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Understanding Reality |
Date: Thu, 27 May 1999 03:11:29 -0600
Lawrence wrote:From: Roan Carratu <[email protected]>
Dear friends,
The last few days' messages have been most helpful, and though they have ranged over a variety of topics, from Kosovo, to the transmission of hoax messages, to concepts of elders, they have sparked a central issue. Roan has spoken of it directly, and Alex raises the same question in his last, insightful message.
The matter is this.
Much of HOW we want to tackle the crafting of the future reflects the understanding we have of what the world is like today. Thus the quality of our understanding underpins our ability to pursue those goals.
Roan and Alex both explicitly challenge HOW we know what we know, and the accuracy or relevance of what we think we know, or what we pay attention to, and I share with them this deep concern.
Much of the latest discussions we have had revolves around the degree to which we should be accurate and the degree to which we are focusing on the most significant domains.
I have just finished a book that explores this beautifully, John Allen Paulos' INNUMERACY, Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences, NY: Vintage, 1988 (paperback). It discusses the uses of statistics and probability (and their misuses by various 'pseudosciences'), and argues persuasively that without some understanding of this, people are left vulnerable to many different types of mis-understandings about how the world is, how it works, and what is happening in it. It is a nice little primer, written for the lay-person!, and immediately useful to the reader.
Toward the end of the book, Paulos suggests that with the radical increase in connections among people and the in the amount of information we have access to, that innumeracy (the lack of ability to use and understand numbers) leaves us especially vulnerable to false conclusions and assumptions.
I am wondering now about what might be the most useful way to tackle the question that Roan and Alex most broadly have posed: how can we know that what we know is accurate, and that we are focusing on issues in the most effective way.
Lawry, my friend, the question you ask has long been a major flaw in the conceptual foundations of 'western civilization'. Once, long ago, I went with my then wife to do some landscaping for a retired doctor of philosophy from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The doctor, who had just found out he had incurable cancer and that his wife had some other kind of slow cancer, talked with me for three hours about this very question.
When he had found out his wife was going to die, for the first time, he tried to find the roots of the philosophy he had personally accepted and evolved from all the ancients he taught his students about. For more than a year, he had struggled with it, until, he told me, he realized that there was no way to identify anything as real, that there was no truth... for him, it came down to a single question; How do we know that anything is real? There was no answer for him. His basics told him everything was totally relative, and no beliefs could be proven to be true.
Having apparently never studied nor put value into anything but 'western philosophy', he was completely lost in confusion and depression, because there were no answers for him. I tried to get him to trust his perceptions, and introduce to him the idea that 'I think, therefore I am', the most basic root of his worldview, is the philosophical equivalent of saying nothing else really exists but ' I ', and with this as basic root, the ego isolates all thought as 'cause' and makes everything else relative as 'effect'. This negates all 'proofs' to purely conceptual sets of rootless words.
In reality, this 'I think, therefore I am' is only one small part of a vaster equation: 'All that is, is'. Science implicitly acknowledges and investigates this larger equation, even while many, if not most scientists attempt to fit this evidence of the larger equation into the former limited truism. Thus many scientists tend to think what is discovered is the equations they arrive at, rather than accept the greater existence of the greater equation 'outside' the truism. The truism is seen as an almost magic 'given' and since it cannot include anything outside itself, everything else is declared to be 'chaotic' and almost unformed. They then tend to consider only what is confirmed as possible and any other, 'unproved', idea becomes absurd to them. It's like taking the description of something for the something described.
(This is why western civilization destroys the environment, easily creates weapons of mass destruction, ignores any data not confirmed through science, and places human ego above all else in Universe. Because the truism is taken as basic 'axiom', Universe seems to be illusion.)
The retired philosopher never understood... the concept seemed to him to be chaotic, because it put to question many of the most cherished of his 'axioms'. I was sorry I was not able to put to rest his fear for his wife and himself. After all, if 'I think, therefore I am' is the most basic of axioms for someone, if they no longer think, then they no longer are... and this seems to mean endless darkness; extinction.
Those who are trapped by the truism as absolute see any wider understanding as some kind of 'faith', and for rigid minds, this is absolute foolishness. But the larger equation, "All that is, is" is not something based on faith. It is something that is constantly, instant to instant, obvious to the perceptions. The truism has to take perceptions as being essentially false most of the time to ignore it, and most of the time, the mind operates despite the ego's philosophy, or people could not survive at all. Folks think and act like the truism is the basic axiom, but what they do is in response to incoming perceptions.
When one stubs the toe, the pain roaring up the leg is not conceptual. The reaction of the body is regardless of the philosophy of the ego. Each such event should snap the ego into a wider view of Universe, but in most, the ego has both individual and cultural filters to prevent that eventuality.
But sometime in each individual's life, they are faced with such overwhelming experiential perception of Universe that their ego's fixations are shattered, and then they often fall into deep confusion, or sometimes a total transformation of their philosophy. Sometimes, someone, after realizing that their philosophy does not explain anything, and causes untold misery in his/her life, the individual 'kills', shuts down, the ego, and from then on, the truism is no longer the basic axiom, but just one factor in a worldview that is so vast that ego itself is seen as only the slightest of tools. It is not taken on 'faith' but is observable moment to moment. The ego comes back, of course, it is necessary, but it no longer thinks of itself as the center of Universe, and may not cling to any philosophy at all.
Now to the question of; "How can we know that what we know is accurate, and that we are focusing on issues in the most effective way?"
The ego cannot know much of anything. It's just too stupid. It holds the 'point of view', 'thinks' in emotions and words, a stream of concepts, builds a simplistic model of Universe in it's imagination which, when untamed, it attaches to the 'point of view' and essentially claims as being the whole center of the Universe... filtering all data coming in like a dogmatic bureaucrat with delusions of grandeur.
By design, however, we are not our egos. We are actually a vast intelligence which is to the ego as the mountain is to the child's pile of sand. This larger intelligence is incomprehensible to the ego, but when the ego is tamed, that vast intelligence, which is the seat of intuition and compassion, empathy and conscience, using constant reintegration of holographic complexes, perceives in this much much vaster model of Universe, what is likely to work and what is not.
The ego, when it tries something, and new data comes in, integrates one little tiny piece of data into it's worldview at a time... this vast intelligence, which does not have a 'point of view', btw, takes in all the new data at once, and integrates it in a split second, presenting an altered model of Universe and new 'instructions' to the ego almost immediately.
This process of observation, integration, alteration of action, and new observation is a spiral of understanding in real time, as compared to the limited cartoon understanding of the minor corresponding process within the ego, which often ends up returning to the same old non-understandings and reactions. This greater individual process, integrated with a synergistic group, is, I think, the closest we can come to finding the most effective way. Gestalt synergy from the highest consciousness, integrating as much intuition directed data as possible, to produce deliberate cooperative action as a result of quickly perceived result. Kinda like surfing. (grin)
Any conceptual disciplines, including math and probability, are ego tools, and while learning them may help a little, that vast intelligence processes data to arrive at solutions far faster than any algorithms learned and used by the ego, without the rigidity of premise all such algorithms inherently have. --
Peace,
The Power of One by Mary-Wynne Ashford, MD Email Conversations on Various Subjects