Potential

I keep wanting to tell parents this:

"Your child's potential is not a trained dog that it should be unleashed. It is the patient accumulation of skill and ability that can be made to do useful work over time. Children have no potential at birth; they have possible futures in which they accumulate potential."

It's the duty of parents and teachers to help them develop those futures so that they can build up the potential with which to do wonderful works — thaumaturgeia, as the Greeks might have said.

What I've been musing on is how the word 'potential', which used to mean 'power, authority or might' became twisted into 'possible use of power, authority or might' in the early 1800s, and now merely means 'possibility regardless of how silly it looks'. Everywhere, you read about 'unleashing potential' without really thinking about how this comes about.

It's more useful to look at the equally common 'developing potential', which actually has more meaning. You can't 'unleash potential' without accumulating some first. Anyway, 'unleashing' is more along the lines of Shakespeare's immortal line — "Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war!" It's as if you can train potential so that once you let its leash slip, it will automatically do what is right, useful, purposeful and wise.

Sorry, that's not how it works. Potential needs to be worked at, and then used wisely and carefully. And once it's gone actual or kinetic, it's gone.

Hierarchical

There is a very fundamental world, of things that are and things that aren't. These things interact, and from them come energy, and matter, and the properties thereof. And they interact through a stately dance of elegant rules, and these we call forces.

We have codified this world, and the codex is what we call physics. And because physics overwhelms us in its desire to make the one-to-one map of reality a logic that allows us to interpolate and extrapolate what we cannot clearly see, we approximate for practicality.

And so are born chemistry, and biology, and geology, and astronomy: these are the fruits of our empirical powers, of natural history and natural philosophy — they are what we call the natural sciences.

But we, the messy masses of cohering chemistry, and biology, incidental and accidental to our geology and astronomy, and containing so much physics that our minds cannot pause to compute it all — we humans must see ourselves as selves, and ask questions about self and other, and selfhood and otherhood, and the narratives thereof.

And so begins the decline, the declivity, from the airless heights of cold physics to the fecund morasses and fertile plains of the aesthetic and the literary and the religious. The water that flows down from those heights becomes a torrent in the foothills of the social sciences and the technological arts, the creative and narrative disciplines.

It is a serendipitous liquid flux in which the elements of humanity erode the banks of math and logic, and by the time we reach the broad and open spaces, it is a delta that carries the silt of science and feeds the starving of the nations.

And on those spaces we build cities, even if they might be prone to flood. We build monuments, even if the volcanic urges of war should destroy them. We build libraries, we build fortresses, we build places of holiness and worship.

From those manmade towers, we look back to the mountains of pure physics, the thin and chilling air of logic, of mathematics, of joining-the-dots and predicting-the-dots. And then clarity comes.

There is a very fundamental world, of things that are and things that aren't. These things interact, and they are called principalities and powers — the convolution of energy and dark matter, the gnarling of strings. And they interact through a stately dance of elegant rules, in the infinite mansions of God.

Three Questions

How do we know things, and how do we know that we know? That's what epistemology is all about, and in the process of figuring it out, we all come up with theories of knowledge.

I think there are three main questions.

1. What led up to this?
2. Where does this lead to?
3. Is it good?

I suspect that no matter how humans think, it all boils down to these three things because I haven't found any paradigm that needs any other questions. In itself, this isn't proof that there aren't any other key questions, of course. I'm just saying that you need three for human inquiry.

Why these three? The first one establishes cause. The second one establishes effect. And the third requires value judgement, whether relative ("Is this good compared to... ?") or absolute ("Is this good in itself?").

It is certainly possible to use fewer questions in some disciplines. However, it doesn't seem profitable to use more except as elaborations or refinements of these three, for a specific purpose within a specific kind of inquiry.

Oddly enough, the 'Rule of Three' is one of the rules of human stories; things always come in threes. Maybe the Rule of Three is like Finagle's Law, one of the great meta rules of human existence.

Gravity and Sorcery

For all that science is, it still has problems dealing with reality. As a teacher of science and of the epistemology that comes with it, I've found that teaching people the difference between reality and representations of reality is very tough.

Take for example the idea of an atom. With things like X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy we can vicariously perceive things that purport to be atoms, or at least, the positions, the wraiths, the ghosts of atoms. Limited by time and space, we still cannot know atoms except at one remove, or more. But the evidence is clear that something is there, and we know its properties well.

The same thing occurs with gravity. We know how it seems to work; we are pretty good at estimating its effects and predicting its behaviour. But how does it work the way it works? Here is where we slip into hand-waving and analogies. Gravitons? Just a name for the supernatural entities that we hang our dreams of gravity on.

The list goes on. Dark matter, dark energy, string theory... our knowledge of the universe has become increasingly tenuous. By what criteria do we call it knowledge now? By the fact that we have found a connect-the-dots theory to account for everything we think we see? By the fact that we can use the theory to predict other things? But how does it work?

That's where we enter the realm of the sorcerer's construct. A sorcerer who knows nothing of science, given a modern gadget (say, a laptop computer with a solar-cell recharger), will eventually come up with an hypothesis of its workings that will account for its behaviour and, because the machine's logic is internally consistent, also account for future behaviours. But does he know how it works?

Think about it. He learns to launch a word-processor by clicking on its icon. He learns that when he presses the 'A' key, an 'A' appears on the screen. This behaviour is reliable, and it will hold true for all the keys — whatever is on the key is what appears on the screen. The simplest hypothesis is that there is a sympathetic link between the symbol on the key and the graphic on the screen. The nature of that link is so complicated that if this were a scientific experiment, scientists would throw out the real explanation by using Occam's razor. It would be far simpler to hypothesize that it works like a typewriter: mechanical action on keyboard impresses the screen with images.

We're in that position. We attempt to name ourselves the lords of creation, writing out our account of how the universe works. But we'll never get into the workings. Even with our analogies, our metaphors, our formulae, the universe is still a black box. We put stuff in, we see stuff, we figure out what stuff produces what stuff. But why does it produce stuff? All we have is the idea that the universe is consistent. And worse, we assume the simplest explanation is probably true.

And now, not even that. The more we know, the more we begin to suspect that the consistencies we find in the laws of physics are merely a local aberration. It's like when you first see a colour change during a titration, before you swirl the mixture. The local concentration has spiked, and the indicator has changed colour, but that situation is not true for the rest of the solution.

We're all sorcerers, just as Isaac Newton was proud to be. We have no idea of what is real, we advance no hypothesis that is worthy of the name; we only report what we see, predict what we think we will see, and are happy if it turns out right. That is what science is about; it is the predictable toy in the bag of jokes.