How does it happen that two persons of equal intelligence, rationality, and good will can come to equally opposite interpretations of the very same set of facts? It is something that has puzzled me for a very long time. Now
I think I have ways to explain some of the mystery.
I believe the oddity known to psychologists as an Ambiguous Figure-Ground Pattern provides a first clue.
One example of this is an image well known to many people who probably first saw it in school. Some see it as
a pretty young girl. Others see it as a witch. The face, neck and ear of the girl can also be seen as the nose, chin and eye of the witch.
Both views are possible. Both views at the same time is not possible. The reason for this has something to do with the way the human mind works. The mechanics aren’t as important as the fact of it. How many of our certainties are only certainties of our bias? The bias of vague notions floating around some backwater of our sub-conscious mind - though barely noticed by our conscious mind - may nonetheless affect our judgment.
Girl. Witch, Which?
Are we more inclined to see young girls, or witches? Even when we know both viewpoints are valid do we still think that somehow, one of them is really much more true.
Aren’t we all pulled between what we believe is true, and what we want to be true.
Serge Aksakoff, in a memoir of his childhood days in the rural Russia, of the 1690’s recalls a game he played many times with a young girl of his own age. They both admired a particular poem by the Russian poet, Prince Ivan Dolgoruky.
This poem, The Contention, was a comparison between the Sun and the Moon. Aksakoff writes “I poured forth an enthusiastic panegyric on the sun, while she repeated one line again and again: the refrain at the end of nearly every stanza – “Quite true, but I prefer the Moon.” Four lines follow the last stanza:
“Contend no more! Be wise in time,
And learn, O foolish man,
That words, which flow from lips we love,
Prove more than logic can”.
Sometimes we choose to make the implausible plausible. Does the heart know things the head will never understand?
Animal instinct, women’s intuition and hunches are all frequently right, (though not always) yet, none of these depend upon the slightest degree of rational thinking. And rational thinking fails when it starts with facts that are not so.
An Impala stares at a nearby bush and wonders if the dappled shadows she sees are
just the light playing tricks, or are they really, as she suspects, the spots of a leopard.
She has seconds to decide.
Most decisions don’t require such speed, though time doesn’t necessarily improve our tendency to jump to conclusions. One person sees certainty where another sees fog. It is a commonplace notion that there are two sides to every story, but that doesn’t mean that both ideas are true. Both sides could be wrong, and there may be more than two sides. All of which requires reflection, information and verification.
Ambiguity abounds.
There is a group called Skeptics who are completely intolerant of any sort of mystery. They can be seen on almost any TV show about UFO’s, monsters, paranormal activity, or anything else that seems inexplicable.
They will provide a mundane explanation for any strangeness that comes to their attention.
A light in the sky, moving at supersonic speed makes a right-angle turn, not once, but many times. Then it disappears. The event is captured on video and radar. Skeptics scoff:
“Only a meteor they say”. The fact that meteors do not make right-angle turns does not trouble them at all. There are many people like the Skeptics that cannot tolerate ambiguity.
These people demand answers, and the answers must be prosaic.
A scientist when confronted with similar phenomena would say, I have no idea what that was; there’s no way to explain it because the data is insufficient. When there is not enough data
it is always better to acknowledge ignorance than it is to invent absurdity.
I’m skeptical of the Skeptics. They have more faith than I can muster in the absolute knowabilty of everything. Perhaps they should have called themselves: True Believers of All Things Quotidian.
So, what should we believe? Is it a pretty girl, or a witch? Is it dappled light, or is it
a leopard? Is the light in the sky knowable, or unknowable?
We are pattern seekers from infancy. Newborn children will respond to a disk with
two black dots as though it was their mother’s face. Of course, babies quickly become more discerning, but throughout life the patterns we believe we understand are not always what
they seem to be.
Part of the problem is time.
On sunny days we all see animals, castles, and all sorts of things in the floating clouds. As the wind moves the clouds what first seemed a cat becomes a dog, then a bird, then . . . nothing but a shifting abstract shape. Clouds move fast enough to reveal the instability of their suggestive imposture. Other things in the world move so slowly they create an illusion
of permanence.
In truth, every aspect of this world is in a state of constant flux: from sub-atomic articles – to stars – to us. “Things fall apart; the center will not hold”. Is magic science we do not yet understand, or is science magic we only think we understand?
Most folks don’t care about absolute truth; they just want to know what to do to avoid burning their fingers. Unfortunately, their modest quest for simple practical information is often led astray by those who would willfully deceive.
There is a field of inquiry know as Semiotics that studies the many ways that signs and symbols affect emotions and perceptions. Many people in the business of persuasion use this knowledge to provide added and subliminal power to the ideas and products they want to sell.
The term Semiotics is modern; the practice is ancient. Color has long been used semitonically to imply meaning. For example: blue typically signals calm; while red typically signals aggression.
Sometime around the election of Jimmy Carter some group used this knowledge
of color association against their opponents. They somehow got the colors representing
the two major parties switched.
For decades the Republican Party was represented by blue (calm, reasonable and responsible} while the Democrat Party was represented by red (emotional, intemperate,
and radical).
The symbol for the former Soviet Union was red, the color for the Chinese Communists
is red, and in widespread practice red is the intuitive choice for emotional radicalism of all sorts.
The degree of impact created by this historic switch cannot be measured, but it certainly had an effect that continues to this day. All of it unknow to those affected.
If we manage to see past all the Chimeras produced by semiotic manipulation we’re still not in the clear.
We depend upon our senses to inform us of reality. Unfortunately, our powers of taste, touch, hearing, sight and smell are limited. Animals do better. Compared to them we are nearly blind, deaf and anosmatic. And, in addition, they have senses beyond ours.
Birds can sense the magnetic polarity of the earth. Cats can see in ultraviolet. Sharks can detect bio-electrical energy – and so on.
Despite their impressive senses animals are limited, too.
Both humans and animals perceive only a small part of the vast time/space energy phenomenon known as the Electro-Magnetic Spectrum, (EMS).
Strangely, the only difference in any part of the EMS is a difference of vibrational frequency. Vibrational differences produce radio waves at one point and the color red at another. We can see red, but were unaware of radio waves, T.V. waves, micro-waves, X-rays and more until devices were invented to detect them.
Our obliviousness to these energy events does not mean they weren’t doing anything until we turned on the radio. The entire EMS is doing something. We just don’t know what.
Imagine a still pond with a small leaf floating near the opposite shore. The leaf flutters. There is no wind. What is making the leaf move. Is it magic, or a physical force beyond our
understanding?
Perhaps it was because of the acorn dropped into the pond shortly before our arrival. It produced a wave that was slight but persistent. It made its way across the pond until the leaf reacted to its energy. We can understand how the energy of the wave in the water moved the leaf. We know almost nothing about what the waves in the energy of the EMS are moving.
Many people, in many ways, have said that the world may not only be stranger than we imagine, it may be stranger than we can imagine.
Can we imagine dimensions beyond the ones we know? No, we cannot. We can imagine the general notion, we can construct mathematical models, but we have no way of understanding what another dimension would be like.
There is a book titled Flatland that has been required reading in math and physics classes for more than a hundred years.
In the world of Flatland, you can travel anywhere you want - except up, or down. One day, inexplicitly, a sphere arrives from above. The folks are flummoxed. From their point of view, they can see only a circle - a circle that changes from larger to smaller and back again as the sphere moves up and down through the plane of Flatland. They had no way to understand.
We intuitively understood three dimensions. Then Einstein included time as a fourth dimension. New evidence suggests there may be more than four.
In the last several centuries Newton and Einstein seemed to have explained almost all the rules governing the world and the universe. Recently, the study of the sub-atomic world has thrown that certainty into contention.
The micro world of sub-atomic reality is so different from the macro world that a new theory was required. This would be a Unified Field Theory; a theory of everything – the Grail Quest of modern physics.
Several theories have been proposed. None have been completely accepted. All are known as String Theories. All require more dimensions, than are known to exist, in some instances, they require as many as seven more dimensions.
All make their case with mathematical formulas. No one questions the accuracy of the math. The problem is that there is no way to test these equations in either the macro, or the sub-atomic world.
Another problem is that there are too many theories. Can they all be true? Multiple solutions for a single problem are not uncommon in science, or life. Nonetheless, one solution eventually proves more reliable than the others and is therefore accepted as the true explanation.
The “strings” in String Theory are vibrating strands of pure energy. The frequency of their vibration creates the illusion of the many kinds of sub-atomic particles. Since the entire universe is composed of atoms this may mean that nothing in the universe is there. At least not in terms of hard stuff, like matter.
We perceive a world of substance because the electro-magnetic fields set by these vibrating “strings” are impenetrable.
One way of thinking of this is that all of reality, from atoms to galaxies, is one colossal symphony I find that thought charming. Did God sing the world into being? When God said, “Let there be light! “was He actually singing?
If you find it hard to believe that vibrations can produce something real, consider the notes of a musical scale. A string, or anything else vibrating at 440hz will always produce the musical note: A. It will hover in the air for a time, then fade away, just like everything else in this world.
We live our everyday lives in a mystery enshrouded by more mystery.
Ambiguity abounds.
God knows.
The rest of us can only guess.