Epistemology, Ontology and Uncertainty.

So I was kicking around some ideas on transcendence, some thoughts about how we reflect God’s transcendence even when we are fixed in space-time. We seem to establish transcendence by setting one dimension of our subject as constant, so that we are transcendent in that aspect, and hence can speak meaningfully about it. We, in effect, create a ‘flatland’ so that we can understand it. As a function of this, we have to give up knowing about the dimension we have set as constant. We can change the dimensions we set as constant, but cannot know the subject in all dimensions at once. Understanding is gained through transcendence. God’s transcendence is innate, so His understanding is complete. Ours is synthetic, so our understanding will always be incomplete. At least eternity won’t be boring… even with infinite time there will always be something to learn.

Let’s start with some definitions. Ontology tries to determine the nature of truth itself. Epistemology discusses the knowablity of truth. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Theorem basically tells us that you cannot know all the things about a particle at the same time. We’re going to try to put them all together. Yes, kids, we’re mixing physics and philosophy. Here’s a secret, though (shhh, don’t tell anybody,) pretty much all the upper tiers of any discipline are philosophy anyways. Advanced math is very concerned with ontology, Historiography concerns itself with the subjectivity of truth, Quantum physics cannot be separated from questions about determinism, Linguistics is irrevocably intertwined with epistemology. It’s all the same stuff anyways. We draw distinctions because we have to call our degrees different things. (Except for MBAs and MPPs, which are all about made up stuff. I should know.)

Consider a thing. Something. Anything. For that thing to exist, there must be some truth about it, and that truth exists in all dimensions in which the thing exists. For the purposes of our discussion, lets consider something that is moving in four dimensions (length, width, heights and time.) Imagine that you are a soldier on Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg. Bullets are flying, the air is thick with smoke, and between the yells and the crack of rifles you listen for bugles. There is a truth to that place. If you are unlucky, that truth will be visited upon you through the laws of physics and biology (momentum transfer, tensile strength of skin, oxygen requirements of brain cells.) If you are not as unlucky, then that truth will be imposed upon you through the laws of sociology and history. (recording of memory, writing of historical narratives, and effects of changes of governments.) From this, we can derive a very important point: you do not need to master, or even understand truth for you to be subject to its effects. Therefore, you do not need to assent to truth for it to exist. (I love the aviator’s saying about excuses: ‘Physics doesn’t care.’)

So there is some truth out there. But the soldier’s experience of that truth is that of a character in a story, certainly not an author, not even someone reading the script. And as immediate as his ontological experience may be, much of the epistemology of the event will likely be lost on him. The guy getting hit by the dodge ball (or wrench, as the case may be) is probably not at that point in time the right guy to ask about the physics of momentum transfer. So how do we get from the existence of truth to the know ability of truth? We have to transcend the situation to begin to understand it. We have to walk up to the balcony (Heifetz) to move beyond experience into understanding. We do this the same way we do a statistical regression: by holding something constant.

Back to Gettysburg. Instead of a soldier, we are now a historian. We climb all over the hillside, trying to understand the perspective of the riflemen. We look at overhead pictures to understand the topography, we climb up hills to understand the effects of elevation. We hold time constant so that we can vary length, width and height. This allows us to step out of the situation and look down upon it. Once we feel we have mastered the space of the battle, we then look to time. We follow the engagement through its time-line, moving it back and forward in its arc until we feel we have mastered the time dimension of the battle. Each time we look at it, we must hold something constant, but after we look at it enough, we gain enough perspectives to have a sense of the whole. This sense of the whole allows us to effectively choose what variables we want to hold constant in order to address a given question. Consider a multivariate regression. Consider the physicist’s discussion of 4-d space-time. In order to meaningfully describe it pictorially, the physicist must take a dimension away, and describe it in three dimensions. Politics finds critical interest groups and institutions, as it is impossible to discuss the sum total of the individual desires of each member of the polity. So in this, we are always speaking by way of analogy. We create a representation which allows us to master an aspect of a whole, but we are always losing something in order to speak meaningfully about the whole. This is why Heisenberg tells us that we cannot understand all the aspects of a particle all at once. We must ‘take a slice’ of reality in order to begin to understand it.

The artist paints on a canvas. Or takes a photograph. What have they done? They have captured something real and presented it to others for understanding. They have captured it by taking away dimensions. A picture exists in length and width. A sculpture has length, width and height, but is fixed in time. Music moves only in two dimensions: time and amplitude. Even in a play, which is experienced in all four dimensions, offers us understanding in the reflection afterwards. Experience and understanding are related but not synonymous. In the play, though, we see something very significant: even when we are in the midst of a fully-dimension experience, part of us can take a step back and begin to understand the situation. We can, be both on the dance floor and the balcony at once. (Refer to Heifetz and Dean Williams for a far better discussion of the dance floor and the balcony.) Whether we ascend to the balcony while we are in the dance, or whether we leave the dance to climb, we must take the same stairs. We must transcend to understand. And we transcend by taking a picture. We drop dimensions to gain understanding.

When we try to understand a chaotic, hyper-variate problem, such as in the social sciences or in relationships, we turn to our history and surroundings to tell us which variables to drop and which ones to keep. This can create conflict when people come from different surroundings or have different histories. Very different conclusions can be reached when you are looking at different variables within the same data set. In this, we see the failings of the line of reasoning that all reasonable, well-intentioned, and well-meaning people will reach the same conclusions. People‘s conclusions have real consequences, and here we run into a snag… resources are scarce and reality is constrained. So different narratives lead to conflict. Consider the American Civil War. To say that the war was about slavery is simplistic. This would imply that the South’s primary aim was the maintenance of the institution of slavery. The cultural narrative of the South saw the conflict as an expression of the legitimacy of state’s rights. The cultural narrative of the North saw the conflict as a moral struggle about the illegitimacy of oppression. (this is debatable, but my purpose here more historiographical rather than historical.) These two issues collided in the institution of slavery. To one narrative, its imposed extinction was an intolerable violation of state’s rights. To the other narrative, its imposed extinction was a moral imperative. Consider two geometric planes. Conflict or consensus exists at the line of intersection.

To the Pakistanis, Kashmir represents national identity. The Pakistanis have never believed that the Indians respect their right to be a state. The Indian-backed transition of East Pakistan to Bangladesh represents this to Pakistan. To the Indians, Kashmir represents national identity. If Kashmir leaves India because of religion, why can’t the Sikhs have their own state? Or the Hindus, or the Christians? A multi-ethnic and multi-religious state cannot allow itself to disintegrate along religious lines. The point of intersection is Kashmir, but notice that neither party really sees it as about Kashmir. So the war is about two different things, although at one locus of intersection. How many symbols, how many issues are the same way: competition for scarce resources at a locus of intersection between two very different narratives? Perhaps, in this, is a hope of reconciliation. Rarely is the locus of intersection teleological. Usually the scarce resources at the intersection are instrumental goals, not end goals. The path to a goal is defined by the ‘slice’ of reality you are using. In another slice, different paths to those goals may be possible. Here is the goal of mediation, the hope of reconciliation. If the problem exists at the intersection between two disparate ‘slices,’ perhaps a third slice can be discovered which bypasses the contested instrumental goals to achieve the end goals of the different parties. In order to find this third slice, we return to the Heifitz’s balcony. On the dance floor, your experiences are narrated by the slice that you occupy. Climbing the stairs, we gain understanding of the whole of the situation, and gain a sense of where to slice the situation to reconcile the two parties. We must see the whole to find the right slice, and in order to understand the whole, we must be able to see the whole from many different slices.

Let’s conclude by going back to Philosophy. What implications can we draw from the intersection of transcendence, truth and dimensionality? First, Post-modernism is incomplete. There is a truth, one that is objective, one that will assert itself upon us without concern for our assent or understanding. It is to our benefit to understand that truth to the best of our ability, to move beyond experience to understanding. Understanding and experience are dialectical, they push against each other. New experience can shape our understanding, and understanding can cause us to modulate our actions and hence change our experience. But in forsaking understanding we cannot expect truth to cease to assert itself on experience. Physics doesn’t care. Second, Modernism is incomplete. Modernity straight-lines out our growth of knowledge, assuming that big-P Progress will lead us to a shining utopian future. Discounting the total failure of 20th Century Modernity to create an idyllic future (reference Communism and Fascism,) we see that we cannot truly straight-line progress out forever. Nor can we expect that we will be able, in the thoughts of enlightenment, to wrestle truth to the ground and force it to yield all of its secrets. We must dance with truth. We must pursue it, and it will yield its secrets bit by bit, but when we try to imprison truth, it will slip from between our fingers. In this, Truth images the Creator. In this, we learn humility. We are still children. This is hardly a bad thing. Children still believe in magic, and its amazing how much magic you can find when you start believing in it again.