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Puzzle Solving
People like to solve puzzles. It is not surprising. Living itself can be quite a puzzle. We have to learn how to do things. We can do some things instinctively, like breathing, but in the main we have to sort out a rather complex way of living in a very complex world.
It has always been thus. Ancient people had to figure out how to find food, safe shelter, and keep the fire alight. They had to find ways of protecting their families and ways of protecting their communities. There were many dangers and in this situation ancient people found that living was really no more a series of puzzles which had to be solved, knowing that at the end of their lives there was one final insoluble puzzle.
Today we still have to solve puzzles and it seems there are many different solutions. The dangers we face are different but just as real as the dangers faced by ancient people.
Perhaps our history of puzzle solving means that we look for puzzles where none exist, or where the solutions are known but rejected. When I try to fill in a cross word I always have a nagging fear that the simple solution to a clue may not be the right solution; there may be another word, so obscure but important, that will fill the spaces and I fear that I simply do not know enough to find it.
The puzzles we have to solve are subtly different these days. History does repeat itself but with variations which can be critical and which can make a critical difference to the outcome. Today there is a puzzle which will be solved by tomorrow – the result of the Presidential election, where each candidate is using every strategy he can think of to solve the puzzle of how he can win the election. There will probably be no difference to America or to the world whether Mr Obama wins or whether Mr Romney wins.
Today there are scientific puzzles that must be solved. Many are trying to solve the puzzle of climate change. All the clues are there, we can see and experience them all the time. We can see that the USA has suffered from the greatest storm it has known on the east coast, that the Arctic is losing ice cover year after year, that glaciers are retreating and drought is afflicting many places. We collect data to attempt to make sense of the puzzle and find the solution, but some say there is no puzzle at all, the climate is simply doing what it has always done and the puzzle is not why the climate is changing but why some say that the climate is changing as a result of human activities.
There are also social puzzles that need solving. We need to try to understand why crime exists and why some particular heinous crimes take place. Some think the reason lies in the nature of some humans, and others think the reasons lie in the nature of what they perceive to be an unfair society. We examine the information and often cannot agree on whether crime is increasing or decreasing, never mind being able to discover a solution to the problem of crime. Like understanding climate change, it is easier to argue that there is no puzzle to be solved, but simply this is how life is and we must work with it.
There are international puzzles to be solved; wars still afflict humanity. At one time we hoped that the world had lost its taste for war, but having had that hope shattered by conflict after conflict, very few of which solve any problems, we find that war, with its lieutenants greed and control, still ravages many folk who simply want no more than to be left to live the puzzles of their lives in peace.
So when you greet a new born babe into the world, with the hope of its innocence abounding, and you get a feeling of the experiences that the baby will go through, think of it in terms of puzzle solving and understand that it is our duty to solve every puzzle we can find, if we can, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of every human who will be born after we ourselves fail in the solution of that final and awesome puzzle.
Filed under: climate change, global warming Tagged: climate, climate change, crime, insoluble puzzles, puzzle solving, puzzles, science, society, war 
2012-11-06 12:40:11
Source: http://robertkyriakides.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/puzzle-solving/
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