Alan Watts – It all makes sense

Reflection

The idea mentioned in the video is comes from a talk about Zen Buddhism, and it’s explaining
the proposition that perhaps everything in nature, however chaotic it may seem, is merely a
part of a larger harmony, so fundamentally it’s harmonious itself. However, it is a fact that
chaos exists, as proven by chaos theory, it’s an intrinsic part of the nature of reality. I believe
this idea doesn’t try to disprove the existence of chaos though, but rather show the duality it
plays with harmony. Duality is a fundamental principle in Zen, how opposites are really the
same, how the existence of chaos allows harmony to exist, and vice versa.

As knowledge in our society grows we notice a tendency on how models we used before fit
into newer, more complete models. Euclidian mathematics were fundamental to the
development of non-Euclidian geometry, Newtonian physics gave birth to special relativity,
string theory united the fundamental forces of nature, etc. No model seems to perfectly
represent reality ever, but we can observe the tendency towards the possibility that all models
could be derived from one, which could explain anything. This is what great men like Einstein
and Stephen Hawking held as a belief to experiment on, what fuels the search for a unified
field theory.

Ultimately, we are not able to understand this single model as of now, perhaps we never will,
but it evidently is something worth seeking and attempting to prove or disprove, in other
words it’s something that’s worth believing exists. This, being the idea that everything in
nature is happening because of the behavior of said singular model, implies that everything
has a role in it, everything has a function. Expand this into our psychology and that would
mean that even suffering and pain and every other emotion we attempt to avoid is as
important as joy and pleasantness, the ones we do seek for, and thus none have any inherit
value to them.

This in turn supports the Zen Buddhist’s belief that to live happily, one must accept all aspects
and details of life without judging them, since there’s no reason to do so. This is reflected on
the scientific method, as the law of parsimony, to only ever assume what is necessary, and
thus our judgment, being nothing but assumptions, is useless and only leads to bias.

I believe this is the only tool with which any problem can be understood and ultimately solved,
and is applicable to any industry, science, or even personal life. To develop this tool, the letting
go of our assumptions about reality, is profoundly useful, and can be practiced at any time by
simple observing and noticing the assumptions we use for anything we may do. Perhaps it’s
something that should be taught more in any kind of problem solving methodology.