THING —> HAPPEN

Here are some things we know (or at least think we do):

Our universe of space and time is something like 13.8 billion years old, and getting older every day.

 

By contrast, average human lifespan is ~70 years.

 

Humanity, our species, is only ~200,000 years old.

 

Life itself, beginning with single celled organisms, is approximately 4 billion years old.

 

In other words, it took over 9 billion years for life on earth to emerge, and another ~3.8 billion years for our species to evolve.

 

Though we have good, albeit circumstantial, evidence of the beginnings of life and the universe, we have no clear idea when—or even if—our universe and even life itself will end, how many more billions of years it will continue to exist.

 

The difference between billions and tens or hundreds or thousands of years is difficult for us to grasp. It's easy to foreshorten these time frames.

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 Our planet, a rocky space object, orbits around a single star.

 

There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy.

 

There are likewise estimated to be two trillion galaxies in the universe, each filled with hundreds of billions of stars, many like our own with multiple planets orbiting them.

The universe itself is thought to be some 93 billion light years in diameter.

 

These numbers are so vast, our minds can hardly calculate them.

 

Yet, somehow we are capable of making reasonably accurate estimates of the age and size of the universe and its number of heavenly bodies.

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 At the other end of the scale, atoms and particles inside of atoms—such as electrons, neutrons, and protons—are unfathomably small. The number of them is incalculable. For example, there are billions and billions of atoms in a single grain of sand.

 

Particles are nebulous, cloud-like, that is, until they are observed.

Through our instrumentation and experimentation, we can make some reasonable observations of their probable locations or velocities.

Yet, they exist in the smallest conceivable unit of physical space, something called a Planck length. One way to visualize how small this might be is the following: Imagine "a particle or dot about 0.1 mm in size (the diameter of human hair, which is at or near the smallest the unaided human eye can see) were magnified in size to be as large as the observable universe [i.e., 93 billion light years in diameter], then inside that universe-sized 'dot', the Planck length would be roughly the size of an actual 0.1 mm dot."

 

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The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second; or ~186,282 miles per second. We've managed to approximate this as well. A light year, of course, is the distance a beam of light, or a photon, would travel in a year at this rate of acceleration.

 

Our planet is about 25,000 miles around the equator. A photon of light could circle the earth more than 7 times in a second.

 

A photon will travel at this constant rate in a straight line forever until it interacts with another particle, though its path may be diverted by gravitational pull.

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At absolute zero, or zero kelvins, or -273.15 degrees Celsius, or -459.67 Fahrenheit, matter reaches it foundational state.

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The scale of human perspective exists in a state in-between all these phenomena: the instantaneous and the near-eternal, the very, very large and the very, very small, energy and matter, the speed of light and absolute zero.

 

How is it that we are privileged to have this vantage on all these phenomena? How is it that we can make some reasonable guesses about the nature of these things? This is a philosophical question.

 

The human scale is characterized by brevity, uncertainty, relativity, and incompleteness.

 

We have, of course, and have to rely on the evidence of our senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste.

 

But we also have extensions of many of these—prostheses, if you will—such as: mathematics and logic, atomic microscopes and particle accelerators, x-ray and infrared telescopes and arrays of radio antennas, gravitational wave observatories and electromagnetic spectroscopes, among many others.

 

These provide access, but they also limit us. It is important to understand these limitations.

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Imagine if we were creatures who could at once perceive things that were ~93 billion light years large all the way down to the Planck length.

 

Imagine if we were creatures who experienced the lifespan of a galaxy the same way we humans experienced a single burst of fireworks.

 

Imagine if we were creatures who experienced the entire universe of space and time the way we now experience a wave on the shore, or even as a single bubble of spindrift in the foam of a breaking wave.

 

Imagine if we were creatures who could code a virtual computer program to run on its own in four dimensions according to certain preset logical conditions.

 

Or, imagine if we were creatures made up of pure, unbounded energy (or, alternatively, information) who never experienced entropy or succumbed to the dimensions of space and time, at once both greater than and somehow beneath physical reality.

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Are such imaginary beings or creatures or things possible? Could they exist? Who knows?

And, if so, would it even be correct to call them beings (or creatures or things) or say that they exist?

We may never be able to say, not least because we suffer from the structural limitations of our language (and thus the human mind) which, ultimately, breaks down to following formula: THING —> HAPPEN.

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I suspect the Ancient Greek philosopher/sophist Protagoras was righter than he ever could have imagined when he said: "Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not."

 

It is at once a statement of great hubris (or vanity) and profound humility.

"Has It Ever Occurred to You..."

I want to thank Jerome Doolittle over at Bad Attitudes, a blog of pointed snippets and commentary I've been reading for years, for pointing me to this article on Psychology Today's blogsite.

Normally, I read/skim posts from the Wisblog Roll on the right side of this page, absorb the information, chase down the links, and continue on my merry way. When I read Doolittle's post the subject struck a chord with me, but I didn't have the time to run down the reference. And I was haunted by it the entire weekend. When I got back to my computer, I couldn't remember where I had originally seen it. I had to page through several of my regular haunts until I found it.

Here's the money quote:

Dunning and Kruger often refer to a “double curse” when interpreting their findings: People fail to grasp their own incompetence, precisely because they are so incompetent. And since, overcoming their incompetence would first require the ability to distinguish competence from incompetence people get stuck in a vicious cycle. 

“The skills needed to produce logically sound arguments, for instance, are the same skills that are necessary to recognize when a logically sound argument has been made. Thus, if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s, are right or wrong. They cannot recognize their responses as mistaken, or other people’s responses as superior to their own.”

I realize that PT has what I would call an "empathy bias", that is to say they don't necessarily see the Gohmerts, Palins, and Becks of the world as knaves, but rather as fools deserving of our understanding. They are granted a certain amount of cultural 'authority' by virtue of their having access to the megaphone of politics and media PR and are allowed to say, or repeat, whatever talking point some political handler or PR flack has put in front of them. To PT, their lies are not lies (because they don't necessarily know what they are saying is false), they simply don't know any better and, in fact, because of their self-regard do not even recognize that they could be wrong. More's the pity.

The problem of assertive, self-confident, self-righteous ignorance has long been a puzzler for me. How do you deal with people for whom the concept of a shared, factual reality is foreign? People for whom the notion of truth is simply irrelevant or at least subsidiary to an emotionally satisfying 'gotcha' point? Especially when they are politically aggressive and noisy and well-funded. Especially when they make every effort to avoid inconvenient facts.

This is quite possibly the central problem Socrates (via Plato) addressed 2500+ years ago in the nascent democracy of ancient Athens:

Sophistry + Rhetoric + PR vs. Truth + Logic + Reality.

Quaint, I know, but the Protagoras is still relevant today.

Socrates was famous for asking questions like 'What does it mean to lead a good life?' 'What is excellence (or virtue), and how important is its pursuit in everything I am and do?' and 'What does it mean to "know thyself"?' These are the sorts of questions that any self-aware person should constantly be asking themselves so they don't fall into the trap of ignorance and bias. It is a philosophical attitude. One that helps a person understand when they might be wrong or mistaken.

The authors of the PT article identify the sort of ignorance into which these types of question simply cannot enter.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias in which people perform poorly on a task, but lack the meta-cognitive capacity to properly evaluate their performance. As a result, such people remain unaware of their incompetence and accordingly fail to take any self-improvement measures that might rid them of their incompetence.

A correlate of this Dunning-Kruger effect might possibly explain how roughly 40% of Americans believe themselves to be in the top 1% financially and thus how they can be duped by political con artists into voting against their own economic self-interest.

Sure, it's possible to argue over what is or isn't a fact, what may or may not be true, what the nature of reality is, what is or isn't a logical solution. And those are the sorts of arguments we should be having in the public sphere. But when we get into the realm of ignorance, emotional manipulation, blind faith, false premises, preconceived notions, self-serving prejudices, ideologically based propaganda, etc., dialogue—and, more importantly, real societal progress—becomes difficult if not impossible. An emotionally satisfying argument is not necessarily the best.

Critical thinking, logic (Aristotelian/classical/propositional as well as symbolic), rhetoric (its uses and abuses) need to be an integral part of every person's education to help them break out of this vicious cycle of ignorance and prepare them for the public sphere of life in a nominally democratic society such as ours. But the question is: how can we inculcate these sorts of values/virtues in a society/culture in which they are not prized and, in fact, in which there are wealthy and powerful interests arrayed against them?