Null Pointers
What is faith?
I'm not positive I know for sure. Faith, it seems to me, has a sort of circular definition. That is, one must 'have' faith in order to know what it is. Faith in ourselves, faith in religion, faith in a god. Without these things we cannot understand its nature. Much like love, or hate, or fear, or grief, we have to experience it firsthand in order to truly define it for ourselves, to fill in the gaps where our higher consciousness left holes for it.
So I guess the question is: why do I need to define faith if someday I might know what it is instinctively?
I don't particularly like holes, or logical gaps, or leaps of, get this, 'faith.' This just seems like bad practice to me. And I've only got one brain.
If I have never quite gone off the deep end with my ideas, I think it is happening currently. However, I was always kind of curious about this phrase, 'going off the deep end.' It seems to me to imply that the people accusing the metphoric descent into whatever are just wading around in the shallow end of the pool. Well, I've got my swimming trunks on. Have I ever mentioned I have a fear of water?
Really, though, I have no right to approach this question. I am not religious. I am what you could call 'faithless.' I have no relationship with God, or Jesus, or Allah, or Whomever. I do not and probably will never understand how faith pertains to religion. In this regard I will simply leave it where it stands, and hope that I don't trample over it.
So, where to begin...
First, something about how we learn. It is a process called 'abstraction.' It is the process of taking many smaller concepts and encapsulating them into a larger concept. It is why we have cars that have thousands of moving parts, but only the pedals, the wheel, and sometimes the stick shift to make the car go forward. It is why we have computers with hundreds of millions of transistors compacted into a single microprocessor performing billions of instructions per second just so that when we press a button we can recieve email. It is why we can sit, stand, walk upright, run, sprint, type on a keyboard, and dance without thinking of conducting and orchestrating hundreds of muscles.
But can you remember exactly how you are moving your finger? Can you single out every muscle in your body? Do you even know where all the muscles in your body are?
I do not. But somehow I know what I can do with them. And like with driving a car, or using a computer, that is all I need to know. Eventually, learning how to manipulate the parts of a problem becomes a solution, and the mastery of these parts brings better solutions to the problem.
However, it is not clear to me whether abstraction eventually yields a perfect solution. People trip, stumble, bump into things, and lose their balance. We can still manage to stall our cars after years of driving a manual transmission. Thus, errors can be made, and abstraction is not a perfect learning method. As both a benefit and a downfall, once a problem is solved, knowledge of the smaller parts is no longer required. But if the problem changes, or if one of the parts changes or disappears, then the process must begin anew. For instance, if a person learns how to drive an automatic transmission, and then must then drive a manual transmission, they can no longer drive like they once did until they relearn the task.
I mentioned before that this 'abstraction' is used when learning how to move. I think, however, that in as complicated a machine as the human body, abstraction is used much more prevalently. We do not have to think about our heartbeat or breathing or blinking. We are, that is, our conscious selves, the manipulators to an extensive machine, given access to some functions and denied that to others.
So that makes us abstractions. Our varied personalities on top of our consciousness on top of our memories on top of our emotions on top of our subconscious on top of whatever other levels of mental hardware and software happens to be up there. And we have no idea how we work. Just that we do.
So, while we're up here, what can we do?
Well, we pride ourselves in our problem solving ability, a testament to our vast intellectual prowess compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. In our short term here on Earth we have gone from nomadic hunting parties huddled around fires in caves to being the dominant species on the planet, supposedly. Douglas Adams thought differently, and really I do get a weird feeling about dolphins. And mice.
But I have a question. How did we start fires without knowing that it is the combustion of chemicals, an exothermic reaction with the surrounding oxygen in the environment. Did the hunters really care? No. It was freezing in that damn cave, and if he didn't scratch his special rock against other rocks then people were going to die in the cold. A larger solution made up of many smaller problems. I guess you could call that abstraction.
This is not to say that our cave man didn't wonder why this happened. What gave him such a power over the universe? How did he ever get so lucky? Why, at all?
There's something else us humans have a habit of: curiosity. Always asking that pesky 'why.' It is this habit that has driven us to develop tools and technology the likes of which could only be dreamt of a hundred years ago.
I think that this is because abstraction can work both ways. Like our cave man, he can learn the solution, by accident or chance, but not know why it is the solution. So despite having solved it, there is a dangling 'why,' nagging at our conscious to tie up the loose end, to close the logical gap, to fill in the hole with information. So with us it is possible to know something, but not to know why, assuming there is a reason why anybody knows anything about anything.
This strikes me as interesting.
Now a little bit on computer databases.
Databases are simply methods of data storage. In their simplest form they can be seen as huge matrices, or 'tables,' having a mostly constant number of columns for the variables you wish to store, and any number of rows for however many records you want to keep. You can store names, phone numbers, addresses, idkfa posts, ballots, CD track titles, images, programs, etc. Essentially anything that you can describe in binary can be stored in a database. From there, you can perform all sorts of fun queries on the data, whether it be sorting the rows, adding or subtracting rows, or find the sum, the maximum, or standard of deviation for any column.
In recent years (the past 30 or so), relational databases and the theory surrounding them have become extremely popular. Relational databases are those that consist of multiple tables that contain 'related' data. For instance, on idkfa, there is a table for users, and a separate table for their posts, their ballots, their priveleges, their awards, and so on. I'll spare you the nasty details on how tables are joined together, but for my purpose it is easier just to say that for two related tables, an object in one of the tables has a field, or column, or a pointer into a record in another table.
It is left up to the database programmer to decide how these relations are to be implemented, and what they mean in terms of the applications that use the database. As long as the relationships between tables are understood by its users, the relational database is an extremely powerful tool. In the software development, database design is one of the most important steps to the process, as the data model often completely defines the function of the program that acts upon it. It is also important because once the relations for the data are defined, it is very difficult and often impossible to change them, or to use them in a different context than what they were originally intended.
Now back to human databases.
I think that humans can store data that is infinitely relational. We can memorize lists of information, like the alphabet or counting to 100 or a CD track list. But we don't see them as lists. Instead, we see the words that the alphabet makes, the sounds that they create, and how certain letters change the sounds of the letters they are next to. We can assign each letter a special meaning, like a mathematical equation or a function, or use them in acronyms to stand for larger phrases. We can see numbers, and we can add them together, subtract them, perform any calculation to them, give them abstract meaning and shape in order to solve larger and even more abstract problems. For tracks on a CD, we know their lyrics, their first few chords, the name of the singer and the bassist, and when you saw the band in concert last.
All of these relations can exist in our memories, and these relationships can change, and often do. So for every concept that we have encountered, there is a relationship with it and pre-existing data that ties it into everything else.
So how do we define the relationships between things we know and things we do not know? If there is no relationship between two things, can that be seen as a relationship in itself? Are there relationships between relationships?
I'm making my own head spin, so let me get to the point.
There are types of relationships. For each type, you could see it as a verb. A makes B. C is more than D. E is an F. G is why H. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of these relationships that we understand between objects, and we can always learn more types, or 'verbs.'
To ask the question differently, what type of relationship exists between concepts that you understand, and concepts you do not?
I call this relationship 'faith.' Faith, from what I understand of it, is an accepted misunderstanding. A surrender to the relentless 'why' of the human data model trying to maintain an accurate structure. It is the solution to a problem that you cannot solve. And it is the belief that a solution does indeed exist, despite your inability to find it. The neurological equivalent of the null pointer.
It is at this point that I start to see faith as more of a verb than a noun. Less as a tangible quantity of something, and more as an action that I perform every day to be able to make sense of things. It is me forcing myself to be humbled by a problem, and accepting that the methods I use to learn are imperfect.
Is it good then that we are able to do this, to 'have faith?' To be able to have a solution, but not to understand it? To believe a solution exists, when it may or may not?
I guess it has gotten us this far, hasn't it? We have a habit of fearing the unknown. What would it be like if we refused to warm ourselves beside the fire because we did not know what it was, or didn't understand it?
I guess it would be an awfully cold night in the cave. Faith, it seems, makes our world more approachable and more understanding and comprehensible.
I fear this 'faith.' I fear not knowing, and accepting it, and storing it as such. Instead, I choose to believe that if I cannot find a solution, then it is because of my own limitations, not necessarily because there isn't a solution. I don't know the word for that. Is there one?