What do you believe that you can’t prove?

OK, so this is a couple of weeks late - this time I did have it written and sitting in Microsoft Word, just didn't get around to posting it - so I'm improving on just composing posts in my head.

The Edge Foundation is an informal group of “some of the most interesting minds in the world.” Its mandate is to “promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.” Their annual question for 2005 to which they have 119 responses up on their website is: “what do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”. The responses come from (amongst others) physicists, mathematicians, biologists, psychologists and writers – people like Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard Dawkins, Paul Davies and Lee Smolin just to pick a few names I recognized – and cover a wide range of topics including consciousness, cosmology, computing and evolution.

I have only just skimmed through them at this stage, but this one from Kai Krause is an interesting challenge to the widely held belief that we should always strive to “live in the present”. Here’s his summary of his belief that we should live in the future and the past rather than the present:

“Bluntly put: spend your life in the eternal bliss of always having something to hope for, something to wait for, plans not realized, dreams not come true.... Make sure you have new points on the horizon, that you purposely create. And at the same time, relive your memories, uphold and cherish them, keep them alive and share them, talk about them.”

And, as he rightly points out, life then is not a mainly humdrum existence punctuated by the occasional “high” moment, but it is about “the anticipation of the moment and the memory of the moment.” An interesting concept.