The limits of what can be taught
Cratylism is a philosophy stating that words can never fully capture reality or convey one person's experience (or qualia) to another. That notion rhymes well with Terence McKenna's idea that an enlightened person can not communicate his insights to a pre-enlightened individual.
"The Tao that can be described is not the real Tao"
In the same vein I recently listened to an interview with Laurie Paul from Princeton on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast. She uses a hypothetical choice to become a vampire as an example of rational decision management in the face of transformative experiences such as becoming a parent, or being *so skeptic* that you even *doubt being skeptic*. If a decision will make you a different person, how can you make a rational decision only based on what you know about your current self's motivations? Actually, the vampire story is a lot of fun so you should check it out. Or just read my twitter thread here.
On December 26, 2019 I finished reading "Wholeness" by the quantum mechanics legend David Bohm. It's a great read for many reasons, including his thoughts about language not having kept up with knowledge about how the world actually works. As it is now, both the grammar and the construction of verbs and nouns are impediments to talking about what's really going on, not to mention the instinctive (and deeply flawed) default to separation of observer and experiment. The observer is always part of the experiment.
Related to "Wholeness", in February I've been listening to Jordan Peterson's "Maps of meaning" and reading Max Tegmark's "Our mathematical universe". Peterson takes a top down view, based on functional, time-tested empirically productive actions for individuals and tribes, which over time are distilled into codified knowledge. First in the form of cultural atoms, memes, such as rituals and ceremonies, and later as rules and science. Max on the other hand has a bottom up approach where pure mathematical concepts form the basis for everything. Together these thinkers can be thought of as providing a hierarchy of a mathematical universe, manifest in life as DNA code and in lastly human relations as more or less functional meme codes - including language.
By the way, the most recent brain research (see episode 168 of The Brain Science podcast with Ginger Campbell) indicates that humans don't have an innate capability for language but a more general sequential learning ability that can be exploited for learning to read and talk among other things. Hence, Campbells guest in episode 168, Cecilia Heyes, calls language a cognitive gadget, rather than a genetically coded cognitive instinct.
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Before continuing my musings about knowledge and conveying experiences, I would just like to take the opportunity tell you that I and my partners are opening up a second round of the Future Skills Program: Decision Making and Risk Management For Your Career and Financial Investing. You can read more about it here. The FSP program is my best effort at explaining how to prepare for investing, and making decisions, in 'wicked' and uncertain environments.
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My conclusion from thinking about Peterson's, Heyes' and Tegmark's works is that language is so far removed from reality and our experience of that reality that it's an almost but not completely useless tool for conveying our qualian inner lives. In the absolutely life changing and amazing book "The master and his emissary" by Ian McGilchrist, the author claims that indirect communication in the form of poetry can invoke more precise understanding for the reader, than descriptive and superficially more exact language can. A poem needs to be taken in in its totality, and can not be read and interpreted word for word. We still can't be sure we're experiencing exactly the same thing, but at least that we're relating to the same category of experiences. Henri Bortoft goes on to state something similar when he talks about how to respectively convey and perceive meaning through books, in his 1971 paper "The whole: counterfeit and authentic"
Spoken language, according to McGilchrist's intepretation of modern brain science, resides almost fully in the left brain hemisphere which only gets a very poor rendering of the actual reality, albeit survival-wise highly functional. The right brain HS has a more direct access and 1:1 experience of reality, but is prevented by the corpus callosum from overwhelming its stupid but efficient left brain HS emissary with the full picture. Donald Hoffman seems to agree, based on his book "The case against reality". According to Hoffman we have evolved away from seeing reality in order to be faster decision makers. Thinking about quantum mechanics was not an effective tool on the savannah when a lion came charging.
Circling back to Terence McKenna, and the famous mycologist Paul Stamets ("Mycelium running"), certain psychoactive plant compounds like psilocybin and DMT might temporarily suspend the separation of the hemispheres normally provided by the corpus callosum. If that's the case, i.e. that an early hominid eating enough magic mushrooms gets a more direct experience of the full wholeness and interconnectedness of reality, that could explain the, in evolutionary terms very sudden, explosion in intelligence and deeply social development that took place a few million years ago. This idea is what Terence McKenna semi-jokingly called "The stoned ape hypothesis".
So, the questions keep piling up. How can there be any solid thruths at all, if both our minds as well as actual reality are in constant flux? And how can we ever hope to fully relate to one another when language is such a poor tool for communication? My take on it all is that that's what makes it interesting. Just like science asymptotically keeps progressing through a series of smaller and smaller errors but never attaining the full truth, the ultimate purpose for a human being is reaching for, but never achieving, a simultaneous perspective of and unity with everything, including oneself and other conscious entities. To understand the whole one must be the whole, lest one is simply an incomplete observer, an isolated bystander. The fun part is gradually inching closer but knowing we are always and forever just in the beginning of an infinitally long process (for more on that specific idea, check out David Deutsch's great book "Beginning of infinty").
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P.S. Check out the Future Skills Program here, or forward the link to somebody you think could use it
