The Phenomenon of Isolation

In politics when someone speaks of "isolationism" they are usually referring to a country's political order which seeks to maintain or establish itself as an independent entity. The consequences of isolationism for countries often leads to failed economies, impoverished citizens, poor educational systems, and a heap of other woeful social occurrences. Isolation in practice has a fundamental root as a natural component of human conceptualization.

I think isolated thought processes are part of a system of experiences through which a thinking entity can orient itself in reality. The development of such a system is a condition brought about by the environment we have evolved in. Since we human beings are not born with an innate understanding of the world we live and are at the same time limited in our mental capacities we use certain conceptual tools to explore the curiosities we find in reality. We are entities that rely on isolated conceptual systems to cut reality in to understandable chunks for our brains to be able to process. Simply put, the amount of matter bumping about the universe is of a such a gigantic magnitude that our meager amount of synapses and very limited brain functions cannot even begin to describe the most simplistic of interactions with complete detail. For this reason our brains have evolved certain conceptual tools for organizing reality into manageable portions simplistic enough for our minds to digest, yet some how equitable to the reality from which they are derived.

There is an inherent flaw or limitation in our conceptual methods though. This flaw or limitation also has no solution. For the reason that it would take exactly the same amount of energy/matter or more to create a symmetrical mental reflection of the exact state of the universe we will never be able to have a complete understanding of the state of reality. Using our mental abilities we break the information we gather from our senses down into manageable bits and organize and group those bits into a sort of mental framework. Since we cannot step back and view the grand picture all at once to verify our understandings we are left with isolated theories and ideas about how we think reality may actually be.

People tend to trust their conceptual systems as true representations of the systems of reality. This trust that we have for our conceptual systems developed in isolation leads to problems. We fail to take into account the things that escape our understanding, the things that we have missed in the development of our conceptual systems. Nicholas Taleb Nassim refers to the product of our lack of understanding about a system with the manifestation of some major event or occurrence as a "black swan". The black swan is simply a reference to the reality that continues to intrude upon our conceptual frameworks like some natural disaster destroying them and causing us to rebuild them. The black swan is also a reminder that our knowledge is limited and that we should utilize skepticism where sufficient scientific scrutiny is lacking.

There will never be complete certainty for any theory, though highly scrutinized it still lingers in a realm that is nearly detached from reality, which is why isolationist thinking leads to such problems. All thought actually belongs to some long chain of often very complex circular reasoning. All of the knowledge that we have has been developed in a system that is self reliant. As a consequence of our isolated conceptual understanding of reality we have no other option than to take a true thing and turn it into a symbol for something else. It is precisely because we do not know what that true thing that we can call it something entirely made up. Once we have determined what we want to call it then to our understandings of that thing it is that thing, regardless of its actual self as true to reality. We do this with all things and attempt to construct an artificial reality that allow us to understand reality through our perspectives as thinking entities.

Our isolated conceptual systems are not completely isolated from reality, in fact they are apart of reality. We manage to fool ourselves, however, thinking that we see the whole picture, when, in reality, we can never truly see "the whole picture". We forget about the things that we don't see, because, after all, we don't see them. You can't stress or worry over what you don't know or even suspect. That's why the old proverb often feels accurate "ignorance is bliss".

It is so easy to get sucked into believability in movies and stories because the story lines always have a predetermined set of circumstances so that the hero never accidentally trips and falls over that pot hole on the street allowing the villain a narrow get away. The cliche wedding crashing scene found in romantic comedies always succeeds because the wedding crasher, in just pursuit of everlasting love never gets diarrhea at the last moment thereby missing the opportunity to proclaim love and win over their partner. Economies that are micromanaged by bureaucrats who attempt to steer every aspect of social life with complex plans and formulas never succeed because these bureaucrats are always sucked into a belief that their isolated conceptual systems some how capture the big picture. For this reason I would say that luck favors the skeptics, who remain forever cautioned by the occurrence of a black swan event.

Nassim's "black swan" wasn't the first caution of our trust in isolated conceptual systems. A particular fallacy known as the "argument from ignorance fallacy" has been known to many logicians for many years. The fallacy states that simply because there is no evidence to prove a theory wrong it does not mean that the theory cannot be wrong or that a lack of evidence to refute the theory some how strengthens the argument. Though, one cannot simply go around placing trusting in no theories. Theories do gain strength through scrutiny and through evidence that concurs with their consequences. It should always be the method of practice to accept theories only as provisionally true or accurate because one can never be certain of the sudden nonoccurence of the black swan.