Curiosity & Experimentation

I know a great person, a great friend, with whom a while ago I had a pleasant time and a very good conversation. A challenging conversation, because he is a deep person, daring and played with his positions, as his personal life story shows, committed to the causes he has been embracing one after another. Under the prism of the expected linearity to achieve success, as it is understood today, a life that has wandered from one passion to another results in an indecision and a waste of valuable time, quite the opposite, to the "concentration of effort" and the use of time in "useful things." However, this is not what I think, as I will detail later. My friend, of whom I speak to you, has been committed to three passions, which have demanded great amounts of energy and dedication: martial arts, religion and science, particularly palaeontology. At first sight and in dialogue with him, contradictions that stress his historical interests, which makes his personal history more attractive, are obvious. In a first phase, that of martial arts, it was where he did all the physical exercise that can be done, where he demanded his body, and that of others, to efforts to the limit of the possible, witnessing fractures and injuries, causing them in some cases, too. Today he recognizes that in full swing of that phase of his life, the way to observe this experience was with cold indifference. I could also observe the coldness and indifference of the Tao universe in that appreciation. Today he recognizes that effort and discipline, blows, routines, will and focused energy led to a threshold of his vitality. However, it was only the beginning of his search.

Once this phase was over, my friend actively participated in his religion: the Christian, perhaps as a way to relax the body from such tension. And in his eagerness for knowledge he deepened on the nature of God and the truth. One quality of my friend is that it is not easy for him to accept an assertion, whether religious or otherwise. He is a methodical man, very studious and does not accept simple answers to his concerns. For this reason, he soon came to have discrepancies with his religious leaders. The most decisive was when the dinosaur issue came up. The pastors of his church called him to an interview to "throw away ears", as he talked to his brothers about these extinct animals and other similar aberrations. Sometimes, churches have simple answers to concerns of this kind. In this particular case, the response of the leaders of his church regarding the ancient existence of dinosaurs was that they were aberrations created by Satan, formed by mixing different species created by God. For example, the demon mixing the hippo with the giraffe had formed what was a long-necked dinosaur (a sauropod). My friend could not resist such ignorance and lack of freedom, with which he snapped at his religious leaders that he was not willing to participate in such intellectual destitution, and thereby decreed his religious independence.

Since Martin Luther hung his 95 diatribes at the gates of the Wittenberg church against the Roman pope, man's relationship with God became direct and the interpretation of the Bible became individual. This was a first step towards freedom of thought that would later lead to rational thinking and the emergence of the scientific method. On a smaller scale, my friend became a man assiduous to science, particularly palaeontology, but without leaving behind his religiosity. During our dialogue, and according to the narrative he told me, I asked him a question about the nature of God. What a question I asked him! I've stopped thinking about things like that for a long time, but my curiosity was superior and I advanced with him. Is God a person like us? I told him, Is it not that Man, being the nature that observes itself, cannot fail to observe himself when he wants to describe the nature of God and thereby humanizes and modifies him, taking into account what the uncertainty principle says? There is no simple answer to things like this. However, I noticed that I had given up this course, my curiosity had been exhausted and with it the search too, for a long time. Is it legitimate to unleash curiosity? I wondered me, then.

What would science be without curiosity? In a society like the current one, all our acts are measured and evaluated under the prism of the utility or the use of our energy in pursuit of the achievement of our personal objectives or of the organization to which we serve or belong. What does an engineer do by reading a book of poetry? What does a biologist reading the Bible? What does the human resources manager of a company look at the plans of the project where he works? What does a doctor admire a Matta painting? It is the result of the tyranny of specialization and concentration of efforts. The segregation of culture and the subsequent division of power that emanates from knowledge.

Jared Diamond says in his book "Weapons, germs and steel" that the need (or utility, it could be said) is not the mother of inventiveness but vice versa, because it is curiosity that takes the reins of innovation. Diamond tells the jocular story after the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Alba Edison, where, originally, this famous inventor devised many possible uses for his invention, within which, the most glamorous of all, was to use it as a recorder and dictator of dictations within the administrative offices. When someone ventured to play music on the phonograph, Edison enraged claimed the bad use he was given. Over time, music took hold of the invention, whereby its author lost sovereign control over his "creation." In this way it is not the necessity-utility in itself that makes its way into these technological experiences. It is curiosity and inventiveness, insatiable attributes of humanity, that enjoy observing and experiencing, and that look in search of new unsuspected horizons. Enrique Lihn, the poet, dying on his deathbed, consulted a group of friends who accompanied him about what they think is the feeling that dominates a man about to die. After a long moment of reflection and silence, only one friend, also a poet, gave the answer that Lihn wanted to hear: curiosity. What made man a man but a curiosity to unfold and observe himself? This reminds me of the "conscientious of the spirit", one of the characters of "Thus spoke Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche, mentioned in this book as one of the superior men. The curiosity of the conscientious took him to the limit of allowing the leech to suck his blood, all this with the eagerness to take beyond the investigation of the brain of this living being. On how many occasions do we not push ourselves to the limit of experimentation by trying to change habits or follow strict morals? We constantly test ourselves, even taking paths beyond our own, simply by observing what might happen.

This is why curiosity can also lead us to another place: anguish, when a sudden freedom demands answers to cement a wobbly stability. I explain. Suddenly the race to overcome a string of thresholds of understanding becomes vertiginous. Beyond the answers we aspire, we believe that the Truth, with all its splendour and tranquillity, is the Platonic ideal that pulls our intellectual hunger and that seduces us to continue moving forward, despite to be exhausted. In these cases, curiosity becomes urgent and becomes necessity, and Truth becomes elusive and unattainable, while our certainties become unstable. The "conscientious of the spirit" is no longer a cheerful scrutineer but a tragic passionate. That false lighthouse that we call Truth blinds us, dazzling the night and hiding the many mysteries that are hidden in it, by excess of light. Someone may tell me that the ships of humanity will come to fruition, the product of manly scientific discipline and its rigor, and despite not seeing the great stage of the world with all its hidden nuances. I just wonder, is there a single universal destiny? And if this universal destiny is entropy or death, as science itself affirms, do we then try to escape from this universal destiny by scratching the Truth and thereby transmuting the meanings of what we observe in the universe?

In Paleontopoiesis, I describe God as the universe - or the universe as God, which is almost the same - that when he is torn, he sees the birth of all his creation work from his wounds. The possibility of creation is thanks to the uncertainty principle. This means that it is the mystery that opens the possibility of the new, and the creation is an act of pain and search at the same time. Ecstasy and happiness arise once Temüjin is born, the son, who surpasses his father and promises an empire beyond the universe-God (...) Of course, this is poetry. However, it is also a product of my search, of my curiosity. In affirming the universe, my poetic God, I affirm a faith beyond what is within reach of my hands and my wounds. Creation surpasses me. An obvious issue, because the universe surpasses man, no matter how much we want to wrap it. Is it possible even if you want to consider reaching or asymptotically approaching the truth? Only an act of faith - because we cannot look beyond our physical, temporal and intellectual limitations - allows us to affirm the historicity of space-time, which is like the body we intuit of the universe.

And what with modern science, then? Have you left behind your eagerness to search, perhaps showing that your curiosity has run out? I wonder this, because the rigor of the scientific method seems to generate bias for observation sometimes. As Thomas Kuhn said, in his book "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", education within a paradigm implies separating experimental results that do not conform to those expected, such as "bad" or anomalous. There is not much difference between this and the rigid intention Don Juan taught Carlos Castaneda, while he was initiated by the shaman in the use of peyote and other hallucinogenic drugs. To learn the "truth" you have to "stop seeing". This was how Carlos Castaneda was reprimanded by the Indian when he saw pink elephants and not white eagles, as expected. In this way, stop seeing the opportunity of new perspectives is lost through intuition, emotion and irrational thinking. That is, the application of a scientific paradigm is an elegant form of "directed" esotericism. Can poetry and emotion be a way of acquiring knowledge then? To illuminate this, one would have to reflect on the nature of emotion, a physiological manifestation that is neither alien nor split from rationality; and reflect about what we know, if we really get to know something really. Topics too arduous to develop here.

On the other hand, any intellectual or spiritual search declines before a milestone of the type "now I know" or "now I have a knowledge". Certainty may be related to fatigue, the need for stability or the fact that the sheet of paper is finished and I must conclude soon: put the signature under this text and spit the great truth at once. Mental laziness? A slight faint-hearted vocation? When do we lose curiosity and start accepting absolute certainties? When do we lose intellectual childhood and the pride of declaring ourselves ignorant, without shame? At the moment that curiosity becomes the need to affirm "truths"? Perhaps it is the pathos of our current society, with its eagerness towards the useful and the result, which has privileged the search for certainty and packaged recipes for the achievement of success and happiness. When do our desire to browse and experiment die? Perhaps in adolescence, this aberrant experiment of the West, where we postpone adulthood to participate in the selective process of the meat grinder, which chooses the best of the rest? Is it the fear of being displaced that impels us to choose conventional responses and stop creating?

 Yes, creating. Because the creative act does not resist planning. Originally we may need a structure that frames our poems, a painting, a house or our life. However, life always surprises us. When life is composed of moments in "wild state", magical moments where mystery and wonder are lurking, it is when you feel more alive. Or does life not overcome itself, only when it is adaptable and diverse to the external conditions that we do not control? Everything has to do with our area of ​​influence. Is the universe so large that our area of ​​influence moves away from it and then we drift alone and aimlessly? We modify the uncertainty principle when observing the universe. Is this a way of influencing it? It seems that life was not in our hands. That we are carried by large masses of energy from one place to another in space-time. How powerful will the uncertainty principle be to allow the universe to influence? To all these questions we are curious. Every new question, every new word pulls our fragile understanding, tearing us apart like a raging pack. The same curiosity has made my friend a brave man and a bitter experimenter. Using the greatest element we have available to experience with passion: our lives. Because this is the biggest experiment we can carry out. In it we test all our principles and values. To transmute them if necessary. To create new when it becomes imperative. It seems that all this hides a moral background. Let's not fool ourselves. There is no religious or scientific voice that forces us to move forward. It is simply the fact that we are here, we can open our eyes, observe, propose and experience. And incidentally create our own universe.