Absolute Uncertainty, Identity, and the Void

Recent events, including the last week's post about Kierkegaard, have generated in me a queasy sense that the world I experience--besides, obviously, not being objective reality--may be fundamentally alien to worlds that many others experience. I don't mean simply in its details. That's obvious. I mean in its basic operational structures, its foundational criteria for reality. 

The privacy of individual experience is, I think, undeniable. We have access only to what we have personally experienced, including secondary information from technology, books, and other people, processed in the context of hereditary human faculties. We are all, in a sense, under house arrest, knowing only what is visible outside our nearby windows. This suggests solipsism, the sense that nothing but private mental life exists, but there is too much evidence for external reality to justify that. Something is obviously out yonder, a life on the streets outside of my mental house, much more than I see through my windows. The question is not whether it exists but whether my perceptions do justice to it.

Fundamental to my world-view since I was quite young has been something I call the Void or the Abyss, the sense that a vast Unknowable exists beyond all that I know. My most fundamental belief is the self-contradictory one that fundamentally I know nothing. This is axiomatic. No proofs can touch it. In last week's post, I compared all knowledge to a "speck falling into that void, the infinite unknown, a scintilla dwindling toward a vanishing point in the abyss of everything we cannot hope to know." If understanding is a torch, it miraculously self-generates in the state of falling into a bottomless pit. I compared this anti-understanding to treading water in night sea, or sinking slowly into it. The Void is, of course, death, but it is omnipresent in life as well--like God, whose face it may be. It is like magma churning in the earth's core, generating magnetic lines and plasma around us even as we walk on a rocky crust.

This queazy uncertainty seems to me an incontrovertible fact. Even if the rosiest promises  of millennial prophets were absolutely true, knowing that the were would be absolutely beyond my pay grade--and, I fear, beyond those of the prophets as well. My sense of uncertainty peaks on this sort of issue, where I have a stake but no good evidence. The more I care about an outcome, the less willing I am to predict it. And behind all of this is a sense that the world is incomprehensibly complex. Of course, I depend on probabilistic patterns that show up, but they can't be confused with reality. I am bemused by conspiracy-theory prone people who believe in simple, easily named causes for complex events, falling into the Fallacy of the Single Cause. In general, I don't mind uncertainty. I have learned to float on the waves of the watery abyss--to go with the flow, be laid back, and other cliches from the 1960s--but the Void still looms. 

          Some people seem to rest on certainties. They live in an incomprehensibly alien world and possibly a more comfortable one. But can they really not see the Abyss looming there?

Maybe it's just a matter of hereditary, brain wiring. A friend who knows me well tells me I'm on the spectrum, however functional. I am not good at sensing what other people are thinking, what interests them, and conversing accordingly. It was common, even before I needed hearing aids, for "everybody else" to understand a situation--what was going on--and for me not to get it. As a teacher I functioned best if I stuck to a pre-determined syllabus and traditional material. Anything improvised might be confusing. I could not avoid seeming odd, thinking differently. I am familiar with more acute cases. A son and a step-grandson on the spectrum both died prematurely because of bad life-decisions. Tragically, they could not (as was recently said of the grandson) find "a place where they belonged" despite their high intelligence and charisma. You might then say that I have found a place to belong but only by the process of constructing one and understanding it to be a construct. As an actor and stage director, I construct realities. The Void, or at least my own emotional relation to it, may be a symptom of Aspergers.

I float this radical speculation because, for all I know, some people may actually wake up in the world (at age three as a rule) in the bosom of belonging and never leave it. They may, for all I know, never gaze into the bottomless Void and wonder who the hell they are and what they are doing here. Maybe they simply (and satisfyingly) are their given name, their family, their job, their nation. Maybe an accumulation of parental and social teaching solidifies seamlessly under them to become a bedrock of What Is. Maybe all of the philosophical superstructure of my speculations is just that, a superstructure rationalized over an emotional lack. I ask out of envy and for information. Can you, for instance, claim to be such an intact person for whom the verse I quoted last week from Omar Khayyam makes no sense?:

Into this Universe, and Why not knowing,
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing.

On the one hand, the cocksure stance of many people, particularly conservatives but not only them, telegraphs this. How can they know over the Void? Or is this only denial, overcompensation? Something like the Cowardly Lion chanting, "I don't believe in spooks!"

A convergence of recent research indicates that most of our knowledge, philosophically defined as "justified true belief," is based on social networks we commit to (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/09/belief-social-networks-and-echo-chambers.html). Beyond the narrow limits of personal experience, we believe what people we like believe.

Rodney Stark, investigating the spread of the Moonies in America, found that the movement spread through social contact and that people joined, not because of the movement's beliefs, but because they were drawn to the people in the movement, knowing very little at first about their beliefs. Self-indoctrination came later, a phase that in my church includes "inquiry classes."  Acceptance of doctrine follow rather than leads conversion. Shared professions of belief are mechanisms of communal bonding. The evidence for a belief is not anywhere outside of the group, so it cannot be refuted from outside. It is true because the group says so..

Kelly Weill's study of Flat Earthers, Off the Edge (2022), finds a similar phenomena. Flat Earther converts are adopted into an extended family bonded around websites and conventions. They are welcomed into a cognitive elite who have escaped the matrix of ordinary truths. Flat Earthers share a brotherhood and assure each other of their mutual superiority. Converts strongly reject all evidence that the earth is round because acceptance would expel them from a comfortable  family, insulting their old friends and admitting to having been fools. 

This applies not only to cults, but to any social group that confers feelings of righteousness, truth, and belonging. An echo chamber serves a desperate purpose, I think. It protects its occupants from the hungry Void. It situates them in a world of unquestionable objectivity--at least, objectivity unquestioned by those who matter, the members of their social network. Truth becomes agreement with those who smile back at them.

False as this sounds, there is tragedy in never experiencing it, in failing to find an echo chamber. I recall my beautiful, brilliant, erratic step-grandson who died of a drug overdose, the one who couldn't find "a place where he belonged." Even if the Void is teeming under all of our provisional truths, the failure to find (or to be socially given) a self-validating identity can be deadly. We all need an echoing sense that simply being what we are justifies our existence. The Void is hungry, a black hole, a deadly objectivity, and those who stand too close feed it.