In Mexico City yesterday I talked to a cousin for sometime, and saw sad Mexicans in the streets after losing against Argentina in South Africa. Through Democracy Now! I see an Asian mother talking about her Canadian son now serving in Kandahar.
With all these experiences I was inspired to write this.
Two sets of ideas affected me very much this month in Warrenville. Maturana and Varela's idea of autopoiesis, and Ted Sejnowski and Steve Quartz's book: Liars Lovers and Heroes. The idea here is Cultural Biology.
Here is my report of all this.
The main difference between Homo sapiens and all other forms of life we are aware of, is the integration of the environment, and the brain.
I can add that even though I didn't read this from these gentlemen's work, I consider the Internet as a big step in that process of externalization of the brain.
Actually the thought is older, Pierre Teihlard de Chardin thought of the noosphere. A kind of sphere of knowledge inside the sphere of life or biosphere.
The way I conceive the ideas is the following.
Geometry is three dimensional, with time geometrical also, to include the observed constancy of light speed. These mathematics are marks in our brains. If there are mirrors "outside" with similar geometrical structures, we do not know; I definitely do not know.
My thinking along these lines started with Paul Dirac's electron equation. I finally understood that matrices and linear differential operators in four dimensions, put together like Dirac did, give a value of the magnetic moment of an electron, with a precision such that if the distance from LA to NYC were to be known with the same accuracy then the error would be less than the width of a human hair!, as Dick Feynman put it so well.
The late Prof. Wigner wrote about the "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences."
The fit we observe is extraordinary, so much so, that some thinkers have said that mathematics has an existence outside of the human mind. Not me, I always resisted that thought as religious; I much prefer the ideas I write in this note; yes ideas have an existence outside of our cranium, but in the way I write here.
Ideas are in our head, that little amount of organic material filling our cranium. The new idea I finally understood, is what Maturana and Varela first, and then Sejnowski and Quartz stated later. From birth we and our adult caregivers connect ourselves to the world outside. I am almost 61 years old now, and I finally understood what Information is. It took me this long, because it is not easy, and you my reader, better prepare yourself to think anew many things you thought you knew.
I will use metaphors, because as Lakoff, I believe in the metaphorical construction of ideas. Inside the brain cortex there are marks, both chemical and physical. Just like sugar tastes good and we take it through our mouths, so some chemicals called neurotransmitters, taste good to brain cells and they take them. These marks need time to build up, when we are born: no marks, when we learn: marks. At 61 I have a history inside my brain, there are many more marks than what I started to think about Information.
These "ideas" or marks, so to say, escape the brain. I then have a notebook, a flash memory, a cloud; where some of my ideas are stored. Even more, I take external marks and make them fit with my own internal network of marks, I synchronize my internal and my external marks. I hope you don't take this as metaphysical, but the aura psychics talk about, for me, is the set of light, sound, and other signals, that I can detect just like a radio, and tune into them. The external world becomes an extension of my brain, and by the same token, my brain becomes an extension of the world out there.
Enter the Internet: what I am writing here is not only in my brain, rapidly goes to Google, to the servers they set up for Blogger, and now I have a more powerful mind. My mind is connected to the mind at large. This mind at large is not some unknown field of force, it is made of optical fibers, and hard drives on the cloud. Real material objects, with real marks on them; that is what my brain is, in the time of the new Internet.
Homo sapiens builds culture, and culture shapes Homo sapiens, this is Cultural Biology, as I understand it.
Now let's move to the Tree of Knowledge.
Traditionally neuroscientists and philosophers have taken two extreme positions, either whatever we think is what is: solipsism, or we have mirrors in our brain and they reflect the world out there.
Neither view is right. We have to take a middle ground, that at times seems unstable. We do make social reality, but it is not arbitrary.
For a circle the ratio of circumference to diameter has gone from six to a real number we will never be able to know with all its digits.
There is no pie (
By the same token there is no Information out there that our brains just connects to, and then know. There is no Information out there.
What we have is a pretty good fit, between some cultural constructs like Mathematics, and what our instruments measure with more or less precise procedures. We call this fit science. I wonder if Prof. Wigner would have been satisfied with it. I hope I could have gotten him at least a little bit interested.
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