As a kid I remember being excited about The Secret when my mother showed it to me: You can visualize what you want over and over and it comes true! At school I was surprised by the vehement disapproval the book got from my more intellectual friend: “Imagining something and it comes true is a stupid notion. It takes work and action and sometimes even that isn’t enough.” What an intelligent boy.
Mining the unknown
Human accomplishments like smartphones, vaccines, the internet and AI are impressive, and yet we have only lightly scratched the surface of all possible human knowledge. This scratching of the surface of the unknown is done by scientists who follow a well-established process that ultimately contributes to the wonders of technology listed above.
But… As someone with a human lifespan, I don’t want to limit myself to scratching the surface of the unknown for my personal use. I’d rather gamble on benefitting from spoonfuls of the obscure that might not be understood for decades or centuries to come. In the book Life 3.0 author Max Tagmark compares humans to an anthill: The message is that an artificial intelligence’s goals might be so incomprehensible to us that it’s like expecting the anthill to understand a highway passing nearby. If I was an ant, I’d rather benefit from the spilled sugar in the kitchen than wait until scientist aunts have released a peer reviewed study on the nature of kitchens and the fractal nature of sugar spillages.
Dare to assume
The way to mine the unknown is by making unscientific assumptions with the help of your intuition and testing them in your own life, using your gut as the judge. Below are a few of my own assumptions for your entertainment. Keep in mind that reality is so vast and malleable that every individual can come up with a distinct set of unscientific assumptions and some of them will work for each person (this being an unscientific assumption of mine).
Unscientific assumption: The core emotion of two people meeting is always equivalent both ways
This one I learned from a former colleague from China: When I first interact with someone I distinguish between the core emotion and the layered onion of emotions around it. This way I have a notion of how much and in what way to interact with this person based on an unmistakable signal from deep within my body: If I sense a core like, I will feel comfortable extending a conversation longer than usual “knowing” (based on this assumption) that the tolerance is there, and I will also be more open to sharing personal stories, making and taking introductions within our networks, etc.
If I feel a core dislike, this is particularly useful when the other person is being friendly. Once I was convinced to join a real estate project in a developing country by a lady that I knew from a foreign language class, who was extremely nice to me. Her kindness went hand in hand with my (limited) money and, crucially, underneath the layers of charm and interesting conversations there was an well-hidden, but palpable dislike within me that I unconsciously ignored. Some introspection here would’ve saved me a large sum of money that I miss even today.
If you see a person you find physically attractive that is not a core emotion, so it is not safe to assume that they find you physically attractive as well. Pay attention next time you meet someone with beautiful features that catch your eye: Your core emotion regarding that person might be dislike and discomfort, even if you would be willing to sleep with them without a second thought.
Unscientific assumption: We can influence our physical appearance over the years
This one is a common one: Our bodies exchange virtually all their cells within seven years, couples start looking more and more like each other over the decades, many of our physical characteristics are defined by our emotional state and, of course, our habits. Some people think they can change their jawline without surgical intervention, while others feel more limited to their body mass index in terms of what they can modify.
Either way, a quick google search will provide plenty on this generic topic. The reason I bring it up is to underline the “unscientific” element of unscientific assumptions. While there surely is even published literature on this, it doesn’t matter. I can make my assumption basking in full ignorance without the need to cite or research anything. Unscientific assumptions are deeply personal and do not require any kind of external justification, even if such justification is easily available.
Unscientific assumption: Intelligence doesn’t exist
Intelligence is a nonsensical term that is given a vast amount of unjustified attention to. It’s similar to using the term Magic to describe the combination of advances in mushroom foraging, robotics, democracy and “other”, where the “other” category is not well understood and likely makes up the largest part of this Magic. Nevertheless, Magic, as a convention, is measured in terms of the number and characteristics of mushrooms catalogued, summarized as mushroom points. We are eager to measure the Magic of the world in terms of mushroom points, because it’s a quantifiable statistic that has been shown to be correlated to desirable outcomes in human society by numerous studies conducted by people who consider themselves mushroom connoisseurs.
Since I see intelligence in our common use just as arbitrarily defined as Magic, I place very little weight on it in my day to day. If we’re to be in business with two competitor companies and I got secret access to the IQ scores of the two companies’ CEOs, I would by no means see the high IQ CEO’s company as more of a commercial threat than the low IQ one. I’d rather judge their past results, sales performance and employee satisfaction.
But let’s say we make some progress and are able to come up with a well-defined global metric for intelligence, which is representative somehow of our “thinking capacity” in broad terms. Then I see the issue with a lot of the problems in our life being circular in nature:
Am I getting too little sleep because I am stressed, or am I stressed due to lack of sleep?
Should I buy a home or rent a home in the current market?
Should I get masters degree, positioning myself for a better job, or enter the workforce earlier, potentially advancing my career earlier?
Now we feed a clone of mine with a boosted brain that has a thousandfold more intelligence than me the question “What came first: The chicken or the egg?” My clone will have no chance to answer this question more accurately than me, and there will be no one “intelligent” (or magical?) enough to judge who’s right anyway.
Unscientific assumption: We can outsource tough problems to our alternate selves
This one I just came up with (although it’s by no means original and will make our physicist friends laugh). I was in the sauna thinking about some unscientific assumptions of mine for this post and, in order not to forget the three assumptions listed above without pen and paper, I gave them each a key word that made sense to me (“mirror”, “particle” and “intelligence”). Putting those three words together I get reminded of entangled particles (“mirror particles”) the potential of alternate dimensions and the vast mystery of our mind (intelligence). So maybe, I can take a problem and feed it to my mind by letting it go, forgetting it for a while, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I will get the solution: “The chicken came first!”
It’s deeply unscientific, so let’s roll with it.
Other people’s limitations
“Succeeding requires hard work”
“The early bird catches the worm”
Anytime someone tells you “how things are” with any certainty they are showing you their own limitations that they self-impose to give some shape to and make sense of this vast, malleable world. Often these takes on the world are valuable, but do remember: Limitations are contagious, especially when they sound logical.