O-bla-di O-bla-da
As we were sitting in the car and I was listening to the kicky base stamped across the bottom of a Paul McCartney tune, my mother said suddenly from the back, “What does O-bla-di O-bla-da mean?” (My mother is one of the most curious people in the world, always asking random questions and expecting random people to know the answers. “What’s a juggernaut?” “What’s a googol?” “How are stars made?” “When will you be on the Dean’s List?” “Are you going to clean your room?” But, I digress.)
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Maybe it’s about drugs.”
“Maybe it’s just a nonsense word like in Walrus,” someone else suggested, and a discussion ensued about the possible hidden meanings in the lyrics. The truth is, we really couldn’t be sure, no matter how much we thought we knew or how clear the meaning seemed to us. After all, in something as variable as music or literature, interpretations are open to anyone.
In science, however, it is expected that there are some certainties, some theories or at least some basic laws that everything in the Universe abides by.
Or at least that’s what people think.
There are certain things in the world that are held sacred. Gravity, for example. The fact that the world is round. Or even that the right and left hemispheres of the brain have different general purposes.
Last semester, however, I had one class in which we were free to question any of this. I could have stood up and argued that the earth was flat and the professor would have said, “All right, let’s look at it that way then.” On the first day of class, we were thrown questions with seemingly impossible answers.
What made the first thing in the Universe?
How do you know there is such a thing as the Past?
How do you know that the world really exists outside of your experience?
We were free to answer them anyway we wanted, from the religious point of view, from a scientific stance, dipping into our philosophical beliefs. The only catch was that for every answer given, anyone was free to rebutt, to question or to posit an alternative explanation. I left that class feeling frustrated, my head in a whirl. Suddenly nothing seemed certain anymore and I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do with this information.
I walked around in a daze the whole week trying to figure out what anyone could assume as reality. The world was round, I knew, or at least, I used to know. But had I actually seen it with my own eyes? Was there anything in my immediate visual vicinity to tell me that it curved ever so slightly? If I thought I knew it was round, I didn’t have the mathematical know-how to make the calculations. And even if I did, what made me so sure that the calculations that the formulas were founded on were foolproof in the first place?
I had a similar discussion with Hanwei later on. Evolution, I told him, was a theory. What makes people so sure that it worked? Gravity was a theory too, he countered. You couldn’t see it, but it still moves things. Why then, would you accept some things as fact and question others?
Later in this class, the answers began to grow clearer. We weren’t meant to go in circles questioning ourselves and our worlds, driving ourselves into philosophical corners as I had originally thought. Instead, we were to look at things that had been proved beyond reasonable doubt. Not absolute certainty, you understand, but reasonable doubt.
The importance of this lesson, I finally understood, was this. There are two types of science in the world. Ready-made science, and science-in-the-making. Ready-made science included the things that could be proved beyond a substantial amount of doubt. That the world was round. That DNA had a helical structure. That conditioning could induce a level of indexical association in animals without symbolic thought.
Sure, these things were open to question, but if you went round your whole life questioning them, we realised, science would never get anywhere. These were things you just to assume and work on until someone came along and proved them wrong. There has to be some kind of foundation to work on. The basic principles of mathematics. Or the proclaimed universal laws.
Taking the DNA’s double-helical structure as fact has allowed for many viable advances in the field of medicine and molecular biology. The thing is, that this foundation has worked so far, whether or not it is the truth.
Science-in-the-making then, are things that are still being researched. We believe for example, that some kinds of schizophrenia are produced by recessive alleles and the lack of dopamine in some parts of the brain, but excess dopamine in others. Is this an absolute certainty? No. Has it been proved in some groups of people? Yes. The only way to know whether this is a certainty is to continue to research it, and continue to question it. Every iota of information has to be continuously probed until some answers can be yielded.
The trick, then, is to know the difference between the two sciences. To know which ones to question and which ones to assume.
Standpatism isn’t the best outlook to have, I suppose. Rather it’s having the gumption to question things that can be looked into and can be changed rather than re-opening black boxes that have worked thus far.
Still, nothing in the physical world is absolutely certain. Science accepts this.
We know that something is only as certain as it can be proved, in the field of scientific endeavour anyway. So what happens if one day a foundation is proven wrong?
Well, you just get up and start again.
============
A science that tries to study how people think? Barking mad, what! As if we can ever know people’s ideas for sure or how the human mind works. How the hell are we supposed to read minds?
The lecturer smiled wryly. “Well,” he said, pointing at a random student in the front row. “Tell me something. What is she thinking right now? You tell me.”
“What are you thinking?” The guy sitting next to her asked.
“I’m thinking about this class,” she replied, or something along those lines.
“She’s thinking about this class.”
“And how,” the lecturer demanded, “could you possibly know that?”
Replied said guy, “Because she told me, sir.”
“Because she told you. Exactly. You don’t have to read minds. You’re not supposed to read minds. If everyone could do that, the world would be a perfect place.
“But you can try to figure it out. And if she continues to tell you, in all honesty, you can know. Not everyone will be honest with you. Not every thought will bring an intuitive answer. And not everyone will divulge their thoughts. But it cannot be denied that this is one way that has worked before. This is one step we can take towards the answer. Because she told you.”
=============
And it’s not all about what people tell you either. There are MRI scans, tests that bring out involuntary reflexes. Glucose levels. Chemical reactions.
Becky told me that psychology isn’t absolute on many counts, but that we’re taking baby steps in the right direction with every study and I agree. Because even if you don’t know what it is, you at least know now what it isn’t.
Newton’s laws dictated the ways of the world for eons, until quantum physics came along. Who’s to say that one day quantum physics won’t be found faulty on some level? And it’s not that Newtonian physics has been discarded for the dogs. Rather, we have two kinds of physics now and we understand the way the world works in just one more way, one step closer to gaining a complete picture.
I don’t think it’s fair to believe that science should have all the answers.
I don’t think it’s fair to assume that science thinks it knows everything either. Not everything that is said by other scientists is taken as fact. It’s a long, deep road to discovery and the magic of treading it is that should we discover that we’re wrong some day, we’ll just keep on trucking on in a different direction.
Many people tell me everyday that I’m studying what people call a “pseudo-science” and that all it will ever be good for is fleecing people of their money when they cry to me over their problems.
Worse, there are people in the world who call themselves psychologists or qualified counsellors who create a false image of what psychology is supposed to be or what good psychology is.
Sure. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs.
Frankly, I don’t give a flying fuck anymore. In a completely personal opinion, I don’t feel like we’re living some opiate dream.
Theories and dogmas aren’t always plucked from thin air despite the fact that false psychologists will make it appear this way.
There are some things that can be proved and some things that can’t. There are some things that are theory-based and some things that are not. Some things work and some things need tweaking. And theory is not always right in practise, that’s why it’s theory.
Just like any other field of study, science doesn’t accept absolutes except under the most rigorous circumstances. That’s precisely what working on the cutting edge is about. The closer you get to any given edge, the more cliffs and valleys will be discovered. But bridges can be built and at least there is room for mistakes and a chance to refute previous claims.
Carl Sagan once said that every science has an enemy and that psychology’s biggest enemy was the advent of pseudo-science and its false practitioners. Thank you, Mr. Sagan. Not everyone is in this for the money and glory.
And it gives me some comfort to know that at least we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, of people before us who have been arrested, taken hemlock and been exiled for the sake of discovery. People who haven’t been afraid to get things wrong.
There has to be some acceptance of the fact that humans are not perfect and that they cannot know everything.
There also has to be some admiration of the fact that despite being born into ignorance, they’re willing to go through hell and highwater to find out.
Some people will be wrong, some people will be right, and psychology will never be absolutely certain. But in this world, the spirit of not giving up is the best thing that we can hope for.
Give psychology a chance. That’s the least it deserves.
And no amount of O-bla-di-bla-da will ever change that.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Maybe it’s about drugs.”
“Maybe it’s just a nonsense word like in Walrus,” someone else suggested, and a discussion ensued about the possible hidden meanings in the lyrics. The truth is, we really couldn’t be sure, no matter how much we thought we knew or how clear the meaning seemed to us. After all, in something as variable as music or literature, interpretations are open to anyone.
In science, however, it is expected that there are some certainties, some theories or at least some basic laws that everything in the Universe abides by.
Or at least that’s what people think.
There are certain things in the world that are held sacred. Gravity, for example. The fact that the world is round. Or even that the right and left hemispheres of the brain have different general purposes.
Last semester, however, I had one class in which we were free to question any of this. I could have stood up and argued that the earth was flat and the professor would have said, “All right, let’s look at it that way then.” On the first day of class, we were thrown questions with seemingly impossible answers.
What made the first thing in the Universe?
How do you know there is such a thing as the Past?
How do you know that the world really exists outside of your experience?
We were free to answer them anyway we wanted, from the religious point of view, from a scientific stance, dipping into our philosophical beliefs. The only catch was that for every answer given, anyone was free to rebutt, to question or to posit an alternative explanation. I left that class feeling frustrated, my head in a whirl. Suddenly nothing seemed certain anymore and I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do with this information.
I walked around in a daze the whole week trying to figure out what anyone could assume as reality. The world was round, I knew, or at least, I used to know. But had I actually seen it with my own eyes? Was there anything in my immediate visual vicinity to tell me that it curved ever so slightly? If I thought I knew it was round, I didn’t have the mathematical know-how to make the calculations. And even if I did, what made me so sure that the calculations that the formulas were founded on were foolproof in the first place?
I had a similar discussion with Hanwei later on. Evolution, I told him, was a theory. What makes people so sure that it worked? Gravity was a theory too, he countered. You couldn’t see it, but it still moves things. Why then, would you accept some things as fact and question others?
Later in this class, the answers began to grow clearer. We weren’t meant to go in circles questioning ourselves and our worlds, driving ourselves into philosophical corners as I had originally thought. Instead, we were to look at things that had been proved beyond reasonable doubt. Not absolute certainty, you understand, but reasonable doubt.
The importance of this lesson, I finally understood, was this. There are two types of science in the world. Ready-made science, and science-in-the-making. Ready-made science included the things that could be proved beyond a substantial amount of doubt. That the world was round. That DNA had a helical structure. That conditioning could induce a level of indexical association in animals without symbolic thought.
Sure, these things were open to question, but if you went round your whole life questioning them, we realised, science would never get anywhere. These were things you just to assume and work on until someone came along and proved them wrong. There has to be some kind of foundation to work on. The basic principles of mathematics. Or the proclaimed universal laws.
Taking the DNA’s double-helical structure as fact has allowed for many viable advances in the field of medicine and molecular biology. The thing is, that this foundation has worked so far, whether or not it is the truth.
Science-in-the-making then, are things that are still being researched. We believe for example, that some kinds of schizophrenia are produced by recessive alleles and the lack of dopamine in some parts of the brain, but excess dopamine in others. Is this an absolute certainty? No. Has it been proved in some groups of people? Yes. The only way to know whether this is a certainty is to continue to research it, and continue to question it. Every iota of information has to be continuously probed until some answers can be yielded.
The trick, then, is to know the difference between the two sciences. To know which ones to question and which ones to assume.
Standpatism isn’t the best outlook to have, I suppose. Rather it’s having the gumption to question things that can be looked into and can be changed rather than re-opening black boxes that have worked thus far.
Still, nothing in the physical world is absolutely certain. Science accepts this.
We know that something is only as certain as it can be proved, in the field of scientific endeavour anyway. So what happens if one day a foundation is proven wrong?
Well, you just get up and start again.
============
A science that tries to study how people think? Barking mad, what! As if we can ever know people’s ideas for sure or how the human mind works. How the hell are we supposed to read minds?
The lecturer smiled wryly. “Well,” he said, pointing at a random student in the front row. “Tell me something. What is she thinking right now? You tell me.”
“What are you thinking?” The guy sitting next to her asked.
“I’m thinking about this class,” she replied, or something along those lines.
“She’s thinking about this class.”
“And how,” the lecturer demanded, “could you possibly know that?”
Replied said guy, “Because she told me, sir.”
“Because she told you. Exactly. You don’t have to read minds. You’re not supposed to read minds. If everyone could do that, the world would be a perfect place.
“But you can try to figure it out. And if she continues to tell you, in all honesty, you can know. Not everyone will be honest with you. Not every thought will bring an intuitive answer. And not everyone will divulge their thoughts. But it cannot be denied that this is one way that has worked before. This is one step we can take towards the answer. Because she told you.”
=============
And it’s not all about what people tell you either. There are MRI scans, tests that bring out involuntary reflexes. Glucose levels. Chemical reactions.
Becky told me that psychology isn’t absolute on many counts, but that we’re taking baby steps in the right direction with every study and I agree. Because even if you don’t know what it is, you at least know now what it isn’t.
Newton’s laws dictated the ways of the world for eons, until quantum physics came along. Who’s to say that one day quantum physics won’t be found faulty on some level? And it’s not that Newtonian physics has been discarded for the dogs. Rather, we have two kinds of physics now and we understand the way the world works in just one more way, one step closer to gaining a complete picture.
I don’t think it’s fair to believe that science should have all the answers.
I don’t think it’s fair to assume that science thinks it knows everything either. Not everything that is said by other scientists is taken as fact. It’s a long, deep road to discovery and the magic of treading it is that should we discover that we’re wrong some day, we’ll just keep on trucking on in a different direction.
Many people tell me everyday that I’m studying what people call a “pseudo-science” and that all it will ever be good for is fleecing people of their money when they cry to me over their problems.
Worse, there are people in the world who call themselves psychologists or qualified counsellors who create a false image of what psychology is supposed to be or what good psychology is.
Sure. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs.
Frankly, I don’t give a flying fuck anymore. In a completely personal opinion, I don’t feel like we’re living some opiate dream.
Theories and dogmas aren’t always plucked from thin air despite the fact that false psychologists will make it appear this way.
There are some things that can be proved and some things that can’t. There are some things that are theory-based and some things that are not. Some things work and some things need tweaking. And theory is not always right in practise, that’s why it’s theory.
Just like any other field of study, science doesn’t accept absolutes except under the most rigorous circumstances. That’s precisely what working on the cutting edge is about. The closer you get to any given edge, the more cliffs and valleys will be discovered. But bridges can be built and at least there is room for mistakes and a chance to refute previous claims.
Carl Sagan once said that every science has an enemy and that psychology’s biggest enemy was the advent of pseudo-science and its false practitioners. Thank you, Mr. Sagan. Not everyone is in this for the money and glory.
And it gives me some comfort to know that at least we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, of people before us who have been arrested, taken hemlock and been exiled for the sake of discovery. People who haven’t been afraid to get things wrong.
There has to be some acceptance of the fact that humans are not perfect and that they cannot know everything.
There also has to be some admiration of the fact that despite being born into ignorance, they’re willing to go through hell and highwater to find out.
Some people will be wrong, some people will be right, and psychology will never be absolutely certain. But in this world, the spirit of not giving up is the best thing that we can hope for.
Give psychology a chance. That’s the least it deserves.
And no amount of O-bla-di-bla-da will ever change that.
She said, she said at 1:11 pm
6 Comments:
i don't know if i have told you this before but i actually wanted to major in Psychology during my year one. But i decided that i love 'back stabbing' ppl theories more and so i majored in PS. haha..
anyway, i agree with you that Science does not necessary have answers to all. And psychology tells us what it is not likely to be and not just providing blind answers. Actually come to think of it, there are no definite answers in this world.
okay dokie. I;m posting rubbish. haha.. byebye
*drools over possible holy grail of language probably on girl's desk this very moment*
Actually there are four types of physics consisting simultaneously...To keep the earth moving, to keep us on the earth, to keep us together and to keep mother nature pretty. Or that's how I think The Science Guy put it.
*it's really funny that there is a disabled button that reads the word identification thing out on this...how in the world are blind people supposed to know where to click to get it to start reading it out?*
Girl -- Exodus
Hahahaha! Dude... you're so not the back-stabbing kind of person. Okay admittedly we've gossiped about a certain someone's restraining order once or twice, but you know what I mean! Anyway how's life? You sound sleepy!
Girl -- Bex
Oh! I miss the science guy! And I didn't realise that's what the button was for! Ahahaha I thought it was for people who couldn't reach the keyboard or something, although, I realise that would pose the same problem! And anyway, how's it supposed to read out words like "nymynuto" and "obxmyo"?! Ahahahaha!
The world is what we see it is. Our hearts, and our eyes. There is no one universe. It's a crazy, crazy mosiac out there. If we see it as real, then it is real, to us. Sociology and psychology rock! =)
I like this post..
I really do.
It left my gawking.
Girl -- Pixie
Hi pixie... I'm not sure who you are, I mean you could be any one of a few people, enlighten me! But thanks very much :D
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