Conjecture 8: On observation and amplification

Us humans seem sensorily meagerly equipped. Almost all animals are better equipped than we are. Rabbits are able to snif solid material, the eyes of predatory birds are able to see mini mice from high above, dogs notice frequencies that are not audible for our ears. In comparison humans are sort of handicapped. The individual capacity for empirical observation is relatively modest as well. We’ll have to be told that there is actually something we could notice. Unless you believe in reincarnation, we live but in one specific era, so we’re only able to see that part of our empirical world. Empirical world as defined as what we can experience in our environment. We don’t really know what the world was like some thousand years ago, and neither do we know what it will be over a hundred years. To know our contemporary world is difficult enough as it is. We need to be told and that’s exactly what happens. We’re continuously told ever so many facts and they come with a meaning in the process, else we aren’t able to make sense of them. Without this, we aren’t able to observe, as experiments as The Monkey Business Illusion illustrate. When one asks people to look at the video and gives them the instruction to specifically watch something, they tend to indeed notice the activity they were asked to watch (in this case the balls touching the ground), but all kinds of other phenomena taking place simultaneously go unnoticed. The video is on YouTube. We cannot see what we don’t know we’re able to see. That’s what professor Hawking meant with his remark that we cannot see ‘aliens’ or ‘Indians’ not noticing the ships of Columbus. When facts are helped to enter our conscious, the facts take different routes from there. A diffuse little fact that, depending on its original meaning, attracts all kinds of other facts, like the Sorcerers Apprentice of the occasional combination Goethe en Dukas, that have a loose connection to it. The meaning grows and grows until it is much bigger than the small facts it was ever deriving from. Many politicians didn’t live to see their political day after having publicly pinned to a small fact that grew until nothing was left of their integrity.

*S. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, Bantam Dell Publishing Group, 1988

Next time: Frozen facts

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