So I wrote to Shasta, a friend of mine, yesterday. She's in love with some guy so she hardly ever writes me anymore, but we were once carrying on some deep philosophical discussions. She has a similar background as me in that she served a mission and then fell away from the Church. She's a good friend of my sister's, and so she's prismatic, brilliant and artistic. Also, no one knows symbology better than she does (except for Joseph Campbell); so when she talks about The Golden Bough or Milan Kundera...you have to strap yourself in.
I've always had a dream of having my 'correspondings' being collected and published for some day. And then I think: get over it, man! You're not that important. But for some reason, I still save all the back-and-forth emails between Shasta and me, Dan and me, Chrissa and me... But then again, I like to save everything with sentimental value. I still have tokens from an arcade I used to visit in elementary called Aladdin's Castle.
Why do I bring this all up? I guess, because I wish I lived in the 18th Century and could just sit around all day like Lord Byron and the Shelleys, or the Transcendentalists, and philosophize. But then, I'm too fickle for that. That would imply having enough deep thoughts to be able to carry on a twenty year conversation and I'm afraid I can't fake it for that long. I was telling Shasta in my email that right now I haven't really had any deep thoughts or even been that immersed in philosophizing lately, since I've been reading Tad Williams and Neil Gaiman instead of Joseph Campbell and Søren Kierkegaard. In fact, I haven't read anything with an -ology in the title for quite some time.
The problem with my philosophizing is that I quickly move beyond the grasp of my reason. I feel like I can't wrap my mind entirely around the thought. It's too big for me -- similar to the feeling you get when you play chess and you try to think eight moves in the future: pretty soon the infinite possibilities are beyond the computing power of my little CPU and it reboots. But I keep plugging away. Sigh.
The first bit of philosophy I ever dabbled in I gave the name "Paradigm Theory." I hardly knew the definition of the word paradigm (still don't), let alone how to create a coherent philosophy string. What it basically boiled down to was this: I was bothered by the discordance between religion and rationalism and hoped that by labeling religion and science as paradigms, I could show that they are exclusive thought patterns but not impossibly so. I was trying to synthesize my dualistic mindset without having to decide which side was more correct. Basically, I was being a puss.
I've come up with a lot of theories since then, most of them crap.
One I was kicking around in my mind a few days ago was about symbols and symbology. I thought about symbols and the various symbols we take for granted in our life. I thought about stoplights and written language and art and every other symbol that shapes our lives. I thought about the various symbols which have long ago lost all meaning until we don't realize that there once was a meaning. All we have is the symbol.
I started thinking about our cognative development. I decided that our first thoughts as children must have been very basic and sensory. As we grew and matured, so did our thoughts -- taking on complexity and dimensionality. However, no matter the complexity of our minds or the intake of our senses, we are grossly inadequate to process even the smallest portion of sensory data available to us. That being the case, we simplify. At any moment our auditory canals are channeling innumerable sound waves into our minds which we convert into electrical impulses, process through our minds, sort by importance, and either use or discard. The same holds true for visual, olfactory or tactile stimuli. Our bodies are being bombarded by sensory stimuli at every second of every minute of every day...stimuli which we filter and simplify.
The same holds true for all of our mental processes: we create mental shortcuts, both neural and intangible, in order to make mental processing easier and more efficient. As infants, our brains are creating neural networks at amazing speeds. Science has shown that the more stimuli we receive the more complex the networking, while the opposite also holds true. On a more figurative level, we are also networking our knowledge into categories -- departmentalizing everything we know for easy access and employment.
Which brings me finally to the crux of my argument, which is that we cannot process information like a computer does: we cannot possibly think serially. We think in swaths, we think in groupings. If you view a PET-scan and monitor the sugar-burning which occurs in the brain, you would notice that when we think we stimulate portions of the brain and not just pinpoints. And when we process information, externally or internally, we do that by simplifying complexities into symbols and patterns.
A symbol is not merely confined to the realms of communications. If we view the definitions of "symbol" then we see that symbols and thoughts are quite enmeshed.
sym·bol n.
1. Something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention, especially a material object used to represent something invisible.
2. A printed or written sign used to represent an operation, element, quantity, quality, or relation, as in mathematics or music.
3. Psychology. An object or image that an individual unconsciously uses to represent repressed thoughts, feelings, or impulses: a phallic symbol.
Why does this matter? Because our entire knowledge-base is founded on symbols and symbology. For example, we cannot truly believe that the world works digitally, and yet physics is based on mathematical models. For as much as scientists would like to disagree, when you think about it, mathematics is essentially disconnected from reality in the same way that the letters c-a-t actually have no bearing on a real cat. In that respect, mathematics is just another medium to interpret the world -- a language spoken easily by those versed in it and fumbled with by school kids everywhere. Science attempts to rectify this disconnect by using statistical probability; however statistics are too crude a construct when dealing with occurrences such as quantum physics (as shown by the Uncertainty Principle) -- where it breaks down. That being the case, we've had to conjure up a new mathematics to deal with the complexity of the world: chaotics, nonlinear mathematics.
The interesting thing about nonlinear mathematics is that it attempts to create nonlinearity out of linear models and thereby more perfectly imitate the chaos of nature; and yet even chaoticians will admit the impossibility of being able to perfectly imitate chaos. They will also point out the fact that - the more complex the model - the less valuable it is. The whole reason we use models is to simplify a natural occurrence down to its barest necessities so we can study it under controlled scientific conditions.
To be continued...
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