Deterministic machines set out in a probabilistic world

How humans cope with their innate determinism

Are you human? If you’re reading this article, then I’m guessing you are. On the off chance you’re a crawler, then you’re in a for a treat.

Humans… what delicate machines. We’re biologically wired for certain things, evolved for certain functions. Survival and replication are all there is to it. But, somehow, we’re so much more, we’ve evolved for so much more.

If you live, like really live, then you’ll certainly know that we’re not the rational agents we aspire to be; we’re full of emotions that govern us, we’re then left on their mercy.

We get to exercise our rationality, but it seems to only do so much. We’re always rationalizing — a part of our brain is made to do just that. I mean just look at Gazzaniga’s split-brain experiments.

And, now, there’s only one important question we can ask: can we ever communicate what’s on our minds?

There are two sides to every word we speak: the universal and the personal. Truth and truthfulness — the two basic ingredients of human communication.

Truth is objective truth — it appears to all of us in the same way. It mainly hurts, but it always stands. Can we ever know it? Well, that’s a question for epistemology. Personally, I believe we can get close to it, but we can never touch it, just like f(x) = 1/x never touches the axises.

Truthfulness is subjective truth — everyone has one. It’s what we believe to be true, depending on our personal conditioning, our beliefs and values, and, last but not least, our goals. Since we’re selfish and rationalizing creatures, what value does truthfulness have? We can basically replace truthfulness with personal and self-serving truisms that we abide by, just so we seem more virtuous and more reasonable to others.

We humans are not made for truth; we’re made for truthfulness. That’s what reasoning is created for. There is no rationality, no rational agents; we’re just deterministic machines that have social functions with rationalizing features.

We’ve evolved in social environments, where there is a hierarchy. So it pays to know your and others’ place in the hierarchy — you have know to everyone’s value, in order to survive. That’s the reason we evolved reason for, because it’s the best social value assessment tool.

Looking into physics, specifically quantum physics, we understand that the world is governed by probability. We may not see it since we’ve evolved a macro-outlook, but it’s there. Human relations are probabilistic, there is no algorithm we can follow.

So how do we, humans, cope with this universe-governing force?

We do what we do best — we bathe in ignorance. We can’t even accept that we don’t deal with truths; that we deal with truthfulness. We navigate the world with self-serving glasses, made out of a biased frame. And you know what? Even if we know that we’re fine with that.

We live in a society that puts reason on a pedestal, never acknowledging our emotional nature. This causes all the breakdowns of communication. But we’re certainly not bothered by it; we continue forward like nothing’s amiss.

You may be wondering if there’s a solution for this… I certainly hope that you are. Truthfulness is, there is — it just happens to hurt a lot, just like truth.

Do you ever doubt yourself? Not in the low self-confidence sense; in the entertaining-the-thought-you-might-be-wrong sense. Does the “maybe I’m wrong on this one” thought ever arise in your self-serving consciousness? Do you ever give the benefit of the doubt to people who say things that appear painful to you?

No signal is ever comprised wholly of noise; no-one is ever 100% wrong. Think about that, and let that signal sink in.

Now, that’s how we SHOULD cope with the world.

Don’t offload the cognitive complexity to your in-group — to the group of people you let define who you are. Truth, besides painful, is hard to see, hard to touch, and hard to hear. It doesn’t come easy; you must fight for it.

But, sadly, truth is the only road to betterment, to ascending to something much better than your current situation. Do you even want that? Leave your own truthfulness aside and ask yourself honestly… truly.

Wake up from your selfish and ego-inflating slumber; it’s time to deal with probability, to become a better deterministic machine, a better human being.

Live boldly and, more importantly, live truly.