The origins of thought
A journey of thought into thought
Galton‘s bean machine
Anti-prologue: The grand human illusion
People in the beginning were
no more intelligent
than the other creatures. At this stage, there wasno meaning of
a notion such as ‗
divine entity
,‘
and every aspect of human activity was focusedon mere survival, even if there had already existed some idea of
a ‗super
-
natural world,‘ with
respect to nature and the stars. It was then that the instinctive, unconscious brain gave its place tothe moral, logical brain.What was the cause of this shift? Some would say that it had to do with purely random processesof evolution. Some others would attribute it to
some sort of divine intervention. I‘d rather say
that, according to the
anthropic principle
, the appearance of intelligent life at some stage in theuniverse was somewhat programmed from the beginning. However, one way or the other, allthese assumptions fall into the category of the moral-logical brain- as it is important we realizethat
logic is part of ethics
, and vice versa.
Why are meaning and cause so important for us (even within the strict context of survival)? Is it just because of our mortal nature so that we all need an ethical-metaphysical basis to rely on?The world of miracles mainly belongs to the gods, so that cause and meaning seem to transcendthe sphere of our everyday-material world. But again this is just the interpretation of our moralmind, suggesting or even imposing on nature what she
should
be and how she should behave. Isthere another way that we may prove or, better,
agree
that human morality corresponds to somekind of universal ethics? Not only morality but also the other fundamental questions of our being- such as those of the
type: ―
Where do we
come from?‖ or ―how did the universe beg
i
n?‖ or ―is individual existence preserved after death?‖
- may be considered only according to a generalized notion of
‗
correspondence
principle
,‘ or principle of analogy. In simple words, our thoughts, our beliefs
and our sentiments or feelings should
correspond
(or be analogous) to
nature‘s respective
properties. I
f they didn‘t then we would be
like
‗castaways,‘
with respect not only to any ethicaland logical validity but, literally, we would seem to live outside nature and the universe. But thefact that, one way or the other, we are part of this world, forms, if not a proof by itself, at least aconfirmation that what takes place in the world, also takes place in ourselves.According to this realization, a complete understanding of the world may seem not impossible,even if it may be proved very difficult and effort consuming to be achieved- even if it would takean
infinity
to be accomplished. It teaches us that if we grasp the
totality
of the world, if weconsider ourselves as parts of a larger whole which consists of mutually related parts, we mayunderstand the meaning of life and of the universe at the largest scale and highest level.But what about the smallest parts? Would it
be enough to divide, let‘s
say, wholeness, into adozen different, fundamental blocks of matter, and accordingly build a theory of the universe, based on the interactions between the fundamental entities? I guess that this is not enough. The
indivisibility
of natural processes, as implied by the notion of wholeness itself, prevents us fromdoing so. Even if we tried to reconstruct wholeness, the resulting object would look like areassembled broken glass, not as fabulous as the original, anyway.
One way or the other, the clue is that when we construct a theory about facts, objects, even aboutourselves and reality in general, we have to pay attention
both
to the individual parts we use andto the totality of the final object
. We can‘t do this
simultaneously
, at least not consciously, butfrom time to time we have to consult the general idea in order not to make a mess with the piecesof the puzzle to be solved.There is a final preliminary remark I would like to make here. When we construct a theory aboutreality, that is more than a vague idea about what it might look like, the formal language we usein connection with our methodological procedure is very important. We chose some particular,abstract symbols, and we use them consistently and universally as patterns or modes of the whole process. For example, all poets know that as soon as they start to write,
writing
itself guidesthem in what they intended to write.The same goes for mathematics. Since the time of classical physics, a whole new set of rules andsymbols has been invented in order to express new notions corresponding to new discoveriesabout nature- which according to the new rules also includes ourselves. These symbols still
preserve their algebraic, arithmetical character, although now they seem to ‗act‘ or
‗project
themselves
‘ to other symbols, while this sort of ‗interaction‘ obeys more matrix algebra than
classical addition.Is this new kind of formal reasoning enough to describe nature, or do we need a far more
advanced ‗non additive‘ or ‗non
-commut
ing‘ basic structure of
a mental language in order to better and higher communicate with a more complex reality? An intriguing aspect, which is alsovery comforting, is that, according to the aforementioned principle of analogy, nature evolves
asmuch as
we evolve. But is nature as
we
know it all that nature can be, anywhere and anytime? I believe the answer is yes, and the reason has already been mentioned above- we are parts of nature, even if not the most intelligent ones. But we are getting on, and this progress is parallel toevolution. Now, if intelligence in the universe grew at a faster (or slower) rate than ours, thiswould be irrelevant because even so there would be another species, the more advanced one, toovertake us. So the real problem has to do not only with
our
thought, but also with the fact of
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