(bey)On(d) Certainty

9/10 statisticians eventually experiment with sodomy

All science, all enlightenment thought, is an attempt to produce, alchemically, “certainty”.

The modern thinker is haunted by a ghost, a fear and a neurosis, and the ultimate aim of his Edenic project is to produce philosophical Certainty - which is to say, the absence of uncertainty.

Certainty is conceptualised as an object, a thing, a positively charged proton. As a-thing, specifically, and not the absence-of-a-thing. Uncertainty is conceptualised as an absence.

I call it alchemically because there is no certainty in nature. We cannot mimic it from anywhere, reproduce it, or set up an industry and factory production of it. We have this idea of certainty, a fantasy of how nice it would be if only we had perfect certainty, about some given thing. Atoms, mathematics, your wife's fidelity. The future. It would mean the absence of fear, we think, as we conceptualise fear as a "fear of the unknown".

Statistics, null hypothesis, induction - the quest for Perfect Certainty

My purpose is not to disprove the possibility of certainty, only to illustrate that it is as of yet undiscovered, and how our formal systems of thought, which we call scientific and rational, are ultimately alchemical, and attempting an alchemical ritual.

This does not mean having to do away with all of our engineering and tools. A wheel still works pretty well for transportation, regardless. But it is my contention that we would likely make better wheels, better tools, if we conceptualise them as tools, and not as steps in a stepladder to climb to the heavens and dethrone god.

The problem of induction is nonsense, it is attempting to turn induction into deduction.

Statistics is ironically a rhetorical trap, an attempt to circumvent the problem on a technicality - cheating, with language. Hypnosis.

"It is rational to take a 99% chance, because it is highly unlikely to be wrong", is just kicking the ball of perfect certainty down the road. Yes, it is practically functional, but it does not produce perfect philosophical certainty. To stop here, is as arbitrary as it would be to stop before making the calculation.

"It is statistically insignificant " is a hypnosis statement, using rhetoric to induce a trance state. It is a practical solution to uncertainty, neurosis, but it is not satisfactory according to the demands of perfect reason.

The hunger of reason, if you feed it 99%, demands 99.9%. 99.9% demands 99.99%. And so on.

To solve the problem of induction would be to perfect the human mind and achieve a higher state of being. An Edinic perfect state of consciousness, where there is no shame, uncertainty, or any human sensation of "displacedness" in the world. "fitting in" perfectly into the great machine of the cosmos as a perfect gear in a perfect clockwork.

The Christian insight is that love is beyond certainty.

Familial, romantic, brotherly - all love is beyond certainty. When you say the words, “I love you”, you might occasionally discover that you are lying. But when you are not, you have perfect certainty that you are not. You submit to love, you do not conquer it. You don't transmute it and generate it, you are not love’s master. You submit to it. It conquers you. Anyone who had experienced love knows that you are it's servant, and paradoxically, only in submission do you experience true, radical freedom.

I have previously made an argument that music is beyond certainty, for the same reasons and by the same mechanics.

You can of course go back and explain away this experience as just that, experience, something non-objective, and thereby unsatisfactory to perfect reason, because it cannot be mapped. You can explain it away as a hallucination, because it doesn't fit into your greater worldview of enlightenment scientism. You can reduce it to a material process of "chemicals in the brain", to preserve your, incoherent and ultimately contradictory, worldview - and if you stop here, arbitrarily, why not stop earlier, arbitrarily?

The smaller the itch the greater the desire to scratch it - in "reducing" uncertainty we only intensify it. A man can withstand pain without giving in, he can be torn apart by horses - but tickle him, or submit him to Chinese water torture and no amount of stoicism will protect him from going mad.

Minimising uncertainty is the philosophical equivalent of Chinese water torture. The smaller the itch, the greater the pain.

Dating advice

The much discussed subject of 'just going up and talking to her' serves to illustrate.

The online male science of talking to women, of the recent decade, is an attempt to reduce or remove, uncertainty. Just as all science, they attempt to resolve the induction problem with statistics: approach 100 girls and one will give you her number. And just like all scientist, the practitioners all eventually go mad, and stick things up their butt, because it doesn't work, you can never achieve the sought after perfect certainty, that would remove fear from the calculation.

The way it works mechanically is a paradox. It is exactly because it is uncertain, that doing it impresses her. The reason “just going up and talking to her” works, is because it shouldn't. It's a miracle. It breaks the laws of physics.

The reason you should go up and talk to her is because it doesn't work. It's doomed to failure, it's ridiculous, you’re going to look like a fool and be humiliated.

The material explanation then goes: and because you are doing something brave, that impresses her in a pre-rational way. But the real reason is, if you are doing it right, that you are committing an act of love, and in so doing, you are introducing a little bit of metaphysical Certainty into her world. And we all want a cure for our inherent uncertainty.

What is certainty if not a triumph of the will?

The amount of uncertainty in your life is not a constant, but it is primarily a product of genetics, habits, and diet, and not thought. Thought is an afterthought.

I conceptualise the history of philosophy as mainly a dichotomy between two major schools of thought, so to speak, in response to the uncertainty problem.

The Edenic: Change the world to limit uncertainty. Design the world, your environment, society, and so on, in such a way as to minimize or, ideally, magically, remove entirely, uncertainty, and all the anxiety and fear and discomfort that follows from uncertainty.

Or

Just sort of, get over yourself. It’s not that big of a deal. “all the anxiety and fear and discomfort that follows from uncertainty” is not a “certainty” - it is not something inherent in the world. it is a product of your own lack of will to engage with the world, imperfectly.

The former being all kinds of utopians, communists, transhumanists, and the latter being a mish-mash group of various kinds of stoics, nietzchians, christians, and other groups I happen to like.

I propose that we have it the wrong way around. Certainty is not the positively charged proton, it is not a-thing. Certainty is the absence, the lacking, and uncertainty is the fulfilment. Uncertainty exists, and certainty does not. Can not, and will not. The alchemical project is in vain, because certainty belongs only to God, and it will only ever produce further exquisite torture, a more profound pain. It is a sin of vanity that carries its own punishment, performing it is simultaneously the punishment. And true freedom is, at any given point in your life, just a choice away.

“For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.”

tldr