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 that humans 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 fairly well. 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 any rate. We evolved to cope with human reality; and after all, what choice do we have? But we really do need to simplify reality for human purposes, and we have a hundred artful ways of doing so. For example: We represent reality with language and metaphor, and with symbols of every kind. We know that language overgeneralizes and distorts, but we make constant use of it anyway. Similarly with maps and diagrams, which always represent 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 or situation while ignoring its messy particulars. Think of trigonometry, 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 of a known rope or chain. Think of tensor calculus, the mathematical language of general relativity, for a more difficult example.

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 some particular way. Tribal customs simplify our dealings with other people. These are just a few of the means that humans use to shrink 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 with reality. 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.

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It is not sufficiently appreciated that scientific theory (like all 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 the purpose 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 oversimplification 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 human reality has become correspondingly more urgent. Devising these has become a major intellectual task, if only because so many completely ridiculous simplifications are able now to gain large followings and corresponding political traction. As Niels Bohr said (on two different occasions): "Truth and clarity are complementary . . . We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."