Category Archives: Reality

Compass

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I feel we are at a point where we can begin to address the questions posed in the first postings of the blog.  Namely, what do we make of a world that can accommodate a wide diversity of cultures and of ways of perceiving and engaging with it; and, since we can actually change our way of living in the world, is there any sense in which certain ways may be preferable?  The previous posts can be distilled into three main points, which I feel describe our common human experience of living in the world.

  1. First, we are aware of very little, of a tiny sliver, of the world.  This is of course commonplace, but this lack of awareness extends to our own bodies and what they are continuously doing to support and sustain our perception and actions.  Reality is in excess, here and now, always and everywhere.  And of the very little we are aware of, we can put into words even less, a point beautifully made by Bian the wheelwright.
  2. Second, all knowledge about the world is the result of hard work.  It involves the effort to learn to perceive and recognize specific patterns, so as to orient ourselves and guide our actions accordingly.  It also involves the effort to learn how to carry out specific activities successfully.  An important aspect of this hard work is the standardization of perception and performance, which provides the basis of our socialization into particular communities.  It is through this standardization that knowledge – and the work of multitudes that it is based upon – is transmitted across space and time.  A lot of related work goes into structuring and organizing the environment to support and guide our perceptions and conduct.  And it is the extension of standardization across times and places that the power of science emanates from.
  3. Third, our knowledge of the world defines us. Knowledge amounts to discipline of perception and conduct. This disciplining of our bodies makes us who we are – knowing amounts to being in a certain way.  Our knowledge rests on our abilities to perceive and act in specific ways, how we place and orient ourselves in the world and how we engage with it.  With knowledge being the result of hard work, the effort we expend on learning how to perceive and act is precisely the effort that disciplines our bodies and shapes us into particular beings.

I view the three points above as a compass with which to orient ourselves in the world we live in.  First, it is important to keep in mind that our knowledge about the world and about ourselves, even our awareness about what we do here and now, is very limited.  Second, when we consider what is presented as knowledge, including our own knowledge, a most relevant question is where did this knowledge come from, how, through what effort was it developed?  And third, that knowledge also reflects who the knower is, their understanding of themselves and in relation to the world, and how they conduct themselves.

One might feel that the compass lacks specifics, but specifics can only be the outcome of work, which is always particular to a place and time and associated with a way of being.  When we embark on learning something new or on developing new knowledge, this effort also shapes us in novel ways.  In future posts I will be shifting my focus to specifics, to maps, which by their nature will be particular to my own vantage point, my own place in the world.

Knowledge, Ability, Discipline

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The posts on the Duhem-Quine Thesis and on the Power of Science pointed to the standardization of performance and of tools as the basis for engaging consistently with the world.  The examples about how to measure scientifically the color of an object or determine the species of an animal highlighted the role played by training in bringing about this standardization.  We are of course all familiar with training, with the instruction, repetition and practice, with the supervision and the checking and cross-checking that goes into achieving mastery of a performance.  For example, the scientific determination of the color of an object depends on the rigorous training of the individuals who carry out the measurements, training that ensures consistency of performance and results. 

Of course, this process of training is not limited to the scientific ways of doing things; it is how we learn virtually all of what we do on a daily basis.  This is how I learned the use of chopsticks, by watching my friends, then trying on my own under their guidance, kept on practicing, and finally managed to eat successfully using them.  This is how we learn a language, listening and speaking, reading and writing, with others who already know it correcting us, and eventually using it to communicate successfully. The standardization of perception and behavior through training is at the basis of our socialization into a community: from learning the language, to using eating utensils and exhibiting proper table manners, to following dress codes and traffic rules when driving…  Similar standardization underlies the socialization into a community of people with specialized abilities, such as doctors, nurses, teachers, soldiers, pilots, lawyers, or farmers.  Guilds of course come to mind.  A scientific community is but one example of people with specialized abilities acquired through training.

We are all familiar with this process of training, with how we get to acquire abilities and skills, with how we learn.  It takes discipline, discipline of perception and of behavior.  Ability and knowledge involve the development of a disciplined performance through the patterning of perception and behavior.  It is on the basis of this patterning that we foreground particular features of our environment, recognize and manipulate objects, behave in a certain way, so that a stable, consistent interaction with our environment can come about.

Of course, as we are all aware, socialization is not the only way that we develop stable and consistent interactions with our environment: we also do it individually, on our own.  Sometimes during play, or while we are going about doing something else, we become aware of a novel pattern, a pattern that we pursue; sometimes, while tinkering, trying to solve a problem, things fall into place and new, unexpected configurations of actions emerge.  Then we fashion these novel patterns and actions into a stable interaction with the world by standardizing our performance, essentially by training ourselves on our own through individual direct engagement with our environment.  A newly developed ability can then be communicated and shared with others, who might adopt or modify it, pick it up or ignore it.  All stable interactions with the world, whether learned through socialization or de novo through self-learning, are based on a consistency of performance, a consistency that we achieve through discipline.  The disciplining of performance, of perception and action, is at the basis of any ability.

Knowing amounts to perceiving certain patterns and acting in particular ways.  It is the assimilation of these specific patterns and actions, this patterning of our perceptions and behavior that constitutes our abilities.  At the same time, this patterning is exactly us, amounts to what we are.  In other words, in order to develop a stable interaction with the world, we have to perceive the world and conduct ourselves in specific ways, we have to be in a certain way.  The abilities that underlie our knowledge are constitutive of who, of what we are.   We are what we know, we are what we do. And we make frequent use of this connection, as when we note the way a soldier carries himself, a lawyer talks, or a farmer looks at a garden.  This connection further means that by virtue of having acquired knowledge in a particular domain, other domains of human knowledge would not be readily accessible to us.  I have previously used the rabbit/duck image to point to this sense of mutual exclusion; a more compelling real-life example was the case of somatization of marital problems among Hindus, a somatization that would not occur in the same way among, say, Christians.  So, being able to perceive and do something entails being unable to perceive and do something else.  Knowing certain things also means not knowing – not having the ability to know – other things.

Two Basic Observations

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Most of us I think would agree with the following two basic observations about us and the world we live in.

First, we all live in the same world, we are all part of the same reality, and this reality is understood differently, is experienced differently by different people.  And these differences in understanding can be extreme.  We understand and go about our lives in different ways, and the reality we live in can accommodate all these very different ways of engaging with it.  It is within the context of these particular modes of engagement with the world that we ascribe meaning to and pursue our lives and actions.  I do not intend this basic observation to be construed as an argument for relativism, but rather as a statement of common human experience –  based on our experience about us and the world we live in.  It is the realization that we might as well have been in someone else’s shoes, leading their way of life, perhaps very different from our own.  This observation gives rise to an uneasy feeling and questions: How am I to find my way around in a reality that manifests itself in so many different ways?  Are there ways of understanding the world that are better than others?  What am I to make of a life that can be lived in so many different ways?  Are there particular ways of life that are superior to others?

Second, our understanding of and the ways we engage with the world can and do change.  Our understanding and means of engagement are initially forged through our early socialization within our family and culture.  This understanding evolves and develops further as we grow older, as we get to interact with more and different people, acquire training and education, as we move and adapt to a new place, or as we embrace other people’s ways.  Such a change is not always trivial.  We invest a lot of effort in developing our own particular ways and the flow of everyday life hinges on them.  Radical change can and does happen and can involve a different perception of the world, concomitant with novel purposes, motivations, activities, and meaning for one’s life.  And, of course, efforts at change could fail.  This second observation, of the possibility of change, underscores the importance of the questions brought up by the first observation: given that change is possible, is there a superior understanding of the world to inform the way to lead one’s life?

These observations may sound familiar and trivial.  In practical terms, they are typically not taken seriously because of the tremendous effort it would take to change one’s way of life and everything that follows along with it.  And we have already invested a tremendous amount of effort to acquire the abilities to lead our current lives, and we continue to expend a lot of effort to maintain them as well.  But these observations do bring to the fore that we have choices in the ways in which we go about our everyday affairs, the way we experience and understand the world, the meaning and purpose we imbue our lives with.  Not a complete freedom of choice of course, but a wide range for sure.

Our cultures do not provide us with tools to even consider the possibilities offered by such choices.  This is not surprising, as our perceptions of the world and our actions are actively guided and coordinated to produce social organization and ensure its stability.  Exercising choices might well destabilize the social structures and networks that after all support and sustain our everyday lives.

In this blog I will cover topics that I hope will provide a guide and tools for how to place and orient ourselves in our world.  A world that can be experienced in multiple ways and can accommodate many different ways of life, a world in which we can change and transform our lives, but also a world where we have learned to prize our own received ways.