Ever feel that your life has been a series of zigs and zags? That only rarely has it progressed in a straight line along a single plane?
 
In 1905 Albert Einstein wrote a paper that explained Brownian movement. The movement is a series of zigs and zags of inorganic particles suspended in a liquid. Robert Brown’s experiments in 1828 characterized the microscopic process, but no one explained it until Einstein addressed the problem. Essentially, Einstein explained the zigs and zags as the result of random “pushes” by water molecules or groups of water molecules. If the average motions cancelled one another as molecules bounced off all sides of a small object, such as a pollen grain, then occasionally, there must be a random fluctuation during which those “groups” bang more on one side than on the other side, effecting a net movement. In other words, the statistical average movements that ordinarily does not concentrate an unbalanced push was interrupted by a few renegade molecules.
 
From a skyscraper, you can observe crowds of people as they move to cross busy streets when a “Walk” sign lights up. The crowd moves in a uniform direction but can sometimes be interrupted by a group of people moving counter to the general trend or by a driver who wants to make a turn into the crosswalk. From your high perch, you could observe a zig-zagging in the crowd, the result of that random fluctuation—the group or the driver.
 
That’s your life, isn’t it? You move along doing mostly what it is that you do, moving in a straight line until some random fluctuation—an accident, a denial, an illness, a downsizing, a loss—changes the direction of your movement. Impinged upon, your life then becomes a “Brownian movement.”
 
Immersed in the “sea of life,” in the human medium, you will inevitably experience the impingement caused by some random fluctuation. You, and almost everyone else, including me, might tend to respond negatively to a disruption of stability, to an imposed need to change course. That is probably natural, but there is a way to handle fluctuations emotionally.
 
Although I’m an advocate of anticipating as much as possible (What you anticipate is rarely a problem), I know that random fluctuations are unavoidable. But our lives are more than those temporary zigs and zags; our lives are greater, are characterized by that statistical average. We do make it across most crosswalks without interference. We do move in straight lines for most of our lives.
 
Looking down from a figurative skyscraper onto your life movements in the “sea of humanity” and the media of your career and relationships, what do you see? Have those Brownian zigs and zags become the focus of your memories or has the stability been your focus?
 
Think at the end of the day, “Have my failures really outnumbered my successes? Have the zigs and zags of the day really changed the overall direction of my life? Has a particular zig or zag actually set me on a new straight-line course with opportunities that I would not have experienced had the random fluctuation not occurred?”  

I’m tempted to say, “Quo Vladis,” in a bad pun, but I know where Vladis Kletnieks of Clarkson University is going: Straight to debunk someone’s suggestion that “aliens” might have been responsible for the Big Bang. The question and Kletnieks’s response, posted on Quora (online digest) indicates for me the problem with our educational system. We haven’t as a group been taught to think critically, to weigh rationally, and to prove methodically. Whatever one wants to posit as a “truth” soon becomes a conspiracy and the theory du jour.
 
Here’s the question he addressed: “How plausible is the idea that the Big Bang was caused by an advanced species experimenting with a light speed (infinite energy) engine?” As Vladis asks, “Where was this advanced species living before space and time existed?” As Vladis demands, “So, show us your math.”
 
In the age of unsubstantiated accusations and conspiracies spread at the speed of the Internet, the wildest imaginations distract us and require our taking time to offer refutations and explanations. Apparently, the manner of the day is to take anything that pops into our heads and propose it as the truth.
 
Where are we going? Or, quo vadimus? Big Foot, Ancient Aliens, No Moon Landing, Hollow Earth: Just a small sampling of unhinged “theorists” saying whatever they want.  It doesn’t matter whether or not what is suggested is provable or plausible; it only matters that “it” is said. Saying has become confirming. Asking has become answering. Suggesting has become concluding.
 
So, when Vladis Kletnieks answered the question posted on Quora with some sarcasm, I did not see any cruel intent that would send the questioner into a “safe space.” Kletnieks doesn’t shut down the question without listing the parameters necessary for its truth. He also writes that there is a “total lack of connection between the conjecture and how the first few minutes of the universe unfolded….”
 
The specifics aren’t important here. What is important is that last statement by Kletnieks: “total lack of connection between the conjecture and…” whatever. That seems to be the way of the modern world: No one needs to connect accusation with proof; no one needs to connect conjecture to truth. Anyone can say anything. By the time conjecture courses through the veins of the Web, it becomes the lifeblood of truth.
 
I’ll ask again, “Quo vadimus?”
 
*Quora at https://www.quora.com/
 Question answered July 22, 2019, by Vladis Kletnieks

An attribute of a deity: Omnipresence.
 
Put yourself in the deep past of illiterate humanity, in the past before the first rune. Yes, there appear to have been purposely scratched stones from a time long before rune writing, but an enduring writing system is a relatively recent accomplishment of our species. If some hundred billion of us have inhabited the planet since our origin, imagine how many were illiterate. Many. Most. Almost all.
 
Of course, if we wanted, we could count cave paintings as a form of stationary writing, but in those in situ pictographs is where the significant difference lies: Cave walls were stationary stationery; modern writing travels. Mobile writing, mobile forms of communication are our best bet at achieving an earthly omnipresence that transcends time. 
 
Here you are, a reader, and your reading gives the writer a chance to transcend space and time. But there are limitations because you are probably not a reader of all scripts. And that means that someone writing in “letters” you don’t know can’t be with you at this moment and vice versa. But for anyone who understands the symbols of your language, you are, even in your absence, present in your writing. In loco, “in place,” means any place where you send a letter or text, any place where someone reads what you have written.
 
I bring this up because I have a little familiarity with Greek letters, but no familiarity with Telegu letters. ఠిస్ ఐస్ అం ఎక్సమ్ప్లె అఫ్ వాట్ ఐ మీన్. I believe I wrote “This is an example of what I mean,” but I don’t really know the syntax, so the words might be out of place. Telugu would make sense to millions who write such script, but nothing to those who don’t. To me, for example, who has a pen pal in southeastern India, that script seemed at first glance to be writing from Lord of the Rings or some SciFi film’s alien spaceship: Fictional scribblings. I could admire the free-flowing graceful lines in the script, but only looked on with wonder. Without a translation, both time and place controlled the message.
 
Our modern hubris amazes me, especially when it comes to modern stationary stationery. Consider art, for example, as a form of modern cave writing. If you go to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., you’ll find a broad range of art, some highly representational; others, not so much. Some, even puzzlingly bizarre, and others, so minimalist that one wonders whether or not they were the products of finger-painting infants or the person who manufactured the canvas rather than a painter. Thus, when I see someone sitting and staring at a large canvas with shapeless splashes of color, I wonder whether or not the artist has really transcended space and time. Regardless of what the people in-the-know say they know, there’s a spectacular difference between a simple sentence sent through the mail or over the Internet and non-representational art hanging on a museum wall. The writer of a simple sentence can be present in his or her absence as long as the language is clear and the script legible. Meaning crosses those two barriers of time and space. But non-representational art is a toss-up. It can mean what I want it to mean because there is no clear meaning inherent in the art, regardless of what the art critics say. Pollock’s art might be a set of fractals upon close examination, but so what? Robert Ryman’s “Untitled” has all the traveling meaning of a cement sidewalk, which, by the way, it seems to represent. Rothko’s rectangles of different color could be hung upside down or sideways.  In other words, the artist isn’t as present as the critics say. The art isn’t the artist “in loco” as long as the viewer is free to impose any meaning.
 
Teach the young that they have the ability to be anywhere in the present and everywhere in the future by virtue of what they write. Teach the young that what they say becomes who they are in their absence. Teach them that what they write becomes mobile stationery that might not disappear with time, enduring like the ancient runes and hieroglyphs that someone somewhere might learn to read and then judge by what is written. That might be a lesson all social media users should learn.
 
With an attribute of a deity, you are everywhere now and hence through your words. So, I have one wish for you: May your written expressions always be godlike. 

As I do rather frequently, I read through as many professional articles as I can with a cup of coffee or tea. I read them to find analogs from which I can derive the points of departure I hope my entries on this site provide.

Most professional reports are of no general interest to a simple seeker of knowledge like me, or their specifics are beyond my understanding. I can't, for example and for whatever value to specialists it is worth, find a lesson about life in "Jensen polynomials for the Riemann zeta function and other sequences," published by Michael Griffin, Ken Ono, Larry Rolen, and Don Zagier. * Before I note a point of departure from an article that I did find interesting, I should say that the Griffin, et al., article has merit as evidenced by its being picked up by 13 news outlets, blogged by 3, and tweeted by 35. Obviously, those "in the know" know more than I about the article's value. Occasionally, however, I do read an article that prods my brain because it seems to have a more widespread application than a specialized field of knowledge, maybe even has universal applications. Today, I found an article at NewBeezer online (June 18, 2019) that made me pen this little essay.

Apparently, the citizens of Çatalhöyük (chat-tal-hoo-yook) were rather rough on one another. Living in a city, even an ancient one dating to 9,000 years ago, seemed to engender violence among residents. According to Clark Larsen, the lead author of a study, the people of the city suffered from “infectious diseases, overcrowding, violence, and environmental destruction.” Sound familiar?
 
That familiar sound is echoed in the title: “One of the oldest cities in the world had surprisingly modern problems.” Really. Who’d a thunk it? Humans acting like humans. And get this, “Of 93 skulls analyzed, 25 had evidence of healed fractures. Twelve skulls showed signs of trauma, which was caused several times.” Most of these head injuries were found on the backs of the heads. Makes me think that what I have heard a number of times in Walmart, malls, and grocery stores, is an age-old expression: “I’m gonna hit you upside yer head.” Ah! Civilization. Were the problems of that ancient city really “surprisingly modern”?
 
So, imagine. You’re in Turkey between 7100 and 5950 BC. You’re living “in the city.” Farmers live on the outskirts, just as they do today. You live in crowded quarters on narrow streets without the benefits of modern sewage systems. You bury your dead beneath the floor of your home. You live in Çatalhöyük. And your legacy of urban disease, crime, and violence foreshadows city life thousands of years in your future. Isn’t there some way you can resolve the problems of city life so that people some seven to nine millennia later won’t go through what you go through? Why aren’t you altruistically thinking of twenty-first century urbanites?  
 
Reading about what the archaeologists seem to think portrays life in Çatalhöyük, I’m given to believe that we will never learn the lessons of the past, even if our elders try to teach us by hitting us upside our heads, a disciplinary technique the Çatalhöyükians obviously thought was effective.
 
So, imagine. You’re living in the twenty-first century. Oh! Sorry, you actually are. Will the people of seven to nine millennia hence have the same urban problems? You need to start hitting some of your contemporaries upside their heads. Or, do you have other solutions since, obviously—very obviously—that Çatalhöyükian technique didn’t work?
 
 
* https://www.pnas.org/content/116/23/11103 PNAS, vol. 116, no. 23. June 4, 2019. 11103-11110.

“What occupied your thoughts this morning? Were you focused on yourself, family or friends, local matters associated with the places you inhabit or visit during a typical day, or were you focused on matters distant, matters that for your personal well-being don’t really matter, that is, that don’t really have an immediacy in your life? Were you concerned about that which is peripheral?”
 
“?”
 
“I was thinking of the role of innuendo in our lives. How can I best describe it? Tabloid headlines, for example. You see them in the checkout line at the grocery store; they have a typical lead-in whose promise is belied by the actual story. They thrive on our addiction to innuendo. I suppose what concerns me is that so much of the news is truly just innuendo. Pundit shows thrive on the stuff of innuendo. Those who name-call live by innuendo.
 
“Derived from the Latin for ‘nod,’ innuendo has come to mean an ‘indiscreet suggestion,’ or in the terms of Merriam-Webster, ‘a veiled or equivocal reflection on character or reputation,’ an insinuation. With the power of the all forms of media, innuendo has increased the power of gossip by an order of magnitude (in fact, an immeasurable amount, not just a thousand times). Innuendo pervades society, brings down the mighty and famous, and especially affects political leaders.
 
“I was thinking that I should start a newspaper called The Innuendo, but then, I wouldn’t establish anything new. We can’t blame Gutenberg, but he made widespread innuendo possible. George Washington suffered from innuendo in the press; Thomas Jefferson, too. Why? It’s an easy thing to do. Innuendo is a ‘nod.’ Nods are easy, just a wink or a slight dip of the head can destroy a life while occupying the thoughts of many. As I asked earlier, what occupied your thoughts this morning? Was it something in the news that centered not on irrefutable fact, but rather on innuendo? Did it occur to you that by focusing your thoughts on innuendo, you are doing Nod’s Will?”

I awoke two weeks ago to find fawn sleeping in my backyard. Today I found a mother turkey and her poult in the front yard. A turtle last week. Groundhog. Rabbit. Sundry birds, including hawks, crows, bluebirds, cardinals, and a bunch of little birds I can’t name. Worms and ants in the ground, raccoons, opossum, squirrels, both grey and red, chipmunks, field mice. Plants growing in the gutter. Weeds wherever they want to grow; saplings of maples, tulip poplars, oaks, and hickory. Occasionally, my yard fills with friends and relatives, and maybe even a Jehovah’s witness direct from God to my front door—All telling me that whatever I believe about owning my house and land, I’m living a fiction. My home isn’t really mine. I need to look into the mirror of pride to see the humble being who temporarily occupies the dwelling, trims the plants, and cuts the grass.
 
We might all be guilty of pride at times. It is, after all, the first of sins. The first of weaknesses. Wasn’t it pride behind the Garden of Eden story? Wasn’t it pride Shelley addressed in “Ozymandias,” the poem about the trunkless stone legs in the desert with a boast on the pedestal? Great little verse. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;/Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!/Nothing beside remains….” * Because I believe the human condition is a long-standing one, I assume that the citizens of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey or Tell Qaramel in Syria also had their Ozymandias’ moments eleven or twelve millennia ago.
 
So, I know, that like Ozymandias’ kingdom, someday my home will belong to another human, to other species, or to Nature in general. But in the meantime, I will share my dwelling with, apparently and sometimes involuntarily, the woods and the wild. That’s a humbling lesson.

“I can’t tell you how frustrated I am that after a couple of millennia, no one has effectively resolved Zeno’s paradox. So, I’m asking you, here, now, is space divisible or continuous? Between you and the computer or smart device where these words appear, is there a unified smoothness? Are there units of space?
 
“Does my confusion arise because I always link, but not in an Einsteinian way, space and time. Moving through space always takes me time, and I have a sense that I can divide time into nanoseconds. At any nanosecond or smaller unit, am I stationary in a spot, just the way a photo captures a single position of a runner? Frozen, as we say, in time and in a particular position in space. But that raises another question. What is the runner? If the runner occupies space and space is discontinuous, is the runner a whole? If space is discontinuous, is the runner a series of spatial units that we see as a whole because the brain is trained?
 
“See, I’m not very good at this. If the quantum physicists tell us that there is a foam of virtual particles coming into and going out of existence so that the vacuum of space isn’t really a vacuum, then in the 'position' where any virtual particle comes into existence—is that a unit? What’s with that paradox that keeps the brightest minds from resolving for us commoners what space is?
 
“I think continuum when I think of my life, but I know that a picture of me as a child seems to portray a unit I no longer am. Kindergarten me isn’t adult me. The link is merely one of my memory that imposes continuity of person. But if I impose that continuity on myself, do I not impose continuity on space, also? Then, like looking at that old photograph, is my looking at space an imposition of the brain? Is all movement just a series of saccades? That would make Zeno happy. 
 
“I’ll grant that the divisibility of space doesn’t occupy my mind when I go to the store for bread, milk, and eggs. But in that trip, I am aware that I move in time and space, or that’s what I believe I do. And the trip seems both continuous and disjointed, every traffic light a punctuation mark on smoothness, every transmission shift, also. Any slight hesitation makes a unit.
 
“Common sense tells me that regardless of the paradox, I can reach the store. I don’t see myself going half the distance, half the remaining distance, half that remaining distance, ad infinitum. I get the bread, milk, and eggs, and return. The apparent smoothness of space becomes for me the real smoothness evidence by the completion of my trip.
 
“And yet, I’m still bothered by the possibility that the universe is discontinuous. It’s vegetable soup, not clear broth. And I’m bothered by the quantum foam and the virtual particles. Is space the matrix of matter or matter the matrix of space. Is motion through a continuum the way of the world, or is motion an illusion as Zeno argued?
 
“I just thought I’d bother you with the old problem to make you reassess your inferences and assumptions as you go about your day ‘moving through continuous space’ in measurable units of time. Or, should I say, ‘moving through continuous time’ by crossing measurable units of space?”

What if We Evolved in Space?
 
UP.
 
Incense: Aromatic obviously. Otherwise, what’s the point? Oh! Yes. There is another point. Incense wafts upward toward the heavens, defying gravity, leaving what we know as our Earth-bound, gravitational home.
 
And those touchdown, goal, and homer salutes by players pointing skyward: UP.
 
UP is an important concept, isn’t it? Must have been so from the beginning. Look at where we place most deities. Look at the signs of the Zodiac. Think Heaven and note its position relative to Hell.
 
UP^. Redefining it got Copernicus’ book banned and Galileo into house arrest. Redefining it got Giordano Bruno burned at the stake. The Authority conditioned by centuries of Ptolemaic geocentric thinking just couldn’t tolerate any confusion about UP. God was up; Satan, below. UP was sacred; UP was Heaven: Olympus, Mount Kailash, Mount Meru, and many other sacred mountaintops, also.
 
The whole UP-thing seems understandable in light of our gravitational setting. We have always lived in the well of gravity. For us, UP is any direction that points away from Earth’s center, directions opposite on opposite sides of the sphere. That center is the center for all Earth dwellers. But what if we had evolved freely floating in space. Then what? No UP, of course. No preferred direction to point to after a touchdown, goal, or homer—if we could participate in such or in similar sport in an Up-less world. *
 
Humans without an UP would be different, wouldn’t they?** Think of having no preferred direction. It isn’t just that we evolved in a gravity well, it’s that we evolved with spatial preferences because of that well. We seem to demand a clear spatial orientation, and we superimpose it on other concepts, such as how one should orient a flat map of the world and orient a life.
 
What if there had also been no electromagnetic control on our evolution and cultural development? What would we do if we couldn’t orient ourselves to the field’s poles? Could we have evolved without physical orientation in the complete freedom of space emptied of direction provided by gravitational and electromagnetic fields? Would our thinking have been radically different from what it is today? Obviously.
 
In a directionless world, would we all think we lie “within the deity”? Would we encompass the deity? Or, given a finite body, even one freely floating without a physical orientation, would we still futilely seek a direction—or a charismatic leader.
 
Are all of our orientations, even those centered on affinities for one kind of thinking or another, extensions of our need to find a preferred direction in a world of vectors? And, one more, is our motive “to rise” innate because “down” always encounters a barrier composed of matter that warps into a well the space around it? UP, by contrast, offers limitless freedom, or in the words of John Lennon, “above us only sky.”
 
In the absence of “up” and “down” would we still direct ourselves toward goals? Having evolved in a cosmos of vectors, are humans innately inclined to follow those who “point the way”? Would we still follow charismatic leaders? Is true individualism difficult because  physical forces in the cosmos demand that we follow?  
 
* Earth’s equatorial marker is defined only by the planet’s spinning about a pole. 
**Our bodies might be spherical or blob-like (Fashion would be simple, and catwalks of dieting models unnecessary) and our phylum more like a brainless, gutless xenoturbillida than a vertebrate.

“So, I got to thinking, and, of course, as thinking often does, it raised a question. ‘Do our gregariousness and interdependency reflect our biochemical makeup?’ I asked myself.
 
“Then, I thought, ‘Why did carbon become the basis for life on Earth? Couldn’t silicon have become life’s element just as easily? Same number of valence electrons, I reasoned, and silicon plays an important role in mineral formation, and thus, in organizing crystal structure. Isn’t there a hypothesis that life got its structure on the back of crystal growth, mimicking the crystal pattern? But then there’s the ease with which carbon forms long chains of molecules with relatively little expenditure of energy. Energy expense associated with acquisition and use, as we all know from the cost of running vehicles and air conditioning houses, is the chief control on our physical lives. Energy efficiency seems to be built into our basic physical nature.’
 
“I continued this way, ‘Does that physical nature extend to our forming ideological blocks? Easy-to-form long chains of atoms appear to be a model for our social thinking. Long chains of like-mindedness are the molecules of today’s extended groups. We tend, I believe, to find security in common thinking because requires the least energy. We become just another link in the chain. And nowhere is this more evident than in politics, religion, and public media when groups of people vary little from commonly held thinking. The carbon of thought is any ideology that forms social chains. Thus, in a way, group thinking is lazy thinking because like a carbon chain it requires relatively little energy. When little effort is required, little effort is made.’”
 
“Where do you come up with this stuff?” you ask. “You remind me of Heraclitus in a way.”
 
“What way is that?”
 
“Well, actually, not just Heraclitus, but almost all the early Greek philosophers. They wanted to somehow tie the physical world to the nonphysical one. Heraclitus talked about the ‘Logos’ and seemed to suggest it was ‘the mind of god,’ but then he threw in the Eternal Fire as the primary ‘element,’ the stuff from which all stuff originates. Like those other early philosophers, he seemed to desire an explanation of the world that derived from something tangible. So, maybe he didn’t fully work out the details since he left only fragments of his thought, or maybe he did, but we just don’t have the appropriate fragments. Nevertheless, even his ‘Logos’ appears to have been part of this world. One wonders whether or not St. John used that thought when he said, ‘In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word (Logos) was with God, and the Word (Logos) was God, and nothing was made that was not made through the Word (Logos).’
 
“And you occasionally blog something similar with your analogies. Are you saying that we are carbon chains writ large? That we are our atoms come together on another level, an intangible level of existence? Are you trying to connect what we are in part to what we are in whole? Certainly, you aren’t very Gestalt-ish in that. Isn’t the whole in Gestalt greater than the sum of its parts? When you say we are manifestations of our atomic parts, you seem to limit us to some Heraclitean-like and ancient-Greek-like notion that ties what we are physically to what we are not-physically. (I hesitate to say ‘spiritually’ because I’m not sure that I can define that term). Anyway, If you want to use carbon chains as analogs of social chains, I guess that’s all right. I just think that you aren’t aware that this tying of physical nature to ‘spiritual’ nature or psychological nature isn’t new. And it’s been tried not just in ancient times, but also in our own era. Think Deepak Chopra. We are driven by our senses and experience to think in terms of the physical.”
 
“Well, how else are we going to describe or explain the indescribable and inexplicable? Why did Heraclitus use fire? Why did the others choose ‘earth,’ ‘air,’ and ‘water’ as the basic substances of existence? When you look at philosophers’ works, you will often find that many of them venture into biochemistry. Many look for analogies in the physical world. Twenty-five centuries of philosophizing, and where are we today? Still making some attempt to explain who we are in terms of what we are. Mind-body duality, right? There are even those who want to apply quantum mechanics to human behavior and thought. Strange, indeed, since the quantum world isn’t one that we can directly experience. Yes, I know people like Deepak Chopra and others, including me in a couple of postings at this website, look for some underlying truth about humanity in the weird world of subatomic particles, but really, wouldn’t that entail some sequence of actions that relates the tiniest particle in your makeup to your behavior?
 
“Here’s an idea. What if the ancient Greeks knew about Maxwell’s equations? Would they have made electromagnetism one of the fundamental elements, the Fifth Element, so to speak?
 
“It just seems to me that in all our philosophizing we’ve lost the central truth: That humans cannot yet define existence and explain human behavior to everyone’s satisfaction, and that includes both our gregariousness and interdependency. Sure, we can give psychological reasons, but we always come back to the question ‘Isn’t there something deeper?’ The only way we can have a meaningful conversation about our intangible world is to refer to something tangible. Go ahead, try. Try to explain your emotions, your intuitions, your philosophy without eventually drawing some physical analog. How does the mind work? And if it is independent ‘in’ everyone, why are so many dependent on a ‘common mind,’ on ‘group think’? The question requires a ‘mechanism’ in the answer. How does morality work? Or, in the instance of mob violence and group hallucinations, how does the connection among individuals occur? What’s the ‘carbon’ that links one to the others? Do morality and immorality lie in group connections? What’s the ‘logos’ at work in the social world of every generation’s groups?
 
“More importantly, what’s the ‘logos’ at work in the social ‘carbon’ chain in which you participate? Are you driven toward group think because you are a carbon-based life-form?”
 
You say, “I’ll think about it.”
 
I reply, “Just make sure that your thinking isn’t an extension of some long chain.” 

“Certainly, my surety isn’t inviolable. It always starts with some assumption. And as I’ve asked you elsewhere, ‘Are you sure you’re sure?’ Sometimes I say I’m sure, but deep-down doubt surfaces because I can’t be certain that I have considered all alternatives. Plus, I know that I arrive at surety through only two avenues. The first is belief. The second is reason. And there seems to be a strange and unavoidable connection between the two: Both require our inserting meaning as well as deriving meaning. Let me ramble a bit.  
 
“We all ‘know’ the inexplicable through belief. Reason handles the rest, that is, the explicable. Yet, reason rests on the unreasonable, on some assumption, and formal reason rests on axioms like those of geometry. And although scientists argue that what they do is deductive, ultimately, because they cannot know if they have covered all alternatives, they, too, rely on inductive thinking, belief that the specifics sum to the general. What if theorems that are supposed to verify the axioms are incomplete? Quantum physicists, for example, have deduced the Standard Model that appears to ‘explain It all,’ but they leave open the possibility that some new discovery at CERN might reveal a family of new phenomena (particles) that will change the Standard Model. Scientists (I’m generalizing, of course) also argue that there’s a big difference between belief and reason, between what they do, for example, and what religious leaders do. Both, however, arrive at working explanations of the world. In living our complex daily lives, we might argue that whatever works works. Someone can go through life happily on the ground of belief rather than on the ground of science though pretty much everyone uses both belief and reason to get through a day. When we exit the bed in the morning, we infer that the floor will not collapse beneath us. We infer because we reason that the structure of the floor is logically designed to hold our weight and because years of experience guide us to conclude inductively that this morning the floor will be no different from what it was on the previous morning. We’ve experimented over a lifetime, and we believe we have discovered and understand the way the world of floors works.  
 
“You—you don’t mind my calling you you, do you?—are likely saying, ‘There’s nothing new in this.’ And you would be right. Nagel and Newman put it this way, ‘Inductive considerations can show no more than that the axioms are plausible or probably true’ (19). * I suppose what we look for in living our lives is consistency. Consistency removes the unexpected and lends meaning to the world. It would be a heck of a surprise if the sun didn’t rise tomorrow, if we didn’t ‘stick’ to the ground because of gravity, and if the oxygen content of the atmosphere dropped from 20.99% to 15%.
 
“I just have to quote Nagel and Newman again: ‘In…attempts to solve the problem of consistency there is one persistent source of difficulty. It lies in the fact that the axioms are interpreted by models composed of an infinite number of elements. This makes it impossible to encompass the models in a finite number of observations; hence the truth of the axioms themselves is subject to doubt’ (20). **
 
“So, you, if you are a ‘believer,’ you woke up this morning with a set of beliefs by which you will operate throughout your day. As long as everything runs consistently, you’ll be happy; life will be good; you will be successful. After all, didn’t those beliefs work for you yesterday? Hasn’t experience taught you that they work? Sure, that’s inductive reasoning on your part, but you have as yet to encounter that exception, that ‘new particle’ in your personal Large Hadron Collider. And that works for you even if you are a nonbeliever, a hardcore skeptic, even a hardcore atheist bent on waging war against ‘foolish’ believers. Hardcore nonbelievers also awake with beliefs.
 
“Believing is an inescapable part of being human. No finite being, as Nagel and Newman suggest, has an infinite amount of time or space to find that special exception. For all of us, what works, works until it doesn’t work.
 
“We can refine our refining ad infinitum, never reaching some inviolable Ultimate. Think Democritus and Leucippus and the concept of the indivisible, that is, the atom. Then think nucleons, quarks, strings, and…. And on the other end of the scale, think planet, Solar System, galaxy, the ‘estimated’ two trillion galaxies, other universes, and…. We really do rely on belief.
 
“The skeptic is right to search through reason for consistency, but is the skeptic ‘more right’ than the believer? And if the believer dismisses the musings of the skeptic as inconsistent with the axioms or tenets of belief, is there any substance to the dismissal? Certainly, dismissals of others’ thinking can vary even among largely like-minded believers.
 
“Maybe all of us just want consistency, and getting it is a personal matter. Intellectually, we’re like ancient dwellers of rock shelters and caves. Emerging, though necessary for acquiring food for thought, means facing the unknown, some wolf of doubt or contradiction.
 
“Early on, did you have the same difficulty I had with multiplication tables? With any system of abstract symbols? Think, 2 + 2. But what? Sure, now as an adult with years of experience with things that come in twos, you have no difficulty, but at the outset, 2 + 2 and 2 X 2 make up a meaningless set of symbols. You have to provide some meaning for the symbols, apples for example. Yet, in every math text book, we can see practice problems that employ only the symbols sans some associated object or process. Any calculus, any system of symbols, is meaningless, though consistent. Yet, we accept the calculus as meaningful precisely because it is self-consistent. It works as it—and only it—can work. Another calculus does the same as long as it is self-consistent. As the editor of Nagel and Newman’s book notes, you can give your car a pet name, but the machine works without any designation (27). ***
 
“Believers have a calculus of one kind, and nonbelievers have a different kind. We can name the calculi as we wish and furnish their symbols with meaning often without acknowledging that they serve the same purpose in different ways: They provide the consistency we all seek.”
 
*Nagel, Ernest and James R. Newman, Gödel’s Proof, Revised Ed., edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter. New York University Press, New York, 2001.
**The same
***The same