Wednesday, November 10, 2004, 8:23am
Wednesday, November 10, 2004, 8:23am
Passengers wander the aisle in utter bewilderment this morning contending with a train already more fully loaded than at the end of yesterday’s commute. Having endured my own bewilderment, I’ve found the aisle end of a three-seater – one of the better spots aboard an overcrowded train where egress access becomes a higher priority.
Norm is running the intercom this morning as head conductor and a rookie I’ve never seen before is running this back end of the train. Nice day to break in a newbie!
In compensation for the added noise of so much humanity, music blares out the sides of somebody’s headphones nearby as I silently rehearse my standard lecture on the topic – ‘In 25 years you’ll be cranking the volume on your hearing aid to drown out the ringing in your ears.’ But I know most people would never listen to me even if they could hear what I have to say about listening fatigue. Don’t crank the volume – buy noise-canceling headphones!
“Wellesley Square. Wellesley Square”
We pick up more bewildered passengers who wander the aisles searching for nearly nonexistent seating, some racing the length of the car as though some better seat is up for auction farther back and the bidding is about to end. More than ever I’d really like to hear what Norm thinks about such variations in ridership from day to day.
Such mysteries must wait.
“Wellesley Farms is next, then express to Back Bay. Wellesley Farms, then Back Bay.”
The music blares on, blending with the normal rumbling of the railroad car with its somewhat out-of-round wheels. Gaining speed past Route 128 the noise of the wheels rises in pitch then smooths and blends into the overall roar of the train. Perhaps these cars are built to run more smoothly at higher speeds or maybe the sound of max track speed overwhelms all other sounds like a Concord jet reaching cruising speed sounding less loud for lack of any other competing noise.
As already announced, starting at Route 128 the train becomes a non-stop express. Here will travel the same distance in the next 15 minutes as we’ve already traveled since Ashland Station 35 minutes ago – if predictions and official schedules are to be believed.
I’m still chewing on what I wrote during last evening’s train ride home about top down versus bottom up thinking. I may be getting ahead of myself when I complain about orthodoxy. Before I plow that field I really need to understand more about how we made our way from the mists of the unknown into the complex world of ideas used to explain those unknowns. In part, this is where Persig travels in his motorcycle journal, but I want instead to look at uncertainty, not his thesis concerning the apprehension of quality.*
Because we are limited in our experience, we can never know anything with full certainty because the Universe is too big and too complex to ever fully observe, and therefore we can never fully trust our ideas about our place in the Universe for the same reason.
We can believe all we want about absolutes but this does not fully underpin absolutes. And we can insist on orthodoxy to the point of burning heretics at the stake. But this only proves that an established power is willing to preserve its own worldview at an abominable price.
We can be reasonably certain about simplistic notions in the sense that we understand our own self-consistent logic. And we can see how our ideas correlate fairly well with our observations. But ‘absolute certainty’ exists purely as an ideal lodged in a world of one’s own imagination producing nothing less than pure delusion.
*[In short, Persig describes how we sense the qualities of an object or event while at the same time imposing preset ways of categorizing these qualities. In a very real sense everything is experienced within a singularity of time, and beyond this cusp of time everything is recognized and processed downstream as it slides into a world of processed forms. Outside of the instantaneous experience everything is either a well-filtered memory or a prediction about what happens next -- all of this mixed into a super-sized sense of the present, which in fact is almost completely a figment of our imagination used to impose order out of an impossibly complex chaos as best we can.]
