USING MUDDLED LANGUAGE TO DESCRIBE REALITY

       There are some phrases that on first reading sound profound but after a few moments reflection are self-contradictory and give a false impression of reality. Take the sentence, “Nothing is true and everything is possible.”  Is it true or false that the water we drink is composed mostly of hydrogen and oxygen in a ratio of two hydrogen atoms to one oxygen atom?  I find that pretty consistently true and can’t think of a way to falsify it. Is it true that 2 + 8 = 10 on a base ten system (1 to 10)?  Again, I would have difficulty faulting this. On the other hand if you said there is a gene for red eye color in fruit flies and it is dominant over white eye, I could show that the red eye color is actually a product of the action of numerous genes falling into one biochemical pathway producing a brown eye color and an independent biochemical pathway for an orange eye color.  There is at least another system that involves proteins that bind the pigments into the compound eyelets of flies.  Thus the term a gene for red eye is false if one tucks the entire color into a single gene.  Science doesn’t seek truths.  It seeks interpretations that fit the known facts about a process or thing or theory.

      How about the second part of that phrase.  Is everything possible?  How about recreating me and all my thoughts and experience after I am cremated and bringing me back to July 1958 when I got my PhD?  Could you do that?  No.  Why not?  First you’d have a hard time replicating every molecule in my body.  Second you haven’t a clue how to reconstruct my memory, the way I speak, my personality, and my desires, guilts, and fantasies. While you’re at it, bring back my first cat Buddy who lived at the Gnome Bakery on 59^th street at the foot of the Queensborough Bridge in 1940.  

So in a literal sense the two claims don’t make sense to a scientist. If I were to take these as meditative themes to enrich my spirituality, perhaps I could say that nothing lasts, even the universe will eventually age and die, and whatever we believe is everlasting in our culture (even the God or gods of today’s hundreds of religions) may not be so hundreds or thousands of years from now (think of Shelley’s poem Ozymandius).  Or how about saying it’s possible that Hitler was right and Aryan supremacy is a scientific fact and all other races should be eventually replaced by Aryans?  It is also possible to try to rescue that second part of that phrase by invoking the limits of today’s knowledge and many things thought impossible today may be part of a future reality, hundreds or thousands of years from now.

       The problem with both rescue operations is that they can’t be proved today.  But if you have to use tortured reasoning to rescue that phrase, what good is it?  One reason science papers are difficult to read for those not in that science is the ambiguity of our language.  That is also a reason we ask lawyers to write our wills or contracts. What we mean and what we say or write may not be comprehensible to others in the way we intend them.