Close enough!

“For my method of cooking the rice we buy, rice to water ratio of 1:1.75 and high heat for 4 whistles on the pressure cooker”, I lectured my mom on a weekday when the wife was sick and the son woke up early and engaged his gripping systems around my neck ensuring that I couldn’t work in the kitchen till he disengaged them for his toys, namely spoons, saucepans, spatulas etc. While she went about following what I’d just said I started thinking about what I’d said and a thought avalanche was triggered. The ratio I mentioned, the duration of each whistle on the cooker, the quantity of water and rice, are all approximations. The pinch of salt is an approximation too, so is the use of measuring cups, weighing scales etc for baking. Our lives are governed by the brain’s ability to match something close to what it already knows, which is already an average of the observations it has made over the years.

Let me explain why I think that nature is an engineer and not a theoretical sciences person. We are approximations all around. When you see someone from even the exact same angle as you did the last time, you are seeing the pixels differently, the photons aren’t the same either, no matter how hard you try. So your brain is processing information based on what it has seen and matching to the closest probable match. It’s the same with smells, sounds, touch, and taste. Every single plant, tree, flower, seed is different too, even twins are different. Which means that each time we assert that a certain something is indeed a certain something, it’s only a choice of what we feel is the closest thing we know to it.

It’s said that machines have excellent precision and can replicate things over and over, but are they doing exact matches every time? A geometry compass may draw circles, but are the microscopic widths of the pencil markings on the paper the same every single time? Probably not.

The cooker whistled 4 times, and my mom managed to turn it off after a few seconds. “Was it the exact same amount of seconds as the other times I’ve cooked rice perfectly, or was the mouth feel of the morsels the exact same as the last time?”, I wondered, as I ended my train of thought to get ready for work, approximately at the same time as I do every day.