Delusion

The artist developes a sense of time that allows the freedom to fit the work into the alloted time/space for accomplishment. If you know you have an hour to complete a task, the task itself will fill the hour and at the end of the time frame, whatever is finished is what the final product becomes. There is always a new canvas to work on and getting it right is an arbitrary value - whatever is created is still art.

On the other end of the spectrum, the scientist/engineer gets to work in a more timeless dimensional frame - because getting the task correct and to exact specification is much more important to the working system than being timely. The problems that come about in the design of novel process arise from experience of working the system; improvements in efficiency contribute very little, compared to the 'aha' of how to do something completely different and better, which accomplishes the same task at lower cost, time or energy. When the science misses - the objective doesn't happen correctly. Shuttle O-rings for instance.

Criteria of thinking is quite different, depending on what it is you think you will acomplish by thinking. Changing the way people think is not difficult - just about any story can convince people of its message, if it is well presented. Patterns of thought require internal consistency, when this breaks down we have to discard the idea that brought us off - and find out how the other pieces can be repackaged to create a logical whole. Too often we don't follow this through deep enough.

Sometimes, there is not enough information available, so we create imaginary information to fill the gap. Brains are funny critters - when we fail to invalidate an assumption, we just continue to use it. If it works in one area, we assume it valid to extrapolate to other areas. Soon, we no longer assume, we take it as a point of knowledge - especially if it keeps the internal consistency of the big picture working in a streamlined fashion.

The time has come to check our premises and abandon some of the old assumptions that really do not fit into the world today. These are carry-overs from the world of yesterday, which seems like the world of today but has changed as we have changed. (My change is eighty-one cents - three quartes a nickel and a penny.) Balancing the resources that we have, both input and output, while decreasing the rate of flux of the system - the turnover of ideas that replace each other within a lifetime - seems to be a worthy balance check on all the scales that we work with. Identifying the assumptions as assumption will be more difficult that searching for the correct answers - there are too many poisoned needles in our current haystack of life.