“What is Creative Uncertainty? Start with the CIA model. There is a secret you have to find out. But it might be impossible to find out. We don’t know what is currently happening in distant galaxies. We receive only news of their remote past, because information cannot travel faster than light.”
-David Keppel
David’s
Writings
The Necessity of Philosophy
At one point in the development of Creative Uncertainty, my father and I took scissors to the manuscript and laid the scraps, sentence by sentence, on the living room sofa. Then we assembled it in reverse order. One version went from the Big Bang at the beginning of...
Uncertainty is Not Just a State of Mind
We associate uncertainty with a state of mind: the inability to decide. Actually, however, uncertainty has its roots in a state of the world, not just a state of mind, as when the outcome is balanced between two or more points. We have to overcome centuries of...
Father & Son
Reflections on my Collaboration with John Keppel My life – or at least my memory – begins on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Our family lived in Rio de Janeiro, where my father was Political Counselor of the U.S....
Uncertainty in an Age of Existential Risk
Ours are the first generations in history to face existential risk: the risk that we will extinguish life on Earth. The fact that this risk confronts us in more than one form suggests that the problem is systemic, with deep roots in our ways of thinking and acting. ...
