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Amusement Parks and Distorted Signals


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"That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from a reality forever beyond your grasp."

 

This is such an elegant way to put it. As a line from Dr. Ferris’ book, it reflects how the world can be described by a conceptual faculty which is not properly engaged.

The mirror in the amusement park counts on your enjoyment of seeing your reflection in carefully designed mirrors that take advantage of simple and complex curvatures by a mind which has grasped the relevant causal connections involved.

Far from distorted signals from reality, the refraction from the simple and complex curvatures can be projected geometrically starting from a focal point drawing a line to an intersection point of the curvature. At this point, a tangency plane can be established on the surface to determine the angle of refraction. This line then is projected back to the object being reflected to identify what specifically gets transmitted back to the focal point.

To those not familiar with the specifics here, reading this is not going to amount to much. The verbiage and specialized knowledge of either drafting techniques or the branch of mathematics dealing with topology might put the explanation out of grasp.

Properly rendered and illustrated on a drawing, can reveal, almost at a glance, if the projections have been properly executed.

To those who might not understand it, even at this point, the onus of gaining such insight lies primarily on the student—where the instructor need be familiar enough with the subject that he can identify, base on the questions, the explanation that might be most fruitful.

Occasionally an instructor will run into the student who may practically dare or even taunt the instructor to teach him. Neither the process of teaching nor learning is automatic. Both are processes imbibed in their respective actors. A student, unwilling to learn, cannot be taught. An instructor, unwilling to teach, cannot be compelled to do so.

The teacher craves the student that wants to learn. The student craves the teacher to teach.

The teacher has the product. The student offers the price he is willing to pay. When they agree on the terms, the exchange can take place.

The teacher, in this sense, has his subject matter. The student seeks to gain it. There are many teachers that claim to have knowledge of subject matters. The student needs to delineate, or identify what it is that he desires to learn. The dilemma here is to discern which teacher on a particular subject matter is best qualified to teach him what he wants to learn. In this sense, the student needs to be in charge of his studies.

The student needs a standard by which to evaluate what it is that he desires to learn. He can either look to reality to set the terms, or to others (including a perspective teacher) to decide it for him. As a student, he has to decide if a particular teacher presents his material in a manner consonant with reality, or to accept the teacher’s material at face value. It is along this axis that the compatibility of the teacher/student relationship gets determined (primacy of existence, vs. primacy of consciousness.)

What a teacher of a subject expects from his student, and what the student expects from the teacher circle back to the agreed upon price.

In my opinion, the teacher of a particular subject, need also be an ongoing student of the same subject—if for nothing else, to continue to expand his grasp of the subject in which he professes. The moment a teacher of a subject cannot address a question within it, the options are to find out for himself, or present what he believes to be true about the matter.

On the student’s behalf, his obligation is to continually identify what can be integrated on the subject matter from his chosen instructor. If he identifies a matter which he cannot integrate on these terms, he needs to discover the right question to ask in order to ascertain the right answer.

If the questions asked do not culminate in satisfactory answers given, the student needs to ascertain if it is the caliber of the questions asked that are not sufficient, or identify to himself his confidence in his chosen teacher’s grasp of the subject matter is sufficient.

Being able to ascertain basic qualities of the mirror into which you may be gazing is a matter might well be worth reflecting on here.

—or so it seems to me. Is it just me, or are there others here that miss new episodes of Paul Harvey’s “Now you have the rest of the story.”?

 

Two more thoughts come to mind. One, to ties back into the opening quote from Atlas Shrugged: the scene where Reardon is carrying Tony back to the mills amidst the attack. The other being the melody line from Beethoven's Minuet in G that became an earworm during the interlude of copying and pasting this.

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