| I was thinking about your quote all night. Others have made that observation.
When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.”
? P.D. Ouspensky
I have thought about this for almost 50 years. Here is what I think the above means in a practical sense. When we lived as animals for 200,000 years or so, relying on our instincts for survival, we lived mostly in a two dimensional concrete world and reacted according to those instincts e.g. we are programed for pattern recognition and are instinctually terrible at probability. Pattern recognition protects us from lions in the bush.
But the modern world needs for us to understand probability more than pattern recognition (can't smoke or eat at MacDonald's every day if one wants to live to be old and healthy) and we can learn it. But we have to make and effort. It does not come to us naturally.
We instinctually function and live most comfortably in the two dimensional concrete world, but are capable of living in the three dimensional abstract world. The world beneath the surface of life. Most people today live pretty much in a concrete world and by a script they do not question very much.
We even understand that concept, sort of without knowing it and call it shallowness. It was a topic of major conversation in the 60's and got lost as the human condition overwhelmed introspection.
But not all people, I would argue Einstein's, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Keynes, Penrose, Pinker, Dawkin's, Robert Sawyer and others live pretty much in an abstract world.
Most people live on the surface of life and are not inclined to look below it. Others realize reality lies beneath the surface in the three dimensional abstract world. And once a person learns about the abstract world, they usually continue to look at it.
Waking people up is the primary objective of education, IMO. |
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