If you've seen The Hurt Locker, you might remember a scene where the protagonist is talking to his baby. The dialogue goes something like this:
"You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don't ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older... some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you'll realize it's just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things. With me, I think it's one."
It's a wonderful piece of dialogue, something that stuck with me after the movie. My thought for this post goes along similar lines. When we're young we assume a lot of things. We live in a sheltered world, and a number of simple assumptions maintain that shelter. Things like how our parents and family love us, how they are probably the smartest people around and how they'll always protect us. Then follow the other ones like your friends being awesome etc. etc. Over time though, most of these assumptions get broken. But the ones that don't, form the backbone of our existence, our foundations so to say. Which is why it's so overwhelming and upsetting when one of our long held assumptions, or beliefs, get shattered. I guess the most important of these assumptions are the most primal, ones pertaining to our immediate family. Maybe it's different for other people, but that's the case for me. It seems like a reasonable assumption (no pun intended), since not having a stable home is known to cause behavioral issues among people. I'll even go far enough to postulate that love is somewhat of a fast track criterion for assumptions to be assimilated into the core backbone, cause that aligns it better with how bad breakups hurt.
And that's how faith works too, right? Cause at the heart of faith is a set of assumptions. That's the beauty of it, that assumptions do not have to answer to any form of logic. Which is also why people get defensive when their faith is questioned by logic or science, since it isn't based in logic. But it also emphasizes the importance of not shattering anyone's assumptions in faith for no better reason than someone's need for logical consistency. But most of all, what's important to remember is how deceptively well hidden these buggers are. We're so used to their existence that we don't notice them even when they're staring us right in the face.
When you think a bit more about it, you start to realize that our mind relies on a lot of assumptions in life. Most problems in CS dealing with human abilities, like sight, hearing, intelligence and comprehension are so insanely hard to solve because developing these assumptions using algorithms. We don't recognize everyone equally easily, only those we expect to see. That analogy carries to other senses too, like we understand languages using context. If someone uses words out of context, even the best language experts have to take an extra second to understand it. All this seems to highlight the importance of assumptions, they help us survive and exist. In fact, it's widely believed (or is proven, I'm not sure), that your mind can hold exactly 8 pieces of information at a time. Anything more and one of these things have to be switched out. I'm guessing that makes multi-tasking hard, and that people who can truly multi-task must have some interesting differences in this architecture.
But all in all, this seems to point to a nice avenue to help our species evolve, cause the newer generations seem to have better assumptions in place for technology and the ilk. So imagine if we can understand how assumptions are formed and assimilated, and are able to speed up the process, we'd pretty much be able to instantly teach people things. Or, on the evil spectrum of things, brainwash and control people. But it would definitely be a cool line of research. Maybe then the assumptions we develop ourselves will have that extra value, or rather I hope our mind would evolve to differentiate between the two. Till then, we'll just have to assume other people know what they're talking about and have some common sense :P
"You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don't ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older... some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you'll realize it's just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things. With me, I think it's one."
It's a wonderful piece of dialogue, something that stuck with me after the movie. My thought for this post goes along similar lines. When we're young we assume a lot of things. We live in a sheltered world, and a number of simple assumptions maintain that shelter. Things like how our parents and family love us, how they are probably the smartest people around and how they'll always protect us. Then follow the other ones like your friends being awesome etc. etc. Over time though, most of these assumptions get broken. But the ones that don't, form the backbone of our existence, our foundations so to say. Which is why it's so overwhelming and upsetting when one of our long held assumptions, or beliefs, get shattered. I guess the most important of these assumptions are the most primal, ones pertaining to our immediate family. Maybe it's different for other people, but that's the case for me. It seems like a reasonable assumption (no pun intended), since not having a stable home is known to cause behavioral issues among people. I'll even go far enough to postulate that love is somewhat of a fast track criterion for assumptions to be assimilated into the core backbone, cause that aligns it better with how bad breakups hurt.
And that's how faith works too, right? Cause at the heart of faith is a set of assumptions. That's the beauty of it, that assumptions do not have to answer to any form of logic. Which is also why people get defensive when their faith is questioned by logic or science, since it isn't based in logic. But it also emphasizes the importance of not shattering anyone's assumptions in faith for no better reason than someone's need for logical consistency. But most of all, what's important to remember is how deceptively well hidden these buggers are. We're so used to their existence that we don't notice them even when they're staring us right in the face.
When you think a bit more about it, you start to realize that our mind relies on a lot of assumptions in life. Most problems in CS dealing with human abilities, like sight, hearing, intelligence and comprehension are so insanely hard to solve because developing these assumptions using algorithms. We don't recognize everyone equally easily, only those we expect to see. That analogy carries to other senses too, like we understand languages using context. If someone uses words out of context, even the best language experts have to take an extra second to understand it. All this seems to highlight the importance of assumptions, they help us survive and exist. In fact, it's widely believed (or is proven, I'm not sure), that your mind can hold exactly 8 pieces of information at a time. Anything more and one of these things have to be switched out. I'm guessing that makes multi-tasking hard, and that people who can truly multi-task must have some interesting differences in this architecture.
But all in all, this seems to point to a nice avenue to help our species evolve, cause the newer generations seem to have better assumptions in place for technology and the ilk. So imagine if we can understand how assumptions are formed and assimilated, and are able to speed up the process, we'd pretty much be able to instantly teach people things. Or, on the evil spectrum of things, brainwash and control people. But it would definitely be a cool line of research. Maybe then the assumptions we develop ourselves will have that extra value, or rather I hope our mind would evolve to differentiate between the two. Till then, we'll just have to assume other people know what they're talking about and have some common sense :P
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