Tuesday, January 6, 2015

The Search For Consistency

One of the many thoughts that have been bouncing around inside my brain for quite a while has to do with what seems to be an innate human desire to flush out inconsistencies. I haven't yet been able to work out something fully coherent on this, but it keeps popping up for me so I wanted to share my initial thoughts.

I usually notice this during a disagreement or argument when one party is trying to discredit another. They dig until they find some point of inconsistency (perceived or real) they hope will be an unraveling of the other's entire idea or position. If an inconsistency is declared, it is usually also hoped that their own position will then be seen victorious by default.

In these cases this desire for some sort of consistent truth is not truly genuine; it's merely an attempt to discredit something with which one personally disagrees. It's not really a search for something universally consistent as an independent goal. These arguments are almost always inane exercises producing nothing of value.

Interestingly--at least to me--is that this goal, usually twisted when pursued in a social, political or religious setting, is also in play in science. What is often considered to be the ultimate scientific prize is the discovery of a Theory of Everything, a single explanation of how the universe works. This ultimate explanation would never have exceptions and would explain every possible scenario that could exist in our universe.

For me it is frustrating to see this pursuit of consistency happening with little acknowledgment of the incomprehensively massive number of variables in play. When it comes to the unending silly political and religious arguments based on this notion, there will always be inconsistencies to be discovered. There are simply too many variables. No explanation of anything can take them all into account. Science has a better chance of doing so, but I think that's only a theoretical possibility. Nailing it all down may not be a practical possibility.

To make matters even worse, we have to consider the issue of change. Even if we could somehow create a list of every possible variable that needs to be considered, the conditions under which those variables exist is always changing. What makes sense under one set of circumstances will not necessarily be true under differing sets of circumstances. The issues of quantity and variability create an incomprehensibly gargantuan matrix of possibilities.

This idea is also a part of any legal system. Because each act in which a human engages is unique, there is no way to write laws that cover every scenario, meaning they are inevitably applied to circumstances with no exact match. Laws can't be written to cover every circumstance--there are simply too many circumstances to take into account. This means that every law is necessarily misapplied in every case. It simply can't be any other way.

As I wrote at the beginning, I'm still flushing this out so I don't have much more to offer yet. I guess all I can share at this point is the hope that these problems will one day be acknowledged. But I don't have high hopes.

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