Making it OK to not know

It’s difficult, sometimes, to explain that I’m comfortable not knowing something.

It may seem counterintuitive to be an intellectual and comfortably ignorant.  I, as an atheist, am comfortable with how many unexplained aspects of life there are.  Watching something with David Blaine performing his “levitation” this evening with Amy, she asked, “How do you think he did that?”

I’m comfortable not knowing.  I said, “I don’t know.”  I know there’s a rational answer, but I don’t know what it is.  I texted her, “He is Jesus.”

Prior to the levitation, he had performed a card trick after which he pulled the participant’s watch out of his pocket and returned the purloined item.  Rewinding (yay DVR) showed that while performing the trick, he slipped it off the guy’s wrist.  Plainly visible in slow-motion, it was obvious that the distraction involved in performing the trick, which included hitting the guy’s wrists, also undid the wristband, and he simply slipped it away in the “confusion” of the situation.

With the “magic” exposed in that trick (even the word used to describe “magic” — trick — tells that it’s all about making someone think one thing while causing the reality to be another), I can appreciate the fact that Blaine is good at confusing people into not seeing the truth.  I just don’t assign the same value to the “magic” part of it that some others do.

I know that I’ve been decieved, and I’m OK with it.  I’d like to know how it was done, but I’m fairly confident that there’s nothing supernatural going on, so it doesn’t get to me.

People that really need an answer either find one, or make one up.  Or twist facts to make it look like there was an answer.  When there’s a limited enough system that there’s a reasonable expectation that all of the inputs can be known, I may look for the algorithm that can create the observed output from those inputs.  When I know that I don’t have enough of the inputs to perform a rational analysis, I either seek additional information or decide that I simply don’t know.

I think that’s a rational way to operate.

And I think that string theory is an answer looking for a question.  (A little nod to ShandyKing)