It Starts In Your Head
Donald Rumsfeld, Blaise Pascal & the 3rd Base Coach
An Offramp
Recently, a friend who reads my Newsletter commented how he felt bombarded by messages about what to do next (subscribe, pledge, brush your teeth). We talked through a few things and I hope his experience is better as a result of always trying to be logged into your profile when you are reading a Substack. For many of you that might read but don’t write on Substack, it seems being logged into your profile reduces the amount of messaging. This in turn reminded me to occasionally share what I enjoy. Each of these Newsletters is “enjoyable enough” to prompt me to comment and even go out on a limb and share their merits. Each of these is fun and completely unlike the other CAFÉ ANNE — So Novelicious — On the Commons — Noahpinion —
Today’s Note
Today’s post is a bit longer than normal. I pruned it three times. I plan to be conscious about making these a little shorter. Today’s post I think is WORTH the extra couple of minutes. If you are an author, and you agree, please consider cross-posting it as I’d love the opinion of more eyeballs. If you are a reader consider sharing this with someone. If it isn’t so good, let me know in the comments.
Known & Unknown
Connecting the three in the subtitle is the mission today. I hope it is MORE INTERESTING than it sounds!!! I think Mr. Rumsfeld likely got some things wrong but to his credit was willing to engage with the media to discuss thought processes. None other than Teddy Roosevelt explained the merits of being in the arena. Take a look at TR and the arena if you are interested. The first video is from the era of the Iraq War. The second is an appearance with Steven Colbert.
Time has been kind to Donald Rumsfeld IMO. It is inconceivable to imagine Donald Trump or Joe Biden being able to have this sort of conversation without becoming irritated, blaming others, and yeah buts (my personal pet peeve when people redirect)! I suppose supporters of EITHER of them can maintain a settled mind because they will never grant such an interview. One thing is for sure, Rumsfeld recognized the importance of knowns and unknowns!
How Did You Think of That?
When I was in high school, I gravitated to chemistry and took college-level chemistry and organic chemistry. It was interesting to me. I can still remember doing a lab experiment to weigh an electron! I wrote about this briefly along the way. Robert Millikan crafted an experiment that revealed to science the mass and charge of an electron! I have to believe those in the camp “there are just things we can never know”, if they were living in the 1800s would scoff at the premise. To think that in a high school chemistry class, I got to do this in the late 1970s is likely the reason I am more in the camp that humanity can go to the very depths of how things work and figure it out. I realize the experiment itself is not interesting to most. What intrigues me is PEOPLE, wholely in their mind, contemplate a problem, take the same set of knowns, and finally craft a way to prove or disprove something novel! All of this occurs inside our heads (Today’s title), long before we grab a pencil and paper. The DESIGN of a novel experiment, a new idea, is the most amazing of human characteristics. A teaspoon of salt contains about 6,624,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 electrons and I managed to weigh one in 1977 or 1978! Thanks to you Mr. Millikan and a germ of an idea in your head!
Today’s Title Again!
My thesis today is most every limit can be challenged INSIDE of our minds. Are you stressed out? Is it because of the circumstances you currently face? Do you ALWAYS get stressed out by the same set of circumstances? Does EVERYONE get stressed out by the same set of circumstances? Unless you can answer YES to all of these, it is likely the stress ORIGINATES in in YOUR MIND and CANNOT be coupled to the so-called stressor or situation with any regularity and perhaps not at all!
I had this set of observations presented to me recently and I find it a remarkable insight. Who would have thought stress and anxiety ORIGINATE in your mind and not your circumstance? I was not convinced at first. However, if the very SAME set of circumstances is faced by a group of people and only SOME of them react by telling you how stressed they are by the situation, how can that be? Perhaps some people have grasped how to bring their minds to a settled state. Even when we individualize the premise, a bit of extra mess in the kitchen doesn’t always end with stress. Sometimes understanding is our thought and it doesn’t bother us a whit! These are the sorts of things I enjoy stringing together in a post. Such a hypothesis appeared first in a person’s mind. Wow!
Another Opinion
I think this crashes against Philosophy at times. Where does reality lie? What are the limits of what we can know? At any given time, if we put what we know in one box and the rest in another, we get a fun starting point. Today, I posit that what humanity is doing is rummaging through the DON’T KNOW box and letting the concept bounce around in their heads. Once we do that, with the proper tools, we can often design a thought or physical experiment in our heads, repeat it over and over, and sometimes, move something from the DON’T KNOW box into the KNOWN box. This seems, at least to me, to be the experience and perhaps even ONE of the destinies of humanity. As our tools get better (that is one of the key factors that separates us from other animals), we seem to be moving lots of things from one box to the other. I am not making the separate claim of course that figuring something out always makes things better. Unintended consequences lurk everywhere.
A Settled Mind
There is a school of thought that shades toward the idea there is an awful lot of stuff we will NEVER KNOW and be unable to discern. This shows itself amongst great scholars in history. The people we associate with great breakthroughs might not jump out as people who embrace “there are lots of things we cannot know”. However, at least in my mind, I have a different conclusion. A recurring pattern appears wherein they make some great breakthroughs and explain something that until they came along was tied up in mysticism. They thoroughly explain something heretofore unknown, yet retain a healthy respect and perhaps serenity with whatever happens to be the frontier beyond which they cannot as yet discern. I believe our minds WANT to be settled. I believe this is a great energy state. I think this is why people who meditate or pray a lot are quite settled and often the VERY BEST of us.
I HOPE this makes sense to all of you and you haven’t closed this yet. One person who comes to mind is Blaise Pascal. Blaise never made it to forty but wow did he ever cover a lot of ground!!! If you go to the lowest common denominator description on Wikipedia, he is described as “a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer”. COME ON, the breadth of all of this borders on the absurd! He was born in 1623 and was gone by 1662. I am sure many of us have not really “found ourselves” by our 39th year! Simply because I cannot resist, Pascal was never married. He seems too busy to have pulled that off also! His Dad was a tax collector so in his free time in the 1600s he managed to make a working calculator!!!
Pascal changed the trajectory of discovery in many fields. Most of the world uses the metric system. When I put air in my tires it is usually something like 32 psi. Pascal was so critical in the breakthroughs related to pressure measurement and understanding, the metric system honors him with the units for measurement of pressure, the pascal.
I happen to have a cousin “JF” who has led a storied life. If you were to speak to him, Pascal in his work as a philosopher and a Christian writer is the period in which he came to some insights of the greatest value. My sense is my cousin looks to this version of Blaise Pascal as pivotal, insightful, and genuinely important to humanity. While I did not consult him when I wrote this I will share it with him after it was written (if he’s interested). Only a SMALL number of my family read this stuff and that feels right! The steady growth of this Newsletter is organic. I have resisted (it’s not that hard) sending it to 700+ in my contact list. That is easy for me as I wouldn’t appreciate it if something random ended up in my Inbox! I hope my impression (of Pascal) matches his (my cousin’s) opinion! If I am way off, I will adjust and that will feel good anyhow. A win-win as I’ll connect with my cousin and learn a little more about him as a result!
Pascal is known for his mathematical, scientific, philosophic, and religious contributions to thought. They are placed in chronological order so no judgment, please! Many of the “great thinkers” seem to end up where Pascal did. I have read with some interest about Isaac Newton. The trajectory of his life was similar. Despite his myriad breakthroughs, he seemed to gravitate to a peaceful understanding of the NOT KNOWN box and chose the settled mind. While it is just my theory, I surmise that a person of such intellect SEEKS certainty. It is unsurprising to me that REGARDLESS of how many things he/she puts into the KNOWN box for the rest of us, his/her mind where all of this hard work originates seeks a SETTLED state and embraces an explanation of the NOT KNOWN stuff for his/her time and place in history.
I also believe therefore it is easy to follow AND ASSUME the merits of such people wherever the trajectory goes. This is the path of least resistance. This is perhaps why we admire Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford. We do our best to pretend their pro-Nazi leanings were an aberration. Anyone who could make a calculator in the 1600s must be worth listening to. I am not so sure about this myself. Linus Pauling is the only person ever to win two undivided Nobel Prizes in different disciplines. One for chemistry in 1954 and one for Peace in 1962. None of this, alas stopped him from becoming an untethered quack recommending megadosing Vitamin C for all sorts of benefits. I surmise those beliefs were arrived at to settle his mind. His contributions were world-changing but a whole generation of people (and even today) still megadose on Vitamin C to prevent sickness. The people who peddle Airborne must love Linus Pauling.
A Quick Tangent
Here’s a link to the rather ignominious website quackwatch.com. The link expands on Linus Pauling. It is a fun website dedicated to debunking absurd health myths, frauds, and the like. One can easily lose some time and probably get a few laughs. If you are confident in your ability to resist going down the rabbit hole, I happen to enjoy “The Power of Coincidence”.
Back to Known & Unknown
I am being careful here not to claim I know how all of the items in the NOT KNOWN box come to a resolution. I think it is natural and instinctive to assume there are matters beyond our comprehension. However, what the brief last 500 years or so have revealed is the KNOWN box is growing with increasing speed and now seems to be a hell of a lot bigger than the NOT KNOWN box.
Wrap It Up
It was the presentation of whether circumstances or our mind is where anxiety is born coupled with a cool story that led to this post. I hope that I manage to tie these together to your satisfaction. I would hate to leave any of you with an unsettled mind :) I took the time to explore Pensées based mostly upon some dialog with my cousin. I am so glad that I did. As always, it is up to us to make sense of the next explanation. Pascal was quite good in his reasoning!
Rummaging Through the Unknown Box
A while back, I made a post about the emergence of an alphabet. The path from ape, to the struggle to walk upright, shedding our hair, and adopting perspiration to cool our bodies were all important steps on the way to us. The development of language and a way to record it were breakthroughs. When I wrote about the history of the alphabet, I fretted a bit. I guess to settle my mind, I assumed we were at a dead-end to figuring out how speech emerged. I guess I just loaded that idea in my personal NOT KNOWN box and moved on. I underestimated the ability of humans to design a new and novel way to proceed down the path of figuring it out. A recent story I read led to this post and helped me understand that perhaps there is a way to move this alphabet and speech mystery closer to the KNOWN box at least in the preliminary.
Once I dug into the topic with some Google searches to group similar questions, it turns out this topic has been progressing for decades! Other fellow humans have been pondering how to shift something into the KNOWN box all along! What this told me was simply because I was UNAWARE, I had put the whole where did language come from in the DON’T KNOW box, and likely because I NEEDED to settle my mind. In this way, just like Blaise Pascal, who leaned on something he understood (probability, gambling, and roulette) naturally migrated from something he knew well (and was settled about) and projected it into his famous notes (at least to philosophy students) that came to be known as Pascal’s Wager. The synopsis below is taken from Wikipedia. It is more extensively presented in Pascal’s Pensées published posthumously as an unfinished stream of notes. I find it to be a fascinating mix of the KNOWN box and NOT KNOWN box with a bit of mathematics and probability sprinkled in. Pensées just means thought in French and is rooted in the French verb penser.
Pascal's wager is a philosophical argument presented by the seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, physicist and theologian Blaise Pascal (1623–1662).[1] It posits that human beings wager with their lives that God either exists or does not.
Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas if God does exist, he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (an eternity in Hell).[2]
The original wager was set out in Pascal's posthumously published Pensées ("Thoughts"), an assembly of previously unpublished notes.[3] Pascal's wager charted new territory in probability theory,[4] marked the first formal use of decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism.[5]
The 3rd Base Coach
Where do I stand? Perhaps this is unimportant to anyone but me. I think there will always be stuff in the NOT KNOWN box. At any moment in time, we will lack the thought experiment and/or the tools to resolve it. This perhaps is the proper place for faith as a venue for the settled mind.
When I dug in to understand today’s final topic, the 3rd base coach, I found references to the material dating back at least to 1968! We have all heard the claims we are related to the apes. They do not have a language but they do make particular noises. What we do have in common is hand gestures (kinda like a 3rd base coach). For those of you unfamiliar with American baseball, look up third base coach signals.
One of the things we know about evolution is its slow rate of change in the natural world. We also know that remnants of our former selves hang around in our DNA even as we go through slow changes. We’ve all heard about the appendix for example. Did you know that humans have a tail during the 5th and 6th week of pregnancy and it goes away at about 8 weeks? A bit more controversial is that humans during EARLY development even have slits in their necks, not unlike gills but we eventually abandon them.
An area of increasing study is mapping the hand gestures of apes of all kinds and to find common motions. Is it possible these gestures are “familiar” to humans even today? The answer seems to be yes. It is also true that small groupings of studied animals birth new gestures and are quickly adopted into the local group. This localization and patterns of commonality are thought to be an early form of language development! Perhaps hand gestures ARE an early form of language and a precursor to speech!!! My absolute favorite observation about the speech was discussed in some of my prior writing. By analyzing brain scans, it appears that upwards of 90% of ALL OF OUR SPEECH is internalized in our minds and is us “talking to ourselves”. For those that know me well, I would do well to keep more of my speech inside my head only!
So the rub today is whether this is interesting to all or some of you. The part I am keen about is that someone did some observation, imagined what it meant in THEIR mind, and then started gathering evidence. It was this uniquely human capacity that may have moved us further backward with a workable theory about the roots of language. That is a pretty cool thing to move from the DON’T KNOW to the KNOWN box. Here are some suggested links for more reading and listening.
Humans can correctly guess the meaning of chimp gestures1
From NPR in 2007 — Primate Gestures May Be Clue to Human Language2
From NPR in 2008 — The Chimp That Learned Sign Language3
Ape Gestures and Language Evolution — This study by J Van Lawick & JANE GOODALL (yes that Jane Goodall) was presented in 1968!4
The Poll & Music
When humans cannot hear, they learn sign language. If a chimp can learn sign language (footnote 3), perhaps this research will bear fruit (probably bananas). When I read stories like this, I am struck by how critical it was for us, despite the myriad disadvantages to (1) walk upright, (2) free our hands for tools and gestures, and (3) become an endurance animal. Orthopedic specialists can point to this stretching of our limits as being one of the reasons back pain is hard to avoid for us. All things considered, it seems to have been worth it.
Pascal straightened out the world and its understanding of what a vacuum was. He gave us the syringe, the hydraulic press and the roulette wheel. Today’s song is in deference to his contributions to understanding pressure.
What’s Next
Next week will be shorter. It will also be an amazing story related to health and the fears we all have (or may have experienced) when a loved one deal with cognitive decline. This is NOT GOING to be a sad story. I am a wide-eyed optimist. It is titled “Cleanup In Aisle 3”.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-can-correctly-guess-the-meaning-of-chimp-gestures/
https://www.npr.org/2007/05/01/9930599/primate-gestures-may-be-clue-to-human-language
https://www.npr.org/2008/05/28/90516132/the-chimp-that-learned-sign-language
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0702624104
Thanks for the shout out Mark; I appreciate it!. I always enjoy your newsletter as you come up with some of the most interesting and different topics. :)