Uncertainty, Open Minds, and the Twilight Zone
Scott MacLeod, a retired public high school teacher and Ethics Bowl coach, currently serves on the board of PLATO. Decades after taking his first philosophy course, he still wonders about the nature of reality and whether Rod Serling was right after all.
When I was a teenager, I fell in love with the Twilight Zone, the original black and white TV series created and hosted by Rod Serling. I was captivated by stories of alternate realities, unexpected outcomes, and the idea that reality may not be what it appears to be. “There’s a signpost up ahead,” part of the signature opening to each episode, signaled that I could not be entirely certain about my experience of the world.
So it was not surprising that when I encountered the metaphysics of George Berkeley and Immanuel Kant in an introductory philosophy course my freshman year in college, I was hooked. It was only many years later, teaching AP Language & Composition at a public high school, that I came to see the thread that connects metaphysics, modern science, logic, and the need – in fact- the requirement — for keeping an open mind, precisely because uncertainty is an integral part of human knowledge.
In my AP Language & Composition class, I began a unit on science by challenging common assumptions about the nature of reality. I grabbed a chair. “Take this chair for example,” I said. “I can see it.” I exaggerated looking down at the chair. “And I can touch it.” I grabbed the chair firmly with both hands and picked it up as if to throw it toward the students. “I can throw it at you, and you’d feel it.” Most of the students recoiled instinctively. “I can hear it.” I shook the chair up and down, banging its legs on the floor. “I can smell it.” I put my nose down to the leather. “I can taste it.” I stuck out my tongue as if to lick the top of the chair but stopped short. “But that would be gross. That’s how I know the chair. That’s what it is, right? That’s the reality of the chair.” I paused. “But where do all those things take place: sight, touch, sound, smell, taste?”
A few students murmured, “In our heads” Others, “In our mind.”
“Right. All I know about the chair is my sensation of it, which happens in here,” I said as I pointed to my head.
This is Berkeley’s theory of Idealism in (over)simplified form. We generally assume that reality consists of matter, the “stuff” of the world. Berkeley presents an argument that appears to destroy that assumption. When I first encountered Berkeley in college, I could hear Rod Serling: “You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind…There’s a signpost up ahead.”
Thankfully, for those of us who need to feel there is matter in the world and not just Berkeley’s “ideas,” Immanuel Kant showed that the “stuff” exists. But importantly, he said we can’t know the stuff in itself, apart from our perception of it. Several hundred years later, physicists Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck said essentially the same thing, that we can’t know “ultimate reality.” How we know the stuff of the world affects what we know of it. The how and the what are inseparable. It’s like wearing orange tinted sunglasses and trying to find out the “real” color of things without the orange tint, except that you can never take the sunglasses off. Further, quantum physics showed there is a degree of uncertainty in our scientific knowledge and that the uncertainty can never be overcome. The stuff of the world at the subatomic particle level has a degree of randomness and our predictions can only be framed in terms of probability. The laws of nature do not appear to provide for certainty. Once again, I hear Rod Serling’s voice.
The scientific method is founded largely on the principle of inductive reasoning, which sounds fancy but is in fact just the process of observation and coming to conclusions based on those observations, something all humans do. The scientist T.H. Huxley gave the example of eating sour green apples. You eat one hard, green apple and you note that it tastes sour. You try another hard, green apple and again it tastes sour. Every time you eat a hard, green apple, it tastes sour. You come to the conclusion that (all) hard green apples taste sour. This is basic inductive reasoning: drawing a general conclusion from observations of specific phenomena in the world.
Here’s the catch though. Huxley explains that because the conclusion is based on observation of experience, what we call empirical evidence, it can never be claimed to be absolutely true or false. If our knowledge is based on particular experiences, then we may encounter a different experience in the future that contradicts our accepted belief. And this is exactly how science moves forward.
We need to be humble in our search for truth. We need to be humble about the opinions we form about other people, politics, and most everything in life. We form our opinions largely based on our experiences, and therefore, we are in the land of inductive reasoning. This means we can’t be absolutely sure of our beliefs and opinions – perhaps most importantly about people and politics – because we may encounter new experiences that prove our ideas false. We may someday find a hard green apple that is sweet.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we can or should believe anything. Conspiracy theories are still false, based on a preponderance of reliable evidence. Like a responsible member of a jury, we must judge whether the evidence causes a reasonable doubt. If the doubt is not reasonable, a jury makes a conviction, which appropriately is language we use to describe our strongly held beliefs.
When we recognize the limitations of our knowledge and embrace uncertainty, the logical, inescapable conclusion is to keep an open mind – to new ideas, different people, and different perspectives. And that’s a signpost worth following.
Note: “Uncertainty” is the theme of the next issue of Questions that will be published in Spring 2026.
