Quora – What has living for a long time made you realize?

Quora – What has living for a long time made you realize?

Life is far more complex and far less certain than I once thought it to be.

It now seems very probable to me that uncertainty is deeply built into the fabric of this reality within which we find ourselves, and at some levels and contexts that uncertainty is so small that the outcome approaches classical determinism.

So I am much less certain about many of the things I once considered “Truth”s.

The whole notion of truth now seems like a simplistic heuristic that is very useful in many contexts.

I now see that evolution for complex entities is much more about cooperation than competition; and that has fundamentally changed how I view competitive markets and their child “capitalism”.

I retain my classical liberal values of individual life and individual liberty, and I acknowledge that liberty comes with necessary limits and responsibilities for cooperative action in social and ecological contexts. I have also extended the concept of “individual” to all sapient entities capable of modeling themselves and others in a model of reality, and of using language to communicate – human and non-human, biological and non-biological.

I’ve learned a bit of humility, and maybe gathered a little bit of wisdom.

It seems to be inevitable that the more that I know, the more that I know that I don’t know, and the less confident I become of many of the things I once took as Truths.