On Progress

Progress involves two complementary components: a desire to grow, survive, proliferate and engineering. The term “engineering” might sound misplaced here, but if defined as another sophisticated and more general word for “tool use,” the spectrum covered by the term will allow itself to settle in the picture. The use of tools changed people. Stone-age, Bronze-age, and Iron-age people improved by changing how they used tools and what they made them out of. “Engineering” can be roughly described as taking raw materials and giving to a desired structure, shape, and form by cultivating some “natural” running processes or flows. This process of using the flow can be sophisticated and might involve a lot of fine-grained subprocesses for control. One example of this process is computer programming, which uses a lot of control constructs like iteration, conditional, and structure for bundling and encapsulation. Another example is a modern supply chain, which can be used for almost anything and has many parts that work together to improve reliability, efficiency, security, and checks to ensure the process line meets the “goals” of the first component.

In general, the first component gives the will or desire to move forward, and the second component creates a path on which to move forward. STEM fields are the second component, driven by logic and reasoning. Almost all of the first components come out as a result of natural evolution: to dominate, to express, to learn, to grow, and the remaining components come from fine-tuning by cultural evolution: for example, to express pain by writing.

These two components must be used together; either will cause problems: the absence of the first component will come out as a directionless, dull, and depthless force, and the lack of the second component will result in mere volatility.

Here are few lines from poem On Reason and Passion by Khalil Gibran, that captures the essence:

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;
And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.