Thought for today, inspired by Oliver Sack's memoir, Uncle Tungsten:
The half-life of a radioactive element is precisely measurable, but whether an individual atom will split in a given moment or in any length of time is entirely unpredictable. The probability of its disintegration is fixed, but whether that split will happen now or in a billion years is unknowable.
Which makes me think that the entire structure of our everyday existence, of cause and effect, of time itself, is merely a convenient fiction, created by our own imagination. Other minds not sharing this collection of arbitrary yet consistent rules are beyond our knowledge but not non-existent, merely unknowable.
Knowable? Unknowable? As King Lear said, “Bounded by a nutshell, I could call myself the king of infinite space, were it not for dreams.” We think we know or perceive reality, because we have created it, in conjunction with all those other, independent individuals who we know to exist, to share our reality. Yet our consciousness is merely an extension of a greater consciousness into a smaller realm, an experiment or an aquarium, a subset of something so much greater.
It is inconvenient, uncomfortable and unnecessary to contemplate the world outside the aquarium glass. But we all know it's there.
- Mark Johnson's blog
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