I take a detour here. Instead of talking about what happened in a session, i talk about the mystery of knowledge, an analysis through a ‘fool’s way’ …
A question we discussed in previous sessions was – If what we ultimately do is believe, then does it matter if we believe in traditions or scientific theories? Since we could not get to any good clarity about it, i thought i will try to make a picture of the way i understand (subject to the ongoing evolution of the thinker) stuff. By the way, this is all ‘leading the witness‘ as the lawyers will complain.
As depicted above, emotional and material needs could probably be said with some confidence to be occupying the human mind’s resources to significant levels. What’s left, could be the curious parts, those which lead to wonder and wander. This curiosity part could be an exploration of what is there, how it is, why is it there, what has been its history, where is it going and so on. Once a question is asked, it often leads to more questioning and becomes difficult to stop. This could drain away resources from the dominant modes – emotional and material insecurities with which we are born with. Hence practical necessities demand that the questioning be stopped for the sake of practical needs. All this conflict between practical needs and our innate curiosity converts a child into an adult when the former wins over the latter. Additionally, holding on to a certain question, or keeping it aside without modulation is not easy.
Imagine a bucket of water as being the human mind’s need of understanding of this complicated world. The rate of true, versatile information could be seen as a tickle of water into the huge bucket. This is true as we have seen earlier or hinted upon that generation of knowledge is a very very slow process. What to do about the remaining empty bucket of hunger? Could imagination have evolved just to fill in this huge void?
As in the above image, a significant portion of human understanding about the world was filled with non-natural concepts, just because getting the natural reasons behind the everyday observations were just too difficult to happen just like that. With this context, the past 1000 years of the growth of science in Europe becomes more astonishing and significant. Coming back to curiosity vs practicality, the sufficing of curiosity of the pre-science years with sufficiently engaging stories was the mainstay of knowledge systems. Science, or its ancestors were just as an aid to the existing march of such knowledge systems as seen in the last session. This is where the current session adds into the stream of thought, more on it from the next session.
Finally could we also explore what do we mean by knowledge itself. Could it begin by facts, or observations that everyone agrees on? If such observations/facts could be draw on a paper as points (above picture), nothing much can be humanly inferred. However, due to the shear “curiosity” pressure in our minds, and in our desperation to fill in the void or understanding isn’t but obvious that we need to add in the red lines in between the facts? This relationship between facts, could be either created artificially, through imagination as a stop gap solution or through actual figuring out the cause-> consequence line of inquiry of the scientific domain. The former probably existed before the sciences came of maturity, and the latter is the current fashion of investigations. What about the blue curves above? Well, if it slightly resembles a pattern, we could as well predict how the unfolding pattern will eventually look. That could be a hypothesis?
In pre-science era, the linking between the facts/observations could be vague and so outliers (the black point in the above depiction) was OK, maybe someone had an extra horn. But not so in the exact sciences, which looks for outliers as indications of a flawed hypothesis.
And finally, what about the relationships between facts? Earlier, since the source of these facts were of non-natural nature, and also because of non-availability of data, the relationships were vague, and made to fit the general dominant narrative as imagined by the authorities. However, now that we cant afford to be so naive or innocent, the chronological linkages between facts as to when the events happened becomes important. Relationships also could be depicted by how much of a cause caused the consequence, linearly or non-linearly. What could be the effect of multiple causes in a single consequence inexplicable by individual causes alone? And so on and so forth.
Truth
What is truth? Why do we want truth? Difference between truth and fact. An event and a pattern. Facts can about a certain event that has occurred, but pattern becomes more relevant because it helps decrease uncertainty in time and space, because then we know if a certain event will happen again. We can estimate and anticipate better. We can get over it, avoid the event, tackle the event and so much more. Such a powerful thing, to be able to anticipate. So here truth becomes directly relevant to security or certainty. Knowledge is clubbing the patterns under names and hierarchies with relationships between, bigger, smaller, more or less powerful, forming from, leading to etc. And variations in patterns, and evolving patterns.
But pattern discovery is not so easy. It takes detailed observations, painstaking work and needless to say expose oneself to sever peer rebuke, all this while overriding practical needs and responsibilities. So obviously not many people would like to do this. So, monks and scientists, sanctioned by culture and traditions of the day are allowed to do this. Earlier however only monks, saints, did that. Probably studied human patterns, and given the limited knowledge, life span of observations, susceptibility to biases, ego, and all human factors, ‘best guesses’ could be generated. Something is better than nothing. And that something was absorbed into the minds and cultures of the remaining people. It may not be complete but its something. But how can those pseudo-patterns last if they were repeatedly proven to not match the reality? Either change it or create exceptions to it (extra horns?). Changing it could be rather costly as one would have to undo then the whole process of getting monks at one place or into remote places, putting them through (called voluntary) long years of penance, etc and then costly dissemination to the layman. But before that doing the most difficult and costly process of unlearning so that the layman’s mind may have some free space for new info! So instead exceptions could be used – if it did not rain as predicted, something was not done right or the right conditions in which the original observation on which the prediction was based were not repeated, the gods were not pleased and so on. But then the right conditions themselves could make it very difficult to follow, or could they be deliberately made difficult to follow so that it could always be blamed on “not well prepared enough”? Quite possibly, keeping the preparations vague could have helped immensely to the ‘knowledge’ authorities as well as to the surprised public, there’s more to do that’s just known, even if they lead to failures…
And fiction, myths and stories, why they?
Carrying forward from MG’s question in a previous session (to which i still wonder) and extending to the common activity we all are concerned now – about why rumors spread? So if truth is all that one ultimately needs, why are we surrounded mostly with epics, drama and fictitious stories?
- Why science conspiracies become popular?
- Why any rumor becomes popular as compared to facts?
- If we look at TV, most of the stuff on it, the sitcoms, movies are all fictional. Could it be 90% of the content? Remaining could be news, but even if we analyze news on TV, there’s a lot of drama. What does it say about us? Interesting article: Reeling the Reality: A study on contemporary Reality Shows and their Influence on other Entertainment Program Genres
- Communicating science through entertainment television: How the sitcom The Big Bang Theory influences audience perceptions of science and scientists – Pei-ying Rashel Li, PhD thesis, ANU, Australia. Excerpts from the abstract:
- Overall the program made science seem less dry and more interesting to the participants, and made scientists seem less socially isolated, humanising them.
- Participants felt the scientist characters in The Big Bang Theory both conformed to and contradicted their preconceived images of scientists and their understanding of scientist stereotypes.
- People had mixed feelings about them being mainly in the biological sciences (rather than being physicists and engineers, like the main male characters), but indicated that on television, good value entertainment was more important than portraying gender balance in science.
Since space is free and this chap has more time (imagined vs real) on hands why not open another door for the fool?
Humor and tragedy – why are they popular ?
Why we laugh? why do we find something funny? Could it be because we have a pleasant mismatch of expectations. Expecting a fall, or failing, or a certain direction to a story and being surprised that it was not so and the outcome was instead more pleasantly surprising! Is there a study on humor and the brain?
How about tragedy? Why tragedy and drama is part of entertainment from times immemorial? Tragedy makes no one happy, and yet its popular. Why? Is it because its relatable? is it kind of a mirror? but is a mirror to our lives always welcome? Is tragedy viewed from a third-person perspective kind of makes it relatable but not too first-hand way, not too close for comfort. Tragedy has a boundary of reality, a play in the imaginations of the viewers, safe and sound but nonetheless profoundly involving. Could it be said that with comfortable distance, tragedy is entertainment – its like expecting a fall by mistakenly stepping on a banana but somehow recovering from it. You can feel, but you will not fall = comfort and surprise. Its all simulation that causes the same stimulation as if it were real.
Could humor be seen as short term twists, fast and with jolts that are better than the bad or boring expectations the viewer simulates the situation to turn out to be? Probably we are always trying to anticipate, what next, what next…. If that were not there then there could be no comedy, as comedy could be all about better than anticipated.
The above all true for fictitious stuff. What about reality TV and modern news broadcasts? Added degree of freedom, unpredictable-ness?
Understanding stuff vs knowing stuff
Often students recount what they have learnt. For example when asked about lenses they blurted out some terms and terminologies, by a very evident act of recollection. That’s OK if its just a language word that they must ascribe a common meaning. But suppose i ask about “what is humor?” i am sure they will jump to definitions they have learnt in their psychology class or read somewhere. I am also sure a lot of times I myself am doing all that. Matching patterns. However, what if we don’t go the path of recollecting from memory, what if we do not react, but repeat the question to really understand what is being asked. After enough pondering, reflection on our own lives, around us, trying to articulate what probably we kind of understand, we may land-up with a bold understanding of it. It may be narrow and incomplete and does not encompass the breadth and depth and scope of a knowledge body about humor generated by deep study over many years and centuries by focused minds, but what we have just done is walked on the similar short term version of what the experts did. Chinese proverb (read somewhere, heard many times) “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish you, feed him for a lifetime”. THAT, must be the method. A practice of :
- Pondering hard and long on things that one wishes to know about, even if all about it has already been discovered and written = ‘reinventing the wheel’ as used and abused in technology. But one who can reinvent the wheel has more chance to invent something else as compared to who skipped the whole practice and skill of discovery. There are no shortcuts.
- Then when one takes to reading, or other sources, one is ready to receive. Many questions extending their arms, shouting to be given, yearning to be filled! The grounds are fertile for seeds to grow into magnificent plants. A prepared mind, right for the germination of new information!
In the current era, the amount of time a question remains as a question in the mind is diminishing further and further. Google and forums and the internet give responses as soon as a sentence is half written. There’s no life of wonder here. Or if there is that’s only at the frontiers of knowledge. But then frontiers are difficult and one has never learnt to ponder because convenience was at stake. There go a billion Einsteins down the drain!
So, the way this course is, it could be seen as ponder-based. How bad could it be, the outcomes of pondered directions? Naive and stupid at worst? But the minds, hopefully will carry forward feeling that pondering can also help in self-discovery and learning stuff through observations and so on. The organic way of learning. Inside to outside.
Disclaimer: All the above banter was not discussed with students (thank god or the powers of the unknown) so please don’t jump on me (metaphorically). I know the above is totally unverified, probably has no place in an educational transaction where i must take responsibility of accuracy and depth. The above could as well be fiction of my mind and i wouldn’t be even aware of such. However, in all these thoughts i had invested much time, and it would be sad to loose them, so they are parked here.