Believing is Seeing

I recall reading a book by Joseph Campbell that really changed the way I viewed philosophy.  He pointed out that the number 432000 shows up an awful lot in ancient cultures' mythologies, and concluded that there was something very important, cosmologically speaking, about that integer.  He mentioned Babylonian uses, Mayan uses, etc.  But being the nerd that I am, I quickly decided to write the number in base 60, since that's what the Babylonians used.  To the Babylonians, it's just 2000.  It's like a big round number that's roughly half a million.  It's just double the cube of 60.  What's the likelihood of rolling all ones on three rolled dice?  One in 216, exactly half of 432.  (Play creepy music).  But it's all just a made up construct.  There's nothing in the universe that says everything has to be made of powers of 6 and 10.  It's just that humans have developed our numerical language around these things.  It's like the Dilbert Comic:



Once my wife and I realized this, we tried it with another number.  We chose a somewhat interesting number (the product of 3 small primes) and started looking for it.  We saw it all over the place.  If we believed that there was something extremely significant to the number, we would have found a ton of evidence for this.  And there's the rub.  If we focus on some pet theory, as we look around at the world around us we will see a ton of supposed evidence for our idea.  I wondered how much of philosophy is based on this.  How much of science is based on preconceived notions that we are simply affirming rather than actually producing real supporting evidence?  It's an easy game to play.

I see people doing this with other things.  When people watch Disney's Frozen, for example, and see Elsa as a metaphor for coming out of the closet as a homosexual, I get where they are coming from.  I saw it, too.  After all, that interpretation has meaning to me, my orientation not being public.  Only I also realized that it could be seen as a metaphor for leaving your family and responsibilities in pursuit of personal pleasure.  In fact, whatever your situation, you could probably draw up a good parallel with the story somewhere.  We humans are very good at that.  We look at the clouds and see forms of, I don't know, a bunny riding a wheeled crocodile, or something like that.  I guarantee that the clouds have nothing to do with that, but we humans see the shapes.  We draw parallels.  We make metaphors where none were intended.  And they help us make sense of the world.  But please be aware that they are not necessarily an intrinsic part of reality.  Rather, they are a way in which our brains interpret and communicate the world around us.