September 17, 2002

• Knowing At All

  
  

  I had an interesting experience the other day.  I had the vague notion that I had written a blog on a particular topic, but I couldn't remember how long ago that might have been.  So I started scrolling back through my Xanga posts in search.  As it turns out, I didn't find the one I was looking for, but I found interesting patterns in my blogs that I hadn't been aware existed.

  
  

  When I think of my Xanga blogs, my perception is that they are mostly about my kids and family with a few philosophical musings tossed in occasionally when I want to give my sister a headache.  I discovered that I have written far less about my kids than I thought.  (Not from their failure to provide material I assure you.)

  
  

  So imagine my surprise when I realized that I've written dozens and dozens of blogs on the concept of knowing.  What do you know?  What do I know?  Who do you know?  How is it that we ever know anything?  Can we ever know another person?  Is what we think we know real?

  
  

  Last night I watched A Beautiful Mind for the first time.  I may have to watch it again, and again.  That film asks a lot of the same questions I ask.  How do we know anything?  How do we know that what we know is real?  Whether or not it's real does our knowledge have value?  John Nash is a brilliant man, his Nash equillibrium is amazing for its simplicity and its analytical power.  He deserved his Nobel prize for a truly original idea that has transformed our ability to understand the behavior of economic groups, political bodies, criminal behavior, models of evolutionary biology, and who gets the girl in the bar.

  
  

  John Nash also suffers from schizophrenia.  Ron Howard did a masterful job of pulling us into Nash's world.  So when he revealed that some of the people who were most important to Nash's life were not real, we experienced disorientation, confusion, and loss.  We can never understand another person, because in spite of the aphorism, we can never walk in his shoes.  Our circumstances will never be identical to his circumstances.  Our desires, passions, dreams and impulses will never be his.  But, through this movie more than any other I've ever seen, we get a glimpse inside the beautiful and terrible reality of a splintered mind.

  
  

  When the film ended, I was left again wondering, what is real?  How can we know that anything is real?  Nash talked about the need to judge by empirical data, but he found empirical data searching through popular magazines and newspapers to support his delusion of a Russian conspiracy.  The pattern was real.  Was the pattern significant?  Does the existence of a pattern necessitate that the pattern has meaning?

  
  

  Even if we know something, what does it mean?  In a scene I particularly liked Dr. Nash writes an equation on the board and tells the class that some of them will work on it all year before they solve it, and that some of them will work for the rest of the term of their natural lives.  Near the end of the story, Nash is still working on an equation that has ocupied him for decades.

  
  

  I may never solve the equation.  To be a fulfilled person, I don't think I have to solve it, I just have to consider it from as many angles as I'm capable and solve what variables I can.  In another marvelous scene Alicia (the future Mrs. Nash) brings her work in and tells him that she's solved it.  He looks it over and pronouces "elegant, but ultimately incorrect."  Every now and then I run across some author or another who claims to have solved one or more of the problems that I call the "Big Questions" - where did we come from, how does the mind work, what is the substance of consciousness, to what extent does any given effect relate to a specific cause, what is the ultimate nature of the universe, what is the ultimate nature of man, is there any significance to history?

  
  

  In almost every instance I recognize that there are variables that the author has failed to consider.  The answer may be elegant, but it is ultimately incomplete.  Dr. Nash tells Alicia, "I never said the variables were rational."  One of the limitations of science is it's need to see the variables as rational.  But throw in even one variable that can be demonstrated to perform irrationally and the whole ball of wax begins to melt in theory after theory after theory. 

  
  

  Does this mean that science is of no value?  Absolutely not.  We may not know all, and we may never know with certainty, but we can develop models that give us a handle on our world.  Newtonian phsyics were overthrown by Einstein and relativity theory.  But phsyicists still use newtonian equations because even knowing that the model is flawed, we still know that on many levels, it works.

  
  

  Nash realized that his mind was flawed.  If the story were fiction, it would be denounced from all quarters of psychiatry because Nash decides to "ignore" his delusions and grasp the reality he's been given, and it seems to work.  He never, even with medication is able to make the hallucinations vanish, but in a way, his awareness that his perception of reality is flawed makes him less brittle, more brilliant.  He shifts from a determination to know it all, to a hope that he may know at all.

  • 3:25 pm
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