My old friend Tom told me the story of a party he threw for some friends. Tom was a smart guy - a scientist, fascinated by the world and the means by which we understand it. In addition to his work which specialized in the nature of measurement, he made a habit of finding unaswerable brain-teasers to excercise his mind and would often share these puzzles with others to compare notes and learn how someone else might wrestle with the unaswerable.
The party at his house and included many bright people, some of them neighbors. One was the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission. Another was Edward Teller, the co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb.
Toward the end of the party Tom shared his latest puzzle with his guests. A family of three earthworms slithers along until they encounter a high wall of mud that extends very far to the right and left. The worms find themselves on the other side of the wall and looking back see two holes. Describe what happened.
This is an open ended question designed to stimulate thinking and imagination. There is no one correct answer. Each guest postulated a possible explanation. The worms burrowed separately but joined paths in the mud wall. The baby worm followed its mother through her path. There was a bend in the wall that blocked their view and they could only see two holes. They slithered over the wall and there just happened to be two holes. On it went.
We humans seem to be storytellers. We seem compelled to discover or at least invent a story that explains our world. One story begets another. I sometimes wonder if the nature of thinking is the nature of story - an abstracted landscape of symbols and metaphors that, like dreams, seem real. Some of us seem barely able to stand the absence of an explanation of any aspect of our lives. We can barely stand the mystery.
When almost everyone at the party had offered an explanation or two in this collective brainstorm, Edward Teller offered this:
There has been research into the abilities of monkeys to count and it suggests that they can only count to five. Is it possible that worms can only count to two?
It's both a blessing and a curse that we find it so easy to think that our world is the landscape in our head. It's easy to forget that the map is not the place, the menu is not the meal, the word is not the thing, and that the world is not bound by our symbols and stories for it. It's so easy to see the world in the colors we know, to only count to two.
My old friend Tom told me the story of a party he threw for some friends. Tom was a smart guy - a scientist, fascinated by the world and the means by which we understand it. In addition to his work which specialized in the nature of measurement, he made a habit of finding unaswerable brain-teasers to excercise his mind and would often share these puzzles with others to compare notes and learn how someone else might wrestle with the unaswerable.
ReplyDeleteThe party at his house and included many bright people, some of them neighbors. One was the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission. Another was Edward Teller, the co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb.
Toward the end of the party Tom shared his latest puzzle with his guests. A family of three earthworms slithers along until they encounter a high wall of mud that extends very far to the right and left. The worms find themselves on the other side of the wall and looking back see two holes. Describe what happened.
This is an open ended question designed to stimulate thinking and imagination. There is no one correct answer. Each guest postulated a possible explanation. The worms burrowed separately but joined paths in the mud wall. The baby worm followed its mother through her path. There was a bend in the wall that blocked their view and they could only see two holes. They slithered over the wall and there just happened to be two holes. On it went.
We humans seem to be storytellers. We seem compelled to discover or at least invent a story that explains our world. One story begets another. I sometimes wonder if the nature of thinking is the nature of story - an abstracted landscape of symbols and metaphors that, like dreams, seem real. Some of us seem barely able to stand the absence of an explanation of any aspect of our lives. We can barely stand the mystery.
When almost everyone at the party had offered an explanation or two in this collective brainstorm, Edward Teller offered this:
There has been research into the abilities of monkeys to count and it suggests that they can only count to five. Is it possible that worms can only count to two?
It's both a blessing and a curse that we find it so easy to think that our world is the landscape in our head. It's easy to forget that the map is not the place, the menu is not the meal, the word is not the thing, and that the world is not bound by our symbols and stories for it. It's so easy to see the world in the colors we know, to only count to two.