Views from the Abyss #57: On Chickens and Eggs

There is an old joke, that goes a little too much like this:

A programmer is asked by his wife to go to the local store. "Buy a frozen chicken, and if they have eggs, get six," she instructs him. The man duly complies, and returns twenty minutes later with six frozen chickens. "Why did you buy six frozen chickens?" asked his wife. "They had eggs."

Why, that foolish programmer husband! If only he could relate to real people and the way that real people speak; if only he could get his head out of the mountains of code that regularly put food on the table for them both, then such mistakes would not happen so readily. I'm sure this was exactly what you were all thinking.

But why? Is the true fault not with his wife for not having communicated her intent less unclearly? There are too many negatives in that question for a simple yes or no answer to make any sense, but rest assured, she is the one at fault.

Perhaps if she had learned to code at a young age, such problems would not arise. Coding is not just for coders, people—start 'em young!

However, it leads us naturally to another quandary of a chicken and egg variety. In terms of human evolution, was our ability to communicate complex ideas a natural byproduct of our emerging advanced cognitive functions, or did our advanced cognitive functions develop in order to facilitative more meaningful communication of what would otherwise be entirely chemically based emotional reactions to stimuli that would mean no more to anybody else than listening to a lion fart?

It is the latter. Google it if you don't believe me, and if you find any meaningful results supporting either conclusion, do let me know in the comments.

The ability to conceptualise is what allows us to articulate feelings in a way that can be understood by others, and if that feeling happened to be "danger evident!!!!", being able to abstract the nature of the danger into something more meaningful such as "superior size sand coloured quadruped, sharp in tooth and claw, two instances thereof" would be next to worthless by itself, but communication to the tribe of this abstract could well be the difference between winning at evolution and being eaten alive by one of two instances of a superior size quadruped.

It also means our thoughts are largely useless in and of themselves.

A wall one often runs into is that the act of thinking is necessarily an abstraction of what one really understands, a representation stripped of nuance, little more than an analogy. Invariably, if you stretch the metaphor too far, you end up chasing your own tail, and to what end?

Some things are better understood in their native format, and do not need to be conceptualised.

Q. By 'native format', are you referring to the 'fantasy bubble' comfort zone you described previously.

A. Yes.

Q. So you're saying that we should just stop thinking about politics and instead focus on things that are real?

A. That would certainly be a most beneficial byproduct; and another chicken and egg scenario to ponder!