Intelligent fish born in a shadowed pool
Since the beginnings of humanity, we’ve been struggling to reach something that answers us the purpose of the existence of the universe, of the Earth, of life. I find that this analogy really grasps what I want to say and its from my favorite book, Consilience, by Edward O. Wilson: “…. Humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep, shadowed pool. Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above, and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong, because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined.” Every single person sees or interprets reality through spectacles, because as Wilson says, humans have invented ingenious speculations and myths. Myth or speculation, everything that we know as truth has been product of a human mind.
After all, our convictions and ideologies are our spectacles, which of course are influenced by our experiences, discoveries and the environment that surrounds us. Our thought isn’t completely individual, as Bohm says “I’m trying to say that most of our thought is not individual. It originates in the whole culture and it pervades us. We pick it up as children from parents, from friends, from school, from newspapers, from books, and so on. We make a small change in it; we select certain parts of it which we like, and we may reject other parts. But still, it all comes from that pool.” It’s very important to mention that the pool of thought (which creates our spectacles) is different to every human being because each of us is exposed to different people and environments. There’s a relation between the experiences and the meaning each person gives to someone or something. Why do we have certain way to interpret reality? How is my brain able to connect or create ideas and perspectives? How do I find meaning in something? Why is it that a rose can transmit love to someone and disgust to another person? In this last question, I think that emotion is related to previous experiences or exposures that stay on the person hardware. I dare to say that our perspectives have stories behind, which involve feelings and emotions. There’s certain danger in feelings or previous experiences because people start creating paradigms and prejudices. That’s why it’s so hard to have shared meaning or to come to an agreement. It’s more complex though to strive for truth when everyone has different conceptions of what is true and what isn’t. We are so closed in our thoughts that we don’t want anyone to prove us wrong, why is that? Is it part of our epigenetic rules, are we born thinking that we are right? It’s hard to answer that because I think that we all think that what we perceive is true, however our mind, knowledge, and senses limit us but we aren’t aware of that. If every single person has different perspectives and creates different meanings, is there a universal truth in which we would all agree?
I do think there’s only one reality, and we all are part of that reality which is barely interpreted and limited by our senses. I found really interesting what Ferguson says, that we have to believe in certain “laws” in order to seek for more. So, we can all agree in something after all. We all agree that each of us exists. What I wonder is, are we ever going to reach the whole truth? Are we ever going to grasp it all? Is humanity going to reach the truth and agree on it? I do understand that we are limited creatures, who exist in a tiny planet that resides on an infinite galaxy. And also, I’m not sure if everyone would interpret the whole truth equally. Maybe it’s there and we just don’t know how to connect it or how to agree on it. Maybe our different perspectives blind us in a way. Or maybe we haven’t reached it at all. The questions that keep on popping in my mind are “Can we know anything?” and “How do we know that what we know is true?”
I think that the real solution to reach truth or at least something in common is to shift paradigms by understanding and connecting our different preconceptions. If we don’t do that, how do we think that we’ll agree as a race? But do we really want to agree? Maybe not, because agreeing on something means that another view is going to be proved false. This reminds me a lot of what Bohm describes as incoherence because every opposed view is going towards different directions to reach the same direction, but maybe what we need is to come together by consilience, by finding coherence among those directions and by doing that we’ll create something in common, i.e. we’ll have shared meaning.
Being curious is part of our nature, and our biggest challenge in life, I think, is to unravel the mystery of life in this universe. I’ve been questioning a lot the role of meaning in humanity. I truly believe that each of us has the power to create or find meaning in something. The complexity of this arises when I realize that we all have different perspectives and by consequence different meanings. How do we understand other meanings? How do we suspend our judgments? Bohm mentions that dialogue is the collective way for opening up judgments and assumptions. I agree with him, I think that having the ability to understand different and many perspectives is one of the marvels of our nature and, paraphrasing Bohm, if we are to cooperate, literally to work together, we have to be able to create something in common, something that takes shape in our mutual discussions and actions.
What would it be like if we all share our opinions as a network, where everybody is at the same level? I’ve been experiencing this at the MPC, every single day and it’s fascinating to hear other people expressing their thoughts. Through dialogue we create something new. However, truth isn’t a democracy. I am aware that it’s very hard to achieve universal agreement, but it can be possible if we shift mentality and if we are open to listen and understand why a person thinks the way he does. Something that really struck me is that we usually tend to hear other’s opinions with our own thoughts. We don’t really suspend the voice inside our heads. So at the end, if we don’t manage to suspend our assumptions we don’t really understand or listen the other person.
This way of dialoguing and approaching others may sound as a utopia, but at the end I think we all want to be understood and this process of dialoguing would help a lot to improve our communication as human beings. We sometimes aren’t aware of our mind’s capacity and I’m sure that as a species we can totally change our habits and our way of thinking towards other’s ideas. We have so much potential inside, every single human being. However, we have to learn to convey and receive messages. We have to be aware of our spectacles; we have to be exposed to this idea of dialoguing since children so that we don’t have a hard time later on. I’ve witnessed an impressive evolution in dialogues, in the participants. It’s overwhelming how people that used to be closed-minded now embrace other’s ideas with arms wide open. I’ve seen people who are longing for connections for a better understanding of the world that surrounds them but how can we really suspend what’s going on in our minds?
There’s an analogy that would be useful to understand this notion of suspension and dialogue better: we all live in the top of a circus carpet, inside of it we keep our ideas, beliefs, notions and desires. They are always being protected and usually we don’t tend to share them with a stranger or with someone that thinks differently from us. We don’t let them in. It’s important to remind ourselves that the other person also lives in the top of his circus carpet. The problem here is that we don’t get to know what’s inside the other person’s carpet if we don’t get off our carpet and if he doesn’t open us the curtains. At the end, both have to get off their carpets. What’s fascinating is that both can open their curtains and share what’s inside each other’s carpets in order to let something new emerge or to find something in common. And the same happens with the different fields of knowledge, views and religions; in order to have a unity in knowledge they have to get down the circus carpet in order to understand the other. They have to get rid of the paradigm “We hold truth” because no one owns truth, we don’t even know if we’ll ever get to understand it and meanwhile we should strive for understanding the others.
Achieving this, the participants of the dialogue get to share a “stream of meaning”. It’s amazing what could emerge from that stream of meaning. I like to think that someday, we’ll reach a world in which everyone’s ideas matter and in which we’ll have this stream of meaning as a survival tool in order to let new ideas flow. The world needs innovation; we can have even more than we have today. The conversation would be between all of us, not one side or the other, but among us. A world in which we’ll construct on the other person thought or opinion, rather than destroy. I’m not saying we’ll all agree, I’m saying that we’ll deeply understand why we disagree with the other person. Really understanding without paradigms and barriers among ideologies or differences. Haven’t you ever stopped for a while and realized how many wars human beings have experienced because of difference in opinions? How many deaths? How many ideas have been shut down because they sound “crazy”? How many misunderstandings have impact in our daily lives? Do you think that we can peacefully engage in a dialogue in order to understand and be understood? How much are we loosing because of being closed towards other’s thoughts? And most important of all, how much are we shadowing our pool by fragmenting knowledge? I think we are loosing more than we think; there’s a lot more to discover, understand and imagine together.
Our thirst to know our purpose on this earth fascinates me. It seems to me that we all have this “software” to question the reason of our existence. Just think about it…how many philosophies do we have? How many thinkers? How many inquirers? How many views? Of course, radical views haven’t built on humanity; many of them destroyed a lot. But I’m talking for the ones that Wilson describes, the ones where people shared a passion to demystify the world and free the mind from the impersonal forces that imprison it. They were driven by the thrill of discovery. Why are we struggling to free our mind? I feel like the fish, from Wilson’s analogy, and it’s true; we are in this shadowed pool trying with all our capabilities to comprehend this gigantic pool, which is the universe. We want to be freed from ignorance; we want to understand everything.
In the spirit of Consilience, the people or scientists that are fighting and dedicating their lifetime to free human mind come each day to their investigation thinking: “It’s there, I’m close, this could be the day.” I love that spirit because it seems to me that we are facing a challenge that could change our history forever and with the every day discoveries we are unshadowing the pool. It’s strikes me a lot how our thought has been a process since the beginning of our race, and how everything happened a certain way; how we reacted to our surroundings and how we linked knowledge from the past in order to disentangle the present. It reminds me of the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system, how Copernicus tried to solve the problem of the planets in order to have a more simple system and other scientist built and changed Copernicus’ system, and so on till today’s solar system. That’s the perfect example of how today’s knowledge connects to previous knowledge. Without connecting knowledge maybe we wouldn’t understand many things. I consider that the ability of connecting is another wonder of humans, even though a lot of knowledge is still fragmented, it gives me a sense that humanity is seeking for a common ground, a shared meaning in order to be freed from ignorance. Consilience of knowledge, as Wilson mentions, can be the way for understanding our nature.
Does fragmentation shuts down the inquiry to know about the whole picture? I think it narrows the view you have about the world and it constricts your connections. It’s wonderful to know a lot about something but it is more wonderful to know about everything and finding unity in knowledge. Why have we created barriers between branches? Wilson proposes that the social sciences and the natural sciences at the end are united; they’ve always been and always will. It’s interesting to think about the reason why scientists decided to divide them or to suppose that one has nothing to do with the other. And those aren’t the only branches divided, as a matter of fact our process of thought is very fragmented, and as I mentioned before, we have a very narrowed understanding that can be broadened if we unite other fields of knowledge.
I keep on thinking about the dark pool we are trapped in, and I think that maybe we are inside a system; are we trapped in a system? This reminds me of what I feel Hofstadter is getting at. He says that in order to understand a system, one must jump out. Is our truth a system? Is our universe a big system? Do we need to jump out, in this case to die, to understand it? Hofstadter says that a system can’t understand itself; it needs a meta-system and so on. There’s an infinite chain. So, maybe there’s a meta-system that understands our system and in this case, we’ll never understand the system itself because we are part of the system! It’s curious that we created a meta-system that holds all truth, God or religion. I mean we are implicitly aware that we can’t know everything and so we rely on something bigger or powerful than us. And that is even more curious because it seems rare that the members of the system, us, are aware that we need a meta-system. “Religion rises from the innermost coils of the human spirit. It nourishes love, devotion, and, above all, hope. People hunger for the assurance it offers”. –Edward O. Wilson. Of course, not everyone thinks we need something bigger or powerful to understand our nature and our system. Instead, they seek to understand the system; the empiricist view claims that: “The individual is seen as predisposed biologically to make certain choices. By cultural evolution some of the choices are hardened into precepts, then laws, and if the predisposition or coercion is strong enough, a belief in the command of God or the natural order of the universe”. So we have two opposite views, one that thinks that religion or God commands our behavior and thought and another that says that because of evolution we have certain epigenetic rules and are predisposed to act certain ways.
The problem in this opposed ideologies or views about our nature is that the people that defend them don’t have dialogues or share meaning whatsoever; instead they only want to prove that they are right. I think that eventually one will prove the other wrong and whichever “wins” or dominates will make a great difference in our thought process and in the way we see and understand the world, the universe, and even our nature. I keep on wondering on how are we going to manage with all these opposed views and radical ideologies? But what intrigues me the most is that even though we are limited creatures, there’s something that goes beyond, which is our mind. The power of imagination is just overwhelming. I’m not sure if we’ll find the whole truth. However, I’m very sure that our drive to seek and discover will never cease. This drive it’s in our nature and it’s unexplainable. I have faith in human beings, I really do. We can achieve great things, maybe not everything but little by little we’ll realize that everything is connected. We just need this leap of faith. By seeking, we’ll discover.
We are exploring the nature of our universe along the nature of our mind. Our mind, the most complex thing we know on earth. Are we ever going to understand it? Are we someday going to create one that works exactly as ours? A question raised in Blum dialogue was: Is it possible for the mind to know itself? It isn’t possible yet. But if I think about Hofstadter, we can’t understand our mind because we cannot pop-out our system, we are trapped in there. However, I think a way to understand our mind is with the input of others. I mean, by living in a society or cooperating with other human beings we realize how our mind works for an outsider. Is it then that we know ourselves because of the input others have on us? By this I mean their reactions, opinions about us, etc. Imagine that you are alone on an island; you’ll get to know yourself, do things you like and satisfy yourself. However, you won’t know on what do you have to improve on, or if what you’re doing is ethic, moral or logic. So my question would be, are we going to be able to understand our mind or are we “understanding” our mind with the aid of others? I believe that we can’t really understand our mind just by ourselves; I think we do need someone who’s outside the system. I’m not sure though, maybe we can understand it by ourselves. But I’m referring to individual minds, not “the mind” of human beings. And that’s the big question, how does “the mind” works? What makes it work? What is the “fire” that sets it alive? Do we need someone outside our system, not a human being, in order to understand it?
It’s really interesting to think again on the analogy about the fish by Wilson, because maybe we are trapped in a cognitive prison, which could be our mind, and at the same time our mind can be trapped in a cognitive meta-prison. So we are wondering, wrestles and with limitations thinking that we’ll discover everything when that could be impossible. Nevertheless, as I defended and stated before, I empower human curiosity and thrill of discovery, and coming back to my dream Plato says: “one must search the things one don’t know, rather than not looking for it”. Just imagine our world today if no one had looked, searched or wondered about anything. Where would our species be? What makes us wonder? What creates that drive that made Copernicus create the heliocentric system and find more answers? Are we created to be that way? Are we born with this curiosity and with doubts? Do they come from a chemical in our brain? Are they metaphysical? Are they a cause from evolution? Maybe when we are able to understand how our mind works we will find out this answers, but meanwhile we’ve got nothing more than to have a leap of faith or just wonder about these complexities and imagine the catalyst behind them.
I also relate this to the powerful words Amable said “¿Cuánto puede el sueño? ¿Cuánto puede la idea?” And it makes me reflect of all the ideas and dreams that human beings have accomplished. If you stop and think about it deeply, it’s overwhelming the amount of what we’ve evolved and progressed. Even though we can’t pop-out our system as Hofstadter says, we can get to know ourselves and really know what we value and what we stand for. It reminds me of Don Quixote’s advice to Sancho: get to know yourself, it’s the most important and the most difficult thing one can accomplish. I think the difficult part is to accept who we are, but once we are aware of whom we really are, we can start evolving and making changes to improve. I’ve always admired how Don Quixote fights and would die for his ideals. I know that many people who have changed the world did that as well, for better or for worse. And many of these ideals or ideas were born because of the intellectual climate that was taking place in different periods. The environment is a very crucial and essential aspect for an idea to be born.
Copernicus, for instance, developed his heliocentric theory while there were many changes and innovation in politics, religion, etc. I think that somehow our context shapes our ideas and our thinking process. In some occasions people had this “shared meaning” that Bohm writes about, because it was the cement that held societies together for many centuries. But was there really a pure shared meaning? Maybe not, and maybe we don’t have it yet in many societies. By shared meaning I mean what Bohm means, a coherence of meaning among the group/society/country. Generally speaking, we haven’t evolved much in sharing meaning with others. Many people still eagerly defend their opinions and assumptions. And that have caused a lot of wars, deaths and serious problems. The ideal is that the group becomes “one mind”, people who think together as a whole. I mentioned before that individuals truly fight for their ideals now just imagine what a group could accomplish if they had shared meaning. What about humanity? And by that, human reason could solve all the problems in a peaceful and understanding way. It sounds as a utopia, but I really believe it can be possible.
Also, another thing that is necessary to achieve shared meaning is to understand that we don’t know. To understand that all we know are approximations to truth. To take the explorer attitude, as Bohm mentions. This is a great challenge. This semester I experienced the vow of silence, and it really was a challenge to avoid listening to my own thoughts and taking the Zen mode. What Hofstadter says it’s true, we cannot pop-out our own thinking. However on the other side, Bohm says that we can think about our thinking, the problem is that we approach the situation in a mistaken way. It’s to be self-aware, as I mentioned on my previous essay. I wonder why is it so hard for human beings to listen to each other? Why are we born thinking that we are right? I dare to say that we learn to listen; we don’t do it naturally.
And it makes me wonder once again about our nature. What makes us be who we are? It reminds me of Plato, in Meno, where they discuss the nature of virtue. Where does virtue comes from? What’s that spark that makes some human beings be virtuous or good with others? Why some people isn’t that way? That pure question reminds me of the inexactness of the social sciences, which is mentioned in Popper’s essay. There is uncertainty in social sciences because we can’t predict how a human would act in a given circumstances, there had been a lot of experiments in which a person reacts totally different from the other one. And also subjectivity has an important role on social sciences, which lead me to the question: are physical sciences really objective? Ferguson says that there’s always a bit of subjectivity on the theories of scientists because they see things from a point of view. They can’t help it. Also, in the Copernican Revolution, Kuhn mentions that nature speaks to us objectively, however the theories or conceptual schemes of the scientist depend on his imagination, which is the subjective part. And Kemeny also talks about the importance of assumptions while taking a direction; in order to take one you have to assume something. So, after all we do need to think that leap of faith. Of course we need speculations or assumptions in order to look for something, and maybe our leap of faith can be consilience, because Wilson defends that social sciences can be predicted if we understand its connection to biology and find certain behavior that is common due to our evolution and epigenetic rules.
After all, is there anything really objective? I think that outside our senses, there is an objective truth in the universe. However, interpreted by us there will always be some subjectivity because of our limits. Of course, I do believe that we’ll approximate more and more, but are we going to be able to grasp it all? One way or another, the subjective part is really important to find truth. Copernicus, for instance, made the heliocentric theory because of a matter of aesthetics, which was the subjective part. And the work he made cause a revolution and made human beings more approximated to the truth. So, in a way subjectivity is very important. Everyone perceives things differently, and that has lead us to the impressive amount of things we know nowadays. Without that subjectivity many discoveries wouldn’t have existed. We have a vast array of thoughts, ideas, opinions and ideals that have made us see the world from many different perspectives. Those perspectives have broadened our knowledge about our universe and ourselves. Maybe we do need subjectivity to find objectivity, and shared meaning takes an important role as well, in order to explore without constraints the canvas of our universe and have a common ground to land off the journey of unshadowing the pool.
Our existence is a mystery and maybe it will always be. Where do we come from? Why are we here? What’s the reason and purpose of our existence in this world? Is there any truth out there? Are we ready to grasp it? Are we prepared to understand it? Who created truth? And, if it has a creator…who is it? Or are we the creators of truth? Do we create it by giving meaning or by finding meaning in things? Is truth going to end if human beings seize? Would it remain in nature? We can ask an infinite amount of questions trying to answer our origin and maybe there are many “truths” and they just have to be connected but we are blind to see its unity. We are blind because we don’t want to see it; it’s up to us to see it or not. It’s all about openness and trying to understand different perspectives.
In conclusion, the pursuit of truth is more complex than we really imagine and I really think that if we approach knowledge through consilience we can get very far, I have hope on that because we haven’t really tried it yet. I would like to finish remarking the spirit of this book, which constantly invited me to search for truth and the unity of knowledge through the insightful chapters. My favorite quote, and I think the one we should have present every day, while waking up and pursuing our journey in this life, our journey on unraveling mysteries is: “Knowledge, obsession, daring.” We are more similar than different, if we have shared meaning and knowledge unified we can reach outstanding discoveries that can change the way we interpret and see what surrounds us in this shadowed pool. Maybe, with patience and perseverance, we can get to grasp the clarity of the pool we are in. We already explained the nature of the heavens, of the sun and the sky and the stars above; we have many things more clear than before, we are approximating and as Wilson says: “Its glow will be caught in the elegance and beauty and power of our shared ideas and, in the best spirit of philosophical pragmatism, the wisdom of our conduct.” And a modified version of another Consilience quote is, they come to life each day thinking, subconsciously, It’s there, I’m close, this could be the day. That’s how I think we should think about reaching objective truth, with that desire and passion to unravel the unknown.
After all, our convictions and ideologies are our spectacles, which of course are influenced by our experiences, discoveries and the environment that surrounds us. Our thought isn’t completely individual, as Bohm says “I’m trying to say that most of our thought is not individual. It originates in the whole culture and it pervades us. We pick it up as children from parents, from friends, from school, from newspapers, from books, and so on. We make a small change in it; we select certain parts of it which we like, and we may reject other parts. But still, it all comes from that pool.” It’s very important to mention that the pool of thought (which creates our spectacles) is different to every human being because each of us is exposed to different people and environments. There’s a relation between the experiences and the meaning each person gives to someone or something. Why do we have certain way to interpret reality? How is my brain able to connect or create ideas and perspectives? How do I find meaning in something? Why is it that a rose can transmit love to someone and disgust to another person? In this last question, I think that emotion is related to previous experiences or exposures that stay on the person hardware. I dare to say that our perspectives have stories behind, which involve feelings and emotions. There’s certain danger in feelings or previous experiences because people start creating paradigms and prejudices. That’s why it’s so hard to have shared meaning or to come to an agreement. It’s more complex though to strive for truth when everyone has different conceptions of what is true and what isn’t. We are so closed in our thoughts that we don’t want anyone to prove us wrong, why is that? Is it part of our epigenetic rules, are we born thinking that we are right? It’s hard to answer that because I think that we all think that what we perceive is true, however our mind, knowledge, and senses limit us but we aren’t aware of that. If every single person has different perspectives and creates different meanings, is there a universal truth in which we would all agree?
I do think there’s only one reality, and we all are part of that reality which is barely interpreted and limited by our senses. I found really interesting what Ferguson says, that we have to believe in certain “laws” in order to seek for more. So, we can all agree in something after all. We all agree that each of us exists. What I wonder is, are we ever going to reach the whole truth? Are we ever going to grasp it all? Is humanity going to reach the truth and agree on it? I do understand that we are limited creatures, who exist in a tiny planet that resides on an infinite galaxy. And also, I’m not sure if everyone would interpret the whole truth equally. Maybe it’s there and we just don’t know how to connect it or how to agree on it. Maybe our different perspectives blind us in a way. Or maybe we haven’t reached it at all. The questions that keep on popping in my mind are “Can we know anything?” and “How do we know that what we know is true?”
I think that the real solution to reach truth or at least something in common is to shift paradigms by understanding and connecting our different preconceptions. If we don’t do that, how do we think that we’ll agree as a race? But do we really want to agree? Maybe not, because agreeing on something means that another view is going to be proved false. This reminds me a lot of what Bohm describes as incoherence because every opposed view is going towards different directions to reach the same direction, but maybe what we need is to come together by consilience, by finding coherence among those directions and by doing that we’ll create something in common, i.e. we’ll have shared meaning.
Being curious is part of our nature, and our biggest challenge in life, I think, is to unravel the mystery of life in this universe. I’ve been questioning a lot the role of meaning in humanity. I truly believe that each of us has the power to create or find meaning in something. The complexity of this arises when I realize that we all have different perspectives and by consequence different meanings. How do we understand other meanings? How do we suspend our judgments? Bohm mentions that dialogue is the collective way for opening up judgments and assumptions. I agree with him, I think that having the ability to understand different and many perspectives is one of the marvels of our nature and, paraphrasing Bohm, if we are to cooperate, literally to work together, we have to be able to create something in common, something that takes shape in our mutual discussions and actions.
What would it be like if we all share our opinions as a network, where everybody is at the same level? I’ve been experiencing this at the MPC, every single day and it’s fascinating to hear other people expressing their thoughts. Through dialogue we create something new. However, truth isn’t a democracy. I am aware that it’s very hard to achieve universal agreement, but it can be possible if we shift mentality and if we are open to listen and understand why a person thinks the way he does. Something that really struck me is that we usually tend to hear other’s opinions with our own thoughts. We don’t really suspend the voice inside our heads. So at the end, if we don’t manage to suspend our assumptions we don’t really understand or listen the other person.
This way of dialoguing and approaching others may sound as a utopia, but at the end I think we all want to be understood and this process of dialoguing would help a lot to improve our communication as human beings. We sometimes aren’t aware of our mind’s capacity and I’m sure that as a species we can totally change our habits and our way of thinking towards other’s ideas. We have so much potential inside, every single human being. However, we have to learn to convey and receive messages. We have to be aware of our spectacles; we have to be exposed to this idea of dialoguing since children so that we don’t have a hard time later on. I’ve witnessed an impressive evolution in dialogues, in the participants. It’s overwhelming how people that used to be closed-minded now embrace other’s ideas with arms wide open. I’ve seen people who are longing for connections for a better understanding of the world that surrounds them but how can we really suspend what’s going on in our minds?
There’s an analogy that would be useful to understand this notion of suspension and dialogue better: we all live in the top of a circus carpet, inside of it we keep our ideas, beliefs, notions and desires. They are always being protected and usually we don’t tend to share them with a stranger or with someone that thinks differently from us. We don’t let them in. It’s important to remind ourselves that the other person also lives in the top of his circus carpet. The problem here is that we don’t get to know what’s inside the other person’s carpet if we don’t get off our carpet and if he doesn’t open us the curtains. At the end, both have to get off their carpets. What’s fascinating is that both can open their curtains and share what’s inside each other’s carpets in order to let something new emerge or to find something in common. And the same happens with the different fields of knowledge, views and religions; in order to have a unity in knowledge they have to get down the circus carpet in order to understand the other. They have to get rid of the paradigm “We hold truth” because no one owns truth, we don’t even know if we’ll ever get to understand it and meanwhile we should strive for understanding the others.
Achieving this, the participants of the dialogue get to share a “stream of meaning”. It’s amazing what could emerge from that stream of meaning. I like to think that someday, we’ll reach a world in which everyone’s ideas matter and in which we’ll have this stream of meaning as a survival tool in order to let new ideas flow. The world needs innovation; we can have even more than we have today. The conversation would be between all of us, not one side or the other, but among us. A world in which we’ll construct on the other person thought or opinion, rather than destroy. I’m not saying we’ll all agree, I’m saying that we’ll deeply understand why we disagree with the other person. Really understanding without paradigms and barriers among ideologies or differences. Haven’t you ever stopped for a while and realized how many wars human beings have experienced because of difference in opinions? How many deaths? How many ideas have been shut down because they sound “crazy”? How many misunderstandings have impact in our daily lives? Do you think that we can peacefully engage in a dialogue in order to understand and be understood? How much are we loosing because of being closed towards other’s thoughts? And most important of all, how much are we shadowing our pool by fragmenting knowledge? I think we are loosing more than we think; there’s a lot more to discover, understand and imagine together.
Our thirst to know our purpose on this earth fascinates me. It seems to me that we all have this “software” to question the reason of our existence. Just think about it…how many philosophies do we have? How many thinkers? How many inquirers? How many views? Of course, radical views haven’t built on humanity; many of them destroyed a lot. But I’m talking for the ones that Wilson describes, the ones where people shared a passion to demystify the world and free the mind from the impersonal forces that imprison it. They were driven by the thrill of discovery. Why are we struggling to free our mind? I feel like the fish, from Wilson’s analogy, and it’s true; we are in this shadowed pool trying with all our capabilities to comprehend this gigantic pool, which is the universe. We want to be freed from ignorance; we want to understand everything.
In the spirit of Consilience, the people or scientists that are fighting and dedicating their lifetime to free human mind come each day to their investigation thinking: “It’s there, I’m close, this could be the day.” I love that spirit because it seems to me that we are facing a challenge that could change our history forever and with the every day discoveries we are unshadowing the pool. It’s strikes me a lot how our thought has been a process since the beginning of our race, and how everything happened a certain way; how we reacted to our surroundings and how we linked knowledge from the past in order to disentangle the present. It reminds me of the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system, how Copernicus tried to solve the problem of the planets in order to have a more simple system and other scientist built and changed Copernicus’ system, and so on till today’s solar system. That’s the perfect example of how today’s knowledge connects to previous knowledge. Without connecting knowledge maybe we wouldn’t understand many things. I consider that the ability of connecting is another wonder of humans, even though a lot of knowledge is still fragmented, it gives me a sense that humanity is seeking for a common ground, a shared meaning in order to be freed from ignorance. Consilience of knowledge, as Wilson mentions, can be the way for understanding our nature.
Does fragmentation shuts down the inquiry to know about the whole picture? I think it narrows the view you have about the world and it constricts your connections. It’s wonderful to know a lot about something but it is more wonderful to know about everything and finding unity in knowledge. Why have we created barriers between branches? Wilson proposes that the social sciences and the natural sciences at the end are united; they’ve always been and always will. It’s interesting to think about the reason why scientists decided to divide them or to suppose that one has nothing to do with the other. And those aren’t the only branches divided, as a matter of fact our process of thought is very fragmented, and as I mentioned before, we have a very narrowed understanding that can be broadened if we unite other fields of knowledge.
I keep on thinking about the dark pool we are trapped in, and I think that maybe we are inside a system; are we trapped in a system? This reminds me of what I feel Hofstadter is getting at. He says that in order to understand a system, one must jump out. Is our truth a system? Is our universe a big system? Do we need to jump out, in this case to die, to understand it? Hofstadter says that a system can’t understand itself; it needs a meta-system and so on. There’s an infinite chain. So, maybe there’s a meta-system that understands our system and in this case, we’ll never understand the system itself because we are part of the system! It’s curious that we created a meta-system that holds all truth, God or religion. I mean we are implicitly aware that we can’t know everything and so we rely on something bigger or powerful than us. And that is even more curious because it seems rare that the members of the system, us, are aware that we need a meta-system. “Religion rises from the innermost coils of the human spirit. It nourishes love, devotion, and, above all, hope. People hunger for the assurance it offers”. –Edward O. Wilson. Of course, not everyone thinks we need something bigger or powerful to understand our nature and our system. Instead, they seek to understand the system; the empiricist view claims that: “The individual is seen as predisposed biologically to make certain choices. By cultural evolution some of the choices are hardened into precepts, then laws, and if the predisposition or coercion is strong enough, a belief in the command of God or the natural order of the universe”. So we have two opposite views, one that thinks that religion or God commands our behavior and thought and another that says that because of evolution we have certain epigenetic rules and are predisposed to act certain ways.
The problem in this opposed ideologies or views about our nature is that the people that defend them don’t have dialogues or share meaning whatsoever; instead they only want to prove that they are right. I think that eventually one will prove the other wrong and whichever “wins” or dominates will make a great difference in our thought process and in the way we see and understand the world, the universe, and even our nature. I keep on wondering on how are we going to manage with all these opposed views and radical ideologies? But what intrigues me the most is that even though we are limited creatures, there’s something that goes beyond, which is our mind. The power of imagination is just overwhelming. I’m not sure if we’ll find the whole truth. However, I’m very sure that our drive to seek and discover will never cease. This drive it’s in our nature and it’s unexplainable. I have faith in human beings, I really do. We can achieve great things, maybe not everything but little by little we’ll realize that everything is connected. We just need this leap of faith. By seeking, we’ll discover.
We are exploring the nature of our universe along the nature of our mind. Our mind, the most complex thing we know on earth. Are we ever going to understand it? Are we someday going to create one that works exactly as ours? A question raised in Blum dialogue was: Is it possible for the mind to know itself? It isn’t possible yet. But if I think about Hofstadter, we can’t understand our mind because we cannot pop-out our system, we are trapped in there. However, I think a way to understand our mind is with the input of others. I mean, by living in a society or cooperating with other human beings we realize how our mind works for an outsider. Is it then that we know ourselves because of the input others have on us? By this I mean their reactions, opinions about us, etc. Imagine that you are alone on an island; you’ll get to know yourself, do things you like and satisfy yourself. However, you won’t know on what do you have to improve on, or if what you’re doing is ethic, moral or logic. So my question would be, are we going to be able to understand our mind or are we “understanding” our mind with the aid of others? I believe that we can’t really understand our mind just by ourselves; I think we do need someone who’s outside the system. I’m not sure though, maybe we can understand it by ourselves. But I’m referring to individual minds, not “the mind” of human beings. And that’s the big question, how does “the mind” works? What makes it work? What is the “fire” that sets it alive? Do we need someone outside our system, not a human being, in order to understand it?
It’s really interesting to think again on the analogy about the fish by Wilson, because maybe we are trapped in a cognitive prison, which could be our mind, and at the same time our mind can be trapped in a cognitive meta-prison. So we are wondering, wrestles and with limitations thinking that we’ll discover everything when that could be impossible. Nevertheless, as I defended and stated before, I empower human curiosity and thrill of discovery, and coming back to my dream Plato says: “one must search the things one don’t know, rather than not looking for it”. Just imagine our world today if no one had looked, searched or wondered about anything. Where would our species be? What makes us wonder? What creates that drive that made Copernicus create the heliocentric system and find more answers? Are we created to be that way? Are we born with this curiosity and with doubts? Do they come from a chemical in our brain? Are they metaphysical? Are they a cause from evolution? Maybe when we are able to understand how our mind works we will find out this answers, but meanwhile we’ve got nothing more than to have a leap of faith or just wonder about these complexities and imagine the catalyst behind them.
I also relate this to the powerful words Amable said “¿Cuánto puede el sueño? ¿Cuánto puede la idea?” And it makes me reflect of all the ideas and dreams that human beings have accomplished. If you stop and think about it deeply, it’s overwhelming the amount of what we’ve evolved and progressed. Even though we can’t pop-out our system as Hofstadter says, we can get to know ourselves and really know what we value and what we stand for. It reminds me of Don Quixote’s advice to Sancho: get to know yourself, it’s the most important and the most difficult thing one can accomplish. I think the difficult part is to accept who we are, but once we are aware of whom we really are, we can start evolving and making changes to improve. I’ve always admired how Don Quixote fights and would die for his ideals. I know that many people who have changed the world did that as well, for better or for worse. And many of these ideals or ideas were born because of the intellectual climate that was taking place in different periods. The environment is a very crucial and essential aspect for an idea to be born.
Copernicus, for instance, developed his heliocentric theory while there were many changes and innovation in politics, religion, etc. I think that somehow our context shapes our ideas and our thinking process. In some occasions people had this “shared meaning” that Bohm writes about, because it was the cement that held societies together for many centuries. But was there really a pure shared meaning? Maybe not, and maybe we don’t have it yet in many societies. By shared meaning I mean what Bohm means, a coherence of meaning among the group/society/country. Generally speaking, we haven’t evolved much in sharing meaning with others. Many people still eagerly defend their opinions and assumptions. And that have caused a lot of wars, deaths and serious problems. The ideal is that the group becomes “one mind”, people who think together as a whole. I mentioned before that individuals truly fight for their ideals now just imagine what a group could accomplish if they had shared meaning. What about humanity? And by that, human reason could solve all the problems in a peaceful and understanding way. It sounds as a utopia, but I really believe it can be possible.
Also, another thing that is necessary to achieve shared meaning is to understand that we don’t know. To understand that all we know are approximations to truth. To take the explorer attitude, as Bohm mentions. This is a great challenge. This semester I experienced the vow of silence, and it really was a challenge to avoid listening to my own thoughts and taking the Zen mode. What Hofstadter says it’s true, we cannot pop-out our own thinking. However on the other side, Bohm says that we can think about our thinking, the problem is that we approach the situation in a mistaken way. It’s to be self-aware, as I mentioned on my previous essay. I wonder why is it so hard for human beings to listen to each other? Why are we born thinking that we are right? I dare to say that we learn to listen; we don’t do it naturally.
And it makes me wonder once again about our nature. What makes us be who we are? It reminds me of Plato, in Meno, where they discuss the nature of virtue. Where does virtue comes from? What’s that spark that makes some human beings be virtuous or good with others? Why some people isn’t that way? That pure question reminds me of the inexactness of the social sciences, which is mentioned in Popper’s essay. There is uncertainty in social sciences because we can’t predict how a human would act in a given circumstances, there had been a lot of experiments in which a person reacts totally different from the other one. And also subjectivity has an important role on social sciences, which lead me to the question: are physical sciences really objective? Ferguson says that there’s always a bit of subjectivity on the theories of scientists because they see things from a point of view. They can’t help it. Also, in the Copernican Revolution, Kuhn mentions that nature speaks to us objectively, however the theories or conceptual schemes of the scientist depend on his imagination, which is the subjective part. And Kemeny also talks about the importance of assumptions while taking a direction; in order to take one you have to assume something. So, after all we do need to think that leap of faith. Of course we need speculations or assumptions in order to look for something, and maybe our leap of faith can be consilience, because Wilson defends that social sciences can be predicted if we understand its connection to biology and find certain behavior that is common due to our evolution and epigenetic rules.
After all, is there anything really objective? I think that outside our senses, there is an objective truth in the universe. However, interpreted by us there will always be some subjectivity because of our limits. Of course, I do believe that we’ll approximate more and more, but are we going to be able to grasp it all? One way or another, the subjective part is really important to find truth. Copernicus, for instance, made the heliocentric theory because of a matter of aesthetics, which was the subjective part. And the work he made cause a revolution and made human beings more approximated to the truth. So, in a way subjectivity is very important. Everyone perceives things differently, and that has lead us to the impressive amount of things we know nowadays. Without that subjectivity many discoveries wouldn’t have existed. We have a vast array of thoughts, ideas, opinions and ideals that have made us see the world from many different perspectives. Those perspectives have broadened our knowledge about our universe and ourselves. Maybe we do need subjectivity to find objectivity, and shared meaning takes an important role as well, in order to explore without constraints the canvas of our universe and have a common ground to land off the journey of unshadowing the pool.
Our existence is a mystery and maybe it will always be. Where do we come from? Why are we here? What’s the reason and purpose of our existence in this world? Is there any truth out there? Are we ready to grasp it? Are we prepared to understand it? Who created truth? And, if it has a creator…who is it? Or are we the creators of truth? Do we create it by giving meaning or by finding meaning in things? Is truth going to end if human beings seize? Would it remain in nature? We can ask an infinite amount of questions trying to answer our origin and maybe there are many “truths” and they just have to be connected but we are blind to see its unity. We are blind because we don’t want to see it; it’s up to us to see it or not. It’s all about openness and trying to understand different perspectives.
In conclusion, the pursuit of truth is more complex than we really imagine and I really think that if we approach knowledge through consilience we can get very far, I have hope on that because we haven’t really tried it yet. I would like to finish remarking the spirit of this book, which constantly invited me to search for truth and the unity of knowledge through the insightful chapters. My favorite quote, and I think the one we should have present every day, while waking up and pursuing our journey in this life, our journey on unraveling mysteries is: “Knowledge, obsession, daring.” We are more similar than different, if we have shared meaning and knowledge unified we can reach outstanding discoveries that can change the way we interpret and see what surrounds us in this shadowed pool. Maybe, with patience and perseverance, we can get to grasp the clarity of the pool we are in. We already explained the nature of the heavens, of the sun and the sky and the stars above; we have many things more clear than before, we are approximating and as Wilson says: “Its glow will be caught in the elegance and beauty and power of our shared ideas and, in the best spirit of philosophical pragmatism, the wisdom of our conduct.” And a modified version of another Consilience quote is, they come to life each day thinking, subconsciously, It’s there, I’m close, this could be the day. That’s how I think we should think about reaching objective truth, with that desire and passion to unravel the unknown.