Certainty and Reality: Your Brain vs the Universe
How We Create a Sense of Certainty (and When We Can’t)
Our brains are prediction machines. They identify patterns in the world around us and use those patterns to more quickly understand and predict what will happen on a moment-to-moment basis. The brain’s imperative is to minimize surprises, creating homeostasis and the perception of a stable world with minimal chaos.
That’s a lot of fancy words. What does it look like in practice? When we hear a loud bang, we need to use all the information available to us about loud noises to understand what the bang represents. Was that a car crash, fireworks, or a gunshot? If our brain can accurately identify the source of the sound, it can predict what may come next and prime itself to respond adequately.
If it’s a gunshot, self-preservation would be the best response. If it’s a car crash, curiosity and a disposition to help might be the right response. If our brain misinterprets the noise as a car crash, we may be in for an unpleasant surprise when we find out it was actually a gunshot (potentially followed by more gunshots), resulting in the experience of a chaotic world.
Consider a time when someone smiled at you, but something felt off. That smile didn’t mean they were happy with you; it felt like a threat. How did you know? Our brain uses our experience of other unfriendly smiles, combined with our current circumstances, to understand that the person smiling at us is actually furious. Our brain is capable of processing a nearly infinite amount of sensory information to quickly interpret what’s happening around us, helping us stay alive, form healthy relationships, and prioritize pleasant experiences.
But we often fail to acknowledge that the brain is not equipped to understand and predict an uncertain universe. Albert Camus, a twentieth-century French-Algerian writer and philosopher, proposed that our relationship with the universe is absurd. Humans crave certainty, stability, and structure. The universe is indifferent, unpredictable, and fundamentally unknowable to us. Our expectations are fundamentally at odds with reality. The absurdity lies in the fact that the universe is infinite and uncertain, yet we still strive to understand it.
We understand what happens in our lives using a feedback loop between our experiences of the world and the sense we make of those experiences. This sense-making process isn’t the right tool for questions like “What is my purpose?”, “Who am I, and why did I turn out this way?”, or “What happens when we die?” Using our brains to intuit the underlying principles of reality and human existence is analogous to bringing a toothpick to a gunfight. It’s not that the toothpick is useless; it’s just that the toothpick is entirely out of its league in a gunfight because that’s not what it was made for.
The gunfight isn’t absurd, and the toothpick isn’t absurd. Taking a toothpick to a gunfight is absurd.
Uncertainty and Collective Knowledge
Humanity’s collective ability to create certainty through exploration and shared knowledge exceeds our individual capacity. For example, we now know that our muscles move as a result of a series of electrochemical events, not because of fluids called ‘animal spirits,’ thought to inflate and deflate the muscles.
That said, we still have no idea how several foundational aspects of our reality function, like the relationship between consciousness and the brain. So, even though we understand the mechanism that results in muscular movement, we have no idea how the conscious intention to move and the subjective perception of the movement relate to the physical action.
And most of us don’t acknowledge that the majority of our collective knowledge isn’t actually true; it’s just probable. Our cognitive faculties limit our understanding of the universe, even collectively. Almost anything we call a fact is actually just a mutual agreement about what we experience using the tools and conceptual frameworks of our time. We create laws of nature when we consistently observe that something happens in a particular way, describing the way nature works under those conditions. There’s always the chance that we’re missing part of the picture and will eventually find a reason to invalidate that law of nature.
The case of geocentrism and heliocentrism highlights the influence culture and society have on collective knowledge. Abrahamic texts, which influenced Christian belief systems, were interpreted to mean we lived in an Earth-centered universe. The Catholic Church was a powerful intellectual force in 16th-century Europe, and it tipped the scales in favor of the geocentric view. Our entire understanding of the universe changed when we realized the Earth was not at the center of the solar system, and it shifted the way the scientific community approached research, eroding the Church’s foothold in intellectual circles.
Uncertainty in Who I Am
Think of an animal. Why did that particular animal come to mind? How much free will or agency did you have in choosing it? We don’t consciously choose the animal. One just comes to mind, and we go with it. It is impossible to know what’s going to happen next, even in our own minds. Our lives are full of examples that remind us we aren’t standing on solid ground, and a large number of things we take for granted are actually uncertain and out of our control.
The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there's no ground. — Chögyam Trungpa
Being human is full of uncertainty to the point that we don’t even fundamentally understand what we are. The Hard Problem of Consciousness, a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers, makes the point that we don’t know how our subjective conscious experience relates to the brain. We understand some of the mechanics of the brain and nervous system, but we have no idea where consciousness resides in the brain. And we can’t say if it’s possible to have a conscious subjective experience without a brain.
How We Cope
There are ways to cope with the massive, absurd disparity between our brain’s need for certainty and our fundamentally uncertain existence.
Religion is one option. It provides us with an overarching framework for existence, our purpose as humans, the big-picture goal of what to achieve in life, and often some promise about what will happen in the grand scheme of existence.
The Abrahamic traditions offer a monotheistic model in which God has an overarching plan and is ultimately in total control of what happens, providing certainty through faith in a divine plan we can’t understand or be certain of otherwise.
The Dharmic religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, etc.—offer a framework that allows for liberation from the cycles of rebirth through enlightenment, providing certainty about a distant end state, even if it’s one we reach in another lifetime.
Taoism, Confucianism, and Shinto directly address existential uncertainty, focusing on living in acceptance and harmony with cosmic forces, society, and the natural world.
When God Died
Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher you should definitely learn more about, said, “God is dead,” not as a celebration or declaration of triumph, but to voice serious concern. The Enlightenment was a period in which Western culture became increasingly secular. The Christian framework of morality, societal structure, and universal purpose that had prevailed in Europe for centuries was losing influence, and Nietzsche worried the fabric of Western society would begin to fray.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? […] Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? — Friedrich Nietzsche
For almost two millennia, the majority of Western culture answered the question “What is the meaning of life?” using a Christian belief system. How would they answer the question without it?
We’ve already established our brain isn’t optimized to uncover the ultimate truths of the universe; it’s just designed to help us understand and predict what’s happening in our daily lives—to make sure we’re not caught by surprise. So we need a different way of thinking about the bigger picture since our brain’s predictive capacity is not the right tool.
If religion is no longer universally regarded as the answer to these big-picture conundrums, what post-Enlightenment frameworks might help us instead?
If God Is Dead, What Else Is There?
This brings us back to Nietzsche and the philosophy of loving one’s own fate: amor fati. The idea is for us to fully embrace whatever happens in our lives as necessary and desirable, celebrating even the brutal, ugly, or painful parts. This approach and mindset require us to view our entire life as one massive gift. Where most people wish life were otherwise, amor fati demands a wholehearted yes: to live as if you would enthusiastically choose your life exactly as it is, over and over again, eternally.
Inspired by Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy, Alan Watts proposes another option. He puts forward that asking about the meaning of life misses the mark entirely, “as if life were some puzzle with a hidden message, a riddle to be solved in the dusty attic of existence.” Instead of thinking of life as a project or test with an inherent purpose, he proposes that we conceptualize it as something to be enjoyed, as a playful experience, full of curiosity and wonder.
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple, and yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
— Alan Watts
Finally, we come to nihilists, people who conclude that life has no inherent meaning or purpose, that there is no such thing as objective morality, and that value is purely subjective. People often discuss nihilism as if it were a 4-letter word, too hot to touch, too dangerous to seriously consider or embrace as a legitimate outlook on our lives and the entirety of existence.
However, there is a liberation of sorts to be found in optimistic nihilism: the release of any responsibility to find or adhere to a cosmic reason for our existence. If we have no pre-determined purpose or path, we are free to navigate and enjoy life as we wish, and we become personally responsible for living into our own sense of meaning. Choosing joy becomes the obvious and logical decision. When presented with nihilism, it’s not uncommon for those uncomfortable with it to readily ask, “Why not just kill yourself?” But that makes no sense. Choosing to enjoy life, to embrace joy, and to seek fulfillment is the logical decision. If one of the few certainties we have is this one opportunity at a human life, the obvious choice is to milk it for all that it’s worth, regardless of its purpose or meaning.
These are just three options, and there’s no single option that’s better than the others.
Living Well When Certainty Isn’t an Option
If we crave certainty but the universe refuses to hand it over, the project of being human isn’t about solving problems and finding answers. Instead, it’s about living in the questions, appreciating them as a necessary and integral part of our most treasured memories, when we are delightfully surprised by the wonder of the unexpected.
Religion, science, and philosophy are all attempts to find certainty that can’t be had, and our predictive brain will always be a toothpick in a gunfight when it comes to ultimate answers. Maybe, then, the most important part of living well is what else we choose to do with the toothpick: create, play, pick our teeth, or simply hold it steady as we make our way through a fundamentally mysterious existence.
