ambivalence

Wired, Issue 16.02

Morality, spirituality, the meaning of life — science doesn’t handle those issues well at all. But that’s cool. We have art and religion for that stuff. Science also assumes predictable cause and effect in a world that’s a chaotic, bubbling stew of randomness. But that’s OK, too. Our approximations are usually good enough. No, the real reason science sucks is that it makes us look bad. It makes us bit players in the Big Story of the universe, and it exposes some key limitations of the human brain.
Look at it this way: Before science, we humans had dominion over Earth, the center of the universe. Now we’re just a bunch of hairless apes on a wet rock orbiting a minor star in a marginal galaxy.
Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can’t really embrace it. Science describes the world with numbers (ratio of circumference to diameter: pi) and abstractions (particles! waves! particles!). But our intractable brains evolved on a diet of campfire tales. Fantastical explanations (angry gods hurling lightning bolts) and rare events with dramatic outcomes (saber-toothed tiger attacks) make more of an impact on us than statistical norms. Evolution gave us brains that crave certainty, with irrational fears of crashing in an airplane and a built-in weakness for just-so stories about intelligent design. Meanwhile, the true wonders revealed by the scientific method — species that change into new species over time, continents that float around the planet, a quantum-mechanical world where nothing is for sure — are worse than counterintuitive. To a depressingly large number of us, they’re downright threatening.
In other words, thanks to evolution, half of all Americans don’t believe in evolution. That’s the universe for you: impersonal, uncaring, and ironic.

As a human race, we seem almost indistinguishable on the cellular level. But as an individual, we are distinctive and unique with disparate characteristics. We are beings with a myriad of differences in characters, personalities, attitudes, interests, and beliefs. As individuals, we can always strive to improve our shortcomings and adapt to our ever-changing environments. We can attempt to embrace a positive outlook to life even if our minds are swarming with bleak thoughts. We are malleable creatures who have learned to accept our own and one another’s differences, or not.

Even if we have accepted that each individual or a collective group of people is unique, we are still at odds with one another. Sometimes, differing personalities, attitudes, and beliefs result in irreconcilable ideas or interests that cannot be resolved. Since I tend to hover over the middle and rarely take sides, I can relate to and identify with arising conflicts. And I always wonder what strong convictions people have that they cannot be swayed by other ideas or refuse to bend to another’s beliefs. But lately I became aware that it is these convictions that give a sense of purpose, fulfillment, and meaning to the unyielding mind.