In Search of Certainty

Chapter 7. Seeing Is Disbelieving: How to explain what we see and make use of it

“What you see is what you get.” (WYSIWYG)

Design principle for word processing

Western culture is obsessed with notions of right and wrong, true or false, black and white. We want answers to questions, and we want those answers as clear, contrasting absolutes. We criticize vagaries and muddle, imprecision and nebulousness, at the very same time as we are all guilty of all of these things at a fundamental level, and even depend on them for survival. As every writer, teacher and editor knows, clarity and simplicity are no mean feats; and as every engineer or designer knows, ‘good enough’ is the only way to build for survival in a noisy environment. Clarity and robustness are conflicting interests.

Still we strive for such clarity, because it seems to lead to certainty, and that is a valued commodity. Perhaps we are afraid of the future, perhaps we are merely spoilt in an information-rich age; whatever the reason, we are apt to draw a line and paradoxically demand: don’t give me details, just tell me yes or no! Certainty is about a desire for predictability, about a desire to know.

These tendencies all bear further inspection. The natural world does not want to be shoe-horned into bi-polar categories of this kind, at least not at the scales of human interaction. There are few, if any, questions to which the honest answer is “yes” or “no”, or “true” or “false”, and those questions which can be answered in such ...