Good morning! I’m glad to see all of your smiling, happy faces once again. Did you all have a nice weekend?Big Al did. The sun was shining. The temperatures were warm. The air was filled with the sights, sounds and smells of spring. Robins sang in the treetops and little insects milled around in their conjugal clouds. By all respects, it should have been a perfect weekend. Except that Big Al had a nasty – and thoroughly unpleasant – experience with his Texas Instruments™ TI-82 calculator.Over the past 10 to 15 years, Big Al has come to rely on his trusty adding machine. To a Computer Information Science major the calculator is what a gun is to a soldier. It’s his weapon. He relies on it for survival. He learns to love it and hate it. But he has to rely on it.But this weekend, Big Al’s calculator failed him. You see he punched in the sine of 4 pi knowing full well that the answer was zero. But what he got back was 5.235 x 10-11. This came as a horrible shock. Big Al sat there stunned for a moment. He checked that the calculator was in radians mode; it was. And still this wrong answer glared at him.But then it occurred to him, maybe the calculator isn’t lying. Maybe it was the math teachers who were lying, and I’d just caught them red-handed. And of course, if the math teachers were lying, then the English teachers and the science teachers might be lying too. They might have just been giving us fictions and expecting us to believe it all at face-value. It’s quite possible.From our earliest days of childhood we are socialized. Socialization is the process by which our parents, teachers and peers educate us about how to interact with the world. And in order to properly interact, you must accept certain beliefs. Many of these beliefs are so central to our existence, we call them facts.To us, facts are unshakable and unalterable truth. In America and the civilized world, the central truth in our lives is science. We were told that the scientific method cannot make mistakes. We believe that science has the only explanation for why the sun and moon rise. But this isn’t the only way of looking at the world. Many cultures have very different ways of explaining the exact same phenomena. For example, let’s take an Amazonian Animist tribe. To them, the souls of their ancestors and the spirits of wood and glen are responsible for everything that they see. These people have carefully observed how these spirits behave.They have observed that Nishkumbawa makes the sun rise every morning. They have seen the good spirits in medicine make the fever demons go away. And they have learned that if you smoke a certain weed, your ancestors will talk to you and give you visions. Since birth, these people are taught to believe in the power of spirits, just like American kids are taught to believe in science.If you try to tell a tribesman that spirits don’t exist and his ancestors are entirely dead, he won’t listen to you because you’re talking nonsense. He can see spirits at work every time the sun rises. But if a tribesman told you that science is all wrong, would you listen to him? Most certainly not. Here we have two sets of “facts” that mutually contradict each other.To most of us, this whole Animist deal seems backward and simplistic. But when you think about it, and use Occam’s Razor, it’s much simpler – and therefore more likely – that spirits control the universe. Molecules, atoms, evolution and even mathematics are complex, cumbersome and unlikely concepts. And these concepts cannot ever be proven to be true.Nobody sees molecules, and if we could see something like them, there would certainly be another explanation. (They might be the toe-nail clippings of Hirukabawa). So this week, keep in mind that your expensive college education is not too much different than Shaman school.
Big Al Vredeveld is a freshman CIS major from Upper Arlington. Updates from his co-columnist brother Big Al’s write-in campaign for Undergraduate Student Government can be found at members.xoom.com/votejohn.