Hooray for a Senseless World!

"Deductions and inferences can be wrong. But they're not illicit; they're how history, at its best, makes sense of a senseless world."

-- Jill LePore. "President Tom's Cabin." New Yorker. 9/22/08.

Stop Making Sense was the name of a seminal Talking Heads album. And it's good advice, as well. Whether we're historians, or quantum physicists, psychologists, or garbage collectors, each time we deduce and infer, we are moving away from what is, and in so doing have removed ourselves from the realm of reality. In fact, sense-making has become such an automatic habit, a knee jerk cognitive reaction, that we don't even know we do it, and so we confuse our stories about reality with reality all the time!

What's the alternative? Let the senseless world be senseless. Quit making meaning. Stop trying to firm up the ever shifting sands of reality with your conceptual bulwarks. Perceive and breathe. Let intuitions bubble up to the surface of your psyche, but don't try to organize them into a nice bow-laden, pre-packaged Theory of Everything.

Reality is beautiful and messy and ever-changing. Whatever underlying principles, or implicit order there may be will only be found by observing reality more closely, letting it penetrate us more deeply, not by mental machinations, educated guessing, or grand theorizing.

Stories about reality are not reality, no matter how intricate, enthralling or well-crafted those stories may be. Face it: You don't know why most things happen the way they do. You don't know why most people do what they do. Hell, you don't even know why you do what you do!

So maybe, in a senseless world, "why?" is the wrong question. The answer to why is always a lie. A lie in that it is incomplete. A lie in that it is merely an interpretation based upon a small glimpse of one facet of the multi-faceted jewel of reality. Why supposedly gets at the meaning behind what happens, but really meaning is just a human made invention!

Today is a good day to stop making sense. Today is... That's all we know. Enjoy it!