Opinion: The unnoticeable beauty of uncertainty
Updated: Mar 4, 2020
“Could you be more specific please,” is something that most people hear often in their lives, especially if you are an introverted unconventional thinker who finds difficulty in organizing thoughts in the heat of the moment. Take a famous example—when I see Elon Musk speaking in front of the public, I find it relatable when he gets caught in his thoughts. Even though it’s the case, Elon generally tends to make conversations and interviews exciting because of this. There are times when certain people speak that you tend to fall into a region of uncertainty, something about their careful use of words catches your attention on a deep level, and you can’t quite put your finger on it. And you bet it’s not because they are specific and on point, but rather because they are not. But why? You know that the world doesn’t run on uncertainty, you know that machines that we use don’t work on uncertainty (except when there’s quantum mechanics involved, that’s a story for another day) you know that our relationships crumble when it gets hazy, you know all of this, but yet, uncertainty holds a strange power over you as if there’s some invisible entity pulling your thinking chords.
Uncertainty, the elephant in the room
We value certainty a lot. So, at times, uncertainty is a direct measure of how much you don’t know about a subject—If you are not sure, then you are not right, and that’s the bottom line. When someone asks your opinion on something, and you exhibit a lack of certainty in your response, your opinion is likely to be reconsidered by the person. When someone’s making a device, uncertainty only hampers the functioning of it. Certainty here is pertinent, for you don’t want your house to come crumbling down a day after construction. In all honesty, the societies that we built would be very efficient without uncertainty—medicines, politics, technology, and a whole load of other fields would be better off without it.
But there is a fundamental problem in this way of thinking. Even though most things that ‘works’ within the system would continue to work in the ‘present,’ we would be stuck in a way, for asking a new question is diving into the heart of uncertainty. And that’s the true bottom line here. It is a ginormous elephant in the room that cannot be moved. The future is uncertain, and no matter what we do to make it a little unclouded, we still got to deal with uncertainty. That’s how discoveries and innovations are made.
Being certain makes you look confident. It gets you perfect jobs, perfect relationships, and they even say that you could get a perfect life if you practice certainty. But I am a little conflicted here, for I have trouble organizing my thoughts. My words hardly come across as certain as it needs to be, and more often than not, uncertainty finds a way into most of the conversations I have. But I don’t find it impeding at all—I find it rather fascinating.
How could the world work without uncertainty? This is the thought that led me to write this article. Sure, uncertainty is just a word that’s used loosely in contexts, but what it represents is unimaginably mysterious. It is the unknown, and perhaps that is why people are reluctant to embrace it—we fear what we can’t understand. The nature of our lives make us ponder into the vast uncertainty around us, as we try to uncover the murkiness of the water, but we only do so much, and the overwhelming factor kicks in—the fact that ambiguity always encompasses clarity.
But some people already know this, and they thrive by this very idea. The people at the frontier of civilization are people who exhibit ample quantities of ingenuity. These are people who befriended uncertainty a very long time ago. For this matter, they have no problem with delving into this tricky domain and coming forth from it unscathed and enlightened. And by doing this, they forge a path through the hedges for the rest of civilization to follow.
The value of uncertainty
Today, it seems that ‘being uncertain’ is undervalued. It needs to be undervalued under certain circumstances, but on a broader scale, I am not so sure. I think the reason why people don’t bother about uncertainty too much is because of the predictable machines that we use. These machines are the fruits of science and technology, and you don’t need to be told twice of their reliability. They generate a consistent output, day in and day out, unless it is defective, in which case, you could always replace it with another reliable machine.
But all it takes is a defective gadget to create uncertainty in our mind. Let’s hold that thought for a second. A defective table fan might not interest everyone to break open their toolkits, but the ones that can’t resist the urge, would break open the device and come across a very simple mechanism inside called an electric motor. Countless devices, ranging from table fans to electric cars, make use of electric motors, and it is regarded as one of the ground-breaking inventions of all-time. Today, the world knows how the electric motor works, but there was a time when people didn’t.
In the early 1800s, when Michael Faraday was working as an associate for Humphry Davy, he was as curious as to the world around him about electromagnetism. People knew that electric current through a wire caused compass needles to deflect, but nobody knew why or what to do with it. So, in an attempt to make something useful out of it, Michael Faraday devised experiments, one of which led to the discovery of electromagnetic rotations, which laid the foundation for electric motors—generating mechanical motion through electric current. Merely a small story of creating certainty from uncertainty, but the implications by and large inducing a revolution in technology. Our books are filled with such riveting stories of people weaving the cloth of uncertainty in search of answers and making the world a better place in the process.
If you could make people think…
Articulate speaking holds a great deal of power. It is those who speak clearly who inspires people. Most of the leaders who live in our history books had this special gift, which made them who they were. Therefore, it must be said that uncertainty in speech is frowned upon by society—but this is just semantics at work. In a speech, it is one thing to babble without making any valid points, but something very different when unintentional uncertainty immerses the audience into something they did not pay for. Once again, take the example of Elon Musk—while listening to him, the audience gets more information than what one would expect from a typical CEO. He doesn’t necessarily make people think about things on purpose, but it’s the act of questioning himself whilst doing interviews that makes his words contemplatable. You can almost always see Elon thinking before he answers. This might be a strange claim to make in the world that runs on articulation, but not dumb by any stretch of the imagination.
You can inspire the world with clear and unadulterated words, but if you could make someone think beyond their normal frame of thinking, even for a second, then you are doing something far greater than inspiration. This line reminds me of the Christopher Nolan movie, ‘The Prestige’. In a culmination of brilliant storytelling, acting, and the typical ‘Nolan-plot twists’, there is yet another piece of the movie that I enjoyed heavily, well, you guessed it—uncertainty. In fact, it is a key element in all the Chris Nolan movies. But the reason why I put ‘the Prestige’ under the microscope is because of the theme of the movie—magic. Magic, in layman’s terms, is uncertainty. The magician is certain of what’s going to happen at the end of the trick, but the poor audience has to keep guessing what it could potentially be. For some time, you are hanging on to that metaphorical cliff, and you don’t know if you’d fall or climb back up. But for that duration between the trick and the reveal, your mind is churning out the possibilities of how this could end, and all the while, it is the uncertainty that’s making you wonder. There is a beautiful quote from the movie that kind of fits into this narrative:
You never understood... why we did this. The audience KNOWS the truth. The world is simple. It's miserable. Solid...solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second...then you can make them wonder. And then you...then you got to see something very special. You really don't know. It was...it was the look on their faces... — From 'The Prestige'
While this might not be the exact point that I am trying to make, it makes sense in the context of the mundaneness of the world. Even though certainty provides a sense of calm and order to the world, it makes it sort of bland, and you need to bring a bit of uncertainty into the mix, perhaps in the form of a scientific question, to get the ball rolling again. This is probably why people are unhappy about unchallenging, systematic jobs—because certainty overtime becomes unstimulating.
Making a case to embrace uncertainty
Chaos isn’t necessarily confusion. On a grander scale, it is the way of the universe. In isolated systems such as societies, certainty reigns supreme because it must do so. It functions as a regulated mechanism and keeps the system from turning to disorder. In some contexts, our societies could be considered as superorganisms, and they thrive within this circle of certainty. This circle, though quasi-static, is not, rather it expands every day with people on the brim, walking in and out of this circle. The world outside this circle of certainty is unknown and treacherous, but it is the realm of new knowledge and understanding, and more people at this boundary bode well for growing civilizations.
At the end of the day, too much uncertainty in one’s life is bad, but in the same breath, I would say that a lack thereof is equally bad as well. It wouldn’t be wise to keep a blind eye towards the future, that would just be playing reckless, and not much good can come out of it. Those who built the foundation of everyday knowledge that we take for granted today were people who knew this paradigm well. They knew that once you let yourself be comfortable with certainty, slowly but surely, you stop asking questions, and this wasn’t something advisable. So, they kept probing at the physical world, questioning everything around them, from the smallest to the largest, questioning the very reality that they lived in. For some, such choices were thrust upon them, for others, it was simply irresistible, and such is the nature of uncertainty—it’s beauty is unnoticeable, but forever alluring.
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