I know waves. I studied them in school, I read the books and worked the problems. I know all about frequency and wavelength, amplitude and phase, polarity and coherence. I’ve studied harmonics and beats and interference, diffraction, reflection and refraction, spectra and particle duality. I can talk all day about simple harmonic motion, trigonometric functions, thetas and omegas, radians and angular momentum. I am intimate with standing waves, absorption and scattering.

So why can’t I surf? I know, I’ve tried it, I can’t even stand up on the board. Oh sure, I guess I could probably learn the basics, if I took the trouble and if I had a knowledgeable and very patient teacher. But the point is, even if I did become an expert wave rider, it would have nothing whatsoever to do with all that stuff I talked about in the first paragraph. My alleged knowledge of wave mechanics is absolutely useless when dealing with the practical problems of surfing.

The average surfer doesn’t seam to rely particularly on the physics and mathematics of wave motion. Hell, I’ve watched sea lions surfing, they don’t know the math either and they are damned good at it. Like their human counterparts, marine mammals seem to have worked out an alternate
conceptual vocabulary, a different symbolic framework to understand wave motion, and to help integrate those incredibly complex external stimuli with the internal physiological responses required to exploit those forces. Seals and surfers can sense the wave, analyze those perceptions into an internal model of the reality involved and, in real time, generate the appropriate motor responses and feedback loops. Think about it, what would it take to program the software and integrate them to the sensors and servos to allow a vehicle to surf the waves with the same ease as a porpoise–or a pretty California girl in a finely-fitted and very shapely wet suit?

Clearly, (and this is the point I’m trying to make here), there are very different ways of modelling and understanding the external world, of representing its complexity and variety so it can be manipulated and utilized by sentient creatures. These alternatives may be very different, but they can be optimized for the task involved, the application. The surfer (and the seal) may react instinctively, reflexively, but we also know the surfer has a highly developed nomenclature that he can use to communicate with other surfers. His symbolic language has given names to the parts of the wave (at least, those that matter to him), and the myriad relationships and geometic relations required to ride a particular set of conditions correctly, or to describe an unusual or extraordinary situation or incident. The surfer lingo isn’t just a cutesy form of insider slang, it transmits real and valuable information, just like my thetas and sine waves do. And the seals, of course, don’t even have that.

There IS an external reality, but as I have often (and perhaps annoyingly) tried to point out, it can be modelled and described in many different ways. The surfer and the seal may not know the math, but their knowledge of the wave is just as valid, just as legitimate, as mine. More so, in fact. They routinely deal with physical phenomena, like wave perturbation, bottom drag effects, turbulence and so on which my mathematical knowledge handle only very clumsily if at all.

There is indeed an external reality, and thinking beings devise internal conceptual structures and models, sometimes even mutually contradictory ones, to effectively deal with that reality. We create our external world, perhaps not perfectly, and perhaps not all the time, but we do so successfully, using only very limited perceptual and anlytical tools to do so. We create the world around us, it is as much a product of our own minds as it is of some background set of abstract, fundamental principles magically coded into the structure of space-time. We rely on conceptual paradigms which are rightly open to criticism; philosophy, religion, ideology, science, but we also rely, as does the surfer, on alternate realities of our own creation, and they are perfectly valid and legitimate.

You don’t need to know Newtonian mechanics to pitch a no-hitter. But you do need to know something.