The Certainty of Uncertainty

Posted by Keith Tidman 

We favour certainty over uncertainty. That’s understandable. Our subscribing to certainty reassures us that perhaps we do indeed live in a world of absolute truths, and that all we have to do is stay the course in our quest to stitch the pieces of objective reality together.

 

We imagine the pursuit of truths as comprising a lengthening string of eureka moments, as we put a check mark next to each section in our tapestry of reality. But might that reassurance about absolute truths prove illusory? Might it be, instead, ‘uncertainty’ that wins the tussle?

 

Uncertainty taunts us. The pursuit of certainty, on the other hand, gets us closer and closer to reality, that is, closer to believing that there’s actually an external world. But absolute reality remains tantalizingly just beyond our finger tips, perhaps forever.

 

And yet it is uncertainty, not certainty, that incites us to continue conducting the intellectual searches that inform us and our behaviours, even if imperfectly, as we seek a fuller understanding of the world. Even if the reality we think we have glimpsed is one characterised by enough ambiguity to keep surprising and sobering us.

 

The real danger lies in an overly hasty, blinkered turn to certainty. This trust stems from a cognitive bias — the one that causes us to overvalue our knowledge and aptitudes. Psychologists call it the Dunning-Kruger effect.

 

What’s that about then? Well, this effect precludes us from spotting the fallacies in what we think we know, and discerning problems with the conclusions, decisions, predictions, and policies growing out of these presumptions. We fail to recognise our limitations in deconstructing and judging the truth of the narratives we have created, limits that additional research and critical scrutiny so often unmask. 

 

The Achilles’ heel of certainty is our habitual resort to inductive reasoning. Induction occurs when we conclude from many observations that something is universally true: that the past will predict the future. Or, as the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, put it in the eighteenth century, our inferring ‘that instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience’. 

 

A much-cited example of such reasoning consists of someone concluding that, because they have only ever observed white swans, all swans are therefore white — shifting from the specific to the general. Indeed, Aristotle uses the white swan as an example of a logically necessary relationship. Yet, someone spotting just one black swan disproves the generalisation. 

 

Bertrand Russell once set out the issue in this colourful way:

 

‘Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken’.

 

The person’s theory that all swans are white — or the chicken’s theory that the man will continue to feed it — can be falsified, which sits at the core of the ‘falsification’ principle developed by philosopher of science Karl Popper. The heart of this principle is that in science a hypothesis or theory or proposition must be falsifiable, that is, to possibly being shown wrong. Or, in other words, to be testable through evidence. For Popper, a claim that is untestable is no longer scientific. 

 

However, a testable hypothesis that is proven through experience to be wrong (falsified) can be revised, or perhaps discarded and replaced by a wholly new proposition or paradigm. This happens in science all the time, of course. But here’s the rub: humanity can’t let uncertainty paralyse progress. As Russell also said: 

 

‘One ought to be able to act vigorously in spite of the doubt. . . . One has in practical life to act upon probabilities’.

 

So, in practice, whether implicitly or explicitly, we accept uncertainty as a condition in all fields — throughout the humanities, social sciences, formal sciences, and natural sciences — especially if we judge the prevailing uncertainty to be tiny enough to live with. Here’s a concrete example, from science.

 

In the 1960s, the British theoretical physicist, Peter Higgs, mathematically predicted the existence of a specific subatomic particle. The last missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics. But no one had yet seen it, so the elusive particle remained a hypothesis. Only several decades later, in 2012, did CERN’s Large Hadron Collider reveal the particle, whose field is claimed to have the effect of giving all other particles their mass. (Earning Higgs, and his colleague Francis Englert, the Nobel prize in physics.)

 

The CERN scientists’ announcement said that their confirmation bore ‘five-sigma’ certainty. That is, there was only 1 chance in 3.5 million that what was sighted was a fluke, or something other than the then-named Higgs boson. A level of certainty (or of uncertainty, if you will) that physicists could very comfortably live with. Though as Kyle Cranmer, one of the scientists on the team that discovered the particle, appropriately stresses, there remains an element of uncertainty: 

 

“People want to hear declarative statements, like ‘The probability that there’s a Higgs is 99.9 percent,’ but the real statement has an ‘if’ in there. There’s a conditional. There’s no way to remove the conditional.”

 

Of course, not in many instances in everyday life do we have to calculate the probability of reality. But we might, through either reasoning or subconscious means, come to conclusions about the likelihood of what we choose to act on as being right, or safely right enough. The stakes of being wrong matter — sometimes a little, other times consequentially. Peter Higgs got it right; Bertrand Russell’s chicken got it wrong.

  

The takeaway from all this is that we cannot know things with absolute epistemic certainty. Theories are provisional. Scepticism is essential. Even wrong theories kindle progress. The so-called ‘theory of everything’ will remain evasively slippery. Yet, we’re aware we know some things with greater certainty than other things. We use that awareness to advantage, informing theory, understanding, and policy, ranging from the esoteric to the everyday.

 

Environmental Ethics and Climate Change

Posted by Keith Tidman

The signals of a degrading environment are many and on an existential scale, imperilling the world’s ecosystems. Rising surface temperature. Warming oceans. Sinking Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Glacial retreat. Decreased snow cover. Sea-level rise. Declining Arctic sea ice. Increased atmospheric water vapour. Permafrost thawing. Ocean acidification. And not least, supercharged weather events (more often, longer lasting, more intense).

Proxy (indirect) measurements — ice cores, tree rings, corals, ocean sediment — of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas that plays an important role in creating the greenhouse effect on Earth, have spiked dramatically since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The measurements underscore that the recent increase far exceeds the natural ups and downs of the previous several hundred thousand years. Human activity — use of fossil fuels to generate energy and run industry, deforestation, cement production, land use changes, modes of travel, and much more — continues to be the accelerant.

The reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, contributed to by some 1,300 independent scientists and other researchers from more than 190 countries worldwide, reported that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxides ‘have increased to levels unprecedented in at least 800,000 years’. The level of certainty of human activity being the leading cause, referred to as anthropogenic cause, has been placed at more than 95 percent.

That probability figure has legs, in terms of scientific method. Early logical positivists like A.J. Ayer had asserted that for validity, a scientific proposition must be capable of proof — that is, ‘verification’. Later, however, Karl Popper, in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery, argued that in the case of verification, no number of observations can be conclusive. As Popper said, no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white. (Lo and behold, a black swan shows up.) Instead, Popper said, the scientific test must be whether in principle the proposition can be disproved — referred to as ‘falsification’. Perhaps, then, the appropriate test is not ability to prove that mankind has affected the Earth’s climate; rather, it’s incumbent upon challengers to disprove (falsify) such claims. Something that  hasn’t happened and likely never will.

As for the ethics of human intervention into the environment, utilitarianism is the usual measure. That is to say, the consequences of human activity upon the environment govern the ethical judgments one makes of behavioural outcomes to nature. However, we must be cautious not to translate consequences solely in terms of benefits or disadvantages to humankind’s welfare; our welfare appropriately matters, of course, but not to the exclusion of all else in our environment. A bias to which we have often repeatedly succumbed.

The danger of such skewed calculations may be in sliding into what the philosopher Peter Singer coined ‘speciesism’. This is where, hierarchically, we place the worth of humans above all else in nature, as if the latter is solely at our beck and call. This anthropocentric favouring of ourselves is, I suggest, arbitrary and too narrow. The bias is also arguably misguided, especially if it disregards other species — depriving them of autonomy and inherent rights — irrespective of the sophistication of their consciousness. To this point, the 18th/19th-century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham asserted, ‘Can [animals] feel? If they can, then they deserve moral consideration’.

Assuredly, human beings are endowed with cognition that’s in many ways vastly more sophisticated than that of other species. Yet, without lapsing into speciesism, there seem to be distinct limits to the comparison, to avoid committing what’s referred to as a ‘category mistake’ — in this instance, assigning qualities to species (from orangutans and porpoises to snails and amoebas) that belong only to humans. In other words, an overwrought egalitarianism. Importantly, however, that’s not the be-all of the issue. Our planet is teeming not just with life, but with other features — from mountains to oceans to rainforest — that are arguably more than mere accouterments for simply enriching our existence. Such features have ‘intrinsic’ or inherent value — that is, they have independent value, apart from the utilitarianism of satisfying our needs and wants.

For perspective, perhaps it would be better to regard humans as nodes in what we consider a complex ‘bionet’. We are integral to nature; nature is integral to us; in their entirety, the two are indissoluble. Hence, while skirting implications of panpsychism — where everything material is thought to have at least an element of consciousness — there should be prima facie respect for all creation: from animate to inanimate. These elements have more than just the ‘instrumental’ value of satisfying the purposes of humans; all of nature is itself intrinsically the ends, not merely the means. Considerations of aesthetics, culture, and science, though important and necessary, aren’t sufficient.

As such, there is an intrinsic moral imperative not only to preserve Earth, but for it and us jointly to flourish — per Aristotle’s notion of ‘virtue’, with respect and care, including for the natural world. It’s a holistic view that concedes, on both the utilitarian and intrinsic sides of the moral equation, mutually serving roles. This position accordingly pushes back against the hubristic idea that human-centricism makes sense if the rest of nature collectively amounts only to a backstage for our purposes. That is, a backstage that provides us with a handy venue where we act out our roles, whose circumstances we try to manage (sometimes ham-fistedly) for self-satisfying purposes, where we tinker ostensibly to improve, and whose worth (virtue) we believe we’re in a position to judge rationally and bias-free.

It’s worth reflecting on a thought experiment, dubbed ‘the last man’, that the Australian philosopher Richard Routley introduced in the 1970s. He envisioned a single person surviving ‘the collapse of the world system’, choosing to go about eliminating ‘every living thing, animal and plant’, knowing that there’s no other person alive to be affected. Routley concluded that ‘one does not have to be committed to esoteric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly’. Whether Last Man was, or wasn’t, behaving unethically goes to the heart of intrinsic versus utilitarian values regarding nature —and presumptions about human supremacy in that larger calculus.

Groups like the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have laid down markers as to tipping points beyond which extreme weather events might lead to disastrously runaway effects on the environment and humanity. Instincts related to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ — where people rapaciously consume natural resources and pollute, disregarding the good of humanity at large — have not yet been surmounted. That some other person, or other community, or other country will shoulder accountability for turning back the wave of environmental destruction and the upward-spiking curve of climate extremes has hampered the adequacy of attempted progress. Nature has thrown down the gauntlet. Will humanity pick it up in time?