I’ve been dancing around some new themes that haven’t entirely come into focus (and might never), but I’ll try to pull some of it together in this post. I apologize for a pattern of putting out half-chewed perspectives, but that’s my meat-brain just doing its best.
I’ve written many lines admonishing human supremacy, bashing brains as limited organs, and cautioning against aggrandizing notions of transcendent consciousness. I’ve praised the genius of Life—all the way “down” to microbes. I’ve called modernity various unflattering things: a brain fart; a cancerous mode of living that has no long-term place on this planet; and most recently linked it to video-game style virtual reality. Let’s see if I can manage some synthesis.
Brain Obsession
First, why have I been fixated on brains lately? Besides obviously being a zombie—having cast off any claim to a soul (yet another brain-fabrication, after all)—consider these facts:
- Our brains endow us with uniquely powerful capabilities beyond those of other species—evidence abounds in the form of cities, spaceflight, and a host of other practices.
- It is easy to twist this undeniably-exceptional quality into one of superiority/supremacy.
- Brain worship pervades our culture; the entirely accurate term “meat-brain” is offensive to many; too few stress the limitations or downsides of brains.
- Brains are where mental models are made, and mental models are guaranteed to be incomplete accounts of the complex world.
- Modernity would not happen without exceptional brains, and since modernity operates like an ecological disease, turbo-brains bear significant responsibility—possibly for a sixth mass extinction.
Of course, I’m not the only one obsessed with brains. Modernity as a whole is too, but from a different, more fawning and self-flattering angle. Cultural teachings offer unwavering praise for our mental capacities, innovative potential, and transcendence above the “dumb” community of life.
The Escape
The almost-inevitable result is that we tend to retreat into the commodious brain. We live in our heads. We take refuge. We construct virtual worlds disconnected from ecological reality, then treat those temporary fictional constructs as the primary reality—including consciousness itself. We appear to be the only animal that does this—at least so fully. As a consequence, we’ve lost touch with 95% of who we are—to the point that we don’t actually know what we’re doing, or how we fit in this world. We’re overthinking it. The answers won’t be manufactured in our disconnected brains: we need to take cues from the (older and wiser) more-than-human world.
Our level of mental awareness itself becomes a problem. We mistake this awareness for “us,” even though it’s just a small component of the whole. We turn our gift of awareness—grossly incomplete as it is—into a soul. While more than negligible, brains do not represent most of our mass, metabolism, or genetic coding. One way to see this is that we share one-third of an amoeba’s genes, or 60% of a banana’s. The brain is not a dominant piece, even though it seems that way to our overwhelmingly-biased brain-dwelling selves.
Not only do we place extreme emphasis on the brain as our defining feature, we also go all-in on mental constructs as defining ourselves. We may identify strongly with a nation, a religion, a profession, and/or even a sports team. We spend enormous amounts of time working in modernity-serving jobs to make money. All these things—nations, religions, money—are fictional and transitory fabrications by and for brains. Yet we mistake these artifices for “the world.”
Our constructs are increasingly detached from ecological reality. But just because ecological connections have been banished from our brains doesn’t mean they’ve gone away. Douglas Adams describes the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast as being so stupid that all you have to do to foil its intent to eat you is cover your eyes. It figures that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you. Putting this flawed logic ahead of direct sensory input is not actually too far from our complete devotion to the flawed logic of modernity: if we can’t see the primacy of ecological relationships, then: poof!—they may as well not exist. If we’ve come this far in an ever-increasing state of ecological ignorance, clearly we’re doing something right and can extend the same approach into a fantastic technological future. What hasn’t failed yet becomes, by definition, fail-proof.
Meanwhile, mounting pressures are poised to bite back, patiently and dispassionately dealing with a species living beyond long-term sustainability. Remember: unsustainable translates to failure, whose judgment is dispensed in the court of ecology.
Other Ways of Knowing
We are so completely held captive by our own brains that the phrase “other ways of knowing” is alien and even nonsensical to us. The assumption is that knowing happens in brains, period. Any other form of “knowing” can’t be, you know, actual knowing, then, can it?
But brains are relative newcomers on the planet—especially the human model. For eons prior, lots of knowing was (and still is) going on. Electrons know they are attracted to protons. Two deuterium atoms fusing to helium at the sun’s center know that 2 + 2 = 4 (they get it right every single time, and it matters). But more to the point, Life knows how to operate, and perform feats that absolutely elude and baffle our brains. The community of life has other ways of knowing how to live that are time-tested and powerfully successful (i.e., sustainable). In fact, we’re the ones who are confused about how to live—because we have developed a staggering over-reliance on brains that are not constrained to run on an ecologically-wise operating system.
We dismiss other animals as dumb. Plants are even worse than dumb: mere vegetables! Because their ways of knowing aren’t cerebrally-based, our biased attitude is to discount them. A dumb moth is helplessly attracted to the porch light. A deer might stand transfixed in a road staring at an oncoming car’s headlights. While on lights, a sea turtle hatchling might mistake a streetlight for the moonlit ocean, and head the wrong way to its premature death. A bird might make its last flight straight into a window at full speed. A wide variety of animals fall victim to our traps: crabs, fish, mice, rabbits, and more. Not a single one is smart enough to use money or legally own property (though I’d call that genius). It’s easy to make fun when animals fail to “get with our program.”
Note that these examples introduce novel elements outside of an animal’s ecological (evolved) context. Within their context, they are absolute geniuses! Let’s try playing the reverse game: putting us outside our context and seeing how we like it.
To a bat, it’s hilarious that you could walk face-first into a brick wall in the dark. How utterly dumb! To a penguin, it’s inconceivable that you’d be too dense to pick out your own child among a wailing crowd of thousands simply by their cries. To a fish, not only are you capable of drowning in water of almost any depth, but you are oblivious to electrical impulses from the movements of predatory fish around you. To a dog, the fact that you can’t smell your way home makes you a total bonehead. Birds note that you’re so directionally-challenged that you are prone to walking in circles in woods or a fog—ignorant of the magnetic field that pervades their awareness. To an amoeba, your lack of ability to perceive chemical gradients is unthinkably insane. To a tree, it’s clear you don’t know the first thing about when its safe this year to put out leaf buds, or how to negotiate the delicacies of nutrient exchange with a mycorrhizal network. These plants and animals know a boatload of tricks, about which we haven’t the foggiest clue. The proof is in the pudding.
You see, brain-thought is only one of many ways to be clever and amazing. But it’s the one to which we assign primary—or even sole—value. Is it a coincidence that we elevate the feature at which we excel? We shamelessly toot our own horn, and then add insult to injury by using this feature that sets us a bit apart to amplify our apart-ness—unhelpfully. It’s the billionaire’s kid incapable of having a conversation without reminding you how much money they have and what that allows them to do. It’s no way to make the kind of friends that are worth having.
The examples above touch on “other ways of knowing.” Brains actually often get in the way of these more reliable, instinctual behaviors. But such instincts are not absent for us. We don’t learn to chew, swallow, walk, run, smile, laugh, or love by careful instruction. One window into this is when someone speaks of doing something “from the heart,” they’re really saying: “by means other than cerebral.” All life possesses deep wisdom in many forms, down to the molecular level—time-tested to survive as amazing beings.
Breaking Captivity
I think the secret to escaping our cerebral escapism is to appreciate that brains are just one imperfect tool, and just one aspect of who we are. We can be grateful to have impressively-versatile headpieces, but also be aware of their limitations and—more importantly—their collateral dangers.
Just as an animal with razor-sharp teeth knows to be careful not to harm itself in grooming, or a hummingbird knows not to get stuck like a dart, or well-armed predators know to hold back during play, we might recognize our brains as lethal weapons capable of inflicting harm to ourselves and to the whole community of life, unwittingly. Without a deliberate check, our brains can turn us into a rogue species (modernity as a case in point).
Rather than retreating into the world of brains and their fancy constructs—responsible for initiating a sixth mass extinction that would wipe us out, too—we ought to break free of their grip. We need to recognize the artificial elements they create that put us out of context. Do we prioritize nation, money, religion, and other constructs? Or do we prioritize Life itself, and the ecological whole of which we are a lucky minority member? What do we fight for? Futile preservation of fictions (nations, money) or the community of life (ultimately the winning team)? This is a present concern right now as the U.S. government reels from an auto-immune attack on its own body. Is preservation of a destructive fantasy justified?
Most are satisfied living in their virtual realities—fighting to maintain transitory and harmful fabrications. Those are the invisible bars of our cage, as Daniel Quinn put it. To break free, we have to realize that it’s a stunt; a sham; a fiction; a cancer that has no lasting place. It comes out of our brains, which can be very wrong about how the world works—initialized in ignorance for having missed billions of years of painstaking preparation. I’m not saying we can drop modernity overnight. It will take generations, but ours can start the journey and pass the baton to those who follow.
What’s real, lasting, and will cradle us into the future if we don’t thwart it are biophysical realities, ecological interrelationships vetted by evolution, and community at many levels—including family, locals, and the more-than-human world.
Postscript
Distrustful as I am of brain-products, I find myself internally reacting to ideas, concepts, proposals, or counter-arguments with something like “Oh yeah? Did that come out of your brain?” Aware of the “pot calling the kettle black” phenomenon, I might offer the following distinction or asymmetry. Yes, I also am availing myself of a brain, but—unusually—to advocate distrust of its products and looking beyond human mental constructions for guidance: physics, ecology, the community of life, etc. I find myself on familiar ground as a physicist: not fabricating the rules, but asking nature what rules it obeys, then being a powerless mouthpiece. This case is little different. It’s less about rank speculation and conjuring fancy feats of cognition than it is about listening carefully and downplaying mental constructs. Less mansplaining and more openness to the world beyond the brain—which turns out to be the vast majority of the universe. It’s about humility, and giving up the self-appointed title as masters of the planet.
Views: 2550
I think writing stuff like this is where one ends up when they live long enough to see their predictions proven wrong. Since the economy isn't collapsing and living standards aren't falling due to a dependence on fossil fuels we end up with "well, human thought isn't the ultimate measure of reality, man?"
Patience. My signature "prediction" is that growth fails within a few centuries on thermodynamic grounds. Or maybe more recently that global population could peak prior to 2050. Limits to Growth models warned of collapse potential mid-to-late century (80+ years out from model). None of this is yet in the rear-view mirror. The decade I've been writing is FAR too short to demonstrate failure. This will be a slow process at an individual scale, and plenty of people will say we could not have seen it coming. I'm now trying to understand the larger phenomenon and its contributing factors at the widest scales.
Economic growth stops when we hit peak oil. Then it starts to contract. Slowly at first but always accelerating till it bottoms out.
If peak oil has been reached, as some suggest, we are living in the "slack water between the tides".
Whether you believe or not that we have reached peak oil. One day we will reach it. Oil is finite and there isn't an alternative out there.
I really appreciate this post! It was clear, helpful, and well-explained. Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge.
…brains are at the leading edge of evolution aren’t they? They’ve been billions of years in the making and aren’t science and mathematics products of brains?
Science and math existed before humans; we just learned to listen and report. The universe followed science and math every attosecond for billions of years prior. Brains are one front on evolution's push, out of countless fronts. Anthropocentric to make brains *the* leading edge, as if we're the pinnacle of evolution and what it's driving toward. Check back in 500 million years and our lineage may be long forgotten, in favor of non-cerebral life.
Science is a methodology, how can it have existed prior to to our conception of undertaking an objective investigation of nature…which is nature looking at itself objectively…human hubris is nature’s hubris, for all our blindness and shortcomings, we aren’t separate from or outside of nature…
Yes: we are part of nature, but latecomers who are responsible for a vanishingly small portion of what exists. The sun existed before us, executing the processes we've witnessed and described. Fusion existed before we named it. Math worked before the first neurons formed. I am not content to restrict the words math and science to the narrow sliver we've named. It's like saying America wasn't a real place until a European flag was planted. But I suppose I can't stop others from using the narrow, anthropocentric form.
It’s probably a semantic difference…I don’t doubt that the processes at work in our astonishing universe can be described by mathematics, I’m just not sure they are mathematical.
But what about all the other things that can’t be described mathematically, like the experience of being in love, or what it’s like to smell a flower…
Meat brains are likely incapable of piecing together how love is a complex emergent result of multi-layer selective influence on arrangements of richly-interacting atoms following nothing more than the mathematical laws of physics. But that's okay. Most things in the universe get on just fine without neural approval or comprehension, yet are true all the same. The "can't be described" is then exposing unsurprising/necessary cognitive limits, rather than a fundamental truth. Truth does not originate in brains, but they sometimes are able to catch glimmers of it in cases that are simple enough to track.
As Antonio Damasio notes, it is only in the latest 100 years that we have come to some understanding of wtf is going on inside ourselves. And the latest 20 years have added significantly to that understanding. Yet we have 1000s of years of guessing about how things work, and 1000s of "truths" about how things work that we are only now unraveling. And that unraveling is only mostly clear to an extremely small set of us. Not only that, but there are a few of us, some of whom are actually aware of the unraveling, for whom a more general knowledge of that unraveling is counter productive…that is they get a lot of benefit from the fact that most of us are unaware of, or even hostile to, that unraveling. And as that unraveling continues, the unknowing hordes are going to become increasingly afraid, and hostile, to those who point out to them that their 'world view' is a fiction.
The scientist who points out to the citizen that his notion of his superiority is false, is less likely to be praised than shot.
Thank you for this, Tom. Brilliant as usual. I'm a retired foreign service officer (Department of State), and served in U.S. Embassies in North Africa, the Middle East, the Gulf, and Washington D.C. Prior to the foreign service, I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco. Having lived outside of the U.S. for almost 20 years, but back here now, I'm with you, Tom. On everything. Modernity has lost. Let's hospice it, though, no matter how long it will take. After retiring, I deprogrammed myself and began reading and learning and listening. My heart told me 'No' to the mainstream/western worldview and 'Yes' to the the indigenous worldview, and the community of life. If anyone says differently, just remind them of Abu Ghraib; in my embassy job, I had to defend what happened at Abu Ghraib and pretend that it was normal, just a few bad apples, and that the good old USA was bringing democracy to the Middle East. Now that's some human brain power, ain't it??? P.S.: Gaza indicates lots of human brain power, too.
“We construct virtual worlds disconnected from ecological reality, then treat those temporary fictional constructs as the primary reality….”
This is a nice simple description of neoclassical economics.
The newish field of ecological economics attempts to correct for this.
Agreed. However, EE still attempts to shoehorn reality into an only slightly-more-expansive model. It does not question the artifice of money or market systems as non-ecological constructs failing to integrate into the community of life, vetted by evolution to have a place.
An example of that there was math before the human brain:
https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2022/05/11/fibonacci-and-pinecones/
Math is expressed everywhere in the physical universe! Electromagnetic interactions multiply charges, divide by the square of distance, integrate over time for trajectories, are sensitive to derivatives in forming magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation. Claiming that math is a human creation is the height of human supremacist arrogance. Stunning, yet common.
Math does not have to be processed by neurons to be math.
Maps enable us to move across the world, it doesn’t mean the world is made of maps….
Hi Tom – I'm 90-ish% with you but feel I'm losing the plot at the moment. And that's fine. Agreed that reality is gonna reality – no need for our meat-brains to approve. Also we'd probably agree that ideas are physical – contained in the connections forming in our meat-brains. However, I'm not sure what math means outside of a framework that can appreciate it – but then I only get to experience existence in this one ever evolving form. I suppose it's comforting that we can reasonably guess the universe will continue to evolve in a manner that our models vaguely approximate long after we're gone. I feel like we've gotten to the philosophical puzzle of whether a tree falling in the woods alone makes a sound.
That tree "puzzle" irritated me greatly since childhood. I suppose if not a single other atom, electron, etc. were in the vicinity (thus no air to carry sound, even), one might get away with saying it made no sound experienced by the universe. But the suggestion that sound only happens if human ears are present. Well, it's hard for me to imagine something more self-centered, absurd, or delusional. But I agree the notion that math only exists if humans appreciate it is connected, and similarly outlandish to me, for similar reasons.
I think the point of disagreement isn't that the falling tree triggers a sequence of physical processes which radiates out into the universe. Those processes occur regardless of whether there is a local observer that has evolved mechanisms to detect minute periodic fluid pressure changes. I think it's accurate within our current model/understanding to say that everything changes everything (at least within the event horizon).
Rather to me the puzzle is about the issue of whether the concepts of sound (or math) exist independently of an observer's faculties. There's sound – the physical vibration, and then there's the information encoding that takes place when those vibrations encounter a suitably primed creature/group of atoms. I don't think any meaningful encoding happens to a nearby rock due to the tree fall. I suppose it microscopically wiggles a bit more than usual – and perhaps the odd molecule jiggles loose of its surface. But the concepts: tree, rock, molecule, all the words I'm writing right now, and on and on – they imply an observer with the appropriate faculties to assign a boundaries and categorize and process. Stuff makes sense in entities capable of sense making.
Admittedly, I can only to imagine the scenario from my extremely limited current state of being. I have no physical evidence of an independent soul inhabiting my mind which could proceed to enter the tree (or the rock) and experience the falling tree from their points of view. Humility is awesome.
Okay–thanks for clarifying. The question, to me, is still dangerously close to the sentiment that if it doesn't get processed/encoded by neurons, it doesn't count. It privileges *our* type of atomic arrangement in a grossly biased way as all that really matters. Neural matter comprises 1e-14 of Earth's mass (which is mass necessary for our being), and a far smaller portion of the universe, making wealth disparity (among the top 1%, 0.1%, 0.01%) seem rather mild. Besides rocks, neural encoding also leaves out most biomass, relegating them to irrelevancy. Again, no microbes, fungi, plants then no neurons and no humans. Boundaries and categories are cute, but mask the deeply dependent interconnections: all matter matters.
I'm liking this debate.
My view is that "sound" is the ear/brains "interpretation" of shock waves in air.
Without an ear/brain to convert those airwaves, there is no sound.
Tom,
I think this post goes well with the previous one on virtual worlds. Virtual worlds can be based on the real world or a completely imaginary one. Currently Trump’s support seems to come from folks who inhabit to some degree imaginary worlds. The first are white Christians who inhabit a mix of promised land conquest and the return of Jesus end times. To them there are no real world limits to humanity, only the limits that God imposes and that he can change at any time.
The second are the tech bros whose holy texts include Star Trek, Star Wars and Lord of The Rings. Elon Musk appears to be in this group. The belief is that future technology developments will overcome environmental constraints.
As a means of signaling group identification these imaginary worlds are a powerful meat brain creation that are currently blocking efforts to even acknowledge the possibility of collapse of modernity.
Thanks a lot for your words. There are lots and lots of people who live in virtual worlds e. g. governments even in democratic countries. I have thought of them as living in bubbles but I will from now on say virtual worlds instead.
Gracias por seguir ahí, Tom.
Many thanks Tom for yet another thought provoking post, and it did work for me.
Some time ago a Sunni colleague explained to me the Muslim concept of two kinds of knowledge recognized in Islam: knowledge by acquisition and knowledge by presence. The former is an artifact of our cortex, our ability to express inferred concepts in language and hence abstract and reductionist. The latter covers knowledge that would be in us without having to acquire it; one could say it could all that isn't or cannot be articulated but yet is learned implicitly, akin to machine learning our meat-brain recognizes patterns and forms them into concepts in a latent space. One could also say, that from the cells in our body over the biome in our guts, all is an expression of Life and should know best; perhaps we lost the ability to tap into this source of wisdom.
Hi Tom,
I came to this blog not even a week ago via your previous post on virtual reality on resilience.org. I have read a couple of posts among them those about the limits of science and others I cannot trace back since you connect everything with everything else. Very appealing for someone of the big history community.
I think your dancing around has produced a synthesis that I really appreciate reading. Thanks a lot for your writing and putting it out there to read ad-free. You seem to make an excellent use of your meat-brain. Looking forward to read some more. It makes me think, and it gives me well articulated arguments to hopefully put to good use within the big history community dedicated to „a modern scientific origin story“ (term coined by David Christian). There’s much to like about it, but there’s also much room for improvement. I feel that more acutely than ever after discovering Indigenous worldviews and knowledge just a few weeks ago. That helps me live in the crazy world of human supremacy.
I am based in Germany and politically things are not going well here either, but we have to survive and chip away at human supremacy little by little. Spending time in nature with all-my-relations makes using the meat-brain so much more effective and life-affirming than getting lost in mental worlds confusing virtual with natural reality.
Feel free to edit excess information out or not publish the comment at all – don’t know the rules of the game. It’s more meant to establish contact. Someone like you would be great to have in the big history community.
For someone who claims to not be interested in philosophy, your recent posts are bringing up a lot of philosophical topics. In this one you broach a deep philosophical question: is mathematics discovered or invented? Yours seems to be a strong, Platonist stance—arguing that math and mathematical structures exist independently of human thought and that the universe itself operates according to these principles whether or not they are observed or conceptualized.
There is another perspective. (There’s always another perspective!) While the universe may exhibit patterns and relationships that can be described mathematically, the formal system of mathematics—the symbols, axioms, and proofs we use to express these patterns—is a human construct. The universe does not "do" math; it simply exists and behaves. We impose mathematical frameworks onto it to make sense of it.
A reasonable person could make an argument that what we call "math" is just one of many possible synthetic symbolic systems that could describe reality. Imagine an alien intelligence that perceives the universe differently. It might use a completely different formal system that we wouldn't recognize as math, yet it could still describe the same physical interactions.
What makes math unique is that it is both a discovery (in that it corresponds to real physical principles) and an invention (in that we created the language and structure to express it). Your assertion that calling math a human creation is "supremacist arrogance" is overstating the case. We can still acknowledge that math is a tool that humans developed to understand reality without diminishing the fact that the relationships it reveals may apply universally. It just recognizes that we interpret the universe through the lens of human cognition.
A rose by any other name… It's hard to believe that "number" requires human conventions, or that any alien species would not require the ability to count to follow the math of the cosmos. Addition and subtraction accompany numbers. Multiplication? In more than one dimension, area requires the concept, and area is not a human creation. Yes, our symbolic representation reflects our dialect, but only to communicate deeply true and logical realities that are independent of any symbolic system cast upon it. At least that's my meat-brain interpretation.
I agree it's hard to imagine any alien species wouldn't create its own math – and that our fellow species on this big sphere don't also experience math in their own ways. I suspect the same could be said about language / communication. I'm just not sure if that makes it a "deep truth" – I'd almost posit that math is closer to the ultimate virtual reality – an attempt to simplify reality to make it comprehensible (often to exploit it more effectively). After all – what do we usually do with numbers: categorize, analyze, take the unique and sublime and attach/reduce it to an abstraction: one tree, two trees…
Here's my half-chewed food-for-thought: what all these mind games (ha) boil down to are attempts to find security within the fundamentally shaky framework of civilization based on totalitarian agriculture. People live in their heads trying to worry, invent, plot, plan, pray, calculate, manipulate, manifest their way into insuring a future supply of food (or money), yet that sense of security and integration remains elusive. The next step is placing faith in those who imply they can find clever new ways to cheat the community of life and bowing down at the big brains altar.
"Too few stress the limitations or downsides of brains." It's exhausting, this so-called awareness. I suspect anyone who ends up with a combative/complicated relationship with their mind would love to be freed from the dualistic thinking roller coaster, if we would actually allow that. Escapism into virtual realities and fabrications seems like a great idea at first, just as many addictions start off innocuously enough, not to mention the social benefits of subscribing to constructs like religion or social media or drinking til dawn at the same dive. But keep going down the hole/s, and eventually modernity backfires on you, except now you're to blame – and the prescription is usually more craftily disguised modernity. It never quite worked on me (perhaps because Ishmael was always lurking there in my heart, trying to keep a straight face at the sentimental tropes) but I have to wonder how much less agonizing the whole recovery process would have been if my task had been to 'fall out of love with modernity' rather than 'let go and let God' or whatever.
"Most are satisfied living in their virtual realities." ARE they? Maybe I'm biased from 3 decades of dealing with the American public, and seeing them only get worse while demanding more and more. These virtual realities take an astonishing amount out of the material and nonhuman world. When the fossil-fueled flow of soothing/stimulating inputs stops and people have to begin to face themselves….well, that'll be an interesting day, indeed. I wonder if then people might begin to find the truth about modernity a less bitter bill to swallow? One can hope.
Great comment (you're on a roll)! Fair point about dissatisfaction. Maybe "comfortable" would have been a better choice than "satisfied." Or "scared of alternative, unfamiliar paths…" I don't know how much of this is projection, but I keep feeling like a lot of people know this isn't right, even if unsure as to why. The dream is lost. We no longer believe (en-masse) the stories of what we're aiming for. Disillusionment is, justifiably, on the rise. I felt this in my academic job: we didn't seem to be a community, pulling in the same direction. It seemed fragmented and frenetic, every person for themselves—going through the motions, because that's all we know. Again, could just be projection.
I appreciate all the good food for thought here and having a space to hash out ideas that up til this point have mostly been confined to my journal!
I think both "comfortable" and "scared of other paths" fit the bill. And definitely "going through the motions"! I wonder if facing the grief of confronting the sham, or the possibility that they may never find that security, or they've wasted their life, is too much for people too?
I don't think your take on what going on is projection unless I'm doing the same (which is possible). Most conversations/interactions strike me as mutual announcements about individual striving, but there's something hollow or weary about it. Everyone is worn out, they're pretty damn sure the emperor has no clothes, and they're sick of playing this game but they don't know what else to do or don't have to change. Yet, that is!
I often think of this from another angle. How conceited we are to worship our brain and its products thus thought wholly intentional? When all we can do is observe the world (including the brain) through our brain. The two lenses cancel each other out and we are back to the darkness of the black box; what our brain always will remain for us. The parts we put apart therefore are bound to tell reductionist part stories and the whole will stay a mystery. Personally I think that is wonderful, providing a never-ending source for metaphors and paradoxes to contemplate. All the more reason to stay humble and weary of statements claiming a right of way to some exclusive path to knowing, doing or discovering.
Two thoughts have popped up in my mind.
The brain has its limitations and e. g. math exists without a brain is involved but even though I cannot prove it I feel sure the brain beats AI in more than one way. The brain is a lot more efficient in the need of energy and it uses lot less space. AI can be compared with a mirror.
Do esthetic values also exist without a brain is watching or hearing. The creek right beside where I live had ice surrounding rocks in the creek this morning and there was a rippling sound from the water. I could hardly stop watching since I found it have esthetic values. But can there be esthetic values when no one looks?
Tom or anyone else, it would be very interesting to read your opinion on these aspects of the brain.
I would say that esthetics as humans experience them are confined to humans. We can't know what captivates a bat, but I would be extremely hesitant to assert that bats don't have esthetic sense. I would venture that for humans, patterns that challenge our brains without being overwhelming do the job—but also plenty of neurochemistry is involved (endorphins, dopamine, etc.). An amoeba—without neurons—might find a plate of algae simply delightful, causing a flood of chemical appreciation/recognition within its walls. Best day ever! I don't know.
It's a tougher job to make the case for esthetics beyond Life, and while I'm not sure it's even important/relevant, I'll paint a few examples. An electron is captivated by a proton. Particles within Earth are mutually attracted, and stay because "they like it here." (They have their criteria, however transparent.) Water molecules collect on the outside of an iced drink, expressing an affinity for that location. Not the same, I know, but food for thought.
In the end, I'd be fine calling esthetics as we perceive them to be strictly a matter for brains. But then so what? Other arrangements of matter experience loads of phenomena that brains do not. The problem comes in assigning primary or privileged value to esthetics as we experience them. We can be thankful to experience the sensations without asserting them as a form of superiority or ultimate value.
Our intelligence may define us, just as a crossbill defines a crossbill. But the unique feature that defines the crossbill does not allow the bird to live 'super naturally' outside the 'laws of nature'. Similarly our supposed species defining intelligence does not grant us super natural powers to live outside those same laws. We all know that if we step off the top of a ten story building we will accelerate to the sidewalk which will push back with equal and opposing force, because we understand our intelligence does not exempt us from the 'law'. Yet we think our intelligence exempts us from the 'law' of Life.
An excellent echo of Daniel Quinn (Ishmael)! Yet, this is our delusion: that we have escaped the law, based on the execution of a temporary and woefully unsustainable stunt.
"To a bat, it’s hilarious that you could walk face-first into a brick wall in the dark. How utterly dumb!" Now, that's a good one! btw. Have you heard the marvelous story of one fellow meat-brained speci-men (it is a he), who, after becoming blind, was able to develop echolocation? He could ride a bicycle in an obstacle course using very high-pitched clicking sound for orientation, just like bats do. – Two things come to mind: (1) Do we have to lose at least one sense to realize just what our out meat-brains can and cannot do vis-a-vis other life forms? (2) I would think that the human brain is technically not a meat (as in muscle) but the largest ganglia (there is small one in the heart and a pretty big one in the stomach) or bone marrow. So, you could probably say it is scull marrow?
My criterion was simple: do prey eat it as nutrition? Kidney, liver, eyes are also not muscle, but prized elements. Looking at a definition (which is a terrible place to seek broad truth, BTW), no mention of muscle is made: edible tissue; flesh. Meat-brain has the intended effect.
I'm enjoying the debate on whether maths exists outside of our brains.
I come down on the side that maths is a human/brain construct.
It's one of the forms of patterns that our brains seek out/create to make sense of the crazy, unfathomable, complex cosmos.
If we didn't see the world through patterns then our meatbrains would explode. 🤯. Patterns are a filter to stop us getting information overload.
(Interestingly, can a blind person do quadratic equations or Pythagoras? Do people need the sense of sight in order to learn maths? So much learning is visual. Some basic maths could be learnt by touch or sound, I guess?🤔)
As we can only experience the world through sensory inputs to our meatbrains, we will never know the answer for sure.
I feel the same about the "laws of physics".
Is objective (observed) science even possible, if we can only experience the world through our very subjective meatbrains????
I'm sorry @tmurphy but these questions always end up as philosophical conundrums.🤣🤷
Lots to consider, reinforce, and supplement in your post. Well done. As a first-time commentator, I will limit myself to two remarks.
Back in HS, when choosing what to pursue in college, I intuited a preferred path away from the procedural, methodological, and scientific toward organic, holistic, collective cultural endeavors, specifically music. While the fine arts are a subset of the humanities, my choice then rewarded my efforts in ways I can’t fathom would have been possible in other fields of study and even today serves as a basis for broader inquiry. Perhaps not entirely accurate, I suggest these categories map to Iain McGilchrist’s description of the divided brain as the Master and the Emissary.
Having read John Reader’s Man on Earth (1988) some years ago, I was fascinated to learn how different cultures, given limited local resources well before the advent of globalization, developed unique patterns of habitation and strategies for coping with scarcity. Each demanded solutions to problems of social organization that observed and/or honored ecological constraints in particular. International commerce and shipping erases many of those limitations — at least temporarily — such that they don’t even register on enthusiastic members of commodity culture. Just order from Amazon!