Talks with my grandmother

We were watching a BBC programme tonight on the thought processes and entire world view of the medieval mind.  Although they never saw them, almost everyone, educated and uneducated alike, were convinced of the existence of strange creatures in far off lands.  Whether dog-headed men, for instance, were human was a significant theological question considered to be critically important for missionaries who might meet them.  The pope actually ruled that pygmies in South America were human, so that it was appropriate for missionaries to convert them to Christianity. 

Lest we in the modrn world are tempted to feel a superior disdain for such ignorance, it is worth reflecting on just how many things in our own world view we have never seen but are just as real to us as dog-headed humans.  It is science that tells us about worm holes and gravity, about atoms and quarks and even dinosaurs. 

I was reminded of one of my African students studying at the university where I was teaching who told me that he’d talked to his grandmother the night before.  This was not remarkable until I realized he hadn’t talked to her on the telephone as I’d assumed but in a dream.  Perhaps still not immensely remarkable until I realized he believed it was actually his grandmother who had visited him in the night, and not a mere figment of his dreaming imagination.

But the real revelation, and the one that has influenced my thinking ever since, was the realization that there is no way to prove whether his perception of the world was the right one or whether mine was.  It is a question simply beyond the capacity of science to answer:  which of our perceptions are “real” and which are not? 

The best scientists can do is to say that only events that are potentially observable by more than one person can be scientifically verified.  Private experiences like dreams and feelings and hallucinations that cannot be shared by others are beyond the scope of the scientific method.  Science can study what people say they dreamed about, or the brain waves or other physiological changes that accompany various thoughts and feelings, but science cannot study private experience directly.  This insistence that scientific observations be verified by other observers or in repeated experiments has eliminated a lot of false reports.  However, that still skirts over the phenomenon of mass delusions when entire crowds of people are convinced they see or hear something like an apparition the rest of us think perhaps wasn’t really there. 

We live in mystery.  Even when we think we know something absolutely, there is always room for an alternative possibility, and that, god help me, I might be wrong.