1111 simplified worlds
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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."
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