The Meaning of What We Learn: An Exercise in Scale

The Meaning of What We Learn: An Exercise in Scale

The next time you take a class or study an idea, think about why it’s important. Think about where it fits in to the construction of knowledge—what concepts are abstractions of smaller-scale concepts, and how this discipline fits in with a larger body of knowledge.

Let’s start by setting a few ground rules. You are a human being. You live on planet earth in a society of other human beings. Society is governed by a complex set of interactions and exchanges. Each ideal person in society contributes in some way, at some level to society at large, whether it is through the introduction of a particular skill, the contribution of new ideas or creative efforts, or through mental or physical effort. People work at their respective ‘layer’ and it’s generally not socially productive to dissect what lies below or above that layer unless it is specifically your place in society to do so.

Thus, abstraction layers. At some point you will become curious enough to try to take apart the concepts (physical and metaphysical) that you encounter in your life. Realize that the human trait that allows for technological and intellectual progress is the ability to simultaneously abstract the things you encounter at a particular level of investigation from their inner workings, but still be able to inquire into the nature of these things.

Take electricity. If you had never before seen a lamp, you would be naively forced to treat the workings of electricity as a black box. You give the box input—you plug in a lamp and turn it on—and the black box predictably gives you output: the lamp shines light. As a black box, you know that plugging in any number of lights will simply give you more light, and by modulating the frequency, color and intensity of these lights you can create a fantastic show of lights.

At some point, however, you begin to wonder just how a lamp works. You realize that a lamp has several different parts, one of which is a bulb. Then dawns the realization that the bulb itself is an abstraction—another ‘black box’, if you will. When it burns out, you know that replacing it with another bulb will predictably restore the function of the lamp. You begin to see the modularity of life—how each larger black box is created from many smaller black boxes, much as the knowledge of large ideas must come from the collective understanding of smaller ones. And so you can continue to venture on downward through form and function until you reach some fundamental building block of the universe that doesn’t yield itself to this kind of analysis because it cannot be broken down any further.

The major disciplines we study in life are an immediate reflection of the scope and scale at which we create abstraction. The area of study corresponds to the layer of abstraction at which phenomena are being observed.

Let’s start somewhere in the middle. Here you are, sitting at your desk, looking at physical objects sitting around you. No molecules and no supernovae are yet to be found—just the surfaces and materials you are familiar with. In your head, you are thinking thoughts, and those thoughts are the study psychology. In animals, this is behavioral biology.

Moving downward in scale. Your body has organs, blood, and bones. This is biology at the macro level—anatomy.

Your brain, an organ, is made up of units called neurons. Neurons have organelles and structures. This level is the study of neurobiology at the cellular level.

Inside of each of the cells, we find DNA and other structures constructed of molecules and proteins. This is biology at the molecular level.

Chemistry falls somewhere in here: changes in molecular connectivity.

Molecules happen to be made out of atoms, which are of different elemental types. We’re getting small here. This is atomic physics.

Atoms are made from protons, electrons, and neutrons. This is nuclear physics.

Quarks etc. String theory. Sub-atomic physics.

What comes next? Math is the abstraction of all abstractions. It gives us a means by which to model and explain phenomena at virtually any of the levels we’ll cover. Crudely put, everything is ‘made’ of math, at least from the human perspective. Math is how we test and explain things that we can’t even come close to interacting with in any remotely familiar human way.

Back to the desk where you are sitting. Now zoom out a little bit and let’s look around.

There are people interacting and cooperating. This is sociology.

If we zoom back in a little bit, we find political science, a quick look into how the society goes about organizing itself. We also find economics, which is how the society trades goods, services, and currency within itself.

If we back up again, we encounter history, which looks at societies over time. We find international relations, which is how large societies (countries) interact.

Somewhere here is philosophy, which is roughly the study of why we should bother to study in the first place.

Pulling out further, we find earth science and archaeology, which is essentially earth science over time. A little further and we’ve encountered planetary science and atmospheric science.

The solar system, astrophysics. Galaxies, relativistic time, parallel universes…

And, once again, mathematics. We find it both at the end of the continuum where things are too small to comprehend or measure and at the upper end where things are much too vast to hope to conceptualize.

All these disciplines have layers of abstraction in common. They are a necessity. Think of the madness that would ensue if sociologists tried to look at societal change using molecular methodology. It would be an impossibly large amount of data to analyze. It would also be impossible to find the relationship between any two variables. They rely fully upon the simplifying assumption that the individual member of society is a black box, with particular characteristics, inputs, and outputs in order to simply cause and effect and find a plausible way to meaningfully obtain conclusion from the relationships between things.

In other words: The reason that anatomy can function as a discipline is because it treats the cell and tissue as an abstraction. The reason psychology can function is that it treats the human as an abstraction. The reason that sociology can function is that is treats communities as an abstraction. The reason that international relations can function is that it treats nations as an abstraction.

And so on. Maybe not revolutionary, but hopefully not totally, blatantly obvious.