Reading, Writing, Thinking: Just Selfish Means of Survival?

The other day I was thinking to myself in one of my many imagined conversations with someone (could be anyone, really; a colleague, the wooden head, my alter ego, whomever or whatever), that the act of reading is an act of creativity, almost brutal in some sense, and, depending on how practiced you are, extremely rewarding if not altogether mentally exhausting—which lead me to consider how all of this (reading, writing, abstract thinking, etc.) could simply be a selfish means of survival for our precarious little neurons.

The little devil (the devil's advocate, as it were) who speaks up in defiance whenever I plead my cases, which is to say make my mental arguments (I need to really watch myself closely these days because sometimes I can be seen almost talking to myself as my lips move while my eyes just sort of waggle off into space without focus), in this case asks me how can reading be a creative act? You just sit there. Well, of course you just sit there, I retort, otherwise you could have a serious accident, say, if you were to try and drive or jog about with book in hand!

But the very act of reading, if you do it well (and I think you can apply this to any sort of work, fiction or non, as long as you avoid crap), requires you to build foundations from all the raw (and perhaps not-so raw) material of your imagination in order for any of the ideas to make sense. As you read you keep building and shaping and rebuilding and reshaping. Maybe you even have to tear some things down, things that you constructed from incorrect assumptions. Perhaps you can liken the idea of this building and constructing of ideas to creating an image of the work's setting, whatever that means. Then, if you consider fiction, or really any work that contains rich characterization, you have to literally create this character, this human being in your mind from only the bits and pieces provided to you by the author. But that's also the reason we read, too. We read to create as we do anything else.

Perhaps books (really language and its eventual persistence, e.g. writing) were somehow a necessary outcome of the evolving human mind. We humans seem to have this need to build, explore, create, etc., almost to the exclusion of anything else, but, biologically and fundamentally, so does life. I mean it moves—it's animated. It seeks and creates for itself a means to continue (back to that fundamental point to all life, survival) as well as recreates in order its kind to perpetuate. Now think neurons in the brain. The fundamental function of neurons is to connect with other neurons (okay, I'm no expert in Neuroscience) via synapses and then to stimulate one another by secreting neurotransmitters. This sort of thing is done in the brain all the time, especially when one's imagination is working and when one learns and works. This is a kind of “survival” of the neuron, or a continuation; an act of creation, if you like, which is to say the forming of a connection where before there was none. It seems to be the neuron's purpose, at any rate.

I was thinking that for some reason our ability to process language (communicate with one another, think symbolically, write, etc.) at such levels beyond the simple, “apparent” reasons for survival (i.e. why didn't we evolve with just enough capacity to survive what we needed to survive?) , is perhaps for more selfish reasons. Perhaps we are what we are simply because we need to be, and for no grander reason than the specific makeup of our human brains, in order for those little neurons to keep connecting as they do, requires us to be this way. Natural selection brought us to a certain point (accidentally?) and now here we are, “conscious” as we are for no other reason than to simply reason, for the sake of reasoning, in order to perpetuate, continue, as with all life, in a purely biological sense.

In my mind I keep seeing these eagerly awaiting, pulsing neurons “wanting” to connect, almost rabid with desire. Imagine that some early human mutations had brains whose neurons made had the ability to make connections so very quickly and efficiently (this is how I imagine a super-intelligent person's brain to be configured, but I have no idea), but that while there was the very real, day to day struggle to survive (forage for food, fight off predators, find shelter, etc.), there was little else for this person's mind to process. Language was still too rudimentary, if it existed at all, and so while common foods might have been known by some associative abstraction (a marking, some primal grunts, etc.), there was nothing to learn, no “symbols” that could be used to associate things in reality with “mental concepts” and so, perhaps, a brain so configured (e.g. genetically predisposed to quickly and efficiently make connections) simply starved (there are cases today, extremely rare, who are born with immeasurably large Iqs, but even with all there is to absorb through books, etc., still go mad because there is no one with whom these people can talk; they are, for all their intelligence, literally mentally handicapped.) Someone born like that back then could go quickly insane; others in the tribe (or whatever you'd call the collective) would probably end up killing the poor guy or abandoning him; this, at least perhaps, before the ideas of the shaman, medicine men, ritual, spirit worlds (in general, repetition, pattern, etc.)

Over time, though, as our stubborn genes persisted and somehow equalized (normalized/found balance), we began to build the foundations (the ideas of repetition, for example, which leads to patterns, or perhaps its the recognition of patterns and repetition that lead to these ideas, were probably key), or scaffolding, to foster such brain chemistry so that our strange “creative,” “intelligent” minds (with their super-fast-connecting neurons) could persist, continue, survive longer than they previously had.

It's interesting how we learn so easily from pattern. I mean, for example, if you play a basic rhythm on some drums and watch how people react, they begin by tapping along with their feet and “counter beating” by, maybe, clapping their hands; i.e. they begin to mimic, repeat, copy, the rhythm. In other words they come to understand it, or learn it (the various new pathways in the brain having been created by newly formed connections between the neurons which now recognize the rhythm as a pattern of sound that now enable one to recall the pattern at the same time as it is being repeated externally on the drums by the performer).

So we hear, we eventually reproduce by playing along and then we can later recall and repeat. Of course one of the most important things to note, too, is that we also “improvise” over or on top of the beat. Which is to say that we create a new kind of pattern that doesn't necessarily deviate too much from the original, but rather complements it, and which is played on top of the learned rhythm. From that point, for some reason, once we know that we can keep the beat or create it ourselves without the need of the external stimulus (the drummer) we not only reproduce the learned beat and improvise on top of the beat, but we come to understand that we can create a whole “new” beat. (I have some questions here regarding whether or not this is actually the case but for now I assume that we can spontaneously create whole new beats (rhythms) from learning to reproduce a rhythm of another kind).

So we have the means now to mimic, improvise and create, and thus our neurons have the means to make all sorts of new connections based on these patterns, learned or synthesized. Back to books and my original ideas that lead me on this ghastly strange tangent. Language, communication, making sounds, persisting language so that it can be passed on (first in the oral traditions of story telling, then in writing, etc.) is merely all a means to keep the selfish neurons connecting and continuing their excitations and their neurotransmissions and we are just along for the ride, whether we like it or not.

And so it was when the first bright mind awoke to a small band of mostly mute, early humans so long ago and cried out in helpless, gurgling spasms for want of something it couldn't possibly yet understand, little could it know, as it was being bludgeoned to death by its dim-witted peers, that its lesser kin were about to pave the way via their genetic material toward its very salvation--eventually.

The Evolution of the Sense of Touch: Questions, Ideas, Etc.

The sense of touch has with it two aspects that I understand… the sense of texture and hardness, and the sense of temperature. Perhaps there are other aspects… pain? I relegate this to both texture/hardness and temperature. Now, what if it were possible to feel only texture and hardness but not to feel temperature. Or what if I could only detect temperature but not feel the texture and hardness of a surface? Are the two interlinked? That is, can I feel one aspect without the other? Note that the same word, feel, is used for both aspects, as is touch. When I feel something very hot I feel a sensation of pain (assuming it were scalding hot). When I feel something particularly sharp, I might feel pain if I cut myself. If I had neither of these aspects of touch, I might certainly have caused severe if not lethal harm to myself as an unwary child. For these aspects seem necessary, and perhaps during the period of the evolution of life itself there were strange mutations of animal that had only one or the other aspect, or perhaps neither, and I would imagine that these did not proliferate through the genome; what you might call nature's failed experiments.

But, does nature, with the exception of some few, grotesque mutations, fail so broadly? Or is there some order in its success, or some careful equilibrium, or balance, to how species mutate and originate within an evolving biosphere? What does it even mean to ask this? What is a balanced, evolving, natural species? Does it require a biosphere that is itself as self-regulating as the earth appears? Or, as with James Lovelock's Gaia, are the two not mutually exclusive? Are the species that inhabit the earth, that evolve within it as vital to the evolution and the balance of the biosphere as the biosphere is to the balance and evolution of the species that inhabit it? Do the species evolve, from one kind of thing to another, because the biosphere itself evolves? Does the biosphere evolve because of the evolution of species? Here I mean both animal and plant (any living thing, for without living things the earth wouldn't be a biosphere). But I am also referring to the delicate balance of biochemicals necessarily for life; for example, the very atoms (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, helium, etc.,) and the complex molecules comprised of these that make up the life-giving air and water that most everything needs to survive and flourish.

Music to a Deaf Man

If I were born deaf, I would never understand sound, or music. I might be able to understand it inasmuch as vibration, for if someone were to strike the strings of a guitar I could see the vibration of the strings and I could place my hand on the wood of the guitar and feel the vibration through the wood as it faded. This would be my only perception of sound and I would know it (and not know it) simply through the sensation of touch. Otherwise music, sound, pitch, volume, sour notes, heavy metal, whatever, would, for me, be all meaningless. It would be senseless for a deaf person to utter the words, inasmuch as he could, “turn up the volume,” for unless he was particularly fond of feeling the vibrations of beat and other sounds at the bottoms of his bare feet resting against a hardwood floor, what would he gain by asking? Perhaps to piss someone off who can hear, I suppose.

Thoughts on Active Reading and the Lure of Insanity

Reading by itself, I don’t think, is sufficient enough to build the vocabulary and expand the mind and the intellect and the mental processes, not even the active reading that Adler recommends in his book on reading. I think it takes not only active reading, but real participation, which is to say, writing and doing. Writing about the thoughts and ideas you’ve read about and doing things that would help you to further understand such ideas. In this writing and doing (this truly interactive form of reading) the vocabulary will increase as will the mind to new ideas, for ideas are all we bags of water and chemicals have to keep us from going insane during our journey from birth to death. Of course sometimes insanity grips the mind and, well, you give in and go with it and suffer until you die, or until the insanity frees its grip from your mind. Of course I wonder, is insanity all that bad? Would it not be wonderful to go completely mad and be put away in some comfortable white room; away from society, people, burdens, duties, taxes, relationships, marriage, holidays, parties, gift buying, gift wrapping, gift giving, forced courtesy and forced smiles? I sometimes think that this would be fine for a little while. Now, how does one make himself mad?

Philosophy of Mind and Neuronal Configurations

I’ve been reading more about the Philosophy of Mind. Although its odd that I cannot discuss it here. I am getting from it now that like a computer, the processing of language or symbols, etc., cannot be observed in the brain, but through brain chemistry and our neural network of connected neurons (or like the memory in a computer and its processor), we can process language and symbols. What was interesting was to read before that about how some think that the mind is not in the brain simply because, if you observe, for example, someone’s face, or a coffee cup, you cannot observe in the brain the face or the coffee cup. Unfortunately I keep reading little bits at a time and haven’t been reading very steady and so a lot of the terminology kind of left my mind, brain, whatever.

What I tend to think is that if you could find a way to somehow examine the neurons and their configuration after you’ve learned something, like a new word, that you could almost interpret the word learned as a pattern somewhere in that gray mass. I don’t mean that you’d see some neurons, like drunken idiots at a football game each display a letter painted on their bare chests spelling out the name of their team, but rather if you could understand how the neurons made the connections to retain the memories you might be able to see within the configuration a pattern that indicates the actual memory. Yes, this is probably ridiculous, but if you look at artificial neural networks, you could probably within a trained network, especially if you understand how it represents the patterns that it can match, discern what kinds of patterns it is recognizing, such as the letter A, or faces, or whatever.

What is Truth

Proposition:

"George W. Bush is president of the United States of America."

This is a statement of truth, but is it not a relative truth? That is, we can believe that in 10 years, for instance, he will not be the President of the United States of America. So now, on this day that I am writing these words this statement is expressing a truth. Or is it?

I wonder if there are other men named George W. Bush. If so, is the above statement true? Would it not make more sense, and would it express ‘real’ truth, if the statement above were worded as such:

"There is a man named George W. Bush who is as of Saturday, August 23, 2003 A.D., the President of the United States of America."

By qualifying that there is a man whose name is George W. Bush, we are stating a truth, but of course we aren’t necessarily stating which George W. Bush. Also by giving the current date in history, A. D., we are establishing another truth. Not only about the man who is president, but also the fact that he is president of what this large area of land in which I and he both inhabit is called the United States of America, which provides no information, however, about how many states there are, but that there are at least two.

The date, however, only expresses truth about this fact (proposition) that a man is the president of some place called the United States of America. What if far in the future the calendar changes and our calendar becomes indecipherable. At least in as much as how it relates in time to the calendar of the far future. Then what can be said is that their was a ‘person,’ perhaps, named George W. Bush who ‘was’ the President (whatever that means) of something called the United States of America. Is then the statement true? What if in the far future the United States of America was, to those ‘people’, nothing more than a myth like Atlantis. To many, then, who don’t believe in the United States of America, any statement or proposition concerning it would be false, with the exception of stating that it is false to make any proposition about the United States of America.

Yet in fact it will have existed in the future’s past, as it now exists. Yet to name a body of land doesn’t necessarily make it so. Before North America was discovered by the Europeans, the land probably only had names as it had been given by the natives who lived in it. My ancestors came along, settled here, named things, created states, united them even through a civil war, etc.

Of course you might say that the roads, which were creations, and which were given names, are fundamental truths about the road. Except that counties, cities, etc., can choose to rename roads and renumber the houses that reside in front of the roads. What truths can we speak about regarding roads and dwellings? We can speak about their material and their function. But, if truths are eternal, then nothing really can be true, for everything will eventually decay as matter does, perhaps a hundred billion years hence, and then what was true can no longer be true.

Still, the a priori truths about which philosophers speak, for example 1 + 1 = 2 or given three trees in a row of differing heights you know by looking and not even having to give language to, that one tree is shorter than another tree which is shorter than the third (e.g. 1 < 2 < 3).

I am wondering if one day along time from now there are no longer sentient beings in the universe, e.g. those that care that 1 + 1 = 2, will 1 + 1 = 2 still hold true? Could it be said, and probably not, that the only time any proposition can ever be true is if there is someone, some sentient being, who believes that it is true? And is belief the only way we can assert truth or can it be known absolutely, meaning to believe or not believe in the truth of some proposition is senseless since it is true.

On Epistemology

I've recently been studying Epistemology (the theory of knowledge and how we obtain it) by reading a book entitled "Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge," by Robert Audi. This book is one in the Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy series. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested, but be warned, although it claims to be an introduction, it's quite dense and slow going, although not because it was written poorly, but rather because the topic itself is a dense topic, yet Audi does a fine job, in my opinion, in presenting it.

Of course the book is an introduction to the topic of epistemology, and I am not a philosopher or a student of philsophy, and so for someone who is well-read in Philosophy and epistemology specifically, this book might be all too familiar and, perhaps, an easy read--which isn't to say that it shouldn't be read. But still, although I don't know the subject well, I find this introduction fascinating and the concepts, as Audi explains them, certainly not simple, but whether because the subject just fascinates me or because Audi's writing and his orginazation of the topics is excellent (and here I think it's probably both), I am learning about and understanding these concepts moreso than with any other book or paper that I've read on the topic.