Wednesday, February 12, 2014

On the Sinking House, Heideggerian Error, and Statistical Truth.

Without the Sinking House phenomenon, in an age of statistical information made instantly available by technology, there would be a possibility of eliminating Error, which Heidegger describes as the essence of the Human Being.

This is why it is frustrating to encounter videos on youtube that are a locus of unified jeers at the most marginal of human errors. These are called "fail" videos, and they are dangerous memes, because they perpetuate the notion that an individual's fallibility is stupidity, that a sense of "Certainty" in numbers* is justified, and a set of personally superficial qualities such as statistics are to be regarded as important (whereas in fact it is the individual decision to regard them as important and to operate according to them, imitated on a large scale, that renders statistical truth of import, despite the total justifiability of human error when something as psychologically inconsequential as a misplaced "0" occurs).

There are more Planck seconds in an individual second than there have been seconds in the entire history** of the Universe. The more infinitesimal the space( of /-)time, the less we can be Certain that no error was made, and the more mysterious the leap we take each day when we take the input of our senses to be the contents of our minds and we say "I know".

dm.A.A.

* A double-meaning.

** "History" not in the sense of human history, but our projections as to the age of the Universe.

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