Complex Numbers

Facts

PROMPT September 10th

Today’s prompt was submitted by LdyPhoenix !

What are some of the weirdest facts you've ever learned? Wow us with your bizarre knowledge!

Today's vocabulary word, boys and girls, is epistemology.

Essentially, that's the study of how we know what we know.

I bring this up because possibly the weirdest fact I ever learned is that we don't know how we know what we know. If that makes any sense. If it does, then congratulations; you're eligible to become a philosopher.

"Fact" is a slippery concept, and I don't just mean for politicians. Most concepts are slippery, I think, if you examine them too closely. It's like... you can see a cat and identify it as a cat, but when you zoom in really close, all you see is the fur. And fur could belong to any number of animals. And what's an animal, anyway? At the smallest scales, the lines get blurred.

This is especially true if you keep zooming in. Eventually, you get to molecules and atoms, and then protons, neutrons, electrons - what we commonly call the building blocks of matter. Zoom in further on a proton or a neutron, and you get to quarks, which are more like electrons. What I mean by that is, not only do we not know where a particular electron or quark is at a given moment, we can't know where it is at that moment. It's all smeared out in a probability distribution.

At that scale, even the distinction between matter and energy is fuzzy. And also the distinction between "is" and "isn't."

How, then, can we know anything?

As I've mentioned before, I only claim to know anything to some degree of probability. I live in Virginia, so I'm close to 100% certain that Virginia exists. But then, what is this concept of "Virginia?" An area enclosed by a surveyed boundary, probably, or perhaps the political system, or its checkered history.

I've been to New York City, so I'm pretty sure it exists, too, though less certain than I am of Virginia. And I've never been to Afghanistan, so I have to take other peoples' word that it exists. I don't have a problem doing this. But if you came up to me and told me you've been to the lost continent of Atlantis, I'm going to need more in the way of confirmation.

So it is with anything we take as "fact."

At some point, to avoid falling down the rabbit-hole, you have to put things in different boxes: "reality," "not-reality," "save for further investigation." But we all tend to put different things into those boxes. Flat-earthers come to mind; the idea of a somewhat spherical Earth goes into the "not-reality" box for them (unless they're just fucking with us, which is a possibility we have to consider). Meanwhile, sane people put the round Earth into the "reality" box. Other people might accept as absolute truth the literal existence (as opposed to the literary existence, which is largely undisputed) of fairies.

Science helps with that sort of thing, but one has to be open to its findings, as well - though science, and science reporting, are not without their problems.

So I don't know if that qualifies as "bizarre." I think it does, if you give it real thought - the idea that there might always be limits to our knowledge, and that facts are actually probabilities.