential crisis through a philosophical inquiry into the foundations of human knowledge and the boundaries of reason leaving them babbling away at an asylum, monastery or ski-slope. It is also becoming more apparent that through the democratization of information, a decrease in the physical struggles necessary for survival, and drive to understand humanity; the 21st century is in desperate need of a reformulation of what this inconsistency means for our lives. Sigmond Frued in his Das Unbehagen in der Kultur realized that for many of us “Life, as we find it, is too hard for us…in order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures.” Beyond self-indulgent distractions and intoxication, an individual is compelled to grapple with and come to some resolution around the strangeness that is self-awareness.
The anxiety associated with uncertainty stemming from incompleteness is knowingly or not a deep-rooted psychosocial phenomenon. A search for alleviation of uncertainty led mankind to grasp for any foothold or bedrock concept upon which a worldview can be built. Mythology, ethnocentrism, religion, and a whole swath of “isms” are by-products of this deep desire to reduce the apprehension associated with fearing the consequences of choices in an unpredictable environment. Similarly, expressions of assertiveness, aggression, and domination of one’s environment or other individuals are more common means of attempting to add predictability and mechanistic order to one’s life. However, once this ‘control’ is attained grappling with the implications of indeterminism in linguistics, material and abstractions will surely find one out again. This ever-present anxiety underscores the human desire for stability and comprehension in the face of a reality that is fundamentally unpredictable, highlighting the complexity of the human condition and forming the basis for spirituality and mysticism.
“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.” Joseph Campbell
Best get comfortable being uncomfortable.