Comprehension.

I.

I HAVE DETECTED an idea running rampant in the world to the effect that people can actually understand things. Our training inculcates this idea in us, and our language is structured in such a way as to almost ordain that the notion be one of our bedrock tenets. The word "comprehend," for example, derived from the Latin comprehendere, meaning "to grasp," invokes feelings of absoluteness in our society, as its relative, "comprehensive," invokes the feeling of "including all," though the best definition of the word is "widespread."

This is, of course, a sort of societal madness, since we can never possibly know all about anything. In order to actually understand something, one would have to take everything about it into account, and this we cannot do, thanks to our finite duration, among other limitations.

Even in the sciences--or perhaps especially in the sciences--does this lack of comprehension apply, because it is there that it is most easily demonstrated.

What we actually do, when we pretend to understand reality, is to understand an analog of that which is under consideration. We build a simple structure which has certain important features in common with that which we are studying; we build it according to simple rules of physics and logic. We do understand the simple rules, because we have invented them.

We find that our subject seems to follow the rules we have invented (because we have made the rules to fit the events), and so we say that we understand the thing under study. But what we really understand is only the rules, which we, ourselves, have invented. Much of formal learning is practicing to remember the rules that have been invented by people who came before us, but nobody seems to mention this during our formal training, and we are too often left with the misleading impression that we have actually learned something about the natural world, rather than a sort of history of man's inventions.

This is most evident in the physical sciences, and a good example might lie in a description of how I learned about electricity. The first thing I learned was that electricity embodied a flow of electrons through various conducting substances.

"What are electrons?" I might have asked, but did not, because from a course in chemistry I already "knew" that electrons were negatively charged particles that were constituents of matter, whirling about positively charged nuclei just the way planets revolve around the sun. I "knew" that particles were tiny bits of matter, and that matter was solid, palpable stuff, in the aggregate, having various characteristics, but always retaining its basic "stuffness." In other words, I pictured (and understood) matter as an analogy, the atom as a miniature solar system, and thus the very first thing I "learned" about electricity already had its basis in analogy.

"What are those 'conducting substances'?" They are matter, already "understood."

"Why are some of them 'conducting' and some not?" Some substances hold onto their electrons more tightly than some others do.

"How do they do that?" etc.

Then I learned that an "electromotive force" (voltage) pushes "electrons" through a "conductor" (wire) to a "resistance" (useful device) forming a "current" and dissipating "power" in the resistance. I learned that the electromotive force is measured in volts, the current in amperes, the resistance in ohms, and the power in watts, and that these units always behaved in accordance with two rules, called "Ohm's law" and "the power law." Here they are:

E=IR P=EI

We were encouraged to understand this phenomenon through visualization of what was known as, hold on to your hats, folks, a "hydraulic analogy," in which voltage equated to water pressure, conduction equated to pipes, current equated to water flow, resistance equated to loss of head in pipes during flow or in overcoming gravity during uphill flows, and power was equated to work done by water in, say, a mill or a turbine. Thus it came about that I began to "understand" electricity as an analogy within an analogy, and the fact that I have made my livelihood in large part through that "understanding" (in other words, it works!) is no indication that I have the faintest grasp of what is really going on. I do not. Furthermore, I cannot conceive of anyone understanding electricity in any other way than through analogy, given the limitations of our nervous systems and the seemingly indefinitely large complexity of the universe.

Please understand that this is in no way intended to fault the use of such analogies. Certainly, even the simplest electrical circuit could not be accurately designed without the knowledge and use of the relationships expressed in those two basic laws of electricity. What this discussion is about, instead, is the notion that we delude ourselves into thinking we understand that which we do not understand by the common practice of ignoring the learning mechanisms that we use in our educational practices.

As long as I am intent upon not understanding things, I would like to mention the notion of absolute position, a conception that, given what we speculate about the universe, seems to me to make no sense at all, unless one hypothesizes a reference point to exist at the center of the (speculative) "big bang," whether one thinks of that event as an origin, a line of demarcation defining a change from a collapsing universe to an expanding one, or something else. In connection with this, the question arises, "Which way to the big bang?" (In a spatial sense, not a temporal one.) In other words, where is the "point of origin" in this universal coordinate system? Does this sound like the needle-dancing angels of the classical philosophers? Consider this:

When I first undertook to comprehend Einstein's theories of relativity, I was at once struck by a seeming lack of a frame of reference for determining velocities. It was easy to see a certain distance into the problem by analogy to the behavior of earthbound practical velocities, such as a man walking through a moving train. But the earthbound velocities had the earth as an exterior reference. Where does that leave one in determining the absolute velocities of two bodies relative to observers positioned upon the bodies having different velocities? And with respect to what absolute point of reference do these velocities occur? Is there any meaning in any of this? There is no fixed, exterior frame of reference, and so the statements heard about variations of the passage of local time aboard a moving body from the passage of time aboard a "fixed" (i.e., having a different velocity) body seemed very muddy at first.

As my study progressed, the muddiness increased, rather than the opposite. For example, in the simple non-mathematical illustrations given in several different treatments of the subject that I read, actual velocity was left out, and mere speed employed. Statements like "If John boards a space ship and travels for X years at nearly the speed of light, when he returns home all of his acquaintances will have aged and died" require a fixed frame of reference in order to have any meaning at all. If the speed alone causes the time difference, the statement may be valid, but it doesn't make any sense when velocity is taken into account. In that case, John may have traveled X/2 years away from home at a "diminished" time-rate, followed by X/2 years toward home at an "augmented" time-rate, and I think one would be justified in expecting the variations in local time to have pretty much cancelled out.

My attempts to understand Einstein by analogy eventually came a cropper after I read somewhere that to understand his theories, one must use tensor analysis. So I started looking into that approach. The first step, it seemed to me, was to learn vector analysis, a prerequisite, and I took the course. Expecting it to be easy for me, since I already had had considerable experience solving problems in physics through the use of vectors, I was astonished to find that at one point I completely failed to grasp the material being presented. After much painful wrestling with this, I came to realize that my failure was through having previously dealt with vectors by analogy, "understanding" them through their correspondence with physical effects that I could see and relate to laws of physics. Like God, the laws of physics are made, if not in man's image, at least by man. They analogize physical reality, and Einstein's theories were nothing more than an attempt to make the classical physics of Newton more closely fit the observed phenomena.

Vector analysis, on the other hand, dealt with vectors as mathematical ideas irrespective of whether or not their characteristics could be related to observable and measurable physical phenomena. A vector is a mathematical construct that has a magnitude and a direction, and they can intuitively be added and subtracted. Sailors have done it from time immemorial in navigation. Thus far are they analogous to practical physical reality. In my studies of physics, we had manipulated vectors by addition and subtraction. In vector analysis, we were shown how to multiply them, an idea that has no easy analog in observable physics, and one that seemed extremely odd to me. Worse yet, we were shown two different ways of multiplying vectors, each way giving different results and having different meanings. I could not come to grips with this, lacking my accustomed basis for "understanding" the analogy. I did learn to grind out some correct answers to problems and I passed the course, but I never felt that I knew what I was doing. I never went on to tensors, which are even more esoteric. I leave them to the geniuses who wrestle these ideas and those of quantum analysis and win two falls out of three in an ongoing battle that looks more and more like a seminar in philosophy than a study of physics.

II.

The notion, as advanced in the previous section, that we are mad to think we can "understand something" suffers a logical weakness that results from our habit of using a language structure that makes the incorporation of inappropriate generalizations into our speech and thinking almost unavoidable. I refer in this case to my use of the term "things," together with its siblings "anything" and "something." These words fail to differentiate between what one may find existing in the world and the rules that one may invent about them, and between what goes on in the world and what we say about those goings on.

As an example, let's look at the laws of physics. On the one hand we have human constructs such as F=Ma (Force=Mass X acceleration), E=M[C.sup.2] (Energy=Mass X speed of light squared), V=s/t (Velocity=distance over time), A=d/([sec.sup.2]) (Acceleration=distance over time squared) etc., and on the other hand we have the actual, non-verbal, non-structured, non-mathematical internal knowledge of most of those laws, derived when we were very small through our constant experimental interaction with our environment. We know that if we go slowly it takes longer to get there; we know that when we fall down, the farther we fall the more it hurts; we know that the faster the motion of something that hits us, and the bigger it is, the more it hurts; we know that the farther we are from our Mommy, the fainter are her cries, though we never heard of the inverse-square law or anything much else in the language.

In our formal studies, we have evolved those mathematical structures, and they serve us quite well, for the most part, despite certain flaws and uncertainties. As an example of that, refer to the second law of mechanics, V=s/t, which is not complete. According to our best understanding[.sub.1993], it should read V=s/t, x[degrees]y[degrees]z[degrees], because by definition, velocity includes both a magnitude (speed) and a direction, and the quotient s/t only gives us the magnitude. Yet outside of text-books, the law is seldom written with the direction indicated.

So to say, as I have, that we cannot understand "anything" is misleading in our society, taking us into a labyrinth of trying to define "thingness," which I do not intend to include in the comprehension of reasonable expectations in the physical world of which we are a part. I know that if I jump up in the air I can expect to fall back down, even though intellectually my bedrock adherence to a philosophy of chaotic genesis and probability does allow for the remote chance of something else.

Should something else actually occur one day, I would be as surprised as any theist, but the explanation I would offer myself would probably be different from his. I expect he would see it as a miracle enacted by his god, while I would likely see it as confirmation of probability theory. I recognize that this illustration opens the door to accusations that my perception of confirmation of my theory demonstrates belief on my part. In response, I can only suggest that the appearance of belief is inherent in any declaration of nonbelief in our linguistically-bound society which can neither trust in the sincerity of nor even tolerate someone who is content to acknowledge his inability to know. To say "I don't know and probably cannot know" is to say "nor can you know!" in the eyes of those whose lives are based upon absolutes. It means the same thing to me, but the difference is that I am not threatened by the fact of his belief, though perhaps some time spent with history books and daily newspapers would make me increasingly uneasy.

The question of whether the world we perceive constitutes "reality" or not was raised in this connection by a friend whose training and vocation is in the field of argumentation, or the winning of arguments at any cost, including understanding; that is to say, a lawyer. In my view, this sort of debate-society exercise has about the same value as does the question of how many angels can dance on the point of a needle. (Should you be interested in the classical logical fallacies, this one is known as an "ad hominum"; attack the opponent, rather than his argument.) I see reality as existing apart from my perception of it, if only because it exhibits a persistent consistency that is entirely missing from dreams. However, I think there is legitimacy in questions about the nature of reality.

The question of determining the nature of reality, I think, boils pretty much down to attaining an understanding of our ways of thinking and talking about it. That which is "out there" (Korzybski's "event" (1), Bois' WIGO, "what is going on" (2)), whatever it "is," is seen by us in certain ways which are determined by our experience, our physics, and the structure of our language, and which do not provide understanding of the actual event, but instead, of a certain interpretation of the event.

To say that a tree falling in the forest is not a real event in the absence of an observer is to oversimplify the case, leaving out the necessary notion that the observer contributes to the observed in equally important part with that which is, or is not, a real event. The word "event," as Korzybski used it, includes any given portion of reality under examination, and can as easily refer to a physical process such as a football game. Korzybski's favorite example of an event was an ordinary pencil. If any sense of reality is to be left us, we must leave to the philosophers any discussion about observed reality as a notion that is separate from the act of observation, along with questions about angels dancing on pinpoints. The main implication of the term "observer" seems clearly to be that there is something to be observed. To call into question the reality of events apart from observation, then, is to destroy the meaning of the word "observer," which then might more rationally be changed to "creator."

Clearly there is a sense in which each of us does create his own world, but my understanding of that sense is that it lies within an external structure, which we call the laws of physics, about which we abstract consistencies with which to form our own analogies, which in their turn permit us to predict many physical consequences of our activities with considerable accuracy. The attributes of the human psyche that permit us to create do not, so far as I am aware, operate in the realm of physics, but within the various realms we call, collectively, the Social Sciences. When I write about a young Tommy O'Boyle being able to jump a creek that is wider than his broad jumping capabilities because of chutzpah, this is more than a tribute to the Irish or a mildly pleasant word game; it is hard, cold fact. Tommy's determination to "make it" doubtless affects his adrenal output, which in turn gives him an advantage that allows him to exceed his "limit."

REFERENCES

1. Alfred Korzybski. Science and Sanity, International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1933, et seq.

2. J. Samuel Bois. The Art of Awareness, Wm. C. Brown, Dubuque, Iowa, 1966.

JACK FOSTER*

* Jack Foster retired from Cal State Northridge's KCSN as chief engineer in 1989 after 37 years in the world of radio. He volunteered as desktop publisher for the Tucson Humanists and the local Sierra Club, and founded Gadfly, a print periodical offering news and essays. Since learning of general semantics more than 50 years ago, he attended seminars with Samuel Bois and taught GS at Chouinard Institute of Art. Respond or subscribe to Gadfly at [e-mail].