The Mechanics of Understanding | Chapter #3 - The Man Explanation
A Short Story
One day Hades, God of the Underworld, saw Persephone and instantly fell in love with her so he caused the ground to split underneath her.
Persephone slipped beneath the Earth and Hades stole her to the Underworld where he made her his wife.
After finding out, Demeter, mother of Persephone, vows that she won't set foot on Mount Olympus and that she won't let anything grow on earth until she sees her daughter again.
So Zeus convince Hades to give Persephone back, he agrees, but before doing what he promised he tricks the girl giving her 6 pomegranate seeds to eat.
Demeter after seeing her immediately asks Persephone if she ate anything while in the underworld, because if you eat something while you're down there, you have to stay there forever.
After soap opera events, it is decided that Persephone should stay in the underworld for 6 months every year, but Demeter says that when Persephone is in the underworld, nothing on earth will grow.
And there you have seasons!
We are accustomed to this kind of myths, we probably read them when we were in school, in a novel or we found them in movies. We also probably consider them to be imaginative stories and no more, but they hide the human desire of explanation and answer.
The myth of Persephone explain in a comprehensible and “reasonable” way why we experience the four seasons and why some are more productive than others. Without the tools necessary to understand the world, humans tend to rely on “the knowledge of the past” which, for the majority of the recorded history, has its roots in the supernatural. In fact, a supernatural reason seems to be the most obvious to explain thunders when your society doesn’t even have developed the idea of the electron.
But even though these myths were not representing the truth they were the product of collective experience, maybe the most powerful tool humans have. It may surprise you, but unlike other mammals, humans can speak and this is the skill that allows us to share ideas and to solve problems in ways that other species can’t.
Animals, such as the orangutan, can learn to solve problem through a process of trial and error or, in some cases, through observation.
This image was taken in Borneo on the island of Kaja and, YES, this is an orangutan fishing with a spear after he watched locals doing it in the Gohong River.
The process with which animals learn limits their skills to their lifetime because they cannot hand over their knowledge in a productive way to their offspring, but humans can!
After the invention and perfection of written language, ideas outlasted their conceivers and remained intact through the centuries. Philosophers alive thousand of years ago still speak through their words and contributed to our collective knowledge of the world.
Being mortals limit us, a lot! But being able to pass our ideas and work together on finding a better explanation of the world makes us limitless, and in a way let our thoughts live forever.
The technology we have today, the scientific discoveries, the medicines we consume are not the product of individuals, but the result of centuries of curiosity and questioning based on the work of thousands who just wanted to understand the “Why of nature”.
Coming soon in the fourth chapter we will talk about the scientific method, how we developed it and how we transitioned from the supernatural to it, see you there!
If you missed the previous one you can find it here!
Super-Duper Important Footnote
I’m really happy recently making these posts because it pushes me to research on topics I always wanted to study in deep, but never had the time to. Also, thanks for your amazing feedback and thanks to everyone who followed me, I hope you are enjoying these posts.
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Thank you and I’ll see you in the next article!
EC.
Great post again! Just some thoughts on the topic of animals learning, hope you don't mind me sharing!: I think we as humans, having the ability to form relatively complex ideas into words to transmit information, may not fully understand the degree of complexity to animal body language. Like a blind person who cannot see and so they develop keen sense of hearing, so too would an animal who cannot speak develop an ability for communication through body language. To me, we are all equal--meaning, every living thing that exists has positive attributes that counterbalance their negative, and vice versa depending on which attribute we are looking at. Like the financially rich person who is poor in other aspects of life, or the financially poor person who finds contentment through their circumstances; there is always a balance in some way, somehow, even across species.
It is hard for us to understand that which is far outside our perceived reality. Like the worm brain with 300 neurons of your previous post, this is a function of our understanding of the brain--they may also function using smaller components that ultimately lead to the same brain power in a way. In a way, there is wisdom and understanding that can be found through thoughtful consideration of the actions of anything in the universe. It is easiest for us to see that through humans because we are most able to understand those things closest to us, but the more we branch out into the infinite other experiences of the universe and try to gain understanding of simple wisdom from things around us, the better :D For example, watching children not as authoritative adults but as students is a great way to learn from the wisdom of an unadulterated, timeless mind! I don't have much experience interacting with worms but I'm sure they offer their own range of understandings. A dog may be a better example to glean information from, as they are extremely loving and affectionate and don't tend to hold grudges easily. They can be protective and caring.
I'm just ranting a bit but just sharing some things I thought were related and pertinent to what you are sharing. :D Thanks for your posts, they are great! :)
In a way I think you understood an important message I was trying to convey with this post. Taking the example of the dog you just mentioned, we might be the stupidest and weakest animals on the planet to its eyes. Humans need clothes to cover, houses as shelter, cars to move around, cooked food to eat... The prospective changes with the eyes of the observer, but it is undeniable that speaking a language is an enormous advantage when talking about learning. As a software engineer, today I know how to write a program not because I invented the processor, the hard drive, the DC, the binary language, the programming language(s) and so on, but because I learned from the knowledge humans acquired before me. This is something animals can't do and this limits their knowledge to what they can can learn by themselves in their own lifetime. But of course, as this is improvement for us it may be madness for the animal observer.
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