Humbler

As I live through more days and years I grow humbler and humbler about both what it is human beings know and what human beings can know. With all the new technologies that have been developed it can become easy to assume that human beings can know and do just about anything - this is, however, not the case.

Take, for example, my trips to the optometry center in the search for a better contact lens prescription. After the first visit I was sent out with lenses that blurred my vision more than my old lenses had. On my second visit we all moved closer to finding good lenses, however, it quickly became clear that the dozens or so of offerings from the contact lens companies were never going to effectively match the peculiar size and curvature of my cornea. The human solution simply could not reach the precision of reality. Even expensive custom fitted lenses or Lasik surgery, I'm sure, would offer various other imperfections.

The same imperfections are true across the natural and physical sciences. Numbers, for example, cannot completely match up to reality. I remember one time trying to convince a bioengineer that the numbers 1 and 2 do not actually exist out there, outside of the human mind. There may be 1 tree in a field, moreover, but that tree is far more complex, far different than the number 1. As physicists try and try to find the smallest unit, it seems, there will always be one smaller. Can we ever purify something down to the true "1"? I do not think so. Numbers do though exist in the universe, that is, in our minds.

So as I try to think about the idea of nature and the threats to the natures of our planet, I will have to do so with the imperfect tools of human thought and sciences. Partly because minds are imperfect, inconsistent, and limited, many of the world's environmental problems proliferate. It is an uphill battle to reconfigure one's mind to better reflect both nature's needs and one's own needs, but it is a battle - I might argue - worth trying.