Category: Philosophy

When we have a theory about something, it’s essentially an understanding of how we believe something is supposed to work, or what its true nature is. It’s like an organized system with a network of branches that connect to different parts that permeate from larger categories to smaller ones in a harmonic way. These categories help to explain, what seem to be, random and unorganized events, using a methodical and holistic approach. In other words, a theory is supposed to be a predicator of varying events/outcomes using an algorithm like a flow chart, or a system of unbroken links like a mind map. When those predictions are verified repeatedly across different situations and or environments, the theory itself becomes more grounded, more real, until it becomes so undistinguishable from reality that it evolves into a formula or a scientific law, rather than just a strong conviction we have.

But a theory has to start from somewhere. It starts off as a question, which evolves into a hypothesis, because as we encounter events that are, on the surface, random and causeless, we try to rationalize and answer the “why” to know and understand what’s happening around us and in the world. But a theory can collapse if it doesn’t align with the predicted outcomes–the world–or with what it’s trying to explain. When that happens, we have to go back to the drawing board and see what didn’t work, why it didn’t stand up to the truth.

In the realm of science, the checks and balances of verifying theories is clearcut, because there are practical consequences if the laws of nature aren’t obeyed, or if the wrong processes or materials are used in the construction of structures or products, such as cars, buildings, airplanes, roads, bridges, etc. A car won’t operate, a building won’t stand, an airplane won’t take off, a road will crack or cave in, and bridges won’t stay up for long if the laws of nature are contradicted or if the materials or if the construction process is faulty.

But in our own lives, affirming or denying a theory is a bit more tricky. Although a theory will play out it in our choices and in their results, it’s up to us as to analyze it, modify it, and ultimately, to decide whether to keep or discard said theory. Furthermore, a theory could be interpreted differently from person to person based on how that theory interacts with the other theories they already hold, in addition to its compatibility with them.

Unlike the realm of science, the social realm is much more dynamic, since it involves people and the complex interaction of their choices with others given everyones’ experiences and values. We can read books and theorize about human psychology and human behavior to approximate what people’s choices will be. The same could be said regarding theories about how to go about achieving success or to be happy. But even if two or more people hold the same theory, it can play out differently for them, since the world is invariably complex, and often times, mysterious. That’s why we ponder after a life changing event, if it was chance, coincidence, luck, destiny, or the divine that caused it. And given that gray area of the unknown, a theory is more like a framework, a guide, since life isn’t just a theory, but an experience that has to be lived in order for us to grow from it.

As time goes on, it dawns on me that time is finite, not infinite. Although it would seem obvious that time is not infinite, we can lose ourselves in experiences that make it seem that time is infinite, such as our hobbies, or spending countless hours listening to music or watching movies. During those musical or cinematic experiences, we’re not even aware of time passing, but rather, we’re transported elsewhere as if time doesn’t exist in the place we’re at.

But when we come back to reality, we become aware of time again, the marching of the clock as it winds down to evening and then morning. It’s like experience itself isn’t quantifiable, but the quantification of time seeks to impose itself on experience as if it should be contained and timestamped.

It’s this duality of subjective and objective time where one seems to be right and the other wrong, and vice versa. Subjective time seems infinite whereas objective time is not, and somewhere between the two, time doesn’t really care, as it sees everything as just passing by and moving along.

There’s a saying that “seeing is believing,” but is this really so? There are instances when we question what we see, especially how something is presented or the context it’s presented in. For example, a magician can pull off a trick which looks “real,” when in fact, we know that there was a method behind it. Videos and images can be digitally alternated, and a reflection in a mirror or in a body of water can distort what we see.

We cannot ignore that we often believe what we hear, read, or deduce from our intellect. Why? Because we can only see so much in a day, and we are dependent on receiving information secondhand because of the limitations of our sight and our location in the world.

Seeing is only believing if we are there, or if we see something via video or images. But what if we can’t be there or if there are no videos or images of an event? For example, the events that took place hundreds or thousands of years ago. Or something which could only be told or written about because the technology wasn’t available to record it.

If we only believed what we saw, what about the things that are invisible, abstract and transcendent? Things that only the mind’s eye can see, things only the intellect can grasp, and things that we can’t see but experience, such as feelings and emotions?

We can be confident of facts, or mathematical statements like 2 + 2 = 4, but there are limits to how far this can be applied in reality. For example, when we make inferences about the world, they’re based on what we already know or what sounds logical to us. But it doesn’t necessarily mean their correspondence to reality is consistent and perfect. No matter how well we try to plan things out, something can go awry–something can get lost, broken, or we can simply miscalculate a result.

Reality has a way of surprising us–of defying or even embarrassing our logic. No matter how confident someone is in their understanding of science, philosophy, economics, or life in general, their knowledge cannot keep up with a world that constantly evolves, and with all the variables that intersect and influence the course of events.

To advance knowledge in science, it has to begin with a question.

Which leads the scientist to a hypothesis. It doesn’t mean they know the answer, though they might have a sliver of an idea of what it might be. And to find the answer to their question, it involves a series of tests, or experiments, to see if their hypothesis is correct. Maybe it’s not. And if not, they have to investigate why, see what the patterns are, what went astray.

When we think about math or science, what comes to mind are facts, formulas, and well-established truths. But what doesn’t come to mind are the questions that led to them, the trial and error and mistakes that steered the scientist and mathematician on the right path in making the discoveries that are known today.

Why is that though? Perhaps we’ve become accustomed to caring more about the solutions, the immediate answers, rather than the impetus which lead to them: questions. It is with questions that truths and facts become known. Questions lead to investigations, and investigations lead to discoveries. Thus, without questions, there would not be investigations, and without investigations, there would be no discoveries.

When we think about all of the technology that science, math, and engineering made possible, it’s easy to accept cellphones, computers, TVs, etc., for what they are, to buy and use them because they are available to us. But how did they get there? They weren’t always there, and they didn’t get there by themselves.

Didn’t it begin with people asking why something is the way it is, how to make something work, how to make something better, how to create something . . . ?

In our lifetime, we’ll come up with various theories about the world. Theories about people, human nature, the universe, etc. Even though we might not publish or share them, they will have more value to us than the ones we’ve read or learned elsewhere. 

The theories we’ve read or learned are stored in our mind, catalogued and retrieved as a sort of talking point whenever they’re discussed or mentioned. They can be useful when we need them to be, but we’re quick to put them aside when they don’t have application anymore.

The theories we’ve developed overtime are a combination of both experience and reasoning, and they stay with us because they have relevance to our everyday life, and in how we function in the world. Even though we’ve learned and heard a lot of interesting theories in our lifetime, we don’t channel them through our actions unless we’ve adopted them, accepted them as if they were our own.

There have been times when we’ve been captivated by a theory, took it for a grain of salt. But it’s questionable how long that theory will stay with us. If we truly care about its validity and usefulness, we have to think about it deeply, see how it plays out in reality, evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, and analyze it until we truly understand it. And once we do so, we’ll improve our own understanding of the world and know that no theory is perfect. 

There’s a big difference between theory and practice. Theory can be whatever you conceive, whatever works in your mind. You see the world operating in a certain way, and you believe that things are that way.

But isn’t our knowledge incomplete? How can we know that things are the way we suppose if we don’t have all the information that exists? Aren’t we just generalizing? Isn’t a generalization just an easy way of encapsulating a vast and complex array of phenomenon into an idea that we can comprehend?

But there is a larger question at hand. The question is, do our ideas have application in reality? Can we be sure that if we take a certain course of action, that things will go our way, or at least the way we predict?

A theory can be born from a single moment of inspiration. From there, it can be mapped out, studied, analyzed, scrutinized, systemized, and defended down to the smallest infinitesimal detail. But how does it stand up to reality where things break down and at every second, decisions are made by billions of people, changing the course of history–the future?

When we put an idea into practice, we are usually the first ones to try it out. It must bear some truth in the reality we experience. We hypothesize, come up with experiments, test out the idea to see if there is some sort of regularity between the expectation we hold and the actual event that occurs.

If an idea maintains itself despite the opposition it faces in reality, then there is some merit behind it. If it passes the tests many times over, then it becomes reliable, useful even. And once it becomes applicable to anyone across the globe with a high degree of consistency and reliability, then the theory rises to a state of fact rather than just an idea. It’s no longer just a product of our mind, but the way things are.

When we try to make change, there are two ways of doing so. One way is to change from within, and the other is from without. When we make change from within, we change the way we do things, the way we look at things: our attitude, beliefs, habits, etc. In other words, we change our mindset.

When we change things from without, we change the environment. That can start with our home, such as the decor, how we organize it, or the community, such as participating in public discourse, or the world we live in, such as when we donate our time or resources to volunteer with charities.

But which is better? Or do we need both?

If we change the world from without without changing ourselves, then we are not focused on our life. Maybe there are some habits we need to change–patterns that are keeping us from succeeding. And if we change ourselves from within without changing the environment, it’s as if we’ve withdrawn from the world–living in our own sanctuary. We might be at peace, but we have no influence in the world.

We can focus on one or the other, or combine both, letting them be a reflection of the values and beliefs we hold. When we do this, we not only improve our life, but become an example of the improvement we would like to see.

Schedules keep us organized, keep us cognizant of what to expect throughout the day. But what about when we’re not at work? What if we go on vacation, or have time off from work, such as on the weekend? Do we still live by a schedule?

To a certain extent, we do. Because of the work week, it has conditioned us to sleep at a certain time and wake up at a certain hour. We might even have the same routine of eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at a certain time. We could have a “weekend schedule” where we do bulk shopping at the grocery store. The weekend can be the time we watch a new movie or go on a hike.

No matter what day of the week it is, there is a schedule we follow (aren’t we creatures of habit?). At work, the schedule is obvious because that’s time we’re getting paid. At home, chores need to get done, and there is a finite time to eat, relax, and read before we go to sleep.

A macrocosm is analogous to looking at the world from a philosophic point of view. It paints a broad picture to encapsulate and explain all the variances that occur within it. It might have a ring of truth to it, something that we can identify with, relate to, but does it hold up overtime? And what about the nuances–the facts that diverge from it, deviate from its conclusions?

In novels, a macrocosm could be the world that is created within the story. Thus, the microcosm is the the narrative that follows the protagonist, not to mention the characters and the antagonist. A macrocosm is like the setting, whereas the microcosm is the plot of the story. They work side by side since the macrocosm is just the staging (the background) of the story, whereas the plot is the main focus.

But when it comes to knowledge about the world in relation to our experience, there seems to be a disconnect between the two. People seem to either tilt toward a macroscopic lens, or a microscopic one. From the macroscopic lens, they try to explain things in grandiose terms (the big picture), elucidating laws and principles while ignoring the variances, subtleties, the grey areas that exist. Those that tend to look at the world microscopically look at the world from their own circumstance, anecdotally, or from their own specialized field (i.e. history, economics, literature, etc.).

Both viewpoints give an incomplete picture, since they either miss the principles and laws that are at work (the big picture), or the minute details and variances that do not fit neatly within broader terms.

The reason why a book can harmonize the macrocosm and microcosm so inseparably is because it doesn’t need to be about everything: taking into account every natural law, or every human experience. It only needs to be about the protagonist and their story arc.

At the end of a story, we want to know what happens to them, how they are affected by the trials that they overcame and faced. Therefore, there’s no ambiguity or confusion about what the story is about. It had a clear goal in mind. There’s no tangent about some irrelevant aspect of their world, or about some side character that had no relevance to the plot. A story is organized in such a way that there is in order, a goal, a conclusion.

In a book, the story encapsulates a philosophic system based on the world and the outcome, whether it is dystopian or utopian, pessimistic or optimistic, because the author paints a world that the characters live in. Obviously, the world we live in is not the same as a book. Our world is indifferent, impartial to our thoughts, wants, and needs. We must adapt to it, learn, grow, and apply ourselves in a way that conform to the environment.

Thus, the macrocosm of our world, which we call reality (or the objective world), is just the setting for which we pursue the values we believe in (our microcosm). Although our values may change with time, we cannot change reality in the same manner (i.e. by thought or will alone). We can modify the environment, make it suitable and habitable, but we cannot bend the rules which govern the world. That’s where science comes in–understanding the rules which underly the natural order of things.

There is a difference between the life we live, and the world in which we live in. When we try to explain everything from our experience, we try to explain it from a microscopic lens. We ignore the fact that reality cannot be bent, twisted, or reshaped arbitrarily. It is what it is despite how we would like it to be. When we try to explain reality from the world we live in, we ignore the life we live, including the domains of morality, creativity, family, happiness, etc.

As a result, each perspective, on its own, gives us an inaccurate representation of the whole picture. It creates a false dichotomy where we either look at things naturalistically (materialistically), or humanistically (based on our judgments, needs, wants, etc.). Because both perspectives are separate and distinct, we must look at things from another lens.

Within the microcosm of our experience, it is always directed toward achieving something, reaching toward a goal. Life cannot be lived passively, since change can only happen when we act–work toward a goal. That goal can be survival, comfort, happiness, knowledge, etc.

The history of science and mathematics has been a laborous and difficult climb toward understanding the reality we live in. It has made possible technological innovations, medicine, you name it, which have made life at present incalculably more comfortable and convenient compared to centuries ago. Thus, we must frame the macrocosm and the microcosm not as distinct, passive, and neutral domains, but as ones being guided by a purpose. That purpose is the reason why we undertake them and study them: to improve our lives.

Therefore the microcosm of our life isn’t just a set of random experiences, emotions and feelings, but one guided toward improving life. In the same way, the macrocosm isn’t just a set of laws and facts about nature, but an encyclopedia of knowledge to help us advance science, technology, and medicine, and thus, to make our world safer, and to reduce suffering.

I think we so often forget the reason and purpose behind why we study the sciences and humanities in the first place. It’s as if we undertake them just for the sake of a degree, a job, and without a perspective of how different life would be without the things we take for granted (i.e. clean water, electricity, medicine, etc.). It’s why people sometimes look at these fields as just being a collection of facts, dates, and names to memorize, rather than having a practical purpose: to teach us how to build and engineer the impossible, and to learn how to live better.