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?