Let me repeat that : reality does not make sense.

But we act like it does.

Maybe he have no choice. I have spoken before about how the human must always assume that it has enough information to make a decision because decisions have to be made if we are to survive. It’s part of the price we pay for having eaten the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and become sentient.

Animal do not have to make a lot of decisions. They just follow instinct.

Where this need to assume we have sufficient knowledge falls down, though, is when it comes into conflict with reason and science.

And I am not speaking of the obvious conflicts like the one between science and religious dogma, or science and entrenched prejudice. Those are a fish of an entirely different barrel and involve a different set of variable.

What I am talking about is how reason and science themselves tend to assume they know everything and how easily that turns reason on its head and becomes merely another set of prejudices perpetrated by people who say they “know enough”.

It was a Heinlein story that put me on to this subject. It’s a story called “Life-Line”, and it tells the tell of a brilliant scientist named Pinero who invents a machine that can measure how long a person’s life line – the line their life makes through time – and thus predict the exact moment of their death.

You can imagine the Twilight Zone possibilities that unleashes.

The story opens with Pinero trying to convince an august assembly of respected scientists that his invention works, and of course, they refuse to even listen to him because, as one of them says of Pinero;s work, “even a schoolboy can see that these ideas are preposterous to the point of being laughable”.

Or something like that.

And that, plus a few other things, got me thinking about that particular form of human stupidity. In the story, these supposed men of science have substituted their prejudiced sense of the absurd for actual rational thought, and enjoy a round of a very ugly and extremely unscientific round of self-congratulation at Pinero’s expense.

These men^[1] were not in any sense thinking logically or rationally. A sense of the absurd is not a rational thought process. Practically every major invention or discovery was thought ludicrous by the establishment at the beginning.

Leading scientists mocked the idea of heavier than air flying machines right up until the Wright brothers made it work. Quantum physics was a subject derided by no less a light than Einstein, even though the mathematics clearly proved them true. People laughed at the idea that you could cure mental illness just by talking to them until the number of patients cured by Freud and his disciples grew too large to ignore.

I mean, how would this “talking cure” even work? Do the words Freud speaks somehow contain vibrations that cure the patient’s brain like a magic spell? Ridiculous.

But science and reason are not concerned with absurdity because it has no direct bearing on truth. All that matters is evidence, whether you’re a nuclear physicist, a historical scholar, or the world’s foremost expert on North Korean beer. The scientific method is simple and clear and at no point does it say “you can skip all of this if the theory being tested makes you laugh”.

Like my hero, Gus Grissom from the show CSI, says, “people lie but the evidence never does”. There is no rationally acceptable reason to a priori reject any postulate, no matter how absurd it seems, without rationally examining it.

Even something very close to rationality, namely testing to see if the postulate conflicts with what we already know, cannot be relied upon. What we already know might be wrong.  The only truly rational method is to test the theory.

There are practical limitations to how many theories we can hope to test, and by that measure we can declare some possibilities to be too remote to be worth spending money on testing, but that is a practical concern, not a rational one. And in a world where doing science at home has never been easier (what with all the cool, consumer-level sensors and such), that barrier is lowering day by day.

The closest non-reasoning method to actual reason is whether or not something “makes sense” to us. That does a very good impression of being actual thinking, but it is nevertheless irrational. Reality is not confined by what makes sense to humans, let alone what makes sense to individual humans. There is actually no correlation between what makes sense to us and what is true. There is no guarantee that we will never discover things that make no sense to us at all and yet are demonstrably true.

Take my favorite example, the fact that we now know that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating. It’s expanding faster that it was when we first starting measuring these sorts of things and nobody has the slightest idea why.

And that plainly makes no sense according to what we already know. On that basis alone, I assume a lot of people rejected the evidence when it first came out. Some probably still do. It flies in the face of a century of astrophysics. Big Bang? Bangs don’t accelerate.

It makes no sense, and yet it’s demonstrably true. And when that happens, the only intellectually honest thing to do is change your ideas. You thought some things that turn out not to be true, and that means that you must stop believing them no matter whether you feel like it (or up to it) or not.

And if you refuse to do so, you are thereby excusing yourself from rational discourse and the company of adults.

Go play with the other infants at the kiddie table!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.