I've been thinking a bit about certainty and mental states recently. I was talking with my roommate about this a while ago, but now, to inaugurate Bingus club, I will talk about it here. My main feeling on the matter is that certainty is an inherently passive thing: in the moment one is thinking about a subject, they cannot, ever, ever, ever, be certain of their own thoughts and opinions. This has some interesting implications I'll elaborate later on, but first I want to trace back how I got here. What originally prompted this line of thinking was the pharoahs of Ancient Egypt. My roommate floated the idea that, having spent their entire lives surrounded by an all-encompassing religion that claimed they were literal divine beings, the Pharoahs were able to face death with absolute certainty of what lay ahead of them, provided that they had faith in the religion they practiced, which it seems most did. It's interesting to think about and so obviously different from my personal feelings on death. I think that I, and most people of the agnostic or atheistic kind, neither feel nor claim even the slightest bit of certainty about death. But what about people who follow a religion faithfully? Could they attain a kind of peace of mind inaccessible to us doubters and nay-sayers? I don't think so. I was finally reading The Brothers Karamazov, which Mom had been trying to get me to read for years. At the time, I had just finished the chapter The Grand Inquisitor. In this chapter, Ivan Fyodorovich describes an imaginary conversation between the leader of the Spanish Inquisition and Christ. The inquisitor lays out his worldview: that people are fundamentally weak, servile, and sinful - that they must be brought to heel and ruled over while still being allowed to indulge their baser impulses. I disagree! I disagree, I disagree. I disagree with the worldview of this inquisitor as strongly as I disagree with just about anything. It is fundamentally opposite what I believe about humanity, society, and leadership, and I denounce it in the strongest possible terms. And yet, in the moment I was reading this chapter, or even thinking about it now, I still had to give it its day in court. As Ivan and the inquisitor make their case for the evil nature of humankind, I gave it some real thinking - it didn't take long for that thinking to end in the conclusion I wrote above, but for a moment or two, I loosened my grip on the ideals and beliefs I claim to hold. To do anything else would be impossible! It was a chapter I hadn't read before and it was laid out with a thesis, supporting evidence, and a conclusion. In the moment I was reading that, simply because I was really considering the merits of its argument, I was not as certain in my beliefs as I had been a moment earlier. I had to ask myself: do I agree? Are humans inherently evil? Do they require a ruler to focus their energy and escape the cruel nature of their world? No, no, no, I cried! But in the moment before I came to my answer, fleeting as it was, I could not say that I was truly certain what that answer would be. I think it's also interesting to consider the contrary - if I had been truly certain, if I had really, truly known my answer before I even finished reading the chapter, then I could not have been really considering the opposite argument at all! And in that case, how could I claim any kind of real certainty in my own opinions? So then I was thinking - more generally, I do this kind of reevaluation constantly. Whenever somebody asks me, "what do you think?" about anything at all, my brain runs a little program, evaluating and inferring whatever it needs to before I give an answer. While this program is running, I'm actually in a state of uncertainty. I think I might extend the computer metaphor a bit. When somebody asks me even the simplest question - "What's your name?" - my brain first processes what they just said, stitching the sounds together into words and then the words together into concepts. Once it's done this, it has to fetch the answer from my memory; if I had been badly concussed or suffered some brain injury, this process could conceivably fail, and even though I would have understood the question, I would be unable to remember my name. Only once my brain puts the relevant information together can I deliver my answer. Until that moment, until the answer is packaged up in my brain and ready to be spoken out into the world, I can't claim real certainty about anything. Sure, that whole process probably takes a few milliseconds at most, but if somebody were to then say, "Are you sure that's your name?" I'd have to do the whole thing over again. In the moments I'm thinking, I am not certain. And I'm constantly thinking! About so much shit. Maybe I don't ask myself, "what's my name, again?" all that often, but I definitely ask myself "what do I think about this?" "Okay, what about this?" "And this?" So I do not think the pharoahs were so certain about what lay beyond those pearly gates. No matter how devoutly they practiced their religion, no matter how often they were asked "are you truly a god made flesh?" and answered, honestly, "yes!" I still do not think they were ever certain. I don't think anyone is ever certain of anything in a stative way - certainty is passing or passive. Maybe you can claim active certainty in that infinitessimally small moment when your brain delivers the answer to one question and before it starts on some other train of thought, but that moment is over oh-so-quickly. I think it's more reasonable to think of certainty as a passive thing. After I answer the question and move on with my life, maybe those are the moments in which I'm certain, when I'm not thinking about the subject at all. Until the question is asked again, my certainty can lie dormant, sleeping, a quantum state of certainty, destined to be obliterated the moment it's noticed.