It’s Risky to Rely on Other People’s Interpretations to Understand the World

Or, If there’s one thing that mainstream cinema demands, it’s an explanation

If you’ve ever walked into a physics conference, you’d never hear a physicist walk up to the podium and say … think of quantum entanglement like a pair of magical dice that, no matter how far apart you take them, always show the same number when rolled. Imagine you and your friend thieved two such magical dice from Hogwarts. Now, when you roll yours and see a six, the other one, regardless of where your friend is, instantaneously shows a six too. It’s as if they share an unseen connection that transcends the physical distance.

Nope! Real physicists don’t talk like that, especially not in physics conferences. If it’s a real physicist, they’d walk up to the podium and instead say … consider a scenario analogous to a pair of correlated quantum systems. Under such conditions, the measurement outcome of one system dictates an instantaneous alignment of the corresponding measurement outcome in the distant entangled partner, regardless of the spatial separation. This peculiar correlation defies classical statistical expectations, challenging the conventional framework of local realism. In essence, quantum entanglement engenders a non-local interconnectedness that eludes classical probabilistic constraints, constituting a nuanced departure from conventional notions of independence in spatially separated systems.¹

But… when the same physicist talks to a non-physicist, they would talk in the former fashion. “Well, this glass, this drink, this countertop, uh, our bodies, all of it, it’s mostly empty space. Groupings of tiny energy waves bound together. Forces of attraction, strong enough to convince us that matter is solid, stop my body passing through yours.” This is how J. Robert Oppenheimer explains quantum mechanics to his future wife Kitty in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. By using metaphors.

A metaphor is a nifty linguistic tool to explain something by saying how one thing is like another, even though they are not exactly the same. On one side of a metaphor is something that people do understand and on the other side of it is something that people find difficult to understand.

If you’ve ever noticed, whenever we’re trying to have everyday conversations about things, one thing we tend to do is use metaphors a lot. And I mean, a lot! We tend to lean in the direction of comparisons, because of how easy and effective they are at bridging our understanding of complex concepts and phenomena.

Comparisons are like cognitive shortcuts that enable us to quickly draw parallels between the known and the unknown and make sense of the world around us. That’s why we say things like, life is a roller coaster, finding love is a journey, having schizophrenia is like having voices in your head, a child’s patience is thinner than the Wi-Fi signal inside a lift. And in doing so, we often let these metaphors shape the assumptions we make about things around us. This causes serious misconceptions sometimes.

People will often say stuff like, the mind is a machine. They’ll use this metaphor with totally good intentions, trying to bring a little structure into how we think about something, like the mind, that is enormously complex.

But then what this can inadvertently lead to is people really thinking of their mind as being similar to a machine. They may think: a machine is usually designed to perform a specific function, and my mind must have been as well. Machines are made up of predetermined processes and fixed capabilities. My mind must have been based on similar limitations.

And if the mind is a machine, then is there something going wrong with my mind if it’s not functioning the desired way? Well, what do you do when something goes wrong with a machine? You take it to a technician that will fix it for you. So I should take my mind to the psychologist (the technician of the mind). And then if the expert can’t fix it, well, then there must be something fundamentally wrong with it. My mind must be broken. It’s basically useless now.

You see where I’m going with this? You can stretch this metaphor as far as you want but, in actuality, there’s nothing about your mind that is anything like a machine.

It’s just a set of interpretations you might make if that metaphor was the one you were using when thinking about the complexity of your mind. Had you used any other metaphor, such as … the mind is like a garden or, the mind is like a canvas, or my favourite, the mind is like a browser with too many open tabs, your interpretations would have been very different.

We do this with almost everything. Especially, things we don’t fully understand — be it complicated mysteries of science (the genetic code is a cookbook of life), or complex political realities (diplomacy is a delicate dance), or health and nutrition (the body is a temple) — or, things that we deliberately want to avoid talking about. With time, how we talk about something heavily affects how we think about it. Take war for example.

The main purpose and outcome of war is injuring. It’s pretty obvious, but we never talk about it directly. We often skip over it or avoid mentioning it altogether. You could read a whole history book about a battle or listen to news reports about a war without anyone really saying that the whole point of it is to alter — to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut — human tissue, as well as to alter the surface, shape, and deep entirety of the objects that human beings recognise as extensions of themselves.

That’s what war is all about! It’s not just about changing the landscape, or a military exercise, or a special operation, or a quest for freedom or power. It’s also about causing harm to people, both physically and emotionally.

This fact gets overlooked amidst all the talk about strategy and politics because we’re so engulfed in a deluge of war metaphors and innuendos that it has completely numbed our senses to its sheer brutality.

If we leave our understanding of the world at the mercy of the comparisons and metaphors we get from other people, our understanding of the world not only becomes very limiting, but sometimes also very dangerous.

SORRY THAT YOU’VE GOT CANCER BUT I CAN’T WAIT TO BE PROUD OF YOU!

Whenever you get an understanding of something complex from a comparison to something else (that is much simpler), your view of the complexity of the thing is in some capacity simplified, reduced, and distorted by that comparison.

I think amongst the most destructive and egregious metaphors are the ones we use when we talk about cancer. Cancer is often seen by people as a battle. “Living with cancer is like being on the front lines of a constant battle.” Or, “Cancer is a relentless opponent.” Or, “Cancer turns your life into a war zone.“ You must have heard such expressions a gazillion times in movies, videos, articles, news, magazines, among family, friends, acquaintances, and what not.

These statements essentially indicate that you are metaphorically fighting against this evil that has invaded your body from the outside. So your body becomes the battlefield for this impending fight.

As a result of this line of thinking, the first and foremost thing that happens is you become objectified. You are turned from a person into “the patient.” They start talking about you in the third person. Often they don’t even mention you, just your individual parts. “The tumour has spread into the southern hemisphere of the lung. The biopsy revealed elevated levels of malignant cells. The patient will need to undergo further diagnostic tests to determine the appropriate course of treatment.”

The misinterpretations don’t end here. They cut deeper. If cancer is seen by society as a battle that someone is going through then, like in any good fight, what we respect as a society is someone who faces this battle head on, and acts like a warrior. In other words, someone who bravely faces their disease, and then fights really really hard to beat it. “We’ve got soooo much respect for you for fighting the disease. Here’s some apple pie to get through!”

But of course, cancer is NOT a battle, and you’re NOT a warrior fighting against it. That’s just a metaphor we tack onto something mysterious to help us explain it better.

But think of how this affects someone with cancer. What if I have cancer and I CANNOT face the disease bravely? What if I’m shitscared of the battle that’s raging in my body? And, most importantly, what if I can’t beat the damn disease? Apart from being promoted from being called “the patient“ to being called “the body,” do I also get the additional honour of being called “the coward”?

And what if it has nothing to do with how strong I am or how much willpower I’m putting into it? What if its just bad genes? What if I don’t have access to the best of medical care to fight the disease? What if it’s just bad luck?

Just think of the added burden of guilt people put on someone who has cancer with their stupid metaphors. They might start thinking … Am I dying because I’m not being a good enough warrior in this battle? Is it because I’m not strong enough? Is that why I’m not able to beat the disease?

DON’T YOU SEE THAT X REALLY MEANS A?

I finished reading the novella Convenience Store Woman by Japanese author Sayaka Murata a couple of days back. Given the fact that I dunno any Japanese other than “Arigato” I obviously read the translated version.

The story revolves around the life of Keiko Furukura, a woman in her mid-thirties who has worked at the same convenience store for 18 years. It was a great read but it got over too soon and left me wanting for more. What happens after the story ends? And what does the story really mean?

I had this strong urge to make sense of what the story was trying to convey. I had so many questions I needed answers to. On the surface, it was the story of Keiko, but there was also a deeper social commentary underneath the narrative that I wanted to know more about.

I also finished watching the absurdist 2009 film Dogtooth by the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos a couple of days back. (Lanthimos is the director of the 2023 film Poor Things, which has been nominated in 11 categories in the 96th Academy Awards.) If you’ve watched any of Lanthimos’ movies, such as, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, etc., you know about his style very well. It makes you want to dig deeper. In fact, without trying to find the subtext, or in his case, the subnarrative of the whole movie, none of it makes sense.

If there’s one thing that mainstream cinema demands, it’s an explanation. Character motivation and plot are continually hammered home until the audience understands what’s going on and, more importantly, why it’s going on (whatever is going on). But Lanthimos refuses to play this game in most of his movies. In Lanthimos’ movies, he presents a world in which there are no fantastical elements and horror is grounded in the mundane. Dogtooth especially is a film that delights in disconcerting the viewer and refuses to supply any answers whatsoever.

There’s this idea that when you look at a work of art — a painting, a movie, a song, take your pick, whatever kind of art you like — when you’re standing around with your friends and somebody says, “What do you think this work of art means?” The most common response you’re gonna get from people are them saying, “Well, let’s really think about what the meaning is. Let’s really try to analyse this painting, and let’s try to get to the bottom of what it truly means underneath.”

In other words, there’s a surface-level experience of the art — the paint on the canvas, for example — and there’s this idea when someone’s analysing art that the paint on the canvas is really just in the way of the true meaning that lies underneath.

Interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, “Look, don’t you see that X really means A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?”

If we’re talking about a novel, the narrative and the characters are really just things that need to be interpreted and sifted through so that we can get to the bottom of the more important — more true — meaning of the artwork that lies underneath the surface somewhere.

All this is fine when it comes to analysing or interpreting or understanding works of art — be it a painting, or a movie, or a story. We may sacrifice experiencing the work if we get too caught up with analysing it, but, it still okay. No harm is done! Harm is done only when you extend this same ethos and get busy searching for “meaning” where none might exist.

OH YOU’VE GOT TUBERCULOSIS? YOU MUST BE THE CREATIVE TYPE!

The constant need for interpretation often leads to misinterpretation. The need to find inherent meaning in everything often leads to finding false meaning, even in randomness, where none exists. Because, if you are in the business of interpretation, you can say literally whatever you want, and it would be very hard to contradict you, well, because interpretation has no empirical basis to it.

Hearing the word tuberculosis (TB), you have a certain understanding of what the disease is. You know it’s caused by bacteria. If you’ve read about it, you’d know that it’s a bacteria that belongs to the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex. The disease typically spreads through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes, releasing bacteria into the air in the form of droplets.

We owe this understanding to the German physician Robert Koch who was able to discover in 1882 that the bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis is what causes TB, and also to the French physician Jean-Antoine Villemin who conducted experiments in 1865 (way before Koch) that demonstrated the communicability of the disease and its contagious nature.

But before Koch and Villemin came into the picture, in the early 19th century, people thought of tuberculosis as more of a “spiritual” disease than a medical disease. Tuberculosis was considered a disease you got if you were a creative or a sensitive person. Artists were thought to be particularly vulnerable to the disease. I’m not kidding! People legitimately thought that tuberculosis caused people to be bedridden so that these creative, artist types could have a long time for reflection and creativity. Basically, if you’re a painter and you contracted TB, well, that means you’ve been given an opportunity and you should be using this recovery time to paint and get some inspiration.

This “mythological” explanation would further go on to affect how people and doctors viewed treatment options. When you got tuberculosis back then, the path to better health for you was more “spiritual” than medical. Patients were recommended to go outside and connect with nature. It was implied that they had to reconnect with something within themselves. Doctors sent patients to sanatoriums, sometimes in these beautiful locations where they would be surrounded by other creative artist types, and where all of them would try to talk their way out of the disease. At least that was the idea. It was almost like a rehab in today’s world.

There are so many examples in books, paintings, poetry, from Charles Dickens to John Keats portraying tuberculosis as a disease that you got if you had a certain kind of personality. it’s just mind boggling!

If that wasn’t enough, when people talked about the symptoms of the disease, instead of talking straight, it was described with very specific metaphors. It was said that tuberculosis “consumed the patient from the inside.” That these sensitive, delicate people with their weak constitutions were “being eaten alive” from the inside by the disease.

There’s no reason you have to be thinking of disease like it’s this autonomous thing that’s eating people. That’s a typical human tendency to personify something in order to explain it — especially, when we dunno jackshit about it.

To the least, we can see any disease as a natural reaction in response to certain environmental factors (“Whenever I eat shellfish, my eyes become red”). We can describe it purely in terms of its symptoms even if we dunno much about it (“I have a pounding pain in my head”). We can also talk about it using things we know about it (“I have symptoms similar to flu”), but no! We instead choose to deceive ourselves through deeper meanings and hidden messages. We start guessing about things we don’t really understand. We rely on metaphors instead of scientific evidence.

We did this all the time in the 19th century. And when we did, it affected the way a person with tuberculosis saw themselves. It affected the way they were viewed by other people. It affected the medical and cultural discourse surrounding the disease, which went on to impact what treatment was recommended. For example, lots of people diagnosed with the disease didn’t seek further help because they thought it was nature’s — or perhaps god’s — way of telling them something. Even doctors and scientists didn’t push too hard about doing studies to find a real cure because they more or less accepted the cultural mythology that the cure was a psychological cure. As a result, people suffered and died.

We often resort to metaphors when we don’t understand something, and then we confuse the metaphor with the real meaning. We could’ve just as easily said, “I don’t know,” and then go on to find the real answer. That would’ve saved a lot of time. That would’ve saved a lot of lives too.

ALL THAT IS MEANINGFUL MAY NOT BE USEFUL

We don’t always realise it, but randomness is a very very modern context. To give you an idea, let me first talk about Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) first.

RCTs are a type of scientific study often used in medical research and other fields to assess the effectiveness of interventions or treatments. In an RCT, participants are randomly allocated into one of two or more groups: the experimental group, which receives the intervention being studied, and the control group, which typically receives either a placebo or standard treatment.

RCTs are basically considered the gold standard for evaluating the effectiveness of interventions because they can provide strong evidence of cause and effect relationships.

But it’s kind of surprising that this “gold standard” became any kind of standard only about 80 years ago. This is how the story goes: Back in 1948, Sir Austin Bradford Hill and Sir Richard Doll were looking into whether a drug called streptomycin could help treat TB (yes, TB again). So, they rounded up a bunch of patients with the disease and split them into two groups: one got the drug, the other didn’t. Then they published their findings in the British Medical Journal and guess what? The group that got the streptomycin, they did way way better. This study totally paved the way for how we do medical research nowadays.

But whenever I think about it, I cannot help but wonder, how on earth the “gold standard” of evidence, the compulsory prerequisite before you are legally allowed to sell any drug, is younger than our grandparents.²

It’s not that we didn’t know about the concept of randomisation. Humans have been playing with dice and coins for thousands of years. The earliest recorded dice were found in ancient Mesopotamia, dating back to around 3000 BCE. One of the most well-known games in medieval Europe (5th–15th Century CE) was “Hazard,” a precursor to modern games of chance, which involved players betting on the outcome of rolls of dice.

We’ve also been trying to cure diseases for as long as, well, for as long as we’ve been human. So why on earth did it take us soooo long to put two and two together and come up with RCTs? The answer is, to quote

Adam Mastroianni

the creator of Experimental History, “First, we had to stop trusting Zeus.”

Here’s how it goes: To us, coin flips are random. There’s no divine intervention. If it’s Heads and I go first, it’s random. If it’s Tails and you go first, it’s still random. But to an ancient human, coin flips aren’t random at all. If it’s Heads and I go first, it’s because the gods want me to go first. If it’s Tails and you go first, it’s because the gods like you more than they like me, and maybe I should kill a goat or something to please them so that next time they favour me instead of you.

This of course is a big problem in how we make sense of the world! This means nothing is random and everything is the “will of the gods.” Which means, everything has some sort of inherent meaning, and by favouring one person over the other (by showing Tails instead of Heads), the gods are trying to tell us something, and if we could only decipher their message and figure out why they are doing this, and then do them some kind of favour or something, we should start seeing more Heads instead of Tails, and there wouldn’t be any more draughts, and people won’t die of plagues.

If you think that the outcome of a coin flip is meaningful rather than meaningless, you cannot use it to produce something useful. For example, you can’t use it to create two equivalent groups, and you can’t study the impact of doing something to one group and not the other. In other words, you cannot run an RCT, as the meaningful isn’t really useful. As Mastroianni puts it so eloquently, ”You can only run a ZCT — a Zeus controlled trial.”

EXCUSE ME, I HAVE WORK TO DO

The French philosopher and author Albert Camus’ ideas are often misunderstood by common folks (thanks to the endless barrage of essays and videos about his ideas created by folks who have never read even one word of Camus).

Central to Camus’ thought is the idea that human existence is fundamentally characterised by the absurdity of seeking meaning in an inherently meaningless universe. He argues that life is essentially devoid of any inherent purpose or value, yet humans persist in searching for meaning despite this.

Camus compares the human condition to the mythological figure Sisyphus, condemned to endlessly roll a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down each time he nears the top. Despite the futility of Sisyphus’ task, Camus argues, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” as he embraces the absurdity of his situation and finds meaning in the act of defiance against the absurd.

It’s not that we’ve been interpreting things — trying to find meaning where possibly none exists — ever since we’ve been humans. Interpretation started popping up in our culture and eventually became a thing when people started to question the power and credibility of old myths. Especially when folks started to think more scientifically and the old myths were starting to crumble in the face of a “realistic” view of the world.

Once people started wondering whether those old religious symbols still made sense in the post-mythical world, it was like, the ancient texts just didn’t cut it anymore. So, they called in “interpretation” to tweak those old texts and make them fit with what folks in the “modern” world wanted.

So, they got on with the task of making the gods seem more moral. They went ahead and “reinterpreted” all those wild tales about Zeus and his rowdy crew in Homer’s epics. Instead of Zeus straight up cheating on his wife with Leto, they said it was really “the amalgamation of power and wisdom.” And then there’s Philo of Alexandria, who looked at the Hebrew Bible stories in a whole new light. He saw the exodus from Egypt, and the wandering in the desert, and the whole promised land thing as more than just history lessons. According to Philo, they were like metaphors for our own struggles and ultimate freedom.

That’s how it started, and ever since then, life has been an endless quest in finding meaning in everything, such as the positions and movements of celestial bodies, the arrangement of cards drawn from a deck, the misfortune and hardship in a person’s life, what day they were born (maybe that’s the reason behind their bad luck), how they spell their name, maybe we add an extra “a” and see if the tides turn, and so on and on and on.

Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet whose work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world. One of her most revered poems is I Go Down to the Shore.

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall — what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

I find solace in the poem. I’m glad the waves roll in and move out regardless of whether I find meaning in them or not. They have real work to do, and it’s more important than me.

1. To be honest, I haven’t really been to a quantum mechanics conference, so I can’t really tell if this is how physicists speak, but this is by far my best imitation based on the little I learnt from moves and YouTube videos.

2. If you’re in your 30s, chances are your grandparents are in their 80s.