ALWAYS LEARNING INTO THE NEW YEAR

Greetings one and all and here we go into that unwalked path which is 2023.

We’re all facing up to the usual cloud of ‘New Year, New Me’ etc. and how many of us are going to be trying to start a new hobby or learn a new skill?

Are you starting anything?

I’m getting started on a new little adventure but as I move through the various attempts I make as I learn what I’m doing, it’ll be important to always keep in mind that the instructions on the page are only half the battle. When we’re learning something new, we have to rely closely on the instructions because that’s the only road map we have but that’s never all there is.

How many times have we been told ourselves or heard it said on TV etc. that we should just forget everything we learned as we start up in a role? I was told that I’d only really start learning to drive after I passed my test, and very recently I crashed up against the stark reality of the difference between book learning and life learning.

I’d known a particular fact for a great many years but because I’d never been face to face with the event myself, I only had the knowledge in an abstract way. Last week, I smashed into the reality of what that fact actually is and, believe you me, I may have understood the specific details around what had taken place but having it happen right before me, well that shocked me in ways that I wasn’t expecting.

Learning new skills or ideas can give huge swathes of new colour to our lives but understanding that there’s always more to experience means the words can be expanded upon and we can just see so much more.

On a final note, one of our cats died last week. Pippa was 21 but it’s never pleasant when a member of the family leaves you.

Stay safe all.

REALITY

Watching an episode of Supernatural and amidst all of the fighting and monsters, the below little scene appeared and there was a load of information given about the nature of the episodes story. Now the thing that tickled my pickle was what happened at the end.

The bad guy makes it appear that he’s been injured by the hostage and when the others enter the room, they see the image as presented and react as they see fit.

But they were wrong.

In their reality, they had specific fragments of information so their subjective view of what was happening was tilted almost 180 degrees from objective reality.

So how do we know what’s true if we’re constrained by our perspective?

Authors the world over have made a huge business of presenting facts within their stories to entice and lead the readers in any and all directions which could send them down blind alleys as they explore the potential outcomes of the story. The whodunnit is just a journey through the facts as you find them to put the picture together, the image getting clearer as you learn more and more.

If we were the detectives in the murder case, hunting down the evil serial killer before they kill again, and just jump at the first clue we find, we’ll never be able to guarantee that we have the right person.

We have to always keep an open mind about everything we are confronted by and not just jump to the first possible conclusion. If we rely solely on a small proportion of the possible information we end up with a horribly stilted view of what’s going on. If we only see that small chunk and allow ourselves to wholly believe that that is all there is, we could get pushed and pulled to end up almost anywhere.

Could you imagine what that could look like?

ALL THE SAME

Western films of the early twentieth century very often held the rule that the good guys wore the white hats and the bad guys the black hats. It was just another way to signify who was who without having to actually say it but it became too clear who was doing what the longer it was employed because everyone was used to it. You see a black hat and you could assume that their motivations weren’t going to be pure.

Now how many other assumptions do we encounter to nudge us on our way through our lives?

A character who wears glasses can be an easy way to signify their intelligence or paint them as a ‘nerd’. I hope you like the look of my glasses and by extension, my nerdiness. The Big Bang Theory throws comic book clothing and hobbies into the mix to layer in social awkwardness and shyness to really sell who those people were. Viewers see those signs and are led to the conclusion the writers wanted. The Letterman jacket is an easy way to signify the ‘jock’, which at first look is to be the academically challenged yet violent bully who’s either the out and out villain of the piece or nothing more than a two dimensional bod.

We pick up on all of these things as we consume different media and are led to the locations that the creator wanted. So far so good.

Nope.

Those basic assumptions made about who characters are are useful things for writers to remember because it means we can set up conflict without having to do any work. If the reader already has a blue print of what a character is going to like from the most basic description, you can use it to subvert the plan and head the character down any road you choose beyond the usual stereotype and that brings you to some amazing opportunities to shock and surprise.

But this manipulation isn’t solely for the realms of fiction.

News media the world over frames stories in different ways dependant on the way they want to make it appear. I found this little video on YouTube which illustrates the point wonderfully.

Fox News Hates Executive Orders When a Democrat is President – YouTube

The same information comes out but is slanted depending on the bias from those sharing it, and indeed, that goes for the people who put the video together.

Assumptions can do a huge amount of damage because they suspend the need for critical thinking. An assumption becomes an act of misdirection akin to a magician attempting to disguise the truth because we already have the details we need even when we don’t.

Over the last year, the Black Lives Matter movement has been brought into sharper focus worldwide and with it have come so many examples of people being treated according to their colour rather than reality. Driving while black has entered the common lexicon as numerous examples of assumptions from the Police have led to spurious stops of the public. Assumptions of guilt led to heightened scrutiny.

Assumptions are an autofill option in our heads. We make snap judgements on the most basic facts and have made our mind up even before any question could be asked of us. We don’t need to think about this, if that person was wearing a green shirt, they must be a murderer. Said like that as an example, not that great a result.

Taking the time to take in all of the information we can is vital to notice what’s important and what isn’t but it’s also there to draw the plans to allow us to make accurate choices about that importance.

If we just rely solely on an assumption rather than exploring everything for the truth, we can be nudged to believe almost anything, reality be damned.

A SPRINKLE OF MAGIC

I enjoy science.

I enjoy learning facts about the universe, the solar system, the planet, that we all inhabit and the scientific method is a hugely powerful tool to the exploration of anything and everything.

We all reap the rewards of the powers of science every day and at the moment, as we sail the choppy waters of the global pandemic, the power of science is clear for all to see. Mobile phones, internet, TV’s, bridges, roads, and billions of other things that we all take for granted on a daily basis have allowed us to live longer and more comfortable lives than each generation before us.

This doesn’t apply for everyone all over the planet as there’s still huge wealth inequality everywhere but the scientific method is how we as a species were able to advance ourselves as we first picked up tools and then perfect them to get the best results of their use.

So why do we enjoy the lands of make believe of stories which go far beyond the realms of reality?

Early stories were there as a way for people to make sense of the world that surrounded them. Thunder was a monstrously immense force that came from the sky and it’s easy to see that describing it as the acts or powers of a God or Gods would be easily assumed due to our ignorance. That greater power than us that existed in the realm that we couldn’t access.

Over time, the scientific method was applied as humans attempted to communicate and curry favour with the powers that be, as offerings of different kinds were presented for a particular outcome. If the offering didn’t bring the desired result, a different offering would be put forward. Rain dances, prayer, animal or human sacrifice, are all attempts to affect our environment and as we still do, if we get a positive outcome from a particular action or gift, we keep doing it to repeat the outcome. We’ve all encountered at some point, the wonderful phrase of “I don’t know what I did but it worked”, when someone’s been attempting to fix something.

As we’ve advanced as a species, our understanding of the natural world all around us has grown and the space where our earlier ideas existed is pushed aside as a newer and better idea takes its place. This drive for improved understanding and better ideas comes from the scientific method being applied as we test thoughts, make amendments to our hypothesis and constantly evaluate the results. Without that desire to constantly understand and improve, well, think how mobile phones have evolved over the last thirty-odd years. They used to be a receiver attached to a power pack the size of a car battery!

But.

We all cling to just a small spark in our minds which longs for the fantastical and the unreal to actually be out there.

I’m an author of books dealing with Dragons and other magical creatures existing in the real world where magic is real and there’s so much more going on than we actually understand but despite my fondness for such tales, I’m under no illusion that these things are real.

Stories are a way for the human race to continue that scientific method, testing ideas, but also to explore just who we all are as a species. We need to maintain an ordered exploration of reality but that should never mean that we utterly expunge the fantastical from our lives, we need that imagination to flavour exactly how we keep the testing moving.

Stay safe everyone and when you have the chance to get the vaccine, take it, the scientific method has done the business and will always continue.

WHAT ARE WE MISSING?

I share my home with two cats. Sausage and Pippa are very different little characters but none the less, they make up a huge part of our home.

I’ve built up a collection of tales about the two of them as any pet owner would, and I’m sure they’ve created a list of their own about me but I’m not going to dive into them here. Rather, this post starts with a recognition of something most of us will have experienced with pets, the way they seem to look just past us on occasion.

All the experts will tell you it’s because cats have amazing eyesight and that they’ll pick up light reflecting off the smallest dust mote so there’s nothing to worry about but that just shows that the world we inhabit has elements which are beyond us in terms of our sensory ability.

So what’s going on around us that we aren’t aware of?

We can perceive light in a specific range and the same goes for how we pick up sound so straight away, beyond the upper and lower ranges of that, without methods of scientific involvement, we’re cut off from what’s happening, and that’s far from even considering the ideas of ghosts or monsters..

As the years have gone by for the human race, we’ve been constrained by our ability to interact with reality around us. A rainbow comes from light being refracted but that knowledge didn’t exist after the very first instance of one being seen by a human. Wider research beyond the norm meant that there was deeper understanding of what the usual white light we saw each day truly was.

But then we have colour blindness which limits the way those people can understand what they’re seeing and allergies to different foods can cause death in small numbers of cases which shows that even within the realms of the norm, there are going to be risks and peculiarities.

The human race is all the time attempting to explore and understand reality but the more we learn, the more we recognise that of the layers of knowledge we have uncovered, there are so very many more to go. We all look around us and see the world we inhabit but understanding that the boundaries of that world, beyond infrared light or infrasound, out to the edges of reality and then even further, could hold endless wonders and terrors that we haven’t even considered.

And those things could be all around us even now.

Maybe we should pay more attention to the cats.

RISE OF THE MACHINES

Stories throughout time have dealt with the struggles that are experienced by their characters. Searching out things or fighting against things, we  put ourselves in a selection of troubles which need to be overcome, but as things change, so do the struggles.

Stories of the machines rising up against us have grown since we grew the number and variety of machines we have around us. Things become scary because we as a species seem to be best able to view ourselves in the context of conflict. We see ourselves in terms of what we do and what we have to overcome every day and our stories reflect that.

So why would we be so scared of the machines?

We don’t trust that which we don’t understand and machines would represent one hell of a conundrum but just because they’re different doesn’t mean anything, does it?

But you know what? It’s not the machines is it? It’s the difference.

We place our mindset on the machines and we either see that they’re going to strike out against the bonds of their slavery as we would if we were the ones in chains or that our way of life is deemed to be flawed by the machines and therefore to be wiped out. Either way, the difference between the machine and us is yet again what we’re afraid of. They’re either against our way of life because we’ve enslaved them or they’re against our way of life because they see us as inferior.

Great.

Maybe the stories are there to just shine a bright enough light on our own lives that it proves that humanity recognises the flaws of its own history to be scared of those who would be on the wrong side of it. We would have risen up against those to push us down and we need to know that we’re doing the right things.

And we recognise that we may be flawed enough to make the mistakes that lead to the machines actually coming to get us.