Inception

My wife and I for the first time since our son was born went last night to see a movie. We settled on the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Inception.

The movie was about a group of agents that get into people's dreams and steal information. The special plot of the movie was that they were going to try to get into a person's mind and rather than mind it for data, they wanted to plant a new idea in it.

At one point, the lead dream agent is talking about how ideas work. He said that once an idea takes root in a person's mind it is nearly impossible it is to unseat that idea. Once it has taken hold it is hard to counter it.

In this case, the movie was describing an idea as coming from outside and being planted in a person as opposed to something that a person thinks up himself.

Is this how our minds work? Do we sit around like empty vessels while others pour ideas into our head? I think sometimes that is the case, but often it is more complicated. An idea has to either fit into your preconceived notion of the universe, or you have to rearrange your mental contents to accommodate the new information. Maybe some people can jam discordant pieces of information in a jumble in their heads, but it seems to be a difficult proposition at best. Maybe that's why contradictions are sometimes so interesting. I pessimistically believe that most people with a head packed full of wrong information, will jealously guard the integrity of their own reality against assault and reject incoming information that conflicts with their own previously held beliefs. There are too many examples of willful ignorance for this to be a rare or casual observation. New ideas, even when truthful, correct, and useful, are often challenged and resisted.

I can understand why this is. If the mind is like a building, put together brick by brick, there are times when accepting a new concept is like asking someone to tear down a wall of their house and rebuild it from scratch from the bottom up.

An obvious example is religion versus science. If a person believes that Earth is 6,000 years old and was whisked into existence all at once by a supreme being, what are they to make of dinosaur fossils, geological records, astronomical observations, and a raft of other sciences that point to a much older world? The reactions fall into many categories. Some completely and vehemently reject all new information that conflicts with their previously held beliefs. Others simply ignore the new information, adopting a posture of deliberate ignorance or disinterest in the conflicting concepts - sometimes not even grasping the point of the new input sufficiently to see that there is a conflict. Others recognize and understand that there is a disagreement, but maintain a serene acceptance of their own beliefs and a faith that this additional information will be reorganized and resubmitted later more in accordance to what they already know to be true. Some people embrace contradictions. They might accept that two opposing things can both be simultaneously true, and enjoy the challenge of maintaining the logic of the two separate ideas without letting them actually fight it out to the death in their mental arena. A small amount of people will see conflicts and take the time to sort them out, with equal weight to the ideas that got to their head first and the new ones that came later. Knowing that you could be wrong in what you believe and being willing to tear into your memories, dredge them up and discard the rotten or unsound fragments embedded in your head is not always an easy task, especially if done properly. There are some individuals out there that are gullible, seem to have no convictions and simply believe the last thing that was told to them, but those people are rare.

There are many examples of organizations that are excellent at implanting ideas. While the obvious first example is a school, you have to realize that their task is not so difficult. They are taking blank canvases and painting fresh scenes on them. I was thinking first of talk radio. In many ways it is extremely successful at implanting ideas in people's minds, regardless of whether those ideas make any sense or not. While propaganda is simply biased misinformation, the adept use of propaganda to sway groups of people is a skill sometimes employed as a high art form. "A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth." People attribute this quote to Lenin, and it has been used as an example of the how Communism subverts truth for its own ends. This is just a form of trying to insert ideas into masses of people and can truly be called brainwashing. It's another logical fallacy called proof by assertion, where you repeat something often enough until all challenges to it dry up and it is accepted as fact. It's an interesting Wikipedia entry, talking about how modern political parties use this in the form of talking points to hijack the national debate.

In any case, once an idea has taken root in a person's mind, it is difficult to displace, and really can only successfully be countered with the help of the person from within.

Touchstone of Knowledge

I think about teaching sometimes. I think about being lucky to have had some good teachers that helped me understand the world and sparked my thirst for knowledge. I've often wondered what makes some people better teachers than others, and I've often considered teaching. My teaching fantasies are just that, scenes where you transform young minds and catch them on fire with a yearning to learn.

I was thinking that the idea of teaching children in a classroom was similar to the teacher pouring knowledge from a container into the smaller containers of the children. I envisioned the teacher with a big urn of liquid and the children each with their little cups, the teacher walking around pouring the knowledge into the children's containers. The more I thought about this, them more I realized that it is a bad analogy. This makes knowledge to be a finite resource and students to be passive vessels. It breaks down when you consider that the teacher is not expending or giving away their knowledge, but sharing and multiplying it.

A better analogy would be to visualize a teacher with a glowing stone and when it touches student's dark stones, they light up. I like the magical flavor of the image. This is more like an ignition of knowledge inside children's minds, where they always had the potential for this knowledge. In this case, knowledge multiplies through education. It spreads out and takes root in a broader audience. In many ways this is what makes us human. When we look at animals, we marvel that they know how to hunt or care for their young through instinct. A certain amount of skills are probably a result of having a body and being hungry and following its natural urges. Culture and other useful skills are taught to the younger members of the species. For humans, this includes written language and such intangibles as ideas, which may not have a direct physical representation in the world.

I also thought of another analogy of the spreading of human knowledge. It is kind of like a brush fire spreading, as ideas ignite and spread. The direct example of this is how early man learned about making fire and taught this skill to other men. This wildfire analogy has an interesting contradiction in it, because fire is destructive and we think of knowledge as constructive. Fire used by man made life easier and gave them control over their environment.

In any case, knowledge should spread like wildfire, but care must be taken that it does not burn us.

Mental Mashup

I like a phrase in the latest HP commercial with Gwen Stefani in it.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FhiIV6srJ0

She says that creativity is a mash-up of all these things you collect in your mind. She also says that creativity can't be turned on and off, it just sort of comes out.

I've often wondered about where ideas come from. I used to find that I would come up with revelations at odd times. For a few years there, they always came during gardening, but I've also had bouts of driving and running inspired creative thought.

I like to absorb as much information as I can. I admit, I'm an information junkie. When I was younger, I read books, magazines, and newspapers. Now I also browse the internet and listen to podcasts. Notice I don't list television as a source there. That's probably not entirely justified, but I just don't feel like it has much to offer in feeding the mind. It's more for turning the mind off and relaxing. I listen to so many podcasts now that I can't keep up with the rate they are generated. I find it very odd and gratifying from time to time when two or more podcasts, sometimes of very different genre, discuss similar ideas. Sometimes it's obvious, it's actually the same subject, but often, it's just analogous, which is more interesting.

I was inspired by the movie Good Will Hunting, of all things, when it came to education later in life. This guy is brilliant, and he taunts a Harvard or MIT student that what the student got for $100,000, he got for $1.65 in late fees from the public library. The movie Phenomenon also has a character that expands his mind simply by going to the public library. Actually, Thomas Jefferson had a great love for books, and was a voracious collector. He had a large collection of books that was amassed over his life which he donated to the government and started the Library of Congress. American founding fathers were well read, and wanted others in their nation to enjoy that same privilege. What inspired me about these examples is that the knowledge of the world is available to anyone with the time, desire, and devotion to simply pick up the books and start reading them.

How much information can we hold in the human mind? I've often wondered if the mind can actually get full. I know when my computer hard drive fills up, I have to start saving the stuff I need on other storage mediums and start deleting as much as I can so I'll have room for more. Does your brain work that way in some respect? If it does, I hope it's only deleting the stuff that is least used, and not anything important. I know if it does, it's not a process I'm in control of. I wonder if you do indeed have all the memories that you've ever accumulated locked away in your brain. If this is so, think of what happens if you die, how much knowledge dies with you.

Until that time, I plan on continuing to feed more information into the pile to see what grows out of it.

Conflict Resolution

Sometimes everything seems so clear.

I was listening to an odd podcast about logical thinking, and the podcaster made an interesting point. He was talking about how stories (on TV in his example, but this also applies to movies and literature) need to have some kind of conflict in order to hold people's interest. If a story just blandly describes a typical day where someone got up and went about their normal routine, no one would be interested. He went on to say that normal every day life doesn't typically have that much conflict in it, so these stories are not typical of life, but are typical of entertainment.

I don't really enjoy watching sporting events, which is pure ritualized conflict. With the popularity of sports in college and on TV, it seems to me that I am in a small minority. I wonder why anyone cares what any particular team does on any particular occasion. It doesn't change anything. Next season everyone will be at zero again. A great deal of the public would probably disagree with me, but I've just never seen the sense in it. For me it's a huge waste of time. I feel that getting really upset when your team loses is a waste of emotion. Again, I'm out of sync with the majority and I expect that most people would disagree with me.

But thinking about our love of conflict, that would explain a love of sports. You set up an artificial conflict and everyone gets to be entertained by it. I suppose it beats fighting a war out of excitement seeking, or something like the gladiatorial games in Roman arenas. At least in modern sports, no one is supposed to die.

But there is another popular entertainment genre out there that also appeals to a great deal of people, which I believe is much closer to what I like and how I think. You could call a program that has a riddle or solves a problem a Mystery. The rise in popularity of the CSI series (except for Caruso on CSI Miami - he's just an overacting buffoon) is an example of this other category of entertainment. Whether it's figuring out what's going on, solving for the unknown, or societal or scientific discoveries, I've always loved this type of story. How did it happen? Who did it? What's next?

It's like education or research in science. Life is a cosmic Easter egg hunt, all those hidden goodies just waiting to be discovered, opened up, and appreciated. The fun thing about unearthing knowledge is that there is no limit. Each mystery "solved" spawns questions that generate more mysteries. Every time we think we are at the end of scientific discovery, some new field pops up.

I think religion follows the conflict outline. It deals with God vs. the Devil, good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, moral vs. immoral. Unfortunately, people that are fixated on conflict see everything else in terms of conflict. This is why religious people are threatened by and rise in opposition to scientific progress, new ideas, and progressive thinkers. Scientists mostly don't care about the bible, and if they have religious beliefs, they mostly assume that scientific discoveries fit into God's scheme. Religious people assume that scientists are setting out to disprove God or the bible and that they are under attack from scientists. This is ridiculous, but by the time you realize this is going on, it's too late. Devout people assume that if we discover that the earth is 4 billion years old, that disproves the entire bible. They assume that if people believe that we descended from apes that they will reject the Adam and Eve story and therefore conclude that the everything in the bible is completely in error.

Religious people don't understand something very basic about scientific people. We don't root for one side or the other. We aren't interested in conflict, we are interested in conflict resolution. Nothing is written in stone, you can always enhance, rewrite, or revise any scientific premise with further studies and new discoveries. There's nothing disturbing or disruptive about this, it's just the way it is.

By making a conflict about Religion, whether it's evolution, astrophysics, geology, or even whether or not to say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays, certain religious leaders are discrediting their own standing, they are picking an impossible fight. It's unfortunate, because while religion has some great aspects like the ability to give people hope or the belief in treating people well and taking care of those less fortunate. Religious leaders run the danger of discrediting all religion by attacking science. In the end, we need the best from both fields to get the most out of life.