Stop Making Sense

Some things make a lot of sense, like not sticking your hand into an open flame. Almost anyone you survey on the street will confirm this. Or what about jumping out of a perfectly good airplane without so much as a parachute to break your fall? Even people on the street, including those who don't know the name of the current Vice-President of the United States, know the answer to that one. For humans, avoiding certain injury or death (wherever possible) makes a lot of sense.

What "makes sense" gets fuzzier in the arenas that lie beyond avoiding death and physical pain, but, even so, humans seem to place a great store of value in behaving in a sensible way. Very rarely, do you hear people say "don't bother taking that umbrella with you, the rain isn't falling that hard." For many years now it has been fashionable to encourage people to act in a sensible way.

So, it's not surprising then that people have trouble understanding the function of nonsense or non-purposeful behavior in their lives. That's why some of us believe that dreams are just your subconscious' version of a Blockbuster video rental. 

In short, people don't think there is much use for things that don't have a clear purpose.

Orderliness and purpose are increasingly cherished commodities.   As we move into the Information Era--where vast swaths of visual and auditory information can be modelled, sampled or just plain captured--we tend to favor the importance of structure in our lives. Computers demand precision and, increasingly, because of our interaction with a computer dominated world, so do we.

The Age of Enlightenment was fascinated with the idea of a perfectly rational world. Descartes would have loved the precision of computers, and their constant state of perfect order. What a wonderful model for the physical world. The "real" world.

He wouldn't have cared much for the sub-atomic world, where "cause and effect" disappears and is replaced by "probabilities." Oh sure, there is an "orderliness" to the sub-atomic world. But the "orderliness" of that world is not a fixed and rigidly predictable sort of order. It's fluid and elusive, but still somehow regular.

Unfortunately, that's not satisfiying to many of us who try to understand the sub-atomic world with our "real world" frame of reference.  The sub-atomic world may be "orderly" but it doesn't make sense.

And here's another thing that doesn't make much sense: dreams. What's up with dreams? Every night we go to sleep and our brains churn out vivid scenes that jump improbably from one topic to another. It makes no sense. Which is why we probably forget them so easily when we wake up.  Right?

Shrinks seem to think that dreams are a way for the mind to work out problems that it can't (or won't) deal with in wakeful life.  Does that make sense?  Well, we know that people have solved real problems in their dreams (e.g. Kekule figuring out the structure of the Benzene ring in a dream).  Okay, fine.  That's one example, but for the most part we regard dreams as nonsense.

Hey, here's a crazy idea. Maybe it's possible that non-sense sometimes has value. Things that don't make sense to us now might be ideas that we are only beginning to understand. But since we don't yet understand them they look like nonsense. Later, things fall into place (because we adopt a new way of looking at things) and then they make sense.

Or perhaps we need non-sense as a release from the strict order and pat logic that increasingly pervades our world. We often seem to think we have fairly complete understanding of our world and the problems it presents. Even when we face uncertain problems we assume that computers and orderly logic will bring us closer to the solutions. However, at a deeper level, maybe we "know" that logic and order are actually limiting our full development.

Whatever.  Still, it often appears that we humans don't always benefit from keeping the world all neatly organized.  We seem to need some improbable randomness mixed into the soup.   That's a strange idea, isn't it? And no doubt it doesn't make much sense.

Last update: 6/5/2003; 10:08:54 PM.