Definition of Insanity

Dear Ben and Albert,

when people define insanity (mostly in political discussions) they attribute their favorite definition to either one of you, presumably to evoke some higher authority on the subject. This definition, hardly contested by anyone, reads:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.”

I personally doubt that either of you is the author of this rather dumb definition. Because it assumes several unlikely events:

1) Sameness of things. In a dynamic universe, no same things can exist. Everything is different and changing all the time. Nothing remains as it was. There just are no same things. This makes our universe principally complex and uncertain.

2) Linear causality: Doing the same thing is plainly impossible as well. Not only does the context of an action change, but so does the actor and thus the action itself. We can at most declare similarities and assume that similar things under similar conditions will produce similar results. But these are essentially speculations. We just cannot know.

To quote Heraclites: "You cannot step into the same river twice." But as Heinz von Foerster once remarked, you cannot even step into the same river once, because there is no same river. In a universe in flux, prediction is always speculation. Although we individually rely heavily (like all species) on such speculations by assuming that events of the past will happen again in the future, this is never certain. Prediction, whether by oracle or clearvoyence of computer models remains speculation.

So my definition of insanity would go like this:

"Insanity is to first believe that we can do the same things again (and again), and second to expect the same outcome."

Yours,

AdLib