Uncertainty

 

I was made aware recently of just how difficult it is to stay with the fundamental uncertainty of life as it really is. I was sitting in our zen meditation group (via zoom), and one of the participants had some computer problem (I guessed) that was causing the light on the screen to brighten and darken every second or two. It was disturbing because I could perceive the recurrent flashing in my peripheral vision. My impulse, of course, was to do something: either alert the person vocally that her screen was flashing, or write a chat message, or otherwise try to take care of the problem. But I could do none of these things without interrupting others and making the problem worse. As I sat there, I became aware of how often this happens. I am constitutionally committed, I realized, to procedures being followed, to order being maintained, to being on time, to things going as they’re supposed to. And when they don’t, I register upset to one degree or another. The same is true of my expectations about sentence structure in a newspaper, and/or grammar or spelling in an online article, and so on (I’ve been trained as an editor). Or the way people drive. Or dress themselves; or groom themselves; or behave in public; or a million other actions or circumstances that we wish to conform to our expectations of what is “right.” We use the word “appropriate” these days, of course, to avoid the appearance of being a moral ‘auntie’ trying to enforce standards of “right” and “wrong,” or “good” and “bad,” but the moral judgment is usually what we mean. 

The source of this discomfort soon became apparent. Like most other humans, I have little tolerance for uncertainty; for disorder; for chaos. “Chaos is come again,” says Othello, referring to the time when he shall not love Desdemona; and we understand that, in his mind, his love for her and hers for him is what keeps his world orderly, from dissolving into chaos. Like Othello, we all insist on some sort of order to keep our lives afloat, and we also tend to insist that the amount or degree of order that we demand is not too much or too little, but just the “right” amount. And, of course, we get into endless trouble by insisting that ours is the optimum amount, and that others, if they knew anything, would insist on that same amount of order for themselves. In fact, the whole of what we call “civilization” is fundamentally the assertion and implementation of various degrees of order imposed on the randomness of reality. But a little reflection shows us that there is really no optimum balance between our preferred order and the chaos, or uncertainty, or randomness of life as it unfolds. And there is no way, either, of making certain that our expectations for order will be met. We want order and predictability, basically so we can be prepared for what’s coming, i.e., to control our world. We demand this “right” order, and if we cannot get what we want, if too much collapses, we tend, like Othello, to despair about continuing our lives in any reasonable or “respectable” way. 

Nor is it just weak or unintelligent humans who feel this way. The classic genius we all acknowledge, Albert Einstein, was so put off by Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” as it relates to the quantum world, that he, Einstein, spent most of the rest of his life trying to prove how wrong that principle was. Heisenberg’s principle, that is, asserts that one cannot know both the speed and the position of a given particle at the same time—indeed, that the more we know about one, the less we know about the other. In response, Einstein retorted with statements like: “God does not play dice with the Universe.” What he meant was that chance cannot be the governing principle of the universe; that there must be some way to calculate both the position and the momentum of elementary particles, but scientists just haven’t found the right formula or solution or hidden order yet. But almost a hundred years later, Heisenberg’s principle stands on firmer experimental ground than ever, and Einstein appears to have been wrong. So perhaps we lesser mortals should not despair, or judge ourselves too harshly.

On the other hand, most of us would like to, if we could, have an accurate picture of real reality. At least I would. And the truth seems to be that we’re all, to one degree or another, deluded about reality. That is, we all demand that our view of the world include some kind of reasonable and knowable and predictable order. We like calendars and we like clocks for this reason, and take ever greater pains to be certain that they are correct: we now have atomic clocks, for example, giving us ever more accurate ways to measure time. But do they? Clocks are, after all, arbitrary impositions of order on what we call the passage of time. And what about Daylight Savings Time? Does it really save time? Does it have any effect whatever on the amount of sunlight that hits our part of the world? Not a bit. It affects only us, and the arbitrary time on our clocks we choose to get ourselves into and out of bed. The same is true of calendars: does the New Year on January 1 correspond to anything like a beginning in nature? Not at all. It doesn’t even coincide with a solar event like the solstice. It is an arbitrary starting point that we then imbue with all kinds of meaning—drunken celebrations, bidding goodbye to a bad year, hoping for a better year, resolutions for us to keep in the new year, and so on. In short, we humans seem to need these arbitrary markers in our lives to give them shape, to keep them from seeming formless, chaotic, without definition, and essentially infinite. For infinity terrifies us (which may be why death terrifies us as well.)

But if we are at all attuned to the world as it actually is, we realize, at least philosophically, that the world and its events have very little of the order we impute to them. Yes, the earth regularly revolves around the sun in roughly 365-1/4 days, but even that is subject to variation and change. As is the tilt of the earth which gives us our seasons. Yes, we rise at roughly the same time each day, but only because our clocks tell us to; if we set our schedules to the sun’s rise and set, our work days would vary with the seasons. Which they no doubt did in the past, e.g., in our hunter-gatherer days. We would also see—and this is one of the things zen training is meant to make us aware of—that many of our expectations of what will happen in any given moment, or what a person will do in a given situation, are simply mistaken. We base them, perhaps, on what might have happened in the past, but when we do, we remain oblivious to the fact that everything changes second by second, and nothing ever happens in exactly the same way twice. Much, if not most, of our discontent stems from this clash between what we expect to happen and what actually occurs. We want “good” things to happen in the same way, again and again. But if they did, if we could somehow influence life to conform to our expectations or desires, life could not go on. For one example, if we could get the DNA of dreaded viruses or bacteria to stay the same, to stop mutating and infecting us, or any organism’s DNA to remain fixed in the way it suits us, that would be the end of life. All life depends on mutations to adapt to always changing conditions. That is, in a nutshell, what life is. Stop mutations, stop change, and you stop life. The entire world, indeed, is like this. We might want the sun to stop burning—because we know that in four billion years or so, its fuel will run out, and it will first expand—incinerating us and all the planets—and then explode into a supernova or a black hole. In either event, this development of the sun will put an end to earth and to human existence. But would we really want to stop that? Would we really want the sun, or any other entity to freeze in place, to stop providing us with heat and light, stop developing as it must to be what it is? Would we want a tree or an animal or ourselves to freeze in place, to stop developing and remain permanently as we want it to at some moment in time? And which moment would that be? And would there even be any moments after that? And, most important, would we really want quantum uncertainty (which amounts to the underlying uncertainty of all reality) to not operate in our world?

A June 12, 2012 article in New Scientist reports on two scientists who have explored this question: “Sorry Einstein, the universe needs quantum uncertainty,” by Jessica Griggs. The scientists, Stephanie Wehner and Esther Hänggi of the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technology, report that, with two bits of information (as analogues to the position and momentum in a quantum particle) encoded in the same particle, one cannot decode both bits of information. If you get more information about one, you get correspondingly less from the other. They then tried decoding information from both simultaneously (like measuring both speed and position of a particle), and concluded that this comprises more information than went in in the first place, thus violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which states that closed systems always move in the direction of more entropy, or disorder in the system). The article’s summary concludes:

Being able to decode both of the messages in Wehner and Hänggi’s imaginary particle suddenly gives you more information. As demonstrated by the piston, this means you have the potential to do more work. But this extra work comes for free so is the same as creating a perpetual motion machine, which is forbidden by thermodynamics.

 

In short, quantum uncertainty is necessary in order to preserve an even more fundamental principle, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. And if quantum uncertainty is necessary, then so is the general uncertainty of the world. As corroboration, we might also think of the mysterious imbalance between particles and anti-particles that allowed the material world to come into existence in the first place. As noted on the cern.com website, “The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe.” And if it had, since matter and antimatter particles annihilate one another, the universe should “contain nothing but leftover energy” (ibid). But it does not; it contains more, including us. Somehow, and the mechanism is still not understood, some small portion of matter survived the expected annihilation of matter meeting antimatter, and now, “everything we see from the smallest life forms on Earth to the largest stellar objects is made almost entirely of matter” (ibid). As has been noted in many places, “the origin of matter remains one of the greatest mysteries of physics” (wikipedia). Imbalance and uncertainty, in short, allow us, indeed seemnecessary for us to be. 

            So, much as we might long for certainty in our lives, in our world, it seems that the forces that refuse to accede to our desires “know” best. What humans want most may be (and, as we are finding to our peril, often is) precisely that which would not only nullify us, but all other life, all other forms of existence as well. We should be grateful that our fondest, our most persistent desires (especially for certainty) do not, and cannot ever be realized. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Freedom or Liberation

“Freedom,” in recent years, has become even more of a rallying cry than usual in the United States. Conservative Republicans, and, in particular, those devotees of our last President, but also those who hearken back to the ‘good old days’ of Ronald Reagan, have used the cry for ‘my freedom’ as a cudgel to bludgeon opponents and justify their own intransigence in the face of what they call ‘government tyranny.’ Especially higher taxes, or government demands to wear face masks to protect oneself and others from Covid-19, or to abide by social-distancing requirements for the same reason, are seen as unwarranted and oppressive government intrusions—outrageous limits to the “freedom” that every American is guaranteed. 

            “Freedom to” people also tend to deny the second important freedom category—“freedom from.” This freedom includes the freedoms aimed mostly at less-well-off or impoverished people: the freedom of low-wage workers fromexploitation by rapacious businesses; the freedom of African Americans from slavery—a freedom that even a violent Civil War was not able to guarantee; a freedom that thousands had to fight for, even after that war, to get it enforced, and which, to this day, has never been fully implemented; the freedom of every American, including children, from hunger, from homelessness, from grossly deficient and costly medical care, from food deserts that lack access to nourishing and healthful food; and freedom from industrial corridors which pollute—with carbon emissions, toxic chemicals, poisoned earth and water sources—the very air that people must breathe, and the water they must drink. 

We should also note here that another significant word for freedom in our history is “Independence.” Enshrined in perhaps America’s most famous document, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, this idea of freedom declared the right of the American colonies to be free from the tyranny of English kings, thereby setting America on its ‘sanctioned-by-nature’ independent and democratic course. But it did more. As its preamble states,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

 

Of course, most of us have realized in recent years that the grand notion, “all men are created equal,” omitted significant chunks of humanity: women, who comprised half the population, and all those slaves brought from Africa, and immigrants from certain countries, and so on. So it seems that the Creator, in the minds of the founding geniuses who adopted this document, endowed mainly white men of property with those “unalienable Rights” to life and liberty (yet another word for freedom) and happiness. All others need not apply. And being deprived of this right was a big deal, since the idea of independence became the pre-eminent American ideal. The quintessential American, that is, believes himself not bound or connected or beholden to anyone; believes himself to be (or has the right to be) absolutely self-sufficient; able to provide for self and family, with no need for help from, or interference from, any government, domestic or foreign. And we teach this ideal to children almost from the day they take their first step. ‘You can do it yourself.’ The same goes for the nation as a whole: we insisted on being free of British taxes; free of all interference by any outside nation; and free from reliance on anyone: any other nation; any union of nations; any outside maker or grower or armed defender of anything. We independent Americans are said to have all we need right here, including millions of lethal weapons to defend ourselves, once we ‘make America great again.’ Free again. 

Without getting too deeply into it, of course, anyone with a modicum of knowledge about how things actually work can see that this notion of total self-sufficiency is, perhaps, the most dangerous and damaging illusion of all. Why? Because it relies on a complete denial of what we know about human social relations, botany, biology, and physics. No single entity, that is, has ever been, or ever can be totally free and independent. From the very beginning of our lives, we must rely on others: our mothers first, and our fathers, and families, and, in the very recent past, our tribe members, or our neighboring villagers, or, in today’s complex societies, our neighbors and fellow citizens—depend on them to abide by common rules such as stopping at traffic lights, or picking up their garbage, or contributing to the roads and bridges we all rely on, or not stealing into our houses at night to ransack them, or not playing loud music at three in the morning. Countless observances like these are required to make complex societies work. 

And this does not even begin to take account of the myriad inter-dependencies we have with the non-human world: the plants that supply our world with the green matter that serves us as  food, and the oxygen that allows us to breathe; the bacteria that supply our soil with nutrients, and without whose presence, in our gut, we could not even digest our food; the trees that form the soil we depend on to grow crops, and which manage the CO₂ that is overwhelming our planet because so many have been removed to profit a few; the oceans that supply fish and countless other nutrients and life itself, all of which are now at risk due to over-fishing and pollution and global warming and acidification; the rivers and aquifers that supply our drinking and irrigation water, that in many places has begun to run out. One could go on almost indefinitely, but the point has perhaps been made: no human being could survive for a second without the prior help of the organisms and natural elements that are the necessary precursors and support of us all.  

Large portions of our lives, in short, are built on illusions, the predominant one being the grand illusion of independence. And this brings us to yet another, deeper, and diametrically-opposed definition of freedom, of liberation: the one propounded by Gautama, the historical Buddha, nearly three thousand years ago. Gautama spoke about liberation in his most fundamental teachings. But the liberation he promised was not freedom from all earthly constraints or pains, but rather awareness of them, and thereby, of liberation from suffering. Because, as he expounded it, there was a cause of suffering, and it was due mostly to the clinging and attachment to the very things that those deluded by independencevalue most of all: the idea that they themselves are substantial and permanent; that everything they desire is similarly substantial and permanent and can be owned, kept, hoarded from others; and will not change; in short, delusionally attached to notions that the world and its objects can be controlled for their personal benefit, and separated from the nexus of relations in which they are embedded. This is what the Buddha realized himself, and then taught: that all this self-ishness was due to ignorance—the first of what he called “the three poisons” (the other two being greed and hatred.) For when he awakened, he saw that there were no “things” in and of themselves. Rather, every thing that appears to our minds as independent (including our very selves) is, in reality, dependent on all else. He called this “inter-dependent co-arising:” meaning that nothing comes into existence on its own; everything co-arises in cooperation with some other thing or many other things. In short, nothing IS on its own. Everything depends inherently and ineluctably on other “things” that co-arise with it. This interdependent co-arising is how real reality actually works. 

One has only to think of oneself. In order for one to be born, one’s parents had to come together by the agency of countless other conditions and events, social, biological, global. But even that hardly scratches the surface of what is involved in the forming of even one human being. First comes the biology of human growth from that initial fertilized cell, all of which is controlled not by anyone, but by evolution—e.g., the pre-ordained processes of cell growth into organs and blood and the billions of cells that we are. Most of these have been developed over eons via organic evolution—the chemical processes by which cells produce energy, how those cells come together to produce all the organs necessary for life, and how the female body nourishes and gives birth to that life. And how it grows. All done without human will or control. But even beyond that production of life from apparently nothing, the survival of that living entity, once it emerges into the world, is dependent on thousands of other constantly changing events and processes. That is to say, aside from the mostly instinctive nurturing that it requires, no organic being could survive without the work of plants upon which it relies for food, animals that can digest plants indigestible to humans to supply it with protein nourishment, and bacteria within its gut that make it possible to digest what it eats. This is not even to mention the plants that turn sunlight into green matter, without which animals like us would not have appeared in the first place. And trees and soil bacteria and fungi that produce the soil upon which plants depend. 

And yet, most humans insist on clinging to their own misguided notion of independence: their supposed freedom to ignore all other entities to accumulate and own and do whatever they wish to whomever they wish, without regard for the embeddedness of every thing in everything else (the results of this ignorance are now coming back to haunt us). The three poisons of greed, hatred and ignorance are what Buddha called the source of this grand illusion. And the freedom or liberation he offered involved seeing this embeddedness, seeing it and letting go of the illusion of independence. 

In short, the freedom, the liberation the Buddha offered was the exact opposite of what the conventional meaning of freedom and independence offers to the average American—and to people of most other advanced industrial countries, especially western ones. Whereas the conventional idea of freedom offers more and better access to the apparent goodies and delights of this world, Buddhism offers a path by which to see through these illusory and temporary satisfactions, and find true liberation. And that true liberation involves not the desperate and doomed-to-fail immersion in always-changing comfort and security, but rather a way to see that this immersion, this endless craving is precisely what leads to suffering (I want it; I deserve it as much as that person; why can’t I have it?). And that the way out of suffering involves seeing, and then the long practice of giving up on all those attempts to change and control life and make it work solely for my benefit, and instead, accepting real life, life as it truly is—good, bad or indifferent. And more than that, not resting in the self-satisfaction of having liberated myself, but rather working to liberate all others mired in the same delusion, by helping them to see the same thing. This last is fundamental, stemming as it does from the realization that no one achieves liberation alone; all liberation comes only in communion with the whole—the whole of sentient life with whom we are embedded, bound, connected, and which, in truth, we are. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi