Part III: Essay based on:
The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How To Tell Them Better. Will Storr. Abrams Press. NY. 2020.
Soft Cover. Glued. 291 pages. 0.75 lbs. With appendix titled “The Sacred Flaw Approach.” Notes and Sources. Index.
Found and purchased at Pearl’s Books
Humans are blind 10 percent of our waking lives and we don’t even know it. That’s one of the astonishing facts we learn in The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How To Tell Them Better. This fact and others about our limited senses call into question our very abilities to perceive reality as it is. It also leads to one of the piercing questions of science: how do we know what we know?
In The Shadow Drawings: How Science Taught Leonardo How To Paint, by Francesca Fiorani, we see that Leonardo da Vinci used the science of optics to learn about how we know what we know. Optics was the leading edge of science in the late 1400’s, equivalent to today’s science of consciousness. Da Vinci used the science of optics to guide his painting explorations. He fully intended to use this science to teach other artists how to paint better, more realistically.
Imagine living in an art world where the science of geometric perspective has been so systematized that it is now taught routinely in art studios throughout Italy. You are an expert artist who can easily portray that perspective. But now you are in competition with your fellow artists to find a way to render your subjects even more accurately and realistically. How do you do so?
Da Vinci’s insight was to add an atmospheric perspective to the geometric perspective. He sought out highly valuable but rarely accessible books in late 1400’s to learn all he could about optics. And he practiced that science in his famous artworks, such as The Last Supper. His strongest admonition to aspiring artists was to use no lines; to instead search out the blending of color and shape in those supposed boundaries between two objects.
The story of da Vinci illuminates our control over how we perceive with our eyes and what we can expect to see should we put our mind to it.
In The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, by Andrea Wulf, we see that one way we know what we know is through scientific instruments. Alexander von Humboldt was such a believer in the value of instruments that he took forty-two of them with him on his journeys through South America.
Imagine going on a river trip through the Amazonian jungle more than two hundred years ago. You have a map that may or may not be accurate; you plan to traverse three interconnected rivers; you will hunt and forage for the food and water for your sustenance. And first you have to travel a thousand miles on horseback before you even put into the water. You will rely on local guides whom you’ve never met before to bring you through and to the end of your journey.
The whole point of von Humboldt’s trip was for the sake of science; therefore, he took scientific instruments of the highest quality. Some were made of glass, some were sensitive to high humidity (remember, he was in a jungle on a river), some could not be replaced or fixed if lost or broken. All gave him information vital to his scientific analyses and conclusions.
The story of von Humboldt’s journey is a powerful characterization of how scientific instruments are of utmost importance to how we know what we know.
David Deutsch, in his The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, uses physics as a basis for explaining how we know what we know and thereby claiming the supremacy of ideas. More broadly, he relies on science itself, especially science as a “quest for good explanations.”
Imagine traveling to the surface of the sun, then digging deeper and reaching for the sun’s core itself. Truth is, you can only imagine it, for you would never live should you actually try it. And thus far, you don’t have an instrument that could reach the sun’s core either. So von Humboldt’s reliance on scientific instruments falls short should you wish to know directly about the sun’s interior. So too da Vinci’s reliance on eyesight; you could go blind using your bare eyes staring at the sun too long.
But ideas—they can reach the sun’s surface and its core. Ideas can access the farthest reaches of the universe’s edge, and even traverse the multiverse. Although, ideas alone can also be wrong. Deutsch emphasizes the importance of science—of testing one’s ideas—assuming all ideas are in fact fallible. An idea is strong only so long as it is the best explanation given at the moment.
The story that Deutsch relates in The Beginning of Infinity is one that carries us further than da Vinci or von Humboldt could go in knowing what we know: beyond our own eyes or the instruments our bodies use, to the realm of ideas as held in our brains.
The science of quantum physics is quite taken with the concept of perception and exploring the question of how we know what we know. Both Frank Wilczek—in Fundamentals, and Carlo Rovelli—in Helgoland, explore perception at depth and philosophically. Dean Carroll—in Something Deeply Hidden, argues against using perception to help explain experimental outcomes.
Imagine performing a scientific experiment that gives a result that defies the good explanation Deutsch so values. Conduct that experiment over and over again, with various measuring devices, in locations all across the globe, over decades and by different people in diverse cultures: all getting the same confounding results. Usually referred to as the double-slit experiment, it has been the basis for applied physics, theoretical physics, quack physics, and much philosophical wrangling.
This and other quantum physics experiments that give unexpected results not easily explained are the basis for one basic disputation in physics: how do we know what we know? Physicists argue over the role of what we experience with our senses, what we measure with our instruments, and what ideas we can use to give a good explanation for it all.
The story of quantum physics—how it started and the experiments that bring it to where it is today—seems to reveal the precarious state any human puts themselves into once they claim to be clear on how they know what they know.
Which leads us back to The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr, and to the eye itself, where we started with da Vinci. Storr gives us the modern take on optics, showing us the physical properties of vision and how truly limited human eyesight actually is in perceiving reality.
I imagine my mind being able to see as my eyes actually see, without the brain’s interference. I imagine being able to look at a scene that has a lemon-sized black hole in the center, a small band in focus around that black hole with the rest of my periphery vision blurred, the whole scene upside down, and none of it in 3-D. Fact is, I can only imagine it, because my brain insists on forcing my mind to see only the story it creates for me: my brain’s version of how the scene ought to look: no black hole, focused, right-side up, and in 3-D.
Imagine—now that you know just how limited human senses are—using those very senses and the instruments that enhance those senses in order to ascertain the reality of the world ‘out there.’ How sure will you be that the perception you have or the explanation you offer is in fact accurate and true?
Storr’s idea, his explanation, is that we make up stories about our perceptions. Each person’s created story then conflicts with another person’s story, and the two mix and match and parry and joust. Somewhere along the way, the stories resolve, in both fiction and non-fiction.
The story of storytelling is a human story. We share stories, we argue about them, we gossip over them, we elaborate on them, we reject or accept them. In turn, the stories we create are then corroborated in art, religion, and science. They are confirmed by agreement of many people over the course of time across a wide terrain and through many cultures.
We also still debate those stories. We probably will for some time to come.
Stay tuned for the next installment of the human story of learning how we know what we know.
Other posts that mention this essay: The Consciousness Instinct