Uncertainty involves our ignorance when we are faced with two or more possible outcomes that cannot be easily discerned with respect to their truth value or future realization (i.e., prediction). Such experiences gained their most precise formalization through the concept of probability and information theory. For instance, repeatedly tossing an unbiased coin will yield, in the long run, the same proportion of each possible outcome, heads or tails. This equality of outcomes is predictable in the long run, but what is unpredictable is the outcome of a single coin toss. When asked to guess the specific outcome of a coin toss, we face complete uncertainty, as there is no winning strategy for preferring one outcome over the other. As formalized through probability and information theory, uncertainty is a powerful concept. However, the first-person experience of uncertainty, the way we experience uncertainty as individuals, falls outside the scope of uncertainty as a scientific concept grounded in mathematical abstractions. This book inquires into the human experience of uncertainty through fiction. As explained in Chapter 2, in fiction, the exception is the rule, and therefore, fiction may provide us with grounds for individual-based research into the experience of uncertainty. This idiographic approach focuses on the individual rather than on generalities and abstractions of the individual. Therefore, it may have some benefits, the most significant of which is experiential comprehension, as explained in the concluding chapter. Moreover, reading about the experience of uncertainty in fiction may help us to understand how deeply uncertainty is associated with the concept of God. Therefore, the book plays on the boundary of uncertainty in its scientific and mathematical forms, the first-person experience of uncertainty as it appears in fiction, and religion in its deep non-institutional sense.
The book is structured as follows. The first chapter gives a general view, locating the discussion in a critical analysis of uncertainty as formalized through probability theory. The criticism does not target probability theory itself or formal measures of uncertainty, which I have used and developed in my own quantitative research. Any measure of uncertainty is developed within a specific “epistemic game”, a structured way of representing, thinking, and problem-solving in a particular context. My point is that epistemic games like probability theory actually have a rather limited scope. They cannot be applied everywhere. Intensive efforts are therefore being developed to set the background for assessing uncertainty as it is experienced from the individual’s perspective and to contrast it with the powerful mathematical games used to deal with uncertainty in the sciences. To repeat, I do not argue for one form of understanding over the other, and I use probability theory only as a contrasting background for my analysis of the individual’s experience of uncertainty.
The second chapter explains why fiction provides grounds for studying the human experience of uncertainty. In this chapter, and following Bakhtin, I also show how the epistemic and the ethical cannot be separated. These two introductory chapters pave the way for the cases analyzed in the following chapters. Chapter 3 reads Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men”. In this chapter, we will meet a devilish assassin who plays dice, God, and the devil, putting a wager on a human being, and a hunter making an irreversible moral decision. I will also discuss uncertainty and the experience of freedom, which seems to accompany the phenomenology of uncertainty.
In Chapter 4, I analyze uncertainty as it appears in Philip K. Dick’s “Solar Lottery”. This reading into a society governed by randomness will introduce us to the idea of uncertainty as a correcting force and show how it is associated with the sin of Sodom, Heisenberg’s random particles, and a synthetic assassin. We shall also see how rebelling against the machine may be a part of experiencing the balance between order and disorder.
In Chapter 5, I read The Dice Man, where a bored psychiatrist decides to live his life with religious submission to chance-based decisions. His sense of freedom from certainty and boredom is replaced by submission to the dice. This chapter deals with the paradoxical meaning of freedom and religion. In addition to the Dice Man, this chapter introduced de Sade, Casanova, and the superfluous man.
Discussed in Chapter 6, “Don’t Mess with Mr. In-Between” is a TV drama written by Dennis Potter in the late 1980s. This masterpiece will introduce us to the deep uncertainty people may experience with respect to reality. In this chapter, we will meet a singing detective, cues leading to the victim rather than to the murderer, and a psychological understanding of uncertainty as resulting from a painful experience. This chapter shows how uncertainty can be experienced not only as an academic epistemological concept but as something embodied “within the skin”.
In Chapter 7, I take as an example Murakami’s novel “Kafka on the Shore.” Through this novel, I introduce a kind of Oedipal uncertainty that teaches us how the experience of uncertainty is deeply associated with the fear of committing a moral sin and the guilt associated with it. We will also discuss the devil, this time appearing under the guise of Johnnie Walker, for whom uncertainty is irrelevant, and talking cats presenting themselves as creatures of habit.
My source for Chapter 8 is McCarthy’s tantalizing novel “The Road”. A father and a son in a post-apocalyptic world experience deep existential uncertainty in circumstances where God’s presence is hidden or missing. We will show how, for a particular father, the love for his particular son is the ultimate certainty, and we will discuss the meaning of hope in a world devoid of God’s presence.
The concluding short chapter locates the current work in the context of idiographic versus nomothetic research in psychology. It explains what we may gain from reading about the first-person experience of uncertainty in fiction and concludes with a Talmudic story to illustrate the point.
As the book focuses on first-person experience, it seems natural to indicate my own perspective on the context in which I wrote this book. Following the massacre of October 2023, I became more interested than ever in better quantifying our ignorance in contexts ranging from the prediction of extreme fatalities in armed conflicts1 to the outcomes of soccer matches.2 However, these papers do not correspond to my personal experience of uncertainty. While writing this preface, we were at war with Iran, and ballistic missiles were striking nearby, targeting civilians. What an experience. I felt I was living in a game of Russian roulette forced on me by evil forces. A ballistic missile that landed at the Weizmann Institute of Science, several hundred meters from my apartment, could have hit the 17-floor building in which I live. Such an experience invites a different perspective on uncertainty from the quantitative one in which I have usually been involved. However, personal experience does not justify writing and inviting others to read a book. Sharing my concerns with my friend, Irun Cohen, a physician, a leading immunologist, and a broad-minded intellectual, gave me a minimal justification for publishing the book. Writing a book, he said, may help you to understand something. I then realized this may be shared with others, who may also find some value in reading the book. With this in mind, I invite you, the reader, to join me on a journey into uncertainty, fiction, and religion.