Thursday, November 11, 2004, 4:27pm
Thursday, November 11, 2004, 4:27pm
To follow up the astounding inbound commute of the morning train – we arrived at South Station on time within the measurement error of my wrist watch with carriage wheels grinding to a stop two seconds after 8:58am.
Before I continue about the details of grinding wheels I need to write something that has come clear about my writing – this is an emotional journal more than a philosophical quest. There is plenty of documentation covering the statistical science of uncertainty and related topics, and there are potentially no limit to the professional opinions about every argument I’ve raised. I’m not trying to compete with that, nor am I very much interested in a structured approach even if I could compete. Growing to adulthood I have found many pathways already well traveled – and therefore of little interest – and my main objective in life involves those pathways not so often trudged. Without overtly recognizing this, my hobbies make little sense – including this meandering journal written while riding a meandering train.
Rather than arguing or preaching from an established premise, my basic method places the focus on detached observation – while remaining aware of the cognitive filters I am using to process incoming experience. Hopefully, as I peal away the need to force each observation into an established category, I’ll spend more time seeing and hearing without rushing to judgment – thereby knowing life more for what it is, rather than how it ‘should’ be.
Individual people at their core are fairly simple, at least by comparison to the festoonery built into the totality of human history and knowledge. Not in a million lifetimes could I understand everything that has been worked out by others. Nonetheless I have a chance at probing my own humanity and my own perspective. Instead of devaluing my singular view, I embrace the notion that one person looking out one window from one railroad carriage might still have something to say.
I suppose this is one of those ‘man as the measure of all things’ humanistic approaches that top-down thinkers despise with such great passion. For example – if I do not work out my ideas from established first-principals then – like Galileo – nothing I conclude is rooted in orthodoxy, and by doing this I thumb my nose at established absolutes. After all if I can figure out how things work all on my own, I am no longer under any authority with regard to my conclusions.
Having written that, I am now conscious of how I might be constructing a straw man.
So here’s my point: Top-down thinkers have done a lot of apologetic thinking to defend their various positions, and I’m not going to upending their arguments on any level since they have the fortress of their ideas built and well-defended. In fact, I really don’t want to take them on at all.
If I do happen to establish useful ideas along the train of thought between top-down versus bottom-up thinking it will happen because I have shown the value of evidenced-based analysis and how it can be used as a practical and meaningful guide for personal living. Beyond that I’ll let the chips fall where they may. After all it’s the top-down thinkers who so desperately require their huge edifice of defensive thinking to survive – as in such notions as ‘defending the faith’ – but not me, because I don’t feel the need to be absolutely right. I only need to be on the right track heading in the right direction with a willingness to overturn and revamp my thinking as needed. Some ideas stay because nothing comes along of any greater value, whereas other notions pass as they are replaced by better thinking.
In the real world – the messy world, not the world of tidy ideals – chaos is the natural order of things, and for this reason there is no limit to how much can be wasted trying to impose an intellectual framework. Those who accept the chaos and the mystery and the uncertainty of the Universe have far less work to do. We only need enough practical theory to carry us through our mortal lives. We need not defend and maintain an edifice of orthodoxy for 2,000 years. We need only support ourselves rarely for more than four score and ten. If along the way I have done both well and good in some undefined form, then I have likely made a good life for myself and the world a better place for having been here.
500 million years from now, will the inhabitants of this planet give a damn about the things we so passionately debate? – Of course not.
Taken to foreseeable extremes there can be no absolutes except for existence itself. In 50 billion years the galaxies themselves will begin to fade. And in perhaps 20 trillion years matter itself will have dissipated into cold particles drifting through a Universe of inconceivable vastness and darkness. Everything has a lifecycle – even the Universe.
That’s the nature of reality – and in the long run nothing stays the same or is ever the same again. With actual existence a matter of relentless change, any sense of absolutes is exceedingly overblown.
The first and only fixed principal of bottom-up evidence-based thinking is how there are no first or fixed principals except those we collectively adopt through debate, enacted law, and other agreed-upon conventions.
Even then, these are only as fixed as long we decide to keep them fixed.
