The Ontology of Flux

We all operate using a version of what we feel is a reflection of the “way that things are.”  What happens when that version is based on variability is, at the end of the day, a prime driver of statistical thinking.

My friend Marc Hersch has been doing some interesting writing that raises the issue of how people view the world You can read his writing here:

That writing and a subsquent discussion with Marc prompted my own attempt to capture a kind of ‘global viewpoint’ that reflects what I think was on the mind of Shewhart and Deming as they taught and wrote.

There is an old saw that states that, “…the only thing constant in the universe is change…” Most people on hearing this nod sagely, but they certainly don’t live their lives as though they believed. It is not a new idea. Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher known as Heraclitus the Obscure, said over 500 years ago that, “All is flux. Nothing stays still.” If we accept this proposition, then everything changes.

Most of us operate with a worldview that is based largely on assumptions about the nature of things and existence. Gravity will work, the Sun will rise tomorrow and mothers love their babies. This system of thought works for us. It is practical. But the table is mostly space, no one knows why gravity works, the Sun may not rise tomorrow and the mother’s love is largely a matter of chemicals in the brain. We make predictions based on these assumptions, however and our belief in the veracity of our assumptions is bolstered as the predictions we make are shown to be more or less accurate. It’s easy to forget that these are, at the end of the day, only assumptions. We reify them and begin to call them “facts”, as though there was a true version of the way things are and we have grasp on it.

But there is another way to view the nature of reality and that is ontology of flux. In this version of being, there no facts, time is a moving point and we are all too aware that our reality is based on assumptions, not truth.
Heraclitus goes on: “… I see nothing but Becoming. Be not deceived! It is the fault of your limited outlook and not the fault of the essence of things if you believe that you see firm land anywhere in the ocean of Becoming and Passing. You need names for things, just as if they had a rigid permanence, but the very river in which you bathe a second time is no longer the same one which you entered before.”

This is another of many versions of the expression, “You can’t step in the same stream twice” that is often attributed to Heraclitus and he does say something like that.

This state of flux changes everything about how we look at the world. Even the way we measure things changes constantly. There is no ‘true value’ of anything that is measured. That which is being measured is in a constant process of change as is the tool that is being used to make the measurement. As my friend Lloyd Nelson used to say, “It’s like trying to measure the weight of someone who is jumping up and down on the scale.” But, the situation in which we find ourselves is even less predictable than that because the scale itself is constantly changing.

This world of flux most closely resembles the world we seem to inhabit as science has been discovering since the early 1900s. We have learned that the universe has a lot more built-in variability than we had once thought and that the variability seems in many going in no particular direction.

As I said, we humans with our reflective minds develop models of reality in which we operate. Assumptions are constructed, predictions are made an experience unfolds. This is not a straight line however. There seems to be built in bias toward linear thought, but this process I’ve outlined operates more as a cycle. As we travel around and around this cycle, the outside world is constantly changing as is our reaction to it and there adjustments made all along the way.

The models we develop are, essentially, probabilistic models and that when statistical thinking comes to the fore. As we make our predictions we must do so in the sense of likelihood or probable outcomes. Sophisticated models have been developed (e.g. econometric modeling, continuous process modeling) to make predictions in our complex world and the presentation of any prediction from such a model should contain not only the predicted value itself, but also some assessment as to its likelihood. We cannot escape the need to understand variability.

Variability is inescapable in this universe and rather than avoiding it, we must understand and accept it. We must embrace the ontology of flux.