Bringing Elegance to Complexity

Imagine an older lady sitting in her living room watching TV. We’ll call her Elaine. Everyday Elaine faithfully watches her soap operas from 9am to 2pm. She knows every character and plot intimately. When her children call she tells them about Rex and the affair he’s having with Cathy - about their son who got in a car crash while running away and is now having a secret sex change in Switzerland - about Lucy and her plot to take over the family business by killing her father with poisoned whiskey. Elaine is so immersed in her soap operas that to her they have become a real - or sometimes better than real - world to her.

If you met Elaine and she started telling you about her characters, what would you think of her? Would you feel sadness for her? Perhaps pity? Would you think that she might be a little deranged?

Have you ever thought of the actual processes behind how we perceive the world? Take sight for example. Imagine looking at a flower in sunlight. About 8.3 minutes ago photos created from fusion reactions in the Sun escaped to race towards Earth and sleet through the atmosphere to hit the flower you’re looking at. Some of them reflect away from the flower, some are absorbed, and a few new ones are created. An incredibly small percentage of the photons that hit the flower happen to bounce into the lens of your eyes and are focused onto special structures in your eyes that, after a bunch of photons hit them, initiate a series of chemical reactions that create an electrical potential across a nerve in your eye. This sets of a series of reactions in other connected nerves that ends in the back of your head in your visual cortex.

Our minds take a massive number of these events and correlate them; hunting for patterns amid the randomness. In the fraction of a second that these billions of individual chemical and physical events occur, we behind to recognize order. We search our memories for similar patterns, initiating new series of reactions, eventually associating the concept of flower with the essential random photons that left the Sun 8.4 minutes ago.

Our worlds are constructed of semantic associations built up from countless events that individually are random. We make up stories. How are we different from Elaine?

For a moment take a step back from the stories.

Start with the premise that everything you know is wrong. Assume that all of the things that others have told you were groundless. Use a sense that we don’t use often - feel truth with you gut. Look inside for that little reaction that you get when you _know_ something is true. Go back to first principles - to the beginning of all you know. Take nothing for granted. Find your own truth. Who cares what others believe is true? Would you feel sad if Elaine told you Rex had died tragically? Become a skeptic who discards any beliefs that don’t feel right.

This is the first step in becoming a scientist. Or a mystic.