Departing from Uncertainty

When looking at the notes from my graduation address from last year, I find it particularly telling that little did we know at the time, that a week later, the world would come to change completely. Only 6 days after the last graduation ceremony, we went into our first hard lockdown - which ended up becoming our living condition for much longer than we initially anticipated. 

It would be unthinkable to address you with the same or similar message as I did the graduates one year ago. The world you are graduating into is different from the world we imagined our graduates entering in the past. As creatives, we enjoy talking and thinking about change, but the last twelve months provided us all the opportunity to really come face to face with global change, in a manner that only a few generations in history get the opportunity to do. 

When thinking about change, I am intuitively drawn to a particular example of change that occurred at the start of the 20th century, when the scientific community endeavoured to shift from classic Newtonian physics to what we have come to know as a quantum understanding. 

Without attempting to dive fully into the complexity of physics (as we are all such experts in the field already), I want to extract some insights that might be useful for us during our own moment of change. You are graduating not only from students to young professionals and practitioners but collectively we are all graduating into what we could call (for lack of better terms) a post-covid world. 

Conveniently and quite fitting to our times, quantum physics offers us with a notion referred to as the uncertainty principle. Werner Heisenberg formulated this in 1927 by pointing out that the position and velocity of an object can not be precisely measured at the same time - not even in theory. His conclusion suggests that there are limitations to what is knowable with certainty. This uncertainty of knowing two distinct attributes simultaneously is precisely how the notion of the uncertainty principle travels through science textbooks and popular culture alike. 

What is less commonly discussed or considered is the fact that Nils Bohr, Heisenberg’s contemporary, raised some objections to this proposal. Bohr’s objections in fact led Heisenberg to add a postscript to his much-celebrated paper on the uncertainty principle in which he states (and I paraphrase slightly for the sake of clarification). 

“Bohr has brought to my attention that I have overlooked essential points. Above all, the uncertainty in our observation does not arise exclusively from the occurrence of discontinuities, but is tied directly to the demand in which we ascribe equal validity to quite different experiments [...] we must therefore acknowledge Bohr’s notion of complementarity, in which he emphasises the need for mutually exclusive experimental conditions, in order to determine mutually exclusive types of observation/measurement.”  

Simply stated, Heisenberg acknowledges that his focus on uncertainty as a condition of knowing needs to consider Bohr’s argument that the act of knowing is contingent on the material apparatuses that comprise an experiment. Therefore pointing out the complementary relationship between the tools used in an experiment and what they can reveal. This postscript in which Heisenberg concedes to Bohr's principle of complementarity somehow gains less traction than his ideas around uncertainty and is often overlooked. But let us not make that mistake here today...

Bohr’s contribution emerges from his emphasis on the influence of the material conditions - the tools and apparatuses of observation, on the resulting measurements that might emerge. And this is where I am going to be making some gross oversimplifications and omissions for the purpose of this particular message. 

(So please if you find the need to fully indulge in Bohr's contributions towards both physics and philosophy in a manner that we do not have time to do here today, I can recommend that you do so by means of Karen Barad’s amazing book entitled Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of meaning and matter). 

But for now, we will keep it as brief and straightforward as possible. What Bohr continuously stresses is the fact that it is impossible for the experimental conditions required to determine both the position and velocity of a particle to exist at the same time. On the one hand, we require a fixed apparatus in order to determine the position and on the other hand we need a dynamic apparatus to measure velocity - and keeping with common sense an apparatus cannot be static and in motion at the same time.  The material configurations required to conduct these measurements therefore simply cannot co-exist. The valuable insight we can extract is that the specific configuration of the apparatuses of observation makes it possible to gain measurable information of either the one attribute or the other. 

So why all this talk about uncertainty, complementarity - why are we talking about physics in the first place? (And if you zoned out when you heard the word physics, this is where you should start paying attention again because we will swiftly be moving beyond all of that) 

In this story about Heisenberg and Bohr, we are presented with two distinct lenses, through which we can approach and encounter the world. On the one hand, we can emphasise uncertainty - we can mission through life pointing out how weird it is, how unpredictable things are, and how we are constantly surprised at what life throws at us - trying our best to just survive amongst the chaos. 

But on the other hand, we can acknowledge that it is our apparatuses of observation that make possible what we might know with confidence. Yet, in contrast to the scientist who uses lasers, and photosensitive plates as their apparatus, we have at our disposal different types of apparatuses, including our values, our ethics, our expectations, our outlook on life, our dreams for ourselves and others. It is these apparatuses of observation that reveal specific information and insights about what we seek to know. 

When approaching life - and its constant changes - through this lens, acknowledging that it is the specific questions we ask that lead to the specific answers that come our way, that we might manage to encounter uncertainty as something less daunting. 

We are at a global pinnacle of change, a moment described by the founder of the world economic forum Klaus Schwab as the great reset. Things are tremendously uncertain. But what I urge you to do is to not see yourselves as objects of this uncertainty, merely swooped around in its strange unfolding, but rather as part of the change that is possible. See yourself as part of the material configuration that makes specific things knowable, thinkable or possible, amidst all of this global change.  

Your generation has an important part to play in figuring what a new world might look like. I urge you to use this opportunity, to ask the questions you want answers for, to imagine the realities that you want to see manifest. It is not by any means an easy task, but surely more exciting than being tossed about by uncertainty. 

I want to remind you of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman refrain - we are in this together, but we are not the same. She hereby reminds us that we are embodied beings with situated knowledge and experience that gives us a unique perspective, each one’s as valid as the other’s. 

But I want to further build on to Braidotti’s refrain by adding, let us aspire to not ever allowing ourselves merely be the same. 

The world is open for change, so why resort to wishing things back to the way they were? Let us aspire to not be the same, to not hold the same complacency towards injustice, to not hold the same apathy towards inequality, to not hold the same profit-seeking-at-any-cost ambitions. Let us not aspire to be the same as the American characters we see on TV, let us not be the same as the european thinkers we encounter in books. Let us be ourselves, as an ongoing unfolding that results from looking at the world with criticality and curiosity. Let us acknowledge that our own unique apparatuses of observation result in what we end up observing. 

This is what I wish for you going forward - now go out, and have a great time exploring and making the world you want to live in.