Curiosity

Curiosity gets us asking question, and it is the intricacy behind the scene that makes perfect answers non-existence. Too much in what seem trivial has a much deeper and much complex system working from behind.

This could very possibly stem from different thoughts and viewpoints of different people. Or more simply, we are not clones of each other. When we were small, we never were able to grasp the idea why older students in uniform are trying so hard, writing gibberish on a piece of paper. We could not begin to understand what is going on inside their head, only when we grew up would we find out that was just a simple calculus problem. Even for those who we love so dearly (whether it’s your parents or your similar aged girlfriend), we just do not seem to perfectly agree and apprehend their actions or thoughts. This is the ‘other minds’ problem.

Now imagine a grown up adult, and you bet there would not be a problem for adults as it would be for kids. You might think they should be able to interpret and make complete sense of what and why others are doing such and such. Then you meet somebody who is a doctor. What would you ask (apart from asking for medicine)? It shouldn’t be “What do you do?”, because we kind of know what a doctor does (more or less). But we would be fond of asking “What does it feel like to be working with patients all day?”. The curiosity about another person’s interior life and the lack of first-hand experience give us the impulse asking why this, why that and “WHY?!” in our everyday life.

How about the answers we get? We never seem to be satisfied with other’s answers, putting forth our own amateur opinions and challenge their stance. Whether it is a professional doctor telling you to stay in bed for a couple of days or your friend explaining why he broke up with his girlfriend, you are likely to try to put yourself into role of the doctor or your friend’s position and ‘think on your own way’. The result is most likely going to be “I’m right, and they’re wrong”. Or sometimes you would perceive it as, “absolutely ridiculous, it’s just not right”.

There are multiple forces that simultaneously exert their influences on us. We can never pin-point an exact reason why someone does something. Behind every happening is full of inter-related and obscured elements of causes. For instance, think of why some knowing individuals, who would think and act rationally under normal circumstances, would fail to resist deceptions. Under pressure, we start making illogical decisions; under a state of arousal, we wouldn’t even recognise our ‘other-self’, under peer pressure, we choose to act differently; under dangerous situations, our reflexive system takes over and controls our actions in split second. When we ‘blend’ various conditions together and create a virtual environment (just for an example), we would see ourselves acting very strangely compared to what we expect ourselves doing. That’s why so many people get conned in real life and most of the time it’s not just about greed (although it does play a big part). And these could simply be avoided if one or a few elements mentioned above just happen not to exist, by random chance.

Here is another thought: In the event of Manila hijacking of a Chinese tour bus occurred on August 23, 2010, the ‘failed’ rescue assault mounted by the Manila Police District resulted in eight hostages dead and nine injured. In retrospect, the rescue operation is regarded as “incompetent”. But looking at this from another angle, relationship between Filipinos and the Chinese community has always been intense, with regular hijacking taking place across the Philippines. The corrupted police force and government officials could also explain the obvious incompetent and inexperienced actions taken throughout. From a developed world’s point of view, it’s a miserable failure. But it might not seem as shocking for the local people. And taking it further, a third world country might even view this as a success as more than half of the entire tour survived the assault!

This is too simple of an evaluation of one particular event. However, it involves a humongous amount of causes and poses an extremely complex situation already. As I proposed, the event could unfold very differently if one or a few elements of causes had been twisted very slightly (What if the country was less corrupt? What if the hijacker was less time to react, in another words, what if the police force acted earlier?).

[‘What’ and ‘If’ two words as non-threatening as words come. But put them together side-by-side and they have the power to haunt you for the rest of your life: ‘What if?’]

I am not proposing everything happens randomly by chance or follows any statistical distribution, but if you try too hard and dwell too deep as to completely understand something, you would find yourself digging into a hole. It’s great if you are satisfied with the answer you get after all, but most of the time we get too serious and try thinking too hard to solve the ‘other minds’ problem, not realising the very existence of the original problem. So we are ultimately trying to understand something, and that we don’t know what that ‘something’ is. And more worryingly, we might not even know we are in this process of problem solving! It is good to challenge yourself and understand the foundation of events that occurred. However, when it goes over our limit of interpretation, it is best to step back a bit and think shallower. Shallow thinking is not necessarily interesting and it is often not suffice to fulfill our curiosity, but at least it gives us a comforting answer.