Before anything else I think it’s important to begin by discussing faith.

We are all creatures of faith, whether we realise it or not, and whether we like it or not.

• We all have faith that the laws of physics are fairly consistent in our everyday lives.
• We all have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, even though there’s no absolute guarantee that it would, apart from “it has every day so far.”
• We all have faith that logic and reason have some sort of correspondence to reality, that what makes sense today will make sense tomorrow, that 2+2=4.
• We have faith that we will not mysteriously cease to exist or spontaneously combust.

We don’t even realise this, but without it we would be unable to function.

Almost all of what I am going to talk about after this assumes a certain degree of faith in certain seemingly self-evident truths. I assume that statistics and probabilities make sense, that there are certain consistencies in the known universe that we cannot reasonably doubt. I have faith that I am not alone, that there exist other human beings that experience the same sort of consciousness that I experience.

Faith is often misplaced. Tomorrow we may find ourselves levitating, free from gravity- or the sun may mysteriously turn blue. But for the sake of living, I will assume that it is so incredibly unlikely, that we can, for the most part, go on with our lives as if it were a certainty. But nothing, of course, is certain. If you are interested in this train of thought, I highly recommend reading Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan– a book describing an idea so intense and powerful that I haven’t yet completely wrapped my head around it.

Still, as long as we’re not playing with other people’s lives and/or livelihoods here (which Taleb argues that economists and other “experts” do), and we’re choosing to make decisions on behalf of ourselves in a realm of uncertainty, I think that we can proceed. Albeit cautiously.