An old man, close to his 100th birthday, was asked what he thought are the greatest mysteries in the world that are likely to remain unknowable forever. "There are just two", he said. Then raising one frail hand he pointed to the sky and added, "What's out there", and slowly he moved his hand and pointing to his head, "and what's in here". Then, "Of the two, the most unknowable is the one we all have here", pressing his finger firmly to his head once more.
To debate which one is more unknowable than the other would, of course, be an exercise in futility. It would be like two kids outdoing each other to come up with the largest number they can think of. One kid, exasperated and running out of patience, finally said, "infinity". The other kid countered with, "infinity plus one", thus restarting the bidding argument all over again. Of course, unknowable is undefinable in such a manner that infinity plus any number or infinity minus any number is still infinity. Analogously, one bottomless pit cannot be deeper than another bottomless pit. You can now stop rolling your eyes, grab and hold on to the spinning head and read on.
Choosing between what's out there and what's in here, arguing for the old man, can we say that the final frontier then is not space as Capt. Kirk of Star Trek would have us believe? We can't take the word of the most ardent cosmologists either. That might seem like a most uninhibited thing to say when one must consider the vastness of the universe - as in a previous musing, "700 Million Trillion".
To debate which one is more unknowable than the other would, of course, be an exercise in futility. It would be like two kids outdoing each other to come up with the largest number they can think of. One kid, exasperated and running out of patience, finally said, "infinity". The other kid countered with, "infinity plus one", thus restarting the bidding argument all over again. Of course, unknowable is undefinable in such a manner that infinity plus any number or infinity minus any number is still infinity. Analogously, one bottomless pit cannot be deeper than another bottomless pit. You can now stop rolling your eyes, grab and hold on to the spinning head and read on.
Choosing between what's out there and what's in here, arguing for the old man, can we say that the final frontier then is not space as Capt. Kirk of Star Trek would have us believe? We can't take the word of the most ardent cosmologists either. That might seem like a most uninhibited thing to say when one must consider the vastness of the universe - as in a previous musing, "700 Million Trillion".
Briefly and we can move on to argue for the old man. Lake Tanganyika is the entire universe of an amoeba. A single bacterium at one edge will think - if bacteria have thoughts at all - that the opposite edge and everything in between is its final frontier. The bacterium will behold that it is impossible for it to get to the other edge. Likewise, our world is this earth that is merely the size of a dust particle from the context of the entire Milky Way Galaxy around which our solar system revolves. Our sun is lost in the glare - if viewed from another galaxy like the Andromeda, and vice-versa a single star there would be indistinguishable to us from here. We will likewise behold that considering that there could be as many as two trillion Milky Way or Andromeda galaxies out there, we are in a position no different from that of the bacterium.
Yes, we will try to argue for the old man even if only for this and only this reason. If we are not here to behold it, to ponder it, to be awed by it, what is the universe? The observable universe is what it is because we are here to observe it. That is according to the anthropocentric principle which, put another way, says that if it were not for us to be aware of it, the universe does not have any meaning at all. And there lies the conundrum. Let's hold that thought.
"The human mind will not be confined to any limits". Yes, we will try to argue for the old man even if only for this and only this reason. If we are not here to behold it, to ponder it, to be awed by it, what is the universe? The observable universe is what it is because we are here to observe it. That is according to the anthropocentric principle which, put another way, says that if it were not for us to be aware of it, the universe does not have any meaning at all. And there lies the conundrum. Let's hold that thought.
----- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The mind has in its employ a brain that is capable of making a number of possible connections that exceeds the number of atoms in the entire universe.
"The human brain has a huge number of synapses. Each of the 10 to the 11th power (one hundred billion) neurons has on average 7,000 synaptic connections to other neurons. It has been estimated that the brain of a three-year-old child has about 10 to the 15th power synapses (1 quadrillion).
The number of possible connections and permutations are maddeningly staggering. Behold the brain, behold the mind.
An IBM computer named Deep Blue beat a reigning world chess champion in 1997, besting chess Grand Master Gary Kasparov. What is not widely known is that the computer was not some laptop sitting in front of its opponent. Its "brain" was an array of several small main frame computers next door in a temperature-controlled room and a support staff of several humans. Additionally, Deep Blue had no idea what it felt like to win. A year earlier, in 1996, Kasparov actually beat it. But did it care? No. Its handlers did, so they went back to the drawing board and pump up more computing power into it. Still Deep Blue cared less when it won the following year. It was the people behind it that celebrated afterwards. Deep Blue merely went into deep sleep once it was unplugged. I used to play chess a lot (minor club level) while in college so I take small delight from knowing that Deep Blue was incapable of the ecstasy from victory over a human.
That is not the only difference between the human mind and a mindless computer, despite the fact that we sometimes treat it like it has a mind. We cuss at it, we shower it with praise when it found us a cheap air fare, a great deal on hotels, a bargain gizmo or, yes, another computer. Actually, it was not even slightly heart broken when we used it to find a newer version of it. And cheaper. With more power. Imagine that. I am using a computer to criticize its own kind but it doesn't care.
Now let's talk about what's in here (I am pointing to my head).
Books, research papers, articles, symposiums, conventions - over a long history of attempts by psychiatrists, anthropologists, neurosurgeons, etc. - have come short of understanding the human mind. What we lack in physical abilities compared to much stronger, faster, more agile species we more than make up for with a powerful brain. However, brain power was not all there was to make us a superior creature. Pure intelligence alone would have taken us only so far. It gave us the ability to fashion tools and weapons and understanding climate and seasons that allowed us to tame the environment that led to settling down in place - a pivotal switch from hunting and gathering to farming that led to agriculture. Agriculture gave us permanent societies which was the key to the development of civilization. There was something more beyond brain power.
Civilization is what makes us uniquely "human". Ants and termite colonies are superbly unparalleled by any human societies when it came to effective organization, division of labor, chain of command, and dogged determination to survive. These micro-creatures outlived the dinosaurs and innumerable species over millions of years but they are incapable of developing a civilization. Here we are, barely a hundred thousand year old species, although civilization is believed to have begun just a mere 8,000 years ago. How did we separate ourselves from the rest of the living things?
Last September Scientific American dedicated a special issue: "The Science of Being Human". Part 1 was "Decoding the Puzzle of Human Consciousness - The Hardest Problem". Part 2 was "How We Learned to put Our Fate in one Another's Hands - The Origins of Morality".
If there is only one thing to say about everything that was written there, it is this: The jury is still out. As it had been for centuries since the time we began to think and ponder the answers to all that are related to the questions about the human mind. There were a lot of answers on the physiology of the brain but a lot more were actually conjectures, guesses, and theories sprinkled over a platter much too diluted by more questions.
Is consciousness an illusion created by the brain? What sets the mind apart from the physical brain?
This is what we know. Or, at least what we think we know. We have a powerful mind generally accepted as the seat of human emotions, the cradle of morality, the creator and admirer of the arts, the source of empathy, altruism and the flint stone of language and inventions, and many more that sets us apart from all the other creatures of the earth.
Here is something to tickle your mind which, just to remind the reader, is the aim of much of the musings I write here - "to ponder with me some of the un-ponderable and the whimsical and lightly thought provoking issues" that you may not have thought about.
Ponder for a moment the Book of Genesis version and the cosmological/anthropological story of the universe. The age of the universe is generally accepted to be about 13+ billion years. Fossil evidence showed anthropologists that bipedal locomotion - the ability to walk upright - for the early human-like creatures came around 1.9 million years ago. But longer legs, total upright posture and gait suitable for life 100% on land (abandoning the trees completely) and the development of communication beyond grunts and bodily gestures did not come about until 100,000 years ago when communities started to form. Modern languages, family and closer social bonds emerged just 8,000 years ago. Now, we read and we know it was not until the 26th verse, Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis when God "created man and woman", which roughly reflects the ascendance of the modern human species in natural history versions.
Here is the biggest argument. Even among those who agree that the Biblical timeline and fossil records are in accord, the debate had always been about why did God wait so long to create man and woman. We don't want to go there. In the greater scheme of things we are still the amoeba trying to contemplate the whole lake.
Last September Scientific American dedicated a special issue: "The Science of Being Human". Part 1 was "Decoding the Puzzle of Human Consciousness - The Hardest Problem". Part 2 was "How We Learned to put Our Fate in one Another's Hands - The Origins of Morality".
If there is only one thing to say about everything that was written there, it is this: The jury is still out. As it had been for centuries since the time we began to think and ponder the answers to all that are related to the questions about the human mind. There were a lot of answers on the physiology of the brain but a lot more were actually conjectures, guesses, and theories sprinkled over a platter much too diluted by more questions.
Is consciousness an illusion created by the brain? What sets the mind apart from the physical brain?
This is what we know. Or, at least what we think we know. We have a powerful mind generally accepted as the seat of human emotions, the cradle of morality, the creator and admirer of the arts, the source of empathy, altruism and the flint stone of language and inventions, and many more that sets us apart from all the other creatures of the earth.
Here is something to tickle your mind which, just to remind the reader, is the aim of much of the musings I write here - "to ponder with me some of the un-ponderable and the whimsical and lightly thought provoking issues" that you may not have thought about.
Ponder for a moment the Book of Genesis version and the cosmological/anthropological story of the universe. The age of the universe is generally accepted to be about 13+ billion years. Fossil evidence showed anthropologists that bipedal locomotion - the ability to walk upright - for the early human-like creatures came around 1.9 million years ago. But longer legs, total upright posture and gait suitable for life 100% on land (abandoning the trees completely) and the development of communication beyond grunts and bodily gestures did not come about until 100,000 years ago when communities started to form. Modern languages, family and closer social bonds emerged just 8,000 years ago. Now, we read and we know it was not until the 26th verse, Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis when God "created man and woman", which roughly reflects the ascendance of the modern human species in natural history versions.
Here is the biggest argument. Even among those who agree that the Biblical timeline and fossil records are in accord, the debate had always been about why did God wait so long to create man and woman. We don't want to go there. In the greater scheme of things we are still the amoeba trying to contemplate the whole lake.
“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
Reading the above quote carefully we note that the Creator had set limits. The scripture unequivocally set our position in the hierarchy - ruling over all of earth's creatures but not one step higher than that. Not even to rule over other humans. Let's leave it at that, or leave it to the politicians, despots and miscreants, etc.
"The mind. A beautiful servant. A dangerous master."
----- Anonymous
The quote covers everything. When we have control over our mind, it is capable of enabling us do a lot of things. Just think, it will take us backwards and forward in time for beautiful memories to reminisce and cherish; and to dream of a future full of promise and hope. It took us to compose beautiful melodies, write poems and books and speak spiritually and socially inspiring speeches and create ground breaking inventions, etc.. Those and many other innumerable accomplishment of the minds were brought about when we had control of it as to harness it for good. Then the bad flip side of it is when we let it control us. And, most tragically is when one mind is allowed to control other minds. Think Nazi Germany and every totalitarian and despotic rulers before and after it. How is it that the mind is able to lead us to be sympathetic, altruistic, compassionate to others but it is also capable of making us envious, hateful and covetous?
Those are just a handful. The mind shall forever be a mystery and perhaps one day we will indeed get some answers. It will be some answers but not for everything. Even the question about whether such a time will come is unanswerable because, contrary to the quote earlier (above) from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, our minds have been limited - perhaps - for our own good.
One that we are or should be thankful for is our ability to express gratitude. That is one definition of humanity we can all acknowledge.
Happy Thanksgiving to All!
