Stuff That Can't Be Explained
You know, it hit me that we thirst for explanations to the point where we assume that everything must have a rational explanation. All things have a cause, is the theory. But we don't actually have a reason as to why things have reasons, or even why things should have reasons.
Consider the workings of the mind. At our current state of knowledge, we know that action occurs when a certain potential in the brain is exceeded in a certain direction. It is possible to see how this might be so, but the causes are complex. In principle, we can predict how a person should behave; in practice, we cannot. To make matters worse, it seems that we decide upon acting long before we actually are conscious of the decision, and that we appear to act on knowledge before we are aware of this knowledge. This leads to the illusion known as intuition. The final insult to the idea that our minds are rational is the fact that memory is mutable, and that our brains reconfigure with some sort of biased randomness in the direction of whatever seems most convenient.
It seems that the very lack of constancy, consistency and/or dependability of our minds and our world is what drives us to want things that are rational and consistent. This is why we invent mathematical structures and rules, and pursue the scientific paradigm. The fact is that we see data points all around us, and we confer upon them significance so that they become information. We weave information into structures that seem useful, and once utility as been conferred upon these, they become knowledge. We weave related-looking bits of knowledge together into elaborate tapestries, and they become areas of knowledge, disciplines, and more complex structures.
But what in all this is useful? The very term 'useful' ranges in utility, from being indicative of necessity (food, water, air, shelter), to denoting the very important (communication, education, construction and synthesis), to labelling the stuff we can demonstrably live without but which we cannot imagine living without (electricity, information technology, powered mechanized transport). Everything has its uses, little is completely useless.
The power of reason overheats the brain in a world that is changing faster and has more and more complexity. A lot of that complexity is man-created; the volume of knowledge constructed follows an exponential curve, but the value of that knowledge is also exponentially less accessible — it consists of stuff that fewer and fewer people need to know or which requires even more stuff to be useful at all.
Why build a Large Hadron Collider? What utility value does it have? There is a long list of questions that it certainly will answer when fully deployed and once the myriad (yes, at least 10,000) scientists, engineers and mathematicians around it get to work. Will it feed the poor, make people happy, tell us right from wrong? Not yet, if at all. But it does cost ten billion US dollars, which is not small fish.
As a teacher of science, I've heard and understand all the reasons why we 'do science'. I understand how and why scientific principles and discoveries have improved the standard of living starting from very basic stuff like what an electron is, or how gravity appears to work. But you can't build a case for future benefits from past successes, especially when immediate needs (urgency) may outweigh the importance of such benefits.
In a sense, we are all necessarily hypocritical. We enjoy the fruits of science and the illusion of its necessity as an industry and costly endeavour, while turning a blind eye to the problems that could be rectified by altruism. But altruism doesn't gain points, and it doesn't work, until material resources have been accumulated (or the illusion thereof, as in money). Such points are real because we have made them so. It is no longer possible to quantify a person's work in load carried or bits generated, but only according to the market value. And the market is all in our interactions and in our heads. It can be explained, but only in terms of our sub-rationality.
In the end, all of it can be explained, but none of it can be explained away. We are full of motives and reasons, excuses and theories. Our propensity for violence has been relatively lowered for a few brief shining moments in a murky sea of disease, death and destruction. This, we call civilisation. I don't think there is a comprehensive explanation for that.
Consider the workings of the mind. At our current state of knowledge, we know that action occurs when a certain potential in the brain is exceeded in a certain direction. It is possible to see how this might be so, but the causes are complex. In principle, we can predict how a person should behave; in practice, we cannot. To make matters worse, it seems that we decide upon acting long before we actually are conscious of the decision, and that we appear to act on knowledge before we are aware of this knowledge. This leads to the illusion known as intuition. The final insult to the idea that our minds are rational is the fact that memory is mutable, and that our brains reconfigure with some sort of biased randomness in the direction of whatever seems most convenient.
It seems that the very lack of constancy, consistency and/or dependability of our minds and our world is what drives us to want things that are rational and consistent. This is why we invent mathematical structures and rules, and pursue the scientific paradigm. The fact is that we see data points all around us, and we confer upon them significance so that they become information. We weave information into structures that seem useful, and once utility as been conferred upon these, they become knowledge. We weave related-looking bits of knowledge together into elaborate tapestries, and they become areas of knowledge, disciplines, and more complex structures.
But what in all this is useful? The very term 'useful' ranges in utility, from being indicative of necessity (food, water, air, shelter), to denoting the very important (communication, education, construction and synthesis), to labelling the stuff we can demonstrably live without but which we cannot imagine living without (electricity, information technology, powered mechanized transport). Everything has its uses, little is completely useless.
The power of reason overheats the brain in a world that is changing faster and has more and more complexity. A lot of that complexity is man-created; the volume of knowledge constructed follows an exponential curve, but the value of that knowledge is also exponentially less accessible — it consists of stuff that fewer and fewer people need to know or which requires even more stuff to be useful at all.
Why build a Large Hadron Collider? What utility value does it have? There is a long list of questions that it certainly will answer when fully deployed and once the myriad (yes, at least 10,000) scientists, engineers and mathematicians around it get to work. Will it feed the poor, make people happy, tell us right from wrong? Not yet, if at all. But it does cost ten billion US dollars, which is not small fish.
As a teacher of science, I've heard and understand all the reasons why we 'do science'. I understand how and why scientific principles and discoveries have improved the standard of living starting from very basic stuff like what an electron is, or how gravity appears to work. But you can't build a case for future benefits from past successes, especially when immediate needs (urgency) may outweigh the importance of such benefits.
In a sense, we are all necessarily hypocritical. We enjoy the fruits of science and the illusion of its necessity as an industry and costly endeavour, while turning a blind eye to the problems that could be rectified by altruism. But altruism doesn't gain points, and it doesn't work, until material resources have been accumulated (or the illusion thereof, as in money). Such points are real because we have made them so. It is no longer possible to quantify a person's work in load carried or bits generated, but only according to the market value. And the market is all in our interactions and in our heads. It can be explained, but only in terms of our sub-rationality.
In the end, all of it can be explained, but none of it can be explained away. We are full of motives and reasons, excuses and theories. Our propensity for violence has been relatively lowered for a few brief shining moments in a murky sea of disease, death and destruction. This, we call civilisation. I don't think there is a comprehensive explanation for that.
Labels: Epistemology, Experience, Philosophy, Science, Social Sciences
etched with acid at 10:51:00 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home