Face it; certainty is difficult to acquire. Yet, we deem ourselves certain, mostly in a few natural “laws,” such as “time’s arrow” that prevents us from going into the past, the Newtonian forces for which we must spend energy and treasure, and the biochemistry that governs our health. In our daily social and psychological realities we accept ambiguity. We have to accept ambiguity with regard to most communication and “understanding” with others and, yes, with ourselves. We can’t wait around for the Incontrovertible in most of our dealings; we’d have to wait forever, and we just don’t have the time, so we accept others and our own assurances that whatever “that” is, it’s “good enough” for us to get by. We find ourselves “sharing” feelings and goals as much as is “humanly” possible. But we can never really know that what we believe we are sharing is exactly what someone else is sharing with us. 
 
Speaking of the temporal flow, time’s arrow and our finiteness, reminds me that it’s time for an inventory of all you accept as certain. I’m the one who has to point this out, just as others have to point it out for me. Otherwise, I’ll operate in supposed certainty. What do I really find to be certain? 
 
See, here’s our mutual problem. Because we are creatures of language, we tend to live by symbols, by the interpretation of symbols, or representations. Ambiguity comes from our reliance on interpreting symbols. Oh! Yes. We can say that some symbols are unambiguous, such as those mathematicians will tell us are not open for “interpretation,” not open for debate. They will tell us that “their” symbols interpret the world incontrovertibly and exclusively, though math is all about relationships, and, as I have written before, doesn’t have to symbolize anything other than relationship. Having incontrovertible certainty (is this redundant?) with respect to human relationships isn’t very easy; we even seem to have difficulty defining the relationship between the Unconscious and the Conscious in our own being. 
 
Imagine being able to put your own being in a formula. You know, constructing the Math of Self. The project would take your lifetime, sort of like Einstein still trying to figure out the Grand Unified Theory on his deathbed. But unlike Einstein’s problem, yours would be even greater because just as you believe you have achieved that moment of epiphany, that revelation will pass into uselessness because of time’s arrow, because, in continuing to live, you will continue to add internal and external relationships that will be both expected and unexpected: “Gee, I never felt this way.” Or “Gee, I never thought of that.” Or even, “Gee, I can’t believe….”
 
Don’t fret—I’m assuming you are—because everyone around you has some level of uncertainty, and everyone—well, not everyone—accepts personal and interpersonal ambiguity as normal, decides it’s okay to live with it because there’s not enough time to be “incontrovertibly certain,” and then simply moves on. Maybe the obsessive-compulsives among us don’t, but you’re not that, are you?
 
So, once again, I’ll remind you that it’s time for that inventory we all need to make. Ask now, “What do I find to be certain in my life?”

Think I'll give you a break. You're becoming addicted, and I'm the enabler. I've written nearly 1,000 blogs for this site so far, some of them not very good; others, relatively good; all in an attempt to get you thinking, even in disagreement. So, you can, if you want, read through past blogs you might have missed, or you can wait until I post another blog in mid-August. And don't forget to look skyward for the meteor shower this week. A single streaking flash of light from an isolated celestial sand grain can provide you with a point of departure for your next insight. 

The Wichita Eagle  ran a story about Texas A&M senior Makenzie Alexis Noland.* No big deal, one might think; just another college senior. The accompanying picture tells another story; it shows Makenzie in the water next to a 13-foot alligator named Big Tex. I’m not sure what Makenzie learned in college, but her graduation picture with the alligator makes me think—very little. 
 
Oh! Sure. She had an internship and worked with the alligator, getting to know him. “It’s something I’m super proud of.”* “It took him a few weeks for him to like me.” Am I missing something I should have learned in college? I thought I learned that wild animals can be unpredictable, just as Siegfried and Roy’s white tiger Montecore unpredictably attacked Roy on stage in Las Vegas. 
 
At the same time that I read the story of Makenzie, I was aware of another college-age girl, Mollie Tibbetts and a different story. Mollie is missing at the time of this writing. Her parents, relatives, and friends are distraught. It could be a tragedy in the making. 
 
So, Makenzie. There you are, in good health, smiling, wearing your mortar board and putting a finger on the nose of a 1,000-pound beast. Cute scene, right? Something different for a graduation picture. Viral image. 
 
See the contrast. One girl possibly in danger from a kidnapper or maybe from a disorienting fall—no one knows at the time of this writing—and another girl putting herself in jeopardy regardless of what she believes she knows about a giant beast.
 
Fact: Earth does have beasts, intentional ones and unintentional ones. Both are, at certain times and certain places more likely to strike. Think the Crocodile Hunter. Dead because of a close encounter of his own making with a stingray. And Makenzie? Okay, she’s gotten away with it, but if we know anything about brains, we know that deep inside all of us is that “reptilian” brain, and that same part of the brain is practically all a crocodile has. It is a beast by nature. Makenzie the new college graduate? Isn’t she supposed to be equipped not only with a more complex brain and because of her education a more complex understanding of animal and human behavior? 
 
Know any Makenzies? Think you can convince them that unnecessary risk can end very badly? Probably not. We all take risks. I take them; you do. We pass through the yellow light. We exceed a safe speed at times—if only, officer, ever so briefly. Texting while driving? Taking a selfie near a cliff or a wild animal (Hey! Did you see the video of the guy that taunted a bison in a national park? Have you seen the many other videos of bad encounters between people and wild animals?) Running with the bulls? Traveling by air? By sea in hurricane season? Going into a cavern with your soccer team just when rains can flood the cavern? (Yeah! But those boys in Thailand got out safely. True, but one of the rescuers died) Chance imposes some risks. We apparently choose others. And true, we survive many of those risks. But touching and kissing a crocodile? 
 
Big Tex has been around humans for a long time. He seems gentle, but he still needs to eat, and regardless of the schedule the zoo keeps, no one knows when that reptilian brain might send the animal lunging forward or sideways, mouth agape, big teeth grabbing onto the nearest “food.”
 
Mollie and Makenzie. One not seeking risk; one seeking it. Ironically, the latter is safe and sound in the arms of her friends and family.  
 
*Alanis, Kaitlyn. Senior takes graduation photos with one of her ‘best friends’—a giant Texas gator. The Wichita Eagle. August 6, 2018. 

Because we seem to be imbued with insatiable desire, we seek something “more” to every aspect of life. Because we are a creative species, we fiddle with things, rework stuff, and make new stuff in attempts to satisfy desire. 
 
Every invention has consequences. The materials from which it is made have to come from somewhere. Someone has to reshape or build the raw materials. Someone applies the invention to some process. Through all of an invention’s phases, other inventors see whether or not they can make improvements or find new applications.  
 
Sometimes inventors don’t account for their inventions’ ramifications. In 1589 Sir John Harington invented a flush toilet. Great, right? Problem was, the “flush” had nowhere to go. Conveniences are not always what they at first seem to be. People had to hand carry in buckets the product of Harington’s invention. In the countryside estate of John Harington, the “product” of his john benefited the crops. In a city without a sewage system, the invention… well, you can imagine, if you wish, the problem.
 
As we invent and reinvent our lives, we sometimes fail to account for the ramifications of fulfilling our needs and desires. Every human action has a product of some kind. Should we ask others to dispose of whatever we produce but do not want?

​The next time something doesn’t fit your worldview, you get the chance to start anew, to rediscover the world you thought you once knew well. 

Presumption has a dual character and performs a dual function in personal universes. It underlies both hope and hopelessness. You awoke this morning with both stated and unstated goals. Maybe on another morning, you had no desire to live the day. In both instances, you presumed. 
 
“Huh?”
 
You might, for example, ask yourself why suicide was called the “unforgivable sin” in the Middle Ages? 
 
“No,” you say, “I get it. In the Christian tradition, suicide represents an extreme manifestation of hopelessness, that there is ‘no way out’ of a dilemma, that life can only continue as it is or get worse. I get it. It’s a matter of presumption. No one, in this kind of thinking, not even God, can come to the rescue. For Christians, it defines the most negative presumption, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the sin of Pride. Pride makes a fallen Adam and Eve, both seeking equality with God to self-determine what is Good or Evil, to make a universe in their own image, to declare power over life itself. The presumptive, the prideful, say, ‘It is I who determine. It is I who state what is and what can or cannot be.’”
 
Yes, it’s presumption that allows us to say, for better or for worse, what the nature of our immediate and distant futures are. We set out to get a high school diploma, maybe to get a certificate for a skill, or for a set of academic degrees, all with the idea that ‘in the future’ we will be such-n-such, have such-n-such, and do such-n-such. Hope is the product of such presumption. But at every setback, there lies that other side of presumption, the side that says, “There is no hope.”
 
You interject, “Again, no. Sometimes external forces eliminate the possibility of fulfilling hope. Chance alone plays a role in thwarting whether or not we continue doing something. Maybe the line for a particular job is just too long when we get there and the applicants just too numerous. It isn’t always presumption that keeps one from achieving all goals. At times, a stark realism sets in as we see possibilities dwindle and disappear.”
 
But presumption is always in the background, and its dark side is pride and its potential to engender hopelessness. Think the American legal system, for example, where “presumption of innocence” plays a key role. The whole “justice is blind” principle is based on excluding negative presumption. For those who defend themselves and others, presumption serves as the base of a legal defense. If there’s no hope of winning or of manipulating the outcome, why enter the arena of justice? 
 
And back to suicide: You can see that regardless of religious beliefs, people who don’t commit suicide say the act is one of extreme presumption, that the actor proclaims ultimate control over life and takes the place of any deity. And for those who believe in God, the actor, in committing suicide, announces by the act that even if there is a God, then that God is what the Deists of the eighteenth century acknowledged. He made the “clock” we call the universe, wound it up, and started its ticking before abandoning the mechanism to a determined unfolding of time and events. The act presumes no Providence, no intervening, and no need for prayer. How else do we characterize such a final, such an irrevocable, act like suicide?
 
But putting the notion of suicide aside, think of daily suicides that don’t involve life itself, but those events in life, things once hoped for and then abandoned, swallowed by the Black Hole of Negative Presumption because we might have decided the future of our personal universe. Everyone’s universe has at least some small black holes down which individual hopes, if not HOPE itself, can vanish. There’s a necessity in all of us to steer ourselves around the gravity of such holes before we get too close to escape. 
 
And that’s a problem because presumption, which gives us energy to steer our course and avoid such bottomless pits also robs us of that energy by playing that dual role. We’re like quantum physicists that recognize the duality of light as wave and particle. The physicists that followed Niels Bohr and his Copenhagen Interpretation noted that it isn’t until we make an observation that light’s character as particle or wave is identifiable. And for us, it isn’t until we make the measurement of our lives that we recognize the character of our presumption as one of continuing wavelike hope, or discrete particles that smash into a black surface of hopelessness. 
 
If I could make that determined world of the deists, my “clock” would have wound into it the wavelike presumption that underlies hope. Yes, it is contradictory. How could one have both a determined universe and hopeful inhabitants. If every event is determined, then despair, the act of Pride, is inevitable. Okay, I wouldn’t make a very good “God.” I admit that. Every universe I would create would have flaws. I could not, as Pangloss says in Voltaire’s Candide, make the “best of all possible worlds.” Nevertheless, I would still impose a wavelike presumption of hope and eliminate the particles of hopelessness that interfere with the search to reach goals that keeps all of us from committing something like that final, irrevocable act in the Black Hole of Suicide. 
 
And if you were such a deity, would you incorporate presumption in your creation? What would a world without presumption look like? You might say, “That’s not even possible.” But remember, you are the deity, and you get to make your world. Does it include wavelike hope on the sea of life, or individual particles of hopelessness? Both? If the latter, then we’re back to a mysterious duality that can drive us equally to successes or losses. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”
 
“I said you can see by the Bishop’s escutcheon that he has a particular set of devotions.”
 
“Whoa! A bishop has a shield? What’s with that?”
 
“Well, it’s just a symbol holder, a way of saying what is of core importance. The practice goes back centuries into heraldic times. Knights and nobles stuff. Can’t just have a plain shield. It would be like having a bumper without a bumper sticker or a business without a sign. Gotta tell people what you are in essence, what is important to you, and what you want to project about yourself.”
 
“Oh! I get it. Tagline. Some short way of introducing yourself. The stuff we see on Twitter IDs.”
 
“Yes, see, lots of people, not just knights, nobles, and bishops, have either actual or virtual escutcheons.”
 
“What’s on yours?”

If you are a regular visitor to this website, you'll know that every so often I repost a blog I had removed. Here's another such reposted blog.

Worth Noting
 
How you view 1903 is worth noting. Here, according to historyorb.com, are some events that occurred in 1903:
 
January:         Houdini shows he can escape from an Amsterdam prison.
                       President Roosevelt closes Indianola, Mississippi's post office when it won’t accept its appointed postmistress 
                      because she is African-American
February:       Bruckner’s Ninth Symfonie plays in Vienna.
                        Temperature drops to -59 degrees Fahrenheit in Minnesota.
                        The White Star Line launches the RMS Republic.
March:            Niagara Falls suffers a drought.
                        The French government dissolves the Catholic religious orders.
                        Ottawa beats Montreal in 2 Stanley Cup games.
April:              The Kishinev pogrom begins in Bessarabia, causing many Jews to migrate.
                        Dr. Plotz discovers a typhoid vaccine.
May:                King Edward VII signs an agreement to normalize Anglo-French relations.                   
June:               Pepsi Cola forms.
                        Henry Ford starts his corporation.
July:                Dr. Jackson completes the first automobile transit of the USA.
August:           Joe Pulitzer inaugurates the prizes named after him.
                       New Zealand’s All Blacks play their first Rugby Test Match and win.
September:    The Boston Pilgrims win the American League championship.
October:         Emmeline Pankhurst forms The Women’s Social and Political Union.
November:     Panama separates from Colombia as rebels declare independence.
                        FDR and Eleanor get engaged.
December:      The Wright brothers make their famous first flight.
                        In Chicago, 602 people die in a theater fire.
                        Marie Curie wins the Nobel Prize for physics.
 
Of course, more than those events occurred in 1903, but I chose a group to make a point. If you look over the major events of the year, some will seem to be more important to you because of your own predisposition. You have a set of values and priorities. The May launch of the RMS Republic, for example, might not seem worth noting. If I gave the list for 1912, however, you would note well the launching of another White Star Line ship, the Titanic. Yet, the Republic, a ship that catered to the rich, was also lost at sea just a half dozen years after its launch. Why didn’t the ship’s launching catch your eye? During its sinking the radio operator used a Marconi wireless to send its SOS, the first such use of the wireless radio, and one that saved lives on the “Millionaires’ Ship.”
 
So, what on the list caught your eye? Whatever caught your eye says something about your interests, your knowledge, your empathy, and your teachers, including those who imbued you with biases and told you “what is important.” Reread the list. What does your reading tell you about yourself?

Quartz India online has a report on “antinatalism” and “antinatalists” in India.* Reem Khokhar writes that she is 38, has been married for 13 years, and has no desire to have children. Her motto is “hum do, hamare do” (“we two, ours two”), basically two people who don’t intend to increase the human population. She writes, “My reasons are not unusual.” Then she enumerates, “parenthood is not for everyone; raising a child is a huge financial and emotional investment; the compromise and commitment required is enormous; and my husband and I find fulfillment in many other ways.” Finally, she gives what seems to be her primary reason:
 
“This is not a world into which I want to bring a child.”
 
The logical response to this is, “Then, what world?” Was Reem brought into a “better world”?
 
Okay, I get it. She is upset that there is a strain on water supplies, forests, and, to her thinking, atmosphere. So, to support her thesis that this world isn’t conducive to an expanding population, she cites a number of antinatalists, all of them pessimists. Understandable, of course. She is centering her argument on India, and says that “Cities like Delhi and Bengaluru will run out of water in two years.” All the antinatalists she quotes seem to have the same opinion, such as that of Zoe Jose, who says, “I believe I have no right to bring a child into this world when they have no choice in the matter and then force them with societal expectations and burdens…in an already overpopulated and polluted country like ours.” Zoe believes that “bringing a child into this world” will make matters worse. Wait! Did I hear Zoe correctly? Was there ever a child who had a “choice in the matter”? If I remember my own beginnings—and I don’t, of course—I just found myself here; I can’t remember planning anything, but I’m used to this place now.
 
The slums of Mumbai and other cities certainly make an argument for the antinatalist/pessimist’s position. Travelers to India often note the rampant poverty. So, are we doomed to a world predicted by movies likeSoylent Green ?  Since no countries other than India and China have reached billion-plus populations, can non-Indians and non-Chinese understand the reasons that antinatalism has gained traction in those two countries? India is even on track to surpass China’s population. Mumbai already has the largest slum in the world. 
 
Of course, human populations have always faced threats, so shouldn’t we consider how having some of us around in excess might ensure the survival of the species? Is there some failsafe system built into our genes to keep us going through thick and thin? Could the population explosions after devastating losses of human life be evidence that there’s an unconscious collective drive in the species to continue? Is that drive demonstrable by population increases that occurred after some of the most serious threats humans have faced? Think of the decades after World War I, a time when the Spanish flu (La Grippe) had taken between 20 and 40 million lives at the same time the war had taken an additional 17 million. And think post World War II after more than 50 million people died in less than a decade because of the war. Post-war populations increased. Is there some driving “natalism” that makes populations increase after the “world” shows itself to be hazardous to life? How bad are today’s “times” compared to the times of world wars and epidemics like the Black Death of the fourteenth century? 
 
Yes, one could argue that a 1950s world of 3 billion people is different from a 2018 world of 7.5 billion. But is humanity just a pandemic or two and a nuclear war away from a decimated population struggling to survive? Even if there were just a few of us left, there’s no guarantee that human folly would not finish off those who remained—that story of Cain and Abel makes a point that is applicable today: People have harmed and killed other people without regard to some blissful, utopian future. And there’s no guarantee that either Reem or her husband will live another day, no guarantee that they will always find something rewarding or even interesting to do with their lives, and no guarantee that the bodies and brains of either will remain free from disease and disability. 
 
We live by anecdotes, don’t we? We tint the shades of judgment by what we experience and what we believe to be the context of our lives. Reem Khokhar probably has plenty to eat and drink. However, she sees that many people don’t have what she has and assumes that her offspring would likely suffer the same as those who are impoverished in her country. But there were the problems of overcrowding, crime, disease, and all those bad things she envisions for her offspring when Reem found herself in “another” world. She survived; she seems to have prospered. Why assume that the future holds nothing but disaster? She’s around to predict on the basis of her anecdotal knowledge of her current world. Her parents might also have predicted an untenable existence for their offspring. 
 
Maybe Reem’s antinatalism is just a product self-centeredness. Remember, she wrote that “parenthood is not for everyone; raising a child is a huge financial and emotional investment; the compromise and commitment required is enormous; and my husband and I find fulfillment in many other ways.” I guess for Reem and antinatalists the burden of continuing the species and of continuously attempting to better the human condition is not worth the effort. 
 
* https://qz.com/1342957/many-indians-are-deciding-not-to-bring-children-into-this-overpopulated-unkind-world/?yptr=yahoo 

Do you take for granted the plus sign you use in an addition problem? I think all of us probably do. Look how convenient the addition sign is; look how convenient all the symbols for mathematical operations are. Want to subtract? Use -. And so on for the operations of division and multiplication. They all seem so natural, so intrinsic, to math. Who wants, for example, to write “two hundred and another two hundred make four hundred” when 200 + 200 = 400 will do? 
 
Math didn’t always incorporate its current operational symbols. They entered the language of math for various reasons and at different times, just as the use of Arabic numerals eventually replaced Roman numerals (except on clocks, for Super Bowls, and at Olympic games). What we take for granted is relatively new in the history of mathematical operations and would be unrecognizable to ancient Greeks, Romans, Indians, Chinese, and any other long-gone civilizations. Operational symbols and even the numbers themselves, such as 0 that was introduced in India, didn’t have an origin contemporaneous with the birth of math. The symbols for the relationships and “interactions” among mathematical entities haven’t always been universal. 
 
Have there been similar developments in symbolic ways for the operations in human interactions? Is the evolution of math symbols an analog for the operations of human interaction and relationships? If there are analogs, are such symbols, though seemingly endemic, autochthonal, indigenous, primeval, and aboriginal, the product of cultural invention? If so, there might be little that is “natural” in society. Yet, many accept certain operations in human interactions as natural and universal. Remember, however, that for a long time no one used a plus sign, that new mathematical operations have been invented to account for new ways of seeing the world, and that without symbolic ways to handle operations, we get bogged down in verbiage. 
 
Time for an inventory. What do you think is “natural,” “endemic,” “autochthonal,” “indigenous,” “primeval,” or “aboriginal” in human interactions and relationships? And what do you think are introduced operational symbols? 
 
Euclidean geometry eventually evolved into an algebra-aided system that was itself aided by the Calculus. At every step in the evolution of a mathematical perspective on relationships among phenomena, new operational symbols were needed. How analogously have humans added the operational symbols to their perspectives on their own relationships and interactions?