more about human comprehension

[johncomic]

Okay, here's a bit more about where my mind was wandering yesterday. A few random thoughts occurred and accreted:

- I remembered an example I read in a religious essay long ago. The writer gave the example of taking your baby in for shots (which I have since done). In this situation, the doctor subjects the baby to a painful procedure... and as the parent, your job is to hold the child's arm still enough to allow it. Which you do.
From the baby's perspective, someone is hurting it. And you, who are supposed to love and protect it, are not only not protecting it, you are participating in administering the pain. How is the baby supposed to make any sense of this? How can you explain it so that they can understand? From your perspective, what you are doing is caring for and loving your child by preventing deadly illness in future. But the baby has no way of perceiving this as anything other than pain and betrayal. It doesn't yet have the mental capacity to understand what you have done.

- I remembered an experiment mentioned in psych class. A preschooler is presented with a device with two buttons. When the left button is pressed, a toy bird emerges from a box. When the right button is pressed, a toy bunny emerges from the box. After both buttons have been demonstrated, the child is asked to predict which toy will show.
Shortly, the experimenter begins pressing the left button revealing the bird every time, without exception. But after a while, the child will predict that the bunny will appear when the left button is pressed. Those children capable of articulating explained that it was time for the bunny to appear now, that it wasn't fair that the bird was getting all the turns.
At this age, children do not yet fully grasp that cause and effect override all notions of “justice”.

In both cases, we're dealing with a mind that does not have the ability to grasp and correctly process the information it has. However, we know that eventually they will grow older, their minds will develop new capabilities, and they will be able to “think correctly” about these things. But what if their minds never grew? Then they would never get it. It would never make sense to them. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't “really” make sense...

- yesterday I ran across this in Wikipedia's Ayn Rand entry: Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge -- and I suddenly thought “But what if it's not?”

We assume that if there's anything we don't understand, it's because we don't have enough information about it. Once we have all the facts, we can figure it out. The human mind is capable of making sense of everything that actually does make sense. We have the capacity to understand everything.

But we don't know this -- we can only believe it. What if there are things out there that make sense to a more powerful mind than ours, but ours will never have the capacity to be sufficiently powerful? What if there is nonsensical truth out there, that we will dismiss as “mere” nonsense because it doesn't make sense to us? Should we assume that humanity will, given enough time and data, have reality “licked” and all figured out?

Comments

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

And if someone wants to say “Well then, what do you suggest we use in place of reason?”, my only reply is I dunno! I'm not claiming to have things figured out better than everyone else, I'm only me! I'm just saying that we have such faith in our powers of reason, and it strikes me that it's a faith which is rarely if ever questioned, or even thought about...

[ginsu.livejournal.com]

It's not that reason is a perfect tool for understanding the world -- only that it's the best available tool.

As you scale up the number of variables, and interactions between them, you clearly reach a point where reason will not suffice. We will never have the ability, for instance, to predict weather accurately very far in advance; it's just too complex a system.

Things get even worse (more complex) once you introduce consciousness as a variable. We can predict very accurately what the planet Jupiter will be doing in a hundred years because it's just a big ball of gas. But we cannot predict with any accuracy exactly what a randomly-selected human being will be thinking, or saying, in a hundred minutes.

So we unquestionably do not have the capacity to understand everything. But we can understand a larger percentage of everything through reason than through any other method.

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

But is it just a question of complexity/amount of data? Or is there like a whole other level or way of thinking that we haven't discovered yet? Sort of like how quantum mechanics describes a reality that classical mechanics can't contain, events that “make no sense” which only quantum mechanics can handle. If there was something like quantum cognition or quantum thought...

Actually, Mimsy Were the Borogoves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves) follows a similar line of speculation, now that I think about it.... love that story.

[ginsu.livejournal.com]

is there like a whole other level or way of thinking that we haven't discovered yet?

I'm sure there is.

It not only follows, but seems likely to me, that as we continue to evolve there will be unpredictable, emergent properties that transform us in profound ways -- as profound as the transformation we got via the unpredictable, emergent property of consciousness itself.

[alisonebruce.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine a time - no matter how distant a future - when we'll have this whole life the universe and everything "licked". It isn't that I think we're incapable of evolving toward that point, only that life the universe and everything will also evolve.

There will always be something more over the horizon. Even if there isn't, we'll believe there is.