Idea Sea

The two symbols “=”, equal sign, and “=\=”, unequal sign, from mathematics, actually may represent broader senses than math, and can be used to understand broader problems. Here I use them to represent two fundamental subjective world views/perspectives, which have been used, consciously and unconsciously, by the human being to explore and understand the physical world. The equal sign represents the perspectives related to conservation or balance, while the unequal sign represent singularity or irreversibility.

On one hand, we always question and answer how things and matters are balanced, conserved, or encapsulated. On the other hand, we always seek to know how things and matters derivate and expand in time and space. The three major laws of Newtonian Mechanics and the First Law of Thermodynamics, all use a conservation perspective to explain the physical world. Meanwhile, from a completely different angle, the evolution-based theories from Darwin’s to the second law of thermodynamics have implemented the perspective of singularity and irreversibility in seeking the truth of happening.

Your eyesight determines the world in your eyes. The fact that the world is as what is known by us may not just be because they are truly like that, but because we have consciously or unconsciously applied such perspectives as conservation and evolution. They have not only assisted us to understand the physical world and life better, but may also affect the results of understanding in our brain. Or say, the way to recognize has influenced how the physical world is recognized.

Recognition may be driven by two human instincts — questioning and the desire to know the answer. It is our instinct that we cannot tolerate we don’t know. Everyone has the experience of desiring to know something. We may be obsessed by confusion, and then struggle to know the truth that underlies what confuses us. Once we have an answer that works for that while, we temporarily feel comfortable, happy, and our mind enters a certain kind of balanced and stable status. When a passenger car runs on a flat road that the driver is familiar about, the passengers will feel comfortable because driving is easily handled. When the car runs on a zigzag strange road, everyone on the car will feel uncomfortable because of the anxiety about the uncertainty ahead.

The efforts to find the answer to the questions and to solve the confusion are human instinct that pursues balance or conservation, or a process to get comfortably self-encapsulated. Answering a question is actually to search a rational boundary that makes the question answerable. Once we believe in an answer, in fact we have entered a self-closed recognized system. Inside the boundary, everything can be explained by something else in the same system. In that case, we won’t feel confused, and will feel happy and comfortable.

Although, human always apply the perspectives related to balance or conservation to solve our confusions, the action forms may be very different. For example, science seeks for rules or laws to explain the routines by which the world operates. Both the perspectives of conservation and evolution are efforts to seek rules or laws. However, religion seeks a “person” or a “conceptual person”. All the occurrences or existences in the world are managed and arranged by such persons, god, Buddha, etc. We don’t have to try and seek more, and we just need to be simply happy because everything can be explained by such a super “person”. Both scientific laws and God’s arrangements are actually applications of the conservational perspective. In particular, don’t forget, this results from our irreversible and endless effort to solve the confusions.

Continuously having questions and confusions, and then seeking for answers, is another type of human instinct. Such behaviors themselves are also singular and irreversible. Just because of this kind of human instinct, and related activities, our recognition on the external world is irreversibly expanding, and the human society evolves and advances irreversibly. At the same time, the pathway of the evolution of human being’s capability of recognition has also affected the pathway of the evolution of human beings ourselves.

Confusion-solving, or say, the search to expand the time and space we recognize, is an instinct of human-being, and an instinct to get happiness and satisfaction in surpassing what had been unknown, unanswerable, and made us unhappy. Applying the conservational perspective to close the system’s time and space of recognition is also human instinct, and an instinct to search the answer to the confusion and puzzle in order for happiness and ease.

The uses of the conservational and evolutionary world views, symbolized by the equal sign and unequal sign, are for the same purpose: pursuing satisfaction in the process of finding answers to our puzzle and confusions, and pursuing the ease from status in which the puzzles are explained. The two complementary philosophical world views of balance and singularity, not only help expand our recognition on the objective and physical world, but also help us recognize our subjective and spiritual world, and establish healthy life attitudes.