on art and engineering

and the dichotomy between rote and felt knowledge

raw, unfiltered thoughts from my brain

if engineering is reducing the complexity of our universe into assumptions and simplificaitons that allow us to harness physics, art leans into the complexity and allows every person to have their own interpretation.

whether or not you believe mathematics and physics are THE objective truths or our pattern matching thinking style mapped onto reality, no one can argue with you that this bridge is going to stand for the next 50 years (until its parts need to be updated). we built these things, they work, so our model holds. is it the only possible model? id say no. i like to think of physics as a projection of how the human mind works. we see patterns. we distill information into neat equations that apply across domains (the same equation that governs the mechanics of a spring governs how electrical engergy moves in a circuit).

great art (not art made for monetary purposes) relies on breaking patterns. doing something different. using your life's experience that only you have to create something. and then other people, with thier own infinitely complex life experience, will interpret it. from this lens, art is closer to the true nature of reality and its infinite complexity than engineering.

but id still argue that great engineering requires an artist's approach. the ability to harness your perspective-changing ability to find the right frame of a problem that will lead to an elegant solution. in any engineering system, there are infintiely many choices to make. the way you choose is determined by how you view the problem. the way you view the problem is determined by your perspective (duh). change your understanding of the problem and you change the solution. this is the how art mirrors engineering.

this type of knowledge is felt. the ability to sit with a problem long enough, try multiple angles, and get to a solution that feels right. the rote knowledge comes later. i dont think whoever first made an abstract expressionist painting (too locked in to look this up and just using it as an example) said "im gonna make an abstract expresssionist painting". they probably had a feeling or message they wanted to convey, felt that specific technique most aptly communicated it, and boom. now you can act like you know your shit at an art galley cause you know a word. im gonna get a bit salty here but bear with me.

engineering these days, especially software, has become so much about this rote knowledge. can you name this data structure, can you recite how recursion works. i bet the first person to write a recursive function didn't know what they were doing. they had a problem, found a novel perspective that gave them an elegant solution, then it goes into textbooks for people to memorize.

this is sort of becoming a critique on language but lets rock with it. language is super useful for communicating ideas. but it is not the idea itself. the language comes after (as we just saw with the abstract stuff and recursion).

side note: if this idea of how ideas become formalized intrigues you, watch this jared bauer video. and also just watch all his videos cause hes so fkn smart.

translating your ideas into language is a skill, it is not knowledge. formalizing ideas into language is useful for passing down the information. and to tie it back to the beginning of this article, it is another mapping of how our brain works onto reality. we need to distill information to process it efficiently. language distills information.

and im honestly for it. its how we teach people things. its useful. but what we need to be emphasizing is that its a tool. the real knowledge is in thinking beyond the rigidity that language imposes on us. not being able to explain something is not a lack of knowledge, maybe its just something there are no words for yet.

and this is a reason why i think ai is overhyped. were grading its intelligence on the ability to produce language? its not producing ideas. its producing language. and it uses complex prose and phrases cause thats how we trained it. cause thats the only way it can display intelligence. real intelligence is intuition beyond language.

some of my most profound experiences in life did not require speaking. the deepest connections are felt. the biggest breakthroughs are felt. the language for it comes later.

i guess its fear of the unknown that pushes us to heavily weigh peoples abiltiy to communicate. its legible and has a clear pass/fail. do you know this word. can you speak like us. it signals belonging (go read my thoughts on this if you want more).

the unknown is scary forsure. but its also where everything we haven't discovered is. and that's beautiful. next time you feel like an idea may not have a name, lean in. and let me know what you discover.

bisous