Knowledge or Certainty

Months ago, in the wake of the London subway bombings in a post about the ideological dangers of absolute certainty, I included an excerpt from “The Ascent of Man” by Jacob Brownoski.

I had read this magnificant book years ago and it left quite an impression on me, so much so that it motivated me to search out other works of Brownoski. I had known that the book was based on a 1972 documentary series that Brownoski put together for the BBC, but until now I had never seen any episodes of the series.

Thanks to Timothy Sandefur at Positive Liberty, I was alerted to the fact that all but two of the episodes now exist at Google Video. Sandefur linked to the episode entitled “Knowledge or Certainty” which is the episode from which I excerpted in my previous post. And I have to agree that it is a masterpiece. The episode eloquently explores the philosophical and scientific question of absolute knowledge and the dangers that arise when man foolishly believes he possesses such knowledge.



The production is excellent and holds up quite well even 30+ years later. In fact some of the cinematography is startling good.

I also learned surprisingly that it was unscripted, that Brownoski had only an outline and basically spoke to the camera off the cuff. To me, that makes it more amazing and illustrates just how knowledgeable and erudite Brownoski was. He was a fascinating man who was as knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the arts and literature as he was about science. Indeed, he considered both art and science to be wonderful manifestations of the creative mind of man and disliked what he thought was the relatively recent artificial cultural rift between the two.

The episode begins with a blind woman studying by touch the face of an old man and correctly concluding many facts about him. It then moves on to how both science and art interpret the face of the man. But more interesting is the time in Gottingen where Brownoski recalls how the great physicists of the day were shaping Quantum Theory and the surprising (and frustrating to Einstein) formulation of the Uncertainty Principle. Though Brownoski preferred to call the theory the Principle of Tolerance as described in this excerpt:

The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science-- or outside of it --we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance [i.e. probability]. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance.

All knowledge--all information between human beings--can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in *any* form of thought that aspires to dogma.

It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance--and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair.

The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.

The work in Quantum Physics ultimately led, of course, to the development of the atomic bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima to hasten the end of World War II. Brownoski was friends with Leo Slizard, a humanitarian physicist, and relays several stories about him from that time, including this:

I had not been long back from Hiroshima when I heard someone say,in Szilard’s presence, that it was the tragedy of scientists that their discoveries were used for destruction. Szilard replied, as he more than anyone else had the right to reply, that it was not the tragedy of scientists; ‘it is the tragedy of mankind.’

The episode concludes at Auschwitz with the moving and eloquent excerpt that I am compelled to share again (but a bit more of it) and it is there we also learn more about the man whose face was earlier examined:

There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilisation, into a regiment of ghosts - obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.

It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people.

And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.

In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken'.I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

It is all so amazingly relevant today. Sadly, mankind has not changed one bit, we have not learned anything from the despots and tyrants of history who claimed a special hold on the Truth.

Link to Google video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5526076062300172543

(If you don’t have time to watch it all, at least skip to 30:00 mark and watch the last 19 mintues.)