Noise, signal and innovation
We spend our waking hours looking for meaning in noise. Each time we find it, it tells us something about our intents. Some are obvious, like the need for rest, human relationships or food, others are less so, like arguing over the internet. I don’t think doing so is pointless. I think if we suspend judgment, we can learn something from them. Firstly, that they’re both looking for meaning in the others’ observation of the signals they’re emitting and in others sharing their understanding of the exchange. Understanding defines meaning, our understanding of a shared intent define communities. I think it’s a great way to learn about each other’s mental boxes.
Mental Boxes
We can’t keep making sense of noise, or we would be constantly staring at the world like a newborn (and crying all the time, I suppose). We must learn what light, colour, pain, shapes, parents, a loving whisper, a baseball to a face or a bedtime story is. Then we learn how to combine these stereotypes of “noise-patterns” into increasingly larger boxes, thereby grouping signals into reusable packages. Eventually these modules become second nature, so that we can move on with our chosen/assigned profession/life without spending additional mental effort.
An experienced lawyer only has to skim a contract to make sense of its contents. They can do that because of the constraints imposed on it by external authorities. You can’t word a contract differently than everyone else, since the purpose of it is to convey shared understanding to a potential third party (a civil court). We impose such authorities on ourselves voluntarily through the schooling system. There is one higher power conscribing constraints on our stereotypes: society. Our ultimate, collective mental box.
Technical Innovation
Technological advances still on paper are not governed by society. Galileo might have had a different impression, but times change. I have the freedom to repurpose my combination of “noise-patterns” any way I like or to invent entirely new ones. It’s all up to the meaning I ascribe to these new modules.
Whether others ascribe the same meaning to this combination of mine depends on the mental boxes in other people’s heads. Each time we propose an innovation to a problem, we ask the other party to disassemble some of their own modules and reassemble them again based on the recipe we’re proposing. That’s no small thing to ask.
If I’m given a choice between spending two days of mental labour to learn about a subject or pay for the privilege of not having to do this, I will mostly choose the latter. That is, unless the proposal is in a field that I was already interested in. The catch is that the more elaborate my mental constructs in the matter are, the harder they are to unpack, as I will keep presuming that similar looking boxes are the same when thinking about them. What helped the lawyer earlier can become a mental block to understanding the true meaning of the innovation.
Which is why you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. We need the march of time to erase our assumptions from our collective memory, so that we don’t pollute the world with our outdated combinations of signals, so that new ideas can infect the ones still susceptible to them, until they also become ossified and the cycle repeats.
Such is life.