Led Down the Garden Path by Our Analogies

Paraphrasing an Einstein quote,, I said to a fellow worker the other day that “You can get from A to B with Logic but you can go anywhere with Imagination”. Her reaction was interesting.  I could see she recognized the quote and gave it passing kudos. However, I also recognized a halting almost begrudging acceptance of this idea. It made me think that she may have been exposed to it in school as the counter argument to a more forcefully endorsed reality.

In school we’re always being taught to compare and contrast differences as though this binary premise was the default. This is probably reflecting the modern computer dominated culture we`ve been raised in. Could it be that the binary nature of today`s computers, it`s bits and bytes as represented by 1`s and 0`s, dominates all our lives by leaking into our very ways of thinking about the world. It wouldn’t surprise me. There must be some reason the modern world is becoming so polarized. Politically, for example, there seems to be little middle ground any more.  

The analogies we use to explain things colour our world. It's as if the tail is wagging the dog.

One of the best analogies I`ve heard to explain speciation on an evolutionary scale involved the idea of a field filled with valleys and peaks whereby the peaks represent new species emerging between the valleys. This is a great way to break with the linear bipolar two-dimensional way that most of us think about nature. The analogies we use certainly limit our understanding of our surroundings. Even Plato`s idea of `knowledge as represented by a dark cave with a light source, casting shadows on the wall, has an inherent binary nature to it. We either see the knowledge or we don`t. We`re either in the light or we`re in the dark.

Binary and linear ways of thinking is most often promoted in our classrooms. It is the easiest way to get from A to B. Thinking outside the box is an anomaly and it's admired by it exceptionalism. The default linear and binary way of thinking no doubt has caused us to diminish our fellow creatures on the planet. Either other animals are sentient like us or not. We very narrowly define intelligence, for example, putting ourselves on a pinnacle and then dismissing anything below us on this scale. How else could we eat animals….

It`s time to teach non-linear, non-binary thinking as a default in our classrooms. But maybe we`ll have to wait until quantum computing becomes established.