This part of my blog is rooted in the faculty of imagination and trying to strengthen and hone it. Einstein was a great believer, with his ‘thought experiments’, and Kekule’s dream* famously illustrates the value of sleep, or dream-states, in re-envisaging things.
I sometimes tell my students that Science is “the art of evidence-based imagination” or “the art of identifying patterns in/underlying Nature, so that we can make accurate predictions” (and testing those predictions so that we can refine the patterns that they’re based on).
So I will be exploring those gaps where we don’t have a convincing explanation, or we have several mutually incompatible but equally credible schools of thought. Meanwhile I will be doing my best to use the available evidence as a spring-board, but this part is inherently more speculative than the others and may digress in unexpected directions, especially if a question/insight arises which may already have supporting evidence in existing theories or known phenomena.
“Science” does such a good job of convincing us all that it has the answers – or will do soon – and that it has the only reliable way of getting answers, that fresh enquiry can be stifled and it can become very difficult for the average person to question the prevailing paradigm or current orthodoxy.
“What kind of un-educated amateur would ask such a question?”
“Were you asleep during the foundation-year at university?”
“Who are you to question what the experts say?”
“Leave it to people who know what they’re talking about!”
I hasten to add that most experts know that there are gaps in their knowledge, are looking for answers themselves, and welcome the curiosity of the ‘average person’. Many of them are only too happy to share their passion for their subject.
The ‘who do you think you are?’ attitude is more of a cultural one, or even one of personal self-doubt – am I worthy to express opinions or question the accepted wisdom in this area of my non-expertise?
Perhaps here is a good place for the inspiring quote often attributed to Nelson Mandela, but actually written by Marianne Williamson. Whilst one might not agree with the religious tone, the general sentiment of the importance of daring to try can easily be re-cast in a Humanist perspective:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other
people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.”
From: Return to Love by Marianne Williamson, Harper Collins, 1992
Quoted by Nelson Mandela in his inaugural speech, 1994
The title of this web-site is “Thinking Allowed”, because only by giving ourselves permission to think do we actually try. And it is by thinking, and sharing our thoughts, that Humanity’s collective understanding grows. That is not to say that all thinking is equally good; but, like our muscles, it is something which is strengthened by frequent use.
“Out of the mouths of babes and innocents…”comes many a truth, as the saying goes.
How many times have interested lay-people, with ‘innocent’ (or ignorant) questions stumbled upon a truth hidden to the experts by the assumptions built-in to their training, or locked-in to the professional academic consensus?
In a similar vein is the moral of The Emperor’s New Clothes story.
The importance of sharing thoughts is the flip-side of the title’s pun – Thinking Aloud.
The 18th-Century reinterpretation of English patent laws and the emergence of the idea of intellectual property suddenly made it in every inventor’s interest to share technological ideas as soon as possible, reversing the previous policy of ‘trade secrets’ (which were often readily exposed by ‘reverse engineering’). This rapid and extensive information-sharing led to a profound acceleration in the rate of technical innovation, and was a major factor in the early Industrial Revolution.
We live in unprecedented times; most of us have ready access to the biggest library the world has ever seen (the internet) as well as the biggest forum for sharing questions and insights; we have more leisure time and more opportunity for on-going life-long-learning; we are living longer, and perhaps more importantly, we’re staying mentally sharp for longer.
It may be that we’re on the brink or a new dawn of ‘Mature Minds’, that have both the leisure time and the contextual/experiential framework (which may have taken many decades to build) to make connections which simply weren’t possible before… (I live in hope of ‘retiring’ and having the time to REALLY think, and finding a group of like-minded ‘mature’ individuals with complementary expertise to bounce ideas off and be inspired by…).
It may well be that imagination remains the last area of Human uniqueness in a world of accelerating ‘Machine-Learning’, evolutionary algorithms and supposed AI. (Not doubting that these entities can sift through vast quantities of data to identify patterns that a human never could, nor that they offer exciting new possibilities in our search for understanding; but before we can meaningfully talk about artificial intelligence, maybe we need to be really clear what we mean by intelligence itself…).
There is a similar, but different issue around what Consciousness is, and the question of whether or not machines will ever achieve it… (along with the nightmare Sci-Fi dystopian visions where it does, and it isn’t friendly… or the Alien inventor scenario where it has already happened, and we are the ‘Biological’ machines which were engineered to achieve it.)
Of course, the internet is far from perfect, and most of the non-subscription, freely available content is not of the same quality as most books and has a tendency to be superficial, or blindly quoting the same few sources, generally with more and more certainty as search-engines often equate proliferation with reliability…
That said, I try to be a realistic optimist, and I deeply appreciate what the internet has made possible; not least the opportunity to express myself in a blog like this..
What do you think?
