Uncertainty - The Other Mother of Invention

Oops, I did it again.

You've heard the saying, "Necessity is the mother of invention".  I put forward that she is not its only mother; uncertainty being one of the prominent other mothers giving birth to our creativity.  We humans are nothing if not skilled weavers of stories, many concocted to explain what we currently don't or can't understand, the underlying purpose of such stories being to cover our fears, or express our hopes.  We accept and  and share these stories to help ourselves feel better about the world and our struggle in it.  The human penchant for filling in the blanks, our inability to leave the unknown and the unknowable undefined, and our distinct ability in the animal kingdom to foresee our own demise, pushes our creative talent and wide imaginations to the purpose of fabricating stories, superstitions, mythologies, and even religions (today's myths were yesterday's religions).  It is my experience that most of these mental pursuits dealing with belief are collections of falsehoods seasoned liberally with truth to some degree, depending on the pursuit itself, all filling in dutifully and predictably the "God of The Gaps".

But what is invention?  Maybe instead of focusing on its mother we should instead consult the Father of it, Mr. Thomas Edison, someone highly qualified to speak on the topic.  He states that "Success (coming up with useful inventions) is %10 inspiration and 90% perspiration".  No doubt, human beings are inspired and intuitive creatures.  No doubt there is a spiritual aspect to reality, and by this I mean the mysteries that lie outside the boundary of empiricism, and how things break down around the edges into paradox.  Science is an "Invention"...hinging on curious and intelligent minds peering in to discover the facts of our reality and inventing things based on these discoveries.  Science and scientific method weaves a story all its own, based on empirical observation and maintaining our reality within the bounds of natural explanation, thus perpetuating its own mode of exploration.  These pursuits lie within the epistemology of knowledge and the natural world.   But what about its counter pursuit, belief and the supernatural?  Is this too fact empirically unapproachable, or is it merely fiction?  We certainly cannot prove it if fact, nor disprove as fiction that which lies outside the bounds of the empirical natural world (Many supernatural claims can be and have been debunked).  People who ascribe to the 'epistemology of belief', an oxymoron, will never give credence to the findings of science because they believe that the things they know cannot be approached or explained by science (the natural).  Being supernatural, they claim that it is only within this context of belief and intuition that these things can be understood.  Yet, an empirical examination of belief proves it to be non-convergent (something that logic demands), but rather divergent in its application, which leads to scads of religious contradictory claims, and a continued expansion of schisms and factions.

Telling stories, along with its inbred cousin, lying, is an innate skill set. The human talent for fabrication, embellishment, bragging, and myth making is soundly demonstrated within the literary world in which there is a growing glut of authors publishing their fictional "stories".  We absolutely love consuming information in story form (narrative).  Even works of non-fiction tread the line of truth and accuracy for reasons I won't get into now.  The difference with self classified works of fiction is that all these accounts are written by the author with a clear realization and declaration of what they are - fiction, the best fiction being that which illuminates and imitates reality.  The problem with superstitions, paranoias, and religions is that their tenets are usually a bunch of hopes, suspicions, and intuitions dealing with the unknowable dressed up as fact, many in story form, and pressured by fear for acceptance.  Uncertainty raises the stakes, upping compliance and conformity when the consequences of doing otherwise are dire.

Our great imaginative talent of inference is often used at its worst to explain the unknown, or things which frighten us.  Alex Jones and his ilk are an interesting study on the human predisposition to fill in the blanks with bullsh-t, latching on to any piece that fits the (paranoid) puzzle they're trying to construct; with fear, or hope against such, being the overarching force at play for gathering the pieces.  They may well be right in some of their assessments (broken clocks come to mind), but what is telling is the predominance of conspiracy in their worldview.  In the realm of the unknowable it's surprising what scant data and a bit of creativity with fear or paranoia can produce.  And it is worthwhile to distinguish between the Immediate Unknowable and the Ultimate Unknowable.  Conspiracists deal with the Immediate Unknowable in the same way that religionists deal with the Ultimate Unknowable. Paranoid delusions are a special study of this human skill to fill in the blanks of uncertainty in a way grabs our attention and speaks to our fears. Accepting these explanations gives a strange comfort of "being in the know", and a pride held in the exclusivity of knowledge and special understanding unavailable to most (the dupes, the suckers).  It needs be noted that there are indeed legitimate conspiracies. As apes living in groups we definitely have learned to form secret coalitions with others with the purpose of getting what we want through nefarious means.
For further reading - Conspiracy Theories

Probably like a lot of people, I have suffered many delusions in my life, or better put, I have suffered in the process of awakening from my delusions. Delusions are usually a happy blissful ignorance of truth; that's why we persist in them.  The suffering comes as we realize we are being lied to, or lying to ourselves.  It is my hope to get to the bottom of these delusions and to know the truth, no matter how painful that truth might be. Currently the most certain avenue I have is that of scientific knowledge.  The ultimate potential irony of this path being that it may very well be that our very existence and things held provable via science are a delusion, a reality within another reality (dimension), or that there exists a twist in the fabric which does not allow us to see past the twist and hence we may draw the wrong conclusions.   The irony and contradiction here is that within these pages I am attempting to weave my own "story" from the threads of "truth".   To find God among observable existence, with the realization that I will likely find what I am looking for, or else to find a way to be, despite my religious upbringing, that is at ease with uncertainty, and the possibility that there is no God.  People can certainly pursue and rationalize what they WANT to believe.  I WANT to pursue and be comfortable with whatever is true.  I've had enough of being lied to and fooled.

The Accretion of Mindset and Perspective: It bears restating that we are each the summation of what we have come to accept as fact (truth). We come to be where we are by what we've mentally accepted as truth in the past, and that perspective directs our present and our future. These thought pathways being used daily in deciphering meanings and purposes in our lives become solidified.  My descent into madness was the stacking of reinforcing ideas and leaps of right brained dominated logic. At every point along the way my perception/worldview always made sense to me because I accepted the previous tenets which propped it up. A lot of religious belief borders on this behavior - a succession of stacked sanctioned delusional madness. I feel that my mental duress and illness was manufactured by the way I was taught to think about the world.  At some point, in my adulthood as I persisted and progressed in my religious thinking, I pushed that thinking to it's logical conclusion - delusion.

It is a hard thing to say "I don't know"   To satisfy this unease the ego wants to pretend that it knows, and it does a pretty good job at fooling us in this pretension.  For most of my young life into adulthood, I was devout to a specific Christian religion high on dogmatic doctrines and promoting personal revelation through scripture study, fasting, and prayer. Like most people, it was merely the religion of my parents and the one most popular in my surrounding society.  I followed what I was taught and in my naivete unknowingly pretended that I knew these things, this was faith, and faith was the main measure of worthiness within the group.  These religious years were also seasoned with intellectual pursuit and mindful self inspection.  At one point, I realized that what I believed was a bunch of feel good answers to unanswerable questions. It struck me like a load of bricks.  Before I became aware of the pervasive concept of confirmation bias, I framed my observation as such, "The human mind looks for, and only sees, that which support its constructs.".   Plainly put, you see what you look for, and you look for what you want to be true.  Cognitive Bias colors much of our human perspective.  We are each the construct of what we have previously accepted as fact or truth, and that construct drives what we see as real, valuable, and worth pursuing.  This a-ha moment came to me, if memory serves, after my first manic episode.

My path of painful discovery was initiated by a series of psychotic breaks, as I pushed on in applying the teachings of my faith.  The result of these episodes taught me plenty about perception.  My initial episode felt just like an extension, an amplification, of what I had been taught that the gift of the Holy Ghost was.  I explained it feeling like a conduit of energy was channeling off the top of my head shooting straight into the heavens.  I felt extremely uplifted and inspired.  As manic experiences do, it progressed over the next few frantic thought laden days into a full blown psychotic break.  I was taken to the hospital and after sedation informed that I, at the ripe age of 34, was Bipolar Type I.  The letdown after the mania and now on the drugs was huge.  "How could all of that wonderful stuff and inspiration; visions, voice of god, seeing and communicating telepathically with my angel grandmother, feeling inspired, directed, full of joy.  How could all that be insane?"  The experience was so powerful that it took a few more to convince me that it was not "god" talking to me and answering my prayers.  My religion had driven me mad, and I was the personality type prone to be taken there, being highly creative, imaginative, and curious, with a can do attitude.  My religion told me that I could have these experiences, that I could know these things, and at a time of heavy stress in my life I sought them with all the intent and focus I could muster.  I think I was subconsciously putting it to the test, to put my doubts and wondering to rest once and for all.

Dealing with my new diagnosis, I underwent the painful process of leaving my comfort zone in favor of what could actually be proven and verified. I went through a terrible nihilistic phase as I lost my religion, my career, and all that I had placed value in.  If Jesus is indeed a mythical amalgamation of Christ frosting, spread over an historical person, as secular study evidences, it's ironic that he is said to have pronounced, "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free".   He failed to add, "and the discovery process will be painful as hell."  Should there turn out to be a God, as I have highly suspected there is in my manic past (I've communed with him in my manic states), he certainly has an ironic sense of humor, some could say it even borders on a perverse schadenfreude or trickster mentality.

After the cyclone that was the first onset of my bipolar episodes at the ripe old age of 34, I was left in the sickening swirling realization that I did not know the things I thought I knew. Realizing that it was the force of ego and arrogance that leads people to claim to know the unknowable, my worldview became somewhat agnostic - "I can't know" becoming my mantra.  During this period as an undulating agnostic, my agnosticism would at times tend to atheism.  I halted from this direction by reminding myself that it is the arrogance of the human ego to assume that the unknowable can be known in either direction. I would be making the same mistake by turning from religion to embrace atheism. To say there is no god is to commit the same crime as people you criticize in saying there is one.  "You should never doubt what no one is sure about" is one of my favorite quotes from Roald Dahl.  This quote informs the ability we must cultivate to tread the middle.  "Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater."  Anything on close inspection will reveal flaws.  I have found flaws, some quite serious, in every aspect of my life which I have chosen to inspect, some of which were forced inspections.  Three stories that might merit telling are "Fraud of My Father", "Guess What?  You're Bipolar", and "Guess What else? Your Religion is a Fraud.".

One thing my bipolar illness repeatedly tries to teach me is to maintain an ability to navigate yourself in the middle of a contradiction without being swayed to either side, no matter how compelling.  To combat my bipolar illness I must constantly strive to be the middle man, and occupy the space between intelligence and spirituality (recognition of the possible relevance of the unknown, the unknowable ....the mysterious) - each if pursued in extreme annihilates the other, yet each one informs and regulates the other.  When I am intelligently focused and logical I become despairing and depressed.  When I am spiritually focused and imaginative and open I become manic and full of joy.  I have visions &  revelations. I commune with god - my godliness is revealed to me, I hear the voice of god as a steady conscious stream of brain chatter.  From this I gather that there are things of a spiritual, intuitive, symbolic nature present in our world that inform upon intelligence. There is a channel separate from logic and empiricism, highly unreliable and irrational, but full of wonder and so, so, indescribably awesome.

One thing for certain, the universe is mysterious, with many a rabbit hole, the nature of matter being one example (quantum mechanics).  Currently I feel that I am recovered and corrected in my thinking enough to avoid the pitfalls of either extreme of thinking.  I am learning to become okay with uncertainty.  Even okay with the idea that I may never know the answers to what I consider to be life's most pressing and important questions.  At points I am quite the logical skeptical Atheist.  This was the natural rebound and protective mechanism from all the madness.  Mitigated I make that extreme stance a bit more agnostic.  There are even times when I believe, in the truest sense of the word that includes a healthy dose of doubt, that there is a god, but I certainly cannot know this or prove it the way you would a scientific theory.  Is this god the god of the bible? No.  I cannot disprove God's existence, but start assigning attributes and these god's are quite easily debunked.  I do not believe in the flawed ego-maniacal god of Abraham.  If these people were seeing god, it was at best a projection of their own state of humanity at the time.  We must most certainly realize that this god was viewed through the lens of those times, and with consideration given to the very human way by which the book was an accretion (interpolations, pious frauds, scribal errors, insertions, as well as the highly probable erroneous views of the original speculator). Is my conception of god merely my modern "invention" compatible with today's humanity?

I think it helpful to cite some of my reading and experience which lends background to my intellectual take on this topic of Uncertainty which leads to invention of a higher intelligence, or a 'spiritual' take on thinking about the possibilities outside our understanding.

First is the story of the bible, consisting of two separate threads, the old and new testaments, which turn out to be essentially the same background story, as far as the writers of such goes, of men weaving the writings, social constructs and philosophies at hand, and borrowing from the social myths and stories of their age into a more complicated and cohesive tale, passed on through time and cemented by tradition.  From my early religious experience I am quite well versed in the bible, both old and new testaments.  I have read each more than once and have also studied both on various topics.  There are many published books on the bible which strive for scholarly examination.  I happened to read first, Who Wrote the Bible, by Richard Friedman.  This book uses the documentary hypothesis to ferret out the most likely authors/sources of the Old Testament.  Turns out from that examination that the bulk of it was likely written/compiled/redacted around 620 BC from 4 sources identified by the letters J E P & D.  It is a great amalgamation woven together by one individual from that time period.  Stories are cooked in the culture of their time.  Next on the New Testament I read the book  Misquoting Jesus, By Bart Erhman.  I also began a book by Burton Mack titled Who wrote the New Testament, but by this time I'd had a gut full, so it went unfinished. 

Watching Zeitgeist the Movie, I was introduced to the Christ myth hypothesis (Version one contained the Christ myth topic at the beginning, it was removed in later versions).  The movie itself gathers a lot of spurious ideas and promotes a future idealistic world of a Utopian dreamland.  As a result I checked out a book by one of the prominent sources used to explain the Christ myth, Acharya S, aka D.M. Murdock.  The book was, The Christ Conspiracy, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, which deals with the Astrological Christ Mythology.  Recently on this topic I've read the online PDF by David Fitzgerald, Ten Beautiful Lies About Jesus http://www.nazarethmyth.info/Fitzgerald2010HM.pdf.  Both full of quite compelling evidence to support their point. Curious to my mind is that one greatest of ironies may be that the story of Jesus Christ is an even greater fabrication than the story of Santa. The true meaning of Christmas and all that becoming the adult version of Santa Claus.  There are certainly many parallels between the two characters and themes.

Then comes the Joseph Smith Story, the core of my religious upbringing. Turns out by accounts of his own family members Joseph was an excellent storyteller of great creativity and imagination. By the accounts of others, and contradictions within his own accounts, as well as a long history of contradictions that dog him on every turn it can be pretty convincingly shown that he was a man who had serious problems with the truth (a smooth liar and weaver of tale tales).  Books read on this topic include No Man Knows My History, by Fawn Brodie, Joseph Smith, the First Mormon, by Donna Hill, Joseph Smith by Robert Remini, and lastly Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Bushman, by which time I'd again had a gut full and did not finish. It should be noted that with the exception of Brodie, these authors strive to take a neutral and scholarly approach to the history of Joseph Smith and the rise of the Mormon church.  Bushman leans toward an orthodox LDS view and presentation, and hence is guilty of some bias. From all this I believe Joseph was a man in earnest misguided by his own delusions and a deep seated need to be revered and recognized.  He may have suffered from some sort of mental illness which would explain his visions. One theory that gets some traction is that he suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, certainly in full bloom toward the end of his life and displayed by his antics at Nuavoo. By other assessments he fits the description of a Sociopath, one of the prominent features being the ability to lie to and manipulate others towards their own self centered needs without the nags of conscience. The account of the Book of Mormon is an exceptional example of man's ability to construct a story that seems so believable and convinces many people.  There are convincing elements in many things within the BoM stories, compelling core moral values such as honesty and integrity (ironically), service to others, kindness, love, diligence, devotion, etc.  These elements can certainly be judged to be true, in a book which is clearly not literal history.  I believe that the Book of Mormon is a construction completely from the mind of Joseph Smith.  Simon Southerton's book which explores the total lack of DNA evidence to support the claims of the source of the indigenous  American peoples supports this idea - the book is not a literal history of any ancient Americans.  Archaeology supports this idea as well - no correlation to what is written in the BOM, and some contradiction.

Other key books that I've read concerning Mormonism are: Mormonism and the Magic World View, by D. Michael Quinn, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet by Dan Vogel, An Insiders View to Mormon Origins, by Grant Palmer, An American Fraud: One Lawyer's Case against Mormonism, by Kay Burningham, and Mormonism Unvailed, By E.D. Howe

Then there's my recent eye witnessed account of watching as my seven year old son evolved his own ghost story, which at all points he truly believed.  I was present as the events unfolded and saw his mind as it misconstrued, warped and added to those events to make a better story.  I still cannot disabuse him of the errors in his tale, or in his conclusion - there are ghosts in our house.  It was quite a revealing study on how the human mind works with perception and bias driven by fears.

Couple all these topics with the stories I've experienced from the paranoids, sayings of the superstitious, the stories of the paranormals, UFO accounts, ancient alien hypotheses, cryptozoology, and even the stories that science may be spinning on the unexplorable (string theory anyone?), and you get a pretty good picture of what we as human beings do - we create stories to deal with the unknown, and then must deal with the problem arising when we believe those stories to be true, becoming misguided by our own mindless myth making.

Religions, most specifically the Abrahamic three, certainly create an atmosphere of separation, certainty, and avoidance of other ideas.  Under such ideologies people become ostriches burying heads to avoid addressing the real problems that face our planet.  One of the biggest problems being or very human nature, because how on earth do you ever change that, especially if unacknowledged?  Studying chimpanzee troops reveals much about our own nature to attack, invade, acquire, and harm and/or kill any group of our species we term to be "the others".  One word describes this wiring: xenophobia.  But there are also; man caused climate problems, pursuing cleaner energy solutions, better forms of government, dealing with over population, the misuse of resources, our tenuous food supply, preparation for the natural calamities that we know can and will occur...there's a long laundry list that most people choose to avoid because it's painful to consider, and God will sort all that out anyway.  If we are to survive on this planet, and truly overcome all of the problems our growing population presents, we as humans need to extinguish this pernicious idea of "the other", and excise it from all religions and ideologies which perpetuate this separating, divergent polarizing view of humanity.  We would be better served to send more time and mental energy pursuing the certain.

So what does all this mean?  As fallible humans we need to be extremely careful that we constantly distinguish the things that we know from the things we believe or suspect.  History has shown that belief is so easily mixed in with knowledge.  

"Between believing a thing and thinking you know is only a small step and quickly taken" - Mark Twain

The real battle and contradiction here is between intellectual knowledge and spiritual musings, between practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge.  We are best served to pursue that which we are certain of, that which we can do toward making the world a better place, and reserving the ventures into uncertainty for scientific inquiry.  So too does it benefit our leisure moments of awe, wonder, entertainment, and the suspension of disbelief.  We are all curious apes who love a good story, and love a mystery.

I leave you with a good read, somewhat related to this topic: