Why Reality is Strange
Human intuition sees reality through a deceptive lens. A lens that is biased to seek objects rather than noticing processes. Modern language shares this noun centric bias.
The notion that species were fixed and never changing was ubiquitous in Darwin’s time. Darwin broke this deceptive symmetry in arguing that all life was connected through a process we now know as evolution. During Einstein’s time matter was thought to also be fixed and unchanging. Einstein broke this deceptive symmetry that matter itself had a continual exchange with energy. Hence he formulated his famous relativistic equation E=mc².
Revolutions in science occur when we see beyond the deception that our minds create to describe reality. It is our minds that are deceptive. Reality has always been a process, our minds however insist on viewing everything through a noun-centric lens.
This breaking of symmetry is what Daniel Dennett @danieldennett calls the strange inversion of reasoning. It is a reflection of systems that achieve competence without comprehension. Darwin, Turing and Hume are examples of this counterintuitive kind of thinking.
Humans think of the world in nouns because it is easier to reason about the world (i.e. see the causality) through just a few objects. We do not have the computational circuitry to see the particularity of the world and follow the causational invariance that leads to things. We see things as they are already constructed but do not see the multitude of error-corrections that lead to their construction. We reasoning that this is magical because we only see the evolutionary path of success. Evolution has a nasty habit of removing from memory all experiences of its error.
Emergence, the interaction of many parts to create a whole that is greater than the parts, is an unintuitive notion that challenges our rational thinking habits. But emergence is everywhere if you choose to see it.
Rational thought has carried modern civilization from the enlightenment 30 generations ago to our modern world. However, citizens of this world are in a losing battle to understand the exponential growth of science and technology.
Humans have always created fictional narratives of the world to make the sense of the world. The success of science to discover reality is a consequence of insisting that our narratives be tested against this world.
It is the error-correcting that makes science powerful. It is this feature as well as systematic thinking that was essential in the development of any civilization that lead to the acceleration of progress by the enlightenment.
Unfortunately, we are at the stage in technological evolution that the things humans invent are beyond the comprehension of a majority of humans. Humans w/o training in systematic thought and combined with ignorance of how things work are left with an inability to grok the world.
Our educational system has failed us on a massive scale. We have ossified hierarchical intellectual disciplines that are driven more by self-preservation than seeking the truth. The error correction mechanism that has evolved in academic disciplines is motivated by the preservation of doctrine. Humanities have shunned rationality because they were never taught about complexity. In the need to preserve a humanistic doctrine they’ve ignored the development of the science of complexity. The one discipline that lends a rigorous and systematic approach required for understanding the complexities of humanity.
Nature just like complexity is intrinsically deceptive. Humans by contrast are deliberately deceptive. Social equity rides on our abilities to convince others of our mental models. It is always easier to convince someone who knows that their own mental models are not working. Mental models that do not work from the human perspective are only revealed through our lack of success. Unfortunately, this is deceptive because one can have the correct mental model and still be mired in poverty. Anyway, those in situations of scarcity are the ones most prone to be sold a mental model of reality that is advantageous to the seller and detrimental to the buyer.
In the modern world, the craziness of the idea is not related to its viral properties. This is because there is a massive population of hosts that have yet to develop the intellectual immune system required to understand the information age. The antibodies that protect us from disinformation is non-existent in most of society.
Noun-centric language leads to our difficulty of seeing change. This is indeed paradoxical because brains evolved to recognize movement. The failure of the pandemic response of so many countries is a testament to our inability to understand an adversary that has exponential growth. The coronavirus is not the only thing growing exponentially, technology has the same behavior. Our inability to respond to climate change that is driven by our exponential technological growth is evidence of an inability to grasp complex systems.
This is because most people have only a noun-centric language and can only think in a noun-centric sense. Dennett’s inversion of reasoning is labeled as ‘strange’. Antonio Damasio also uses the word ‘strange’ to describe the counterintuitive sequence of how cognition arises.
Our salvation as a species depends on strange thinking.
