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The Simplified World

from Richard Ostrofsky

of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed)www.secthoughts.com

quill@travel-net.com

November, 2011

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality." Eliot doesn't

have this quite right. What he should have said is thathumans needs to have their reality shrunk down to a

manageable level of complexity, still correct enough for the

immediate purpose at hand. Actually, human beings endure

a whole lifetime's worth of reality, and most do it fairlywell. Of, course, we die of reality eventually, but somehow

we bear even the most miserable lives and deaths, and find

ways of making ourselves happy or less miserable, at anyrate. We evolved to cope with human reality; and after all,

what choice do we have?

But we really do need to simplify reality for humanpurposes, and we have a hundred artful ways of doing so.

For example:

We represent reality with language and metaphor, andwith symbols of every kind. We know that language over-

generalizes and distorts, but we make constant use of itanyway.

Similarly with maps and diagrams, which alwaysrepresent and emphasize some aspects of reality while

deliberately glossing others.

Similarly with games and simulations of all kinds,which function like interactive diagrams allowing their

participants to enter and 'play' in some deliberately safer

and simpler world.Math is an extraordinarily powerful means of

intellectual simplification seeking to capture and

calculate with the bare structure of a building or process orsituation while ignoring its messy particulars. Think oftrigonometry, for a (simple) example, which allows the

surveyor to calculate the height of a mountain or the width

of a river, by measuring just one angle, given the length ofa known rope or chain. Think of tensor calculus, the

mathematical language of general relativity, for a more

difficult example.

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Art as a whole and also religious ritual and doctrine

also serve to simplify reality some aspect of life, or even

life as a whole even as they frame and color it in someparticular way. Tribal customs simplify our dealings with

other people.

These are just a few of the means that humans use toshrink the world's appalling size and complexity to a level

that we can handle. It's a big world and a short day. All

these methods serve to 'get our heads around' and cope withreality. And they serve us well so long as we are aware

that imposed over-simplification is what we are doing. "The

map is not the territory," as Korzybski put it. Life is what

happens while you are imagining something much simpler.

* * * * *

It is not sufficiently appreciated that scientific theory (likeall writing) is always a compromise between the human

need for simplification and an attempt at true description.

On one hand, the scientist needs to cover the experimental

data, (and the experiment itself is a clever simplification).On the other, he hopes to do so intelligibly and elegantly

and he is applauded just to the extent that he succeeds,

because a lab notebook of raw data points are of little use.Nor is it well understood that artful simplifications, even

when not quite true, can be useful contributions to

knowledge so long as they are not decisively wrong for thepurpose at hand, and so long as we are shrewd enough

abandon them before they become seriously misleading.

We must not allow ourselves to forget that imposed over-simplification is what we are doing; and we must never

confuse them with 'Truth.'

With the explosion of modern knowledge, the need for

adequate, but publicly viable simplification of humanreality has become correspondingly more urgent. Devising

these has become a major intellectual task, if only because

so many completely ridiculous simplifications are able nowto gain large followings and corresponding political

traction. As Niels Bohr said (on two different occasions):

"Truth and clarity are complementary . . . We are all agreedthat your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is

whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being

correct."