Recognition

I've been feeling kind of down lately, and lacking the motivation and energy to do much.  When I go through periods like this I usually end up retreating into myself and returning to places of comfort.  I rewatch old TV shows and binge seasons at a time of shows I've seen many times over.  Tonight was the turn of Sherlock, in this case season 4.  I got to the end of the season to the final episode aptly titled "The Final Problem" and watching the episode a few ideas started passing through my mind.

Spoiler alert, if you haven't seen the episode I will be discussing some of it below so don't read on if you don't wish to know more.

One of the tropes throughout the Sherlock series is the remarkable ability that the titular character possesses, namely his deductive reasoning.  His brother Mycroft has also been shown to possess the same capability however not to the same extent as Sherlock, or at least not in terms of rawness and volatility.  We do however learn through the course of this episode that Sherlock has a sister named Eurus and it also becomes quickly apparent that not only does she possess the same ability, but hers is unbridled.  She possesses a level of genius that as Mycroft puts it, is "era defining" genius. 

What I find fascinating is the idea that for Eurus this translates into a volatility and instability that puts anyone and everyone around her at risk.  The fascinating concept that goes unexplored in this episode is the concept of recognition.  That is to say the ability for her ability to be recognised and quantified.  Mycroft mentions that all three siblings had been tested and graded many times but I have to wonder, in the real world, in reality, would that actually happen?

In the UK most schools have methods of assessing children and splitting them into streams based on their ability.  However most of these methods are standardized, they follow national cirrucula defined by central or devolved administrations, and in some cases defined by examining bodies are superfluous to mainstream education beyond what is required by law.  These are all inflexible however and treat every candidate the same way and makes the same assumptions.  There is a meme in which a group of animals stand before a tree with a caption that reads to the effect of: "So you are all treated equally you must all climb that tree" - the obvious message being that several animals depicted are physically incapable of climbing the tree but their intelligence is being defined by whether or not they can complete this task.

Go beyond government controlled education and venture into independent organisations such as MENSA the High IQ society, and surprisingly the same inadequacies do exist.  Whilst the tests MENSA gives its applicants do at least attempt to make the subject matter more abstract, removing prior knowledge of the tests as possible bias, they still treat all applicants the same way.  Further to this, the questions asked, test only what has been agreed within MENSA would be indicators of a High IQ and demonstrate heightened intelligence.  The problem with that is by definition this is subjective not objective - indeed it can be argued to be factual as it is not an individual opinion expressed however at its core it remains subjective, the fact it has been agreed upon as a collective does not change that fact. 

Ultimately Eurus ended up imprisoned in Sherrinford a facility built on an island to serve as a maximum security prison - that in and of itself is another trope that is rather tired and cliché but let's leave criticism of the show itself aside for now.  The fact Eurus ended up imprisoned in this way demonstrates she possesses something society as a whole does not know how to handle - or more importantly control.  She did do quite a few things prior to her imprisonment that warranted incarceration, so the debate here doesn't centre around whether she deserved to be locked up, but rather on the element of isolation and the extremity of the measures used.

The question I'd like to ask you to contemplate is simply, how would we recognise a real life "era defining" genius?  Would we even be able to recognise them at all or would we consider them to be someone unhinged for behaving and seeing the world in a way they is dislocated and fractured so far from what society considers to be normal?  I like movies that play on this concept, X-Men is another franchise that touches on these concepts and depicts a world where society as a whole doesn't know or understand how to respond to a minority that doesn't conform to anything they have seen before - and in the case of Eurus in Sherlock this being a minority of one.

Would we recognise genius if we saw it?

It's also easy to say that a true genius would herald breakthroughs of all sorts in many fields of study but to that I simply say, what if they don't care?  What if they have a mind that is truly fantastical but they have no interest at all in any of those fields?