Thoughts about Thoughts and Things that "Just Work"

Once again, I retreat into my quiet place of introspection--the scratchpad of my imagination where my ideas find an outlet. I find it such a strange thing that I often begin writing blog posts having hardly anything to write about but then stumble upon ideas that then form into extended thoughts, sentences, and paragraphs at length.

A couple of days ago, I found myself in a weird situation. I was browsing through Netflix and was planning to decide between two TV shows to watch--Seinfeld or Sherlock. I told myself I would watch Sherlock and then proceeded to search for it; I discovered the show wasn't on Netflix, but to my surprise, I felt a small feeling of relief or happiness rather than feeling disheartened. Even though the choice was in my hands, it seems I had picked the choice I less wanted, despite my (subconscious?) preference for the other.

Back to this idea of these posts writing themselves. It really does seem as though they are writing themselves, and I am merely witnessing my brain formulate and transcribe these ideas through my hands (like when Venom uses his photographic memory to draw pictures through the body of Eddie Brock). My role in this affair seems passive, though this idea is delicate to express. It is delicate to express because we are dealing with layers of the mind. Of course, my mind is writing this post. So then how can it possibly be that I have a passive role in doing typing? Rather, what did I mean when I said my role is passive?

Well, maybe my role is passive because the ideas are being generated of their own accord, popping into my head the same way that floaters wanter into the field of one's vision. They are not always visible, but just as soon as you focus on one, the precise movement and location of each little floater become apparent. If one tries, one can even control the general movement of the floaters by halting one's eyes and deliberately pointing one's eyes in a different direction. Similar to my control of floaters, the relationship of myself with respect to my thoughts is not master-slave. I cannot dictate what idea I will think of next, but I can attempt to direct my thoughts in a general direction.

When this happens, I can guess what must be happening in my brain, though at a laughably high level. When I have a starting point for an idea, I give my mind a starting place to search for new ideas. Out of the seemingly unbounded scope of possible thoughts I could think of, I localize the thoughts I am interested in into a subregion of this space of thought, sort of like placing a hypersphere into a high-dimensional Euclidean space. My mind then generates thoughts through a search process, whereby it probes into the expanse of related ideas: the well-thought-out ideas and half-baked notions kept by my subconscious. It is from this search process that ideas must emerge.

This passive nature of idea generation, however, also seems to make it unreliable. It works, but I don't know how it works or why it works. Therefore, if/when it fails, I won't have a starting point to "debug" its failure. I felt a similar thought when working on my programming homework earlier today. I desperately wanted my solution to work, but I knew that there were many deep gaps in my learning that, in the event of failure, would hinder me from understanding the flaw in my design. More concretely, here is what happened: I had a program written in Java that was intended to compress a file in a multithreaded manner. I don't know the inner workings of the compression algorithm, since we were given a working single-threaded program to start with. I was not familiar with Java's compression library that was used to perform the elementary compression step. I did not know the specification of the gzip format, which is the output of the desired program. If my program failed and began to return corrupt output, it would therefore be difficult for me to understand whether or not a subcomponent of a program is broken or not, let alone why it is broken.

There are many things that "just work" in life. The existence of such things may inspire a sense of fear because there would perhaps be no lower bound to human suffering if they were removed. For example: humans' ability to form stable intersocial relationships. This enables the existence of cohesive family units and stable marriages that yield healthy children. It also allows, generally speaking, humans to trust each other--the customer to trust the grocer, the citizen to trust the police officer, the wife to trust her husband, and vice versa.

Also, consider our body's ability to maintain homeostasis. Imagine having a mutation that removed an element from human functionality, such as the ability to digest solid food or the ability to walk on both feet without much deliberate thought or the ability to learn languages seemingly automatically in early childhood. Disabilities exist and, unfortunately, there are humans who suffer the brunt of such conditions of human existence. Yet, these individuals are considered anomalies precisely for this reason--most humans are provided with the majority of intended human function.

There certainly is no guarantee for the aforementioned categories of things to "just work". Exceptions to these rules, such as psychopaths (behavioral and social anomalies) and disabled individuals (anomalies in physical/mental human functionality) are reminders, often painful ones, that the structure and harmony that generally characterize the state of humanity are certainly not guaranteed.

Maybe our realization of the fortunate alignment of many factors that enabled relatively stable human existence is what made us religious Like when the sunset shines directly through MIT's infinite corridor twice a year. We felt grateful for all the things that "just work"--things as simple as being able to feel positive emotion and to breathe without pain. And the natural harmony and order present in human life granted to us via human experience inspired us with a sense of purpose to expand the harmony through civilization, both for ourselves and for posterity. Maybe this sense of gratitude and religious duty is what led to human civilization.

Perhaps I am missing something, but is human existence alone not enough justification for the existence of religion? The world is rational and objective, sure, but humans are subjective creatures who perceive the world as we are able in our limited way and act in ways that are constrained by our biological, emotion-driven motivation system. That we feel guilt and remorse, happiness, sadness, anger, and sense of purpose--Is this not enough reason to believe in God? In other words, what reason do the Christians have to resist the idea of evolution or to insist upon the accuracy of the Bible? The Bible is an old book and, as history tells us, is the product of documentation of what so many millions of people trust to be the essence of human life. What does Christianity have to lose by admitting the factual inaccuracy of what it claims to be true? Rationality and science may be advanced, but human psychology can hardly be any different than what they were a few thousand years ago, to the extent that humans are the same as they were that long ago. Collective intellect and reasoning about the objective world continue to grow, but the entry of every new life alongside the exit of every departing life signifies the redundancy of human experience--the same things that must be learned, the same types of relationships that must be built and maintained, and the same type of deep insight regarding human life that must be formed generation after generation.