Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Understanding Uncertainty

It is only human to be scared of the unknown.

Thus ventures the mental gymnastics of the species, steadily categorizing new experiences, expanding the forefront of human knowledge, rigorously explaining and correlating all that we know.

And yet we still find ourselves on the brink of uncertainty daily. The presence of human errors lead to the unpredictability of life, and the fear of the unknown that lies behind it.

It is this fear that drives people to believe in religion, that there is a quintessential need for someone to take care of the race as a whole, to guide us towards a higher purpose. That there is something for us after we pass, something for us to look forward to. It makes the darkness of death a little brighter by placing a little light at the end of the tunnel.

It is uncertainty that drives us as a species to explore every single facet of this existence we know as life. We are creatures that abhor entropy, the disorderliness of the system in which we exist in, and it is ironic that in our struggle to form order, we introduce even greater disorder on a microscopic scale.

We live each day with the same fundamental rules - The sun rises in the east, we breathe and awaken, we eat and move and talk. We know intrinsically how to do these certain actions, we know intrinsically how the world works as a whole.

But closed are the minds of men and the ways of people, for these are the vagaries of the human race.

We strive each day to place new order in our lives, and to define rigidly the boundaries and barriers that we have placed. We search for new rules and new ways to intepret the data that we are presented with.

But what if the answer is not one that we are searching for?

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