748
any and all human deliberation and induction, namely, the human itself. We, who
are the most probable candidates of extrapolated consequence, no matter what other
subjects and predicates may be involved in the probabilities of our survival.
And thus, hope begets more hope, while extinction level events at global scale—
unfathomed in their totality—repel any equal measure of conscious investment
given the overt outlines of obliteration of that very object of interest, the subject
itself, humanity. Bayes’ theorem, at the heart of his probability doctrines, and most
subsequent statistical foundations, hinges upon the updating of belief predicated by
new and revised data. If the central argument of our observed time is that of Hope
versus Doomsday, it is clear that the coordinates of destruction offer little dialogue
with a most flimsy, finite, self-interested protagonist who reigns unfettered still, at
the centerstage of perception and infliction, proffering the idle whim, against the
blistering truth of all that humanity has actually undertaken.
Little wonder, then, that over 80 years after Bayes’ momentous Essay,
Kierkegaard, writing of “Existential Pathos”; of an individual’s apprehension of the
outer world (the world beyond his “inwardness” “before God,” of “a greater or
lesser environment”) exclaimed, “…the unfortunate individual must not lose his
courage, since there are many who are still more unfortunate than he, and besides
there is every probability that things will with God’s help become better…”
8
.
8 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, by Søren Kierkegaard, Translated By David F. Swenson and
Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press, Princeton New Jersey, 1941, p.391.
82 Shifting Balance
any and all human deliberation and induction, namely, the human itself. We, who
are the most probable candidates of extrapolated consequence, no matter what other
subjects and predicates may be involved in the probabilities of our survival.
And thus, hope begets more hope, while extinction level events at global scale—
unfathomed in their totality—repel any equal measure of conscious investment
given the overt outlines of obliteration of that very object of interest, the subject
itself, humanity. Bayes’ theorem, at the heart of his probability doctrines, and most
subsequent statistical foundations, hinges upon the updating of belief predicated by
new and revised data. If the central argument of our observed time is that of Hope
versus Doomsday, it is clear that the coordinates of destruction offer little dialogue
with a most flimsy, finite, self-interested protagonist who reigns unfettered still, at
the centerstage of perception and infliction, proffering the idle whim, against the
blistering truth of all that humanity has actually undertaken.
Little wonder, then, that over 80 years after Bayes’ momentous Essay,
Kierkegaard, writing of “Existential Pathos”; of an individual’s apprehension of the
outer world (the world beyond his “inwardness” “before God,” of “a greater or
lesser environment”) exclaimed, “…the unfortunate individual must not lose his
courage, since there are many who are still more unfortunate than he, and besides
there is every probability that things will with God’s help become better…”
8
.
8 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, by Søren Kierkegaard, Translated By David F. Swenson and
Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press, Princeton New Jersey, 1941, p.391.
82 Shifting Balance