The Universe of Perfection
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
In his “Meditations,” Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Everything is but what your opinion makes it; and that opinion lies within yourself.”
I hold certain opinions about matter and spirit, which opinions shape my life profitably. I begin by imagining a universe where everything is perfect: all matter in it has taken the form of a tightly ordered crystal, which never changes. Being a a crystal, such a universe would not be subject to the second law of thermodynamics: it would not move towards greater disorder. Energies flow inside the crystal structure in never-ending cycles sustaining the existence of vast numbers of spiritual beings, garnered from living planets everywhere. This is a universe of peace, tranquility, total security, and bliss.
The souls in such a heaven are linked together in a master mind, which sees to all their needs, immaterial as these needs are. Spirits in heaven exist in perfect harmony with each other. Yet, sometimes a soul will pine for living in a material world, with all its vibrant sensations, the risks and thrills of adventure. Then it is sent out to a planet outside the heavenly orb to experience material life once again, and procreate new bodies into which spirits may enter. The connection of the soul to heaven is never lost; after the death of the body, the soul returns to heaven to enrich it with new experiences and bring new growth to the universal mind.
I choose to think I am such a soul. I am not my body, but an imperishable spirit making its home in my body; my body is a possession like my clothes, house, car, discarded when worn out, not useful any more, replaced by a new body, or no material body upon my return to heaven. I can provide no scientific evidence for the existence of the crystal universe of heaven or even for the existence of an immortal soul in me inhabiting my material body; I find it helpful in my life to think and feel it is so. I choose to feel I am always tethered to heaven, no matter what dangers threaten my body. I am like a deep-sea diver or a space-walking astronaut with my lifeline to heaven and companions above. I am a surveyor craft landed on this planet to collect data and sensations, transmitting these to my home in the crystal universe for my fellows there to experience.
I am confronting dangers in my adventures here, yet my soul is always safe from harm; if my body is destroyed, or when it dies of old age, God will withdraw my spirit through the umbilical cord connecting me to heaven. I can experience my body aging, suffering injury, disease and damage; if I cannot prevent these ills, I am not concerned. I seek help from above and continue my life on earth as best as I can.
As I pass from moment to moment, I keep in mind that my spirit is priceless, being the immortal and important part of me; but my body, having evolved over billions of years through innumerable struggles and dangers, this body is also very valuable, deserving the best of care to survive long and well in order to serve the goals of my spirit.
Even when walking through the dark valley of death I will not be afraid; my spirit is safe with God. If my body perishes, it will be a small loss compared to the safety of my spirit. Not that my spirit can be lost, but it may be barred from heaven, and go to a different place, a place of oppressive power, anger, and cruelty.
I remember in my daily efforts that my mission on earth is justice, peace, compassion, knowledge, and wisdom; I focus on my mission: to experience many sensations, adventures, learning, arts, actions, helping my own spiritual growth and that of family, friends, and community. To continue doing so, I also want to make my body as strong, healthy, and versatile as it can be for my age and constitution so I can cope with life's mountains and pitfalls.
How do these ideas of mine differ from religious teachings? They differ because I take them as conscious choices, assumptions, or definitions; no one can argue with definitions. The test of a definition is not its truth, because a definition is arbitrary, but the usefulness of a definition in solving a problem. I define spirit, God, and heaven as I choose, because my definitions help me solve the problem of my existence, and continued survival on earth-- posssibly even beyond this earth.
Should I discover that one of my notions is a detriment rather than an aid in my life, I am ready to reject it, replacing it with a more effective notion; so does a physician when a particular medicine does not heal a patient; the physician tries a different prescription which may help, not harm the patient. This approach of mine is also very different from the various religious doctrines, which sometimes do harm, but are not erased from the scriptures by the patriarchs, except rarely. In this respect, my approach to spiritual matters is more scientific rather than religious, evolving when I meet with new facts and experiences, and not becoming petrified.
The commandments to myself are not carved in stone; I prefer to change, adapting to new trials. I visualize my move before taking it, seeing the result in perfection, sensing that I am
guided by a beam of light from above. I become keenly aware of my surroundings, my body and mind acting deliberately to do what is right, what is proper, what brings forth good fruit, and what is beautiful.
Beauty is indeed immortal, such as we find in great works of art. And my spirit is immortal, but can it change as artistic expression changes? Can my soul get better or worse? Yes, it can, just as character changes. The spirit aims towards perfection, which is not possible on earth or any other material planet; yet that goal of perfection is clear to me. I see that goal in what I think, feel, and do. I clearly visualize the perfect moves I need to make in any game I play. When I achieve that perfection occasionally, then I am “in the zone,” as athletes say. I cannot fail in that state of mind, but can only do what is right and successful.
Otherwise, what happens if my spirit changes for the worse? Can it go back to heaven? I think admission back to heaven would be barred; heaven cannot allow an infected spirit to come back. That sick spirit needs to go through lives of purification, penance, and cleansing on other planets, before being re-admitted to the crystal orb of perfection. Sometimes a soul goes so far astray, it cannot hope to enter heaven any more and is sucked into a sphere of evil, known as hell, a place of grief, agony, and slavery.
My main effort in life is to avoid the whirlpool of hell, to seek the updraft of heaven, not just to prolong the use of my body or to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. Yes, I want to prolong life to get the maximum mileage I can from this body, in order to learn more things, experience fascinating adventures, do good work for myself and my fellows. But when the time comes to go away from this sphere, I will leave without fear or regret, having done the best I could have done with the gift of life given to me.
I will have no regret upon dying, but joy instead, looking forward to joining my beloved parents and friends who passed on before me. I will be eager to arrive in heaven and be in the company of people who share my feelings and beliefs, congenial souls, those of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammad, Lao-Tse, Descartes, Bacon, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Whitman, the souls which are brothers of my own. It will be great indeed to be talking to these people, remembering together our lives on earth, discussing the ideas that intrigued us all during our lifetimes and the opinions laid down in our writings and talks.
Yet, what if I am mistaken in hoping for the immortality of my spirit? In that case, my consciousness will dissipate in earth's air upon my death as my body goes still and begins to decompose. There will be no harm done to me or to any one else because I imagined a great existence in an afterlife. In the meantime, I enjoy romancing the soul; and transcendent hope sustains me, filling me with meaning and purpose, moving me to good feelings, deeds, and accomplishments.
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Monday, February 9, 2009
The Practical Dreamer
On Becoming a Practical Dreamer
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
A dreamer is a person with a fruitful imagination; a dreamer is practical when imagination is combined with action to produce useful products or services, yielding profits. America has been home to many practical dreamers: Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, Walt Disney--the list is endless. Most started life in the United States as poor immigrants or humble locals, seeking to improve their condition, surpassed their dearest dreams. A dreamer enjoys indulging his fantasies without doing anything to realize them; a realist keeps trudging along in life doing what is customary, certain, or conveniently profitable, without achieving anything of great splendor. As partners but separate individuals, dreamer and realist can function productively as well as one individual possessing both qualities. If you are not such a person, find a complimentary partner. Some of the most successful teams in the corporate world are those of the imaginative engineer and the person of business. Many marriages do well also, combining the dreamer and the pragmatist. Most of us are not practical dreamers; otherwise, we would be far more successful; but we all possess a measure of imagination and practicality, which we can enlarge if we follow right thoughts, right purposes, and right behaviors.
Most of what we think is day-dreaming, escaping our limitations and humdrum existence into worlds of unrealistic fantasies, with no chance of actualization. Thoughts are birds in flight; but they can be directed towards a goal, a destination, while retaining some of their winged power. Through the exercise of the will, even in sleep after some years of practice, you can focus your thoughts on a specific subject, and with laser strength penetrate the barrier of your problem. You can view the universe of matter and mind as a complex web of problems, a never-ending series of questions, asking like a child why, why, why. Daddy, why do things fall down? It's gravity, my child. What is gravity? Gravity is a force. What is a force, daddy? Oh shut up, can't you see I'm busy paying bills? That is the end of questioning, the beginning of routine.
Practical dreaming to create new things is the opposite of routine. Direct your thoughts to what is novel, unfamiliar, even surprising, in a strange territory. Expect to discover good things, expect you will solve your problem, expect you will be able survive the wilderness of the imagination to reach civilization. That's self-confidence, the armor for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Abraham Lincoln went through some very disappointing periods leading the Union armies in the Civil War. Despite his melancholy nature, his faith in a united America never wavered. Faith is the springboard of creative work: fervently believing in something gets you going, building, achieving; doubt lays you low in lethargy.
Yeah, but how do I acquire an active faith? I consider the accomplishments I admire, choosing one I am well suited by my nature to emulate. I admire the works of Lord Bertrand Russell; I seek to think, write, and act as he did in his life, because I have similar talents to his, although I may not be as gifted as he was. I do the best I can in my chosen direction. Whom do you admire? Do you have any true affinity for the projects you are to undertake to approach your master? If not, look elsewhere for your proper occupation. But anywhere you look, you cannot be without proper direction.
Thoughts need reins; galloping this way and that they go nowhere. To get somewhere, aim towards a specific goal, a purpose, a project to complete, at a specific point in the future. The future is shaped by our thoughts and goals to be bright, dark, or gray; a right goal helps realize a bright future for ourselves and our community. But your goal cannot be placed too far into the future; if your project is very large, requiring much time to complete, divide it into sub-goals, each one with a completion date. I know that until you get accustomed to goal setting, it will stress you, and make you anxious. Bear up, persist, the stress will lift. If you cannot meet a deadline, don't despair; next time set a reasonable time line. When we are working creatively, independently, our goals are tools, not commands from authority. Imaginative ideas incubate, on occasion requiring a longer or shorter period to hatch.
Most people don't direct their imagination. Listen to a group talking socially or even for business purposes. People talk as they think, in a confused, disorganized, random way. They don't stay with a topic of discussion for long, wondering this way and that, unless they are tightly controlled by debating rules, which often some individuals will defy to rant on and on about their pet grievances. In synergistic groups for creative work, the proctor needs to maintain discipline on members to stay on focus; yet allow enough freedom for exploration into the unknown.
The unknown, the unsolved problem, and the mystery are always unpredictable and our conquest of these cannot be programmed. We can follow, however, some general approaches. Do not get boxed in preconceived or customary ideas. Dare to go outside established boundaries. Do not assume more constraints to the problem than are actually there. Allow your imagination free flight, simply recording any and all ideas that occur without criticizing them or analyzing them at the time of brainstorming. You choose and analyze ideas later, during the critical phase that follows as which ideas are practical and which are nonsense. Sometimes, the most apparently nonsensical, far fetched, ridiculous, outlandish ideas will lead to the most important breakthroughs. Because these ideas seemed unlikely to be of value, they were ignored by other thinkers.
We cannot ignore any possibilities when exploring the unknown; the solution can be hiding anywhere in the problem manifold. Walt Disney and company called this “imagineering.” Disney's business was entertainment, to amuse children and their families. From the first primitive images of Mickey Mouse to his final classic “Mary Poppins,” Disney followed the principles of “imagineering:” engineering fantasies to satisfy his ultimate goal of entertainment, with stupendous financial success.
Before Disney, Thomas Edison mastered the art of “imagineering” with a sixth-grade education. Edison tested thousands of processes and materials to come up with a working light bulb. One of the materials for his bulb filament was a mustache hair; how ridiculous can you get? Finally, a tungsten filament did the job, but it burned too quickly to ashes in spite of the vacuum. The inventor had used the best available equipment to produce vacuum in the bulb. Did he give up? No, he designed his own vacuum pump for a far better vacuum than had existed on earth before. Success and fortune followed, with the formation of the Edison Company for the production and distribution of electric lights, starting with Wall Street of New York.
Edison was a model of well-directed persistence for success. Smart persistence on a task works because it is a rare quality; most people quit early, tired or disheartened. People generally seek instant gratification, fast, fast relief, quick weight loss, free gifts, and lucky big wins. Few are those willing to dig, dig, and dig for the gold. The Mother Lode of gold, the richest in the American West was found a few feet below the surface gold miners originally extracted, after which they quit the mine. Persistence is right behavior for the practical dreamer, poking a problem from one side, then another, and another, until the dreamer finds a weakness in the shell surrounding the problem. Try this method to break a macadamia nut with an ordinary cracker; many times you will succeed. Brute force also works if you don't have a macadamia cracker. Place the nut inside a paper bag and whack it with a hammer. Sometimes, brute force is the right action to put our dreams into profitable practice.
Brute force may be useful on occasion, but as a rule the practical dreamer is gentle and deliberate. The great innovative surgeon works with precision and care in cutting out a tumor, bringing tissues together, and suturing. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt worked with many detailed sketches, studies, details, before putting paint on canvass or wall to create an artistic masterpiece. The astronomer searches the night sky patiently and systematically to locate an unknown celestial body that will bear the searcher's name. We should all try to be like the people weaving the famed oriental rugs with simple tools, never tiring of detail, as if time stands still for us, and eternity is in our every moment.
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
A dreamer is a person with a fruitful imagination; a dreamer is practical when imagination is combined with action to produce useful products or services, yielding profits. America has been home to many practical dreamers: Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, Walt Disney--the list is endless. Most started life in the United States as poor immigrants or humble locals, seeking to improve their condition, surpassed their dearest dreams. A dreamer enjoys indulging his fantasies without doing anything to realize them; a realist keeps trudging along in life doing what is customary, certain, or conveniently profitable, without achieving anything of great splendor. As partners but separate individuals, dreamer and realist can function productively as well as one individual possessing both qualities. If you are not such a person, find a complimentary partner. Some of the most successful teams in the corporate world are those of the imaginative engineer and the person of business. Many marriages do well also, combining the dreamer and the pragmatist. Most of us are not practical dreamers; otherwise, we would be far more successful; but we all possess a measure of imagination and practicality, which we can enlarge if we follow right thoughts, right purposes, and right behaviors.
Most of what we think is day-dreaming, escaping our limitations and humdrum existence into worlds of unrealistic fantasies, with no chance of actualization. Thoughts are birds in flight; but they can be directed towards a goal, a destination, while retaining some of their winged power. Through the exercise of the will, even in sleep after some years of practice, you can focus your thoughts on a specific subject, and with laser strength penetrate the barrier of your problem. You can view the universe of matter and mind as a complex web of problems, a never-ending series of questions, asking like a child why, why, why. Daddy, why do things fall down? It's gravity, my child. What is gravity? Gravity is a force. What is a force, daddy? Oh shut up, can't you see I'm busy paying bills? That is the end of questioning, the beginning of routine.
Practical dreaming to create new things is the opposite of routine. Direct your thoughts to what is novel, unfamiliar, even surprising, in a strange territory. Expect to discover good things, expect you will solve your problem, expect you will be able survive the wilderness of the imagination to reach civilization. That's self-confidence, the armor for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Abraham Lincoln went through some very disappointing periods leading the Union armies in the Civil War. Despite his melancholy nature, his faith in a united America never wavered. Faith is the springboard of creative work: fervently believing in something gets you going, building, achieving; doubt lays you low in lethargy.
Yeah, but how do I acquire an active faith? I consider the accomplishments I admire, choosing one I am well suited by my nature to emulate. I admire the works of Lord Bertrand Russell; I seek to think, write, and act as he did in his life, because I have similar talents to his, although I may not be as gifted as he was. I do the best I can in my chosen direction. Whom do you admire? Do you have any true affinity for the projects you are to undertake to approach your master? If not, look elsewhere for your proper occupation. But anywhere you look, you cannot be without proper direction.
Thoughts need reins; galloping this way and that they go nowhere. To get somewhere, aim towards a specific goal, a purpose, a project to complete, at a specific point in the future. The future is shaped by our thoughts and goals to be bright, dark, or gray; a right goal helps realize a bright future for ourselves and our community. But your goal cannot be placed too far into the future; if your project is very large, requiring much time to complete, divide it into sub-goals, each one with a completion date. I know that until you get accustomed to goal setting, it will stress you, and make you anxious. Bear up, persist, the stress will lift. If you cannot meet a deadline, don't despair; next time set a reasonable time line. When we are working creatively, independently, our goals are tools, not commands from authority. Imaginative ideas incubate, on occasion requiring a longer or shorter period to hatch.
Most people don't direct their imagination. Listen to a group talking socially or even for business purposes. People talk as they think, in a confused, disorganized, random way. They don't stay with a topic of discussion for long, wondering this way and that, unless they are tightly controlled by debating rules, which often some individuals will defy to rant on and on about their pet grievances. In synergistic groups for creative work, the proctor needs to maintain discipline on members to stay on focus; yet allow enough freedom for exploration into the unknown.
The unknown, the unsolved problem, and the mystery are always unpredictable and our conquest of these cannot be programmed. We can follow, however, some general approaches. Do not get boxed in preconceived or customary ideas. Dare to go outside established boundaries. Do not assume more constraints to the problem than are actually there. Allow your imagination free flight, simply recording any and all ideas that occur without criticizing them or analyzing them at the time of brainstorming. You choose and analyze ideas later, during the critical phase that follows as which ideas are practical and which are nonsense. Sometimes, the most apparently nonsensical, far fetched, ridiculous, outlandish ideas will lead to the most important breakthroughs. Because these ideas seemed unlikely to be of value, they were ignored by other thinkers.
We cannot ignore any possibilities when exploring the unknown; the solution can be hiding anywhere in the problem manifold. Walt Disney and company called this “imagineering.” Disney's business was entertainment, to amuse children and their families. From the first primitive images of Mickey Mouse to his final classic “Mary Poppins,” Disney followed the principles of “imagineering:” engineering fantasies to satisfy his ultimate goal of entertainment, with stupendous financial success.
Before Disney, Thomas Edison mastered the art of “imagineering” with a sixth-grade education. Edison tested thousands of processes and materials to come up with a working light bulb. One of the materials for his bulb filament was a mustache hair; how ridiculous can you get? Finally, a tungsten filament did the job, but it burned too quickly to ashes in spite of the vacuum. The inventor had used the best available equipment to produce vacuum in the bulb. Did he give up? No, he designed his own vacuum pump for a far better vacuum than had existed on earth before. Success and fortune followed, with the formation of the Edison Company for the production and distribution of electric lights, starting with Wall Street of New York.
Edison was a model of well-directed persistence for success. Smart persistence on a task works because it is a rare quality; most people quit early, tired or disheartened. People generally seek instant gratification, fast, fast relief, quick weight loss, free gifts, and lucky big wins. Few are those willing to dig, dig, and dig for the gold. The Mother Lode of gold, the richest in the American West was found a few feet below the surface gold miners originally extracted, after which they quit the mine. Persistence is right behavior for the practical dreamer, poking a problem from one side, then another, and another, until the dreamer finds a weakness in the shell surrounding the problem. Try this method to break a macadamia nut with an ordinary cracker; many times you will succeed. Brute force also works if you don't have a macadamia cracker. Place the nut inside a paper bag and whack it with a hammer. Sometimes, brute force is the right action to put our dreams into profitable practice.
Brute force may be useful on occasion, but as a rule the practical dreamer is gentle and deliberate. The great innovative surgeon works with precision and care in cutting out a tumor, bringing tissues together, and suturing. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt worked with many detailed sketches, studies, details, before putting paint on canvass or wall to create an artistic masterpiece. The astronomer searches the night sky patiently and systematically to locate an unknown celestial body that will bear the searcher's name. We should all try to be like the people weaving the famed oriental rugs with simple tools, never tiring of detail, as if time stands still for us, and eternity is in our every moment.
Language and Evolution
Language and Evolution
Basil Gala, PhD.
(5557 Words)
The Christian bible says "in the beginning was the word, and the word was God." Word is the translation of "logos" in Greek, the language of the Bible used by educated people in the times of Christ, "logos" referring to Jesus. This is a prime example of the importance of language in human life. Recently, researchers in human evolution have found that the development of speech and the speech center in the left hemisphere of the brain played a critical role in the emergence of humans as a distinct species from the common primate ancestor of Homo sapiens and chimpazees. A large vocabulary, much larger than the thirty of so sounds chimps make to communicate, was the beginning of human divergence from the common primate stock. Over a period of about twelve million years pre-humans and true humans expanded their vocabulary to an average of sixty thousand words today. A powerful language was more important to human evolution than walking on two legs (bipedal locomotion), or using hands on tools and weapons. As an organ of nerve cells (neurons) in the back of the brain (the medulla oblongata) grew substantially in size and complexity to handle balance and stability on two legs, as the motor center center grew to allow more adept manipulation of objects, so did the speech center become enlarged and more capable to deal with words. More power with words meant better thinking to plan, to remember, and to communicate, granting a major survival advantage to those possessing it; the genes augmenting this power with words spread quickly in the population. Humans evolved with the use of language at an accelerating pace. Individual minds evolve similarly in childhood and adulthood, in social interactions and formal schooling. Can we make this evolution of mind a partly conscious and controlled procedure? We are beginning to understand much better how language works to make us more effective, and in the near future we will be able to control the process of creating new concepts for our natural language, thus expanding our minds in unimaginable ways.
Language evolves; we see that in children who replay the entire evolution of life from the womb outwards. At about two years of age or so, children begin talking with simple and halting words and phrases. After a few months of baby talk, connections are established in the brain (as they are for walking), and talking usually comes out with a rush, a replay of human verbal evolution. As the child grows into an adult, language becomes more complex and effective, reflecting the evolution of the brain. In old age, language, writing, and brain activity deteriorates back into childhood patterns. Sometimes, language, thought, and behavior degrade before old age; we see evidence of that on walls covered with graffiti, airwaves filled with rap music, and theaters crowded for the violence of films with cartoon superheroes. Overall, however, as long as civilization continues on our planet, language and thought are advancing in effectiveness, nobility, and power. Evolution to more powerful modes of language does not need to come to an end.
Language is made up of words, which are strings of symbols, such as letters together with other special characters. Symbols make it possible for us to communicate better with each other and with ourself, but gestures work well too as you can see if you are watching deaf mutes or Italians. Gestures are symbols too, as are postures. Are symbols necessary so that we may think? Not at a basic level, because we can think with pictures, also configurations of sounds, even of scents, tastes, and tactile sensations. We can guess how prehumans thought before symbolic language emerged. In many cultures the first written words were pictorial, such as the early hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, which were later stylized, and eventually became brief symbols, similar to what we use today to form our words and sentences. The paintings on the walls of the Altamira caves in Spain, exquisite as they are, were prehistoric expressions of language. Advanced, more complex and effective, thinking requires abstract concepts and their corresponding words, such as justice, science, evolution, computation, history, integration.
What exactly is a concept? A concept is a classification of sense data or other input to the mind into organized groupings so you can respond appropriately for your survival to a challenge from your environment. For example, you may see certain moves by someone which you recognize as threatening and respond by taking defensive measures. You have conceived you are being threatened; classifying the sense data you have received, the concept you have derived is that of threat. Alternately, other moves you see, you may classify as humor or love. Concepts thus defined are similar to Emanuel Kant's categories, a major feature of his philosophy of logic.
I am concerned here with advanced concepts of abstraction, a high-level natural language. In computer science, researchers developed a number of high-level languages to program computers with greater ease, such as FORTRAN, Pascal, and C++. My aim here is not to get strictly technical and discuss languages for calculations, symbol manipulation, and picture processing, but what we have learned from computer linguists can be of some use in understanding natural languages. A natural language is much more extensive and versatile, capable of dealing with a great variety of subjects including feelings, than a computer language limited to just a few hundred words and symbols that put the machine into a few digital operations . English has millions of words, capable of dealing with every thought, sensation, and emotion we can experience; a natural language is constantly changing and expanding in response to new experiences and challenges facing a human population.
Today we are facing such fearsome challenges as we did when as a small band of Homo sapiens we emerged in arid East Africa a hundred thousand years or so ago, challenges which threaten our existence again as a species. I expect if anything can save us now that has to be a new and transcendental way of talking, writing, and thinking. Transcending old ways of dealing with the world and with each other, we reject confrontation, exploitation, and destruction, to greater cooperation among ourselves and with the web of life on our planet. The age-old ways of speaking and thinking worked well when populations were small around the earth, tribes hemmed in by powerful predatory animals and a harsh nature with what appeared unlimited resources: vast forests, deep oceans, and unscalable mountains.
From an orbiting satellite, the Pacific Ocean looks like a pond, and Mount Everest a mere molehill. The forests are burning everywhere to make room for fields and buildings, or being cut down for fuel and lumber. The challenges are: destruction of human habitats, depletion of natural resources, planetary pollution, overpopulation, intractable epidemics, and warfare with ever more powerful weapons. We have to stop doing what we habitually do, and think with new concepts and words, suited to our present predicament.
Words or other symbols refer to things or concepts, which are called referents. Words represent referents; they take the place of referents in communication and in thinking. Using words we can do work in the mind without dealing with the actual things they represent, like mentally traveling on a map instead of the actual terrain, looking at hazards, time constraints, and destinations. Words allow us to organize, plan, command, entertain, motivate ourselves and others, lead, woo, impress, but mainly words allow us to think on an abstract level. Words can also mislead, so conditioned are we to them after many years of using them daily. Say the word lemon, visualize the fruit, and your mouth fills with saliva. Recite your national anthem, and your heart fills with pride, ready to drive you to battle.
What comes first, the word or the concept? Clearly, the concept. First we form concepts, such as pride, pointing to the emotion, then we configure the word or symbol to represent it. Conceiving new concepts is the creative part of language. There are now words for every concept so far conceived by humans. Where do I find new concepts of value? How to I spur the mind to bring forth a new concept of importance?
Such was the concept of science, the scientific method. René Descartes and Francis Bacon conceived the scientific method in the seventeenth century A.D. Two thousand years earlier, in the sixth century B.C., Democritus and Thales did science without formalizing a method for it. A century later, Plato and the Socratic philosophers gained influence with idealism, which overwhelmed early science in Greece. Idealism spread with Christianity and the Romans to all of Europe. The idealists deal with ideals and ideas: words often without referents, without end, without observations, measurements, or experiments.
We know now that when we question Nature with experiments and carefully observe her answers, that is how we arrive at new and useful concepts. We don't need to exclude our own minds as objects of observation and study. Our minds are part of Nature also; we can study our minds with introspection and meditation as the ancient Indian gurus learned to do long ago, making vital discoveries about our spirits. Combining Eastern wisdom from meditation with the practicality of Western science, connecting the immense outer universe with the equally vast inner one, human evolution may reach levels of thought we cannot even imagine today, with our most potent concepts yet to be conceived.
Again, how do we conceive concepts? When I think about a problem on any subject, words and symbols spring to mind which I have not coined. Am I thinking my own ideas or rehashing those that I have read? But if I have a new or unsolved problem and if I come up with a unique solution, then I can coin words to fit the concepts I have discovered in the struggle for the solution. Posing a question is the way to discovery, learning and evolution. Sometimes the question is foisted upon us by nature; it is a natural challenge for survival, as it is imposed on simpler animals and plants, a challenge to which we must respond by changing ourselves to be fit the solution. Bees, ants, and other social insects have hit on the solution to their survival problems; they have stuck to their social devices for millions of years, the queen mother, workers, and warriors, without much change in behavior. Birds build their nests in the same stereotyped way for each species; the cuckoo bird has its own peculiar way of taking care of its young, and so does the wasp planting its eggs in a tarantula. Such animals don't deviate much from their habitual behavior.
Advanced people explore and deviate from what they are accustomed; they keep posing questions to themselves out of curiosity; they do not rest until they have answers or they have died.
Such was Carl Friedrich Gauss, interested in the statistics of disease and death, working for the life insurance fund of the German government. He posed the question: Can we predict how many people will live to what age in a large population of insured individuals? It was important to fix these statistics to determine premiums for policies. Studying this problem Gauss came up with the concept of a frequency distribution, called today Gaussian, commonly known as normal or bell shaped. Pose an important problem, find the answer; if the answer is new and original, you have a concept you can name, or your name becomes a suitable word for it.
How do we produce suitable words? Who were the people who invented the words in Websters dictionary and how did the use of the new words spread in the population, becoming standard English? Many of the words scholars imported from Latin, Greek, and other languages, used them in their books and speeches and gradually the circle of their use expanded among educated people and later to the population at large. This explanation only translates the problem to other countries. How did the Greeks go about about inventing their words? Spoken language predates its written form by many thousands of years. Many words are imitations of natural sounds: murmur, screech, whistle, crash, bang, etc. These phonetic words don't take us very far into the dictionary. I can imagine that some bright fellow, a leader or primitive intellectual of an ancient tribe, woke up one day and got the notion of naming objects not previously named by the tribe. That person picked up a rock and called it such; a piece of wood, the same; then a handful of water. Later the leader talked to fellow tribal members and instructed them using the new words. Everyone imitated the leader as monkeys do today, the new words accepted and their use spreading quickly because they were useful for communication and survival.
Today scientists and engineers do similar feats with language when they observe new phenomena in their researches. Consider the language of organic chemists, describing combinations of atoms in compounds, with words made up by compounding the names of the elements in a molecule or that of physicists explaining the structure of subatomic particles with bosons, mesons, leptons, gravitons, and quarks.
Naming things, such as objects, sensations, even feelings, is not creating abstract concepts. This way we are using concrete words, which are fine in literature, especially in metaphors. We get abstraction when we name classes of things. In this sense the word chair is abstract, unless we are pointing to a particular chair, because it names pieces of furniture with legs and a top on which we sit. Furniture is the genus to which the species chair belongs; furniture includes many other artifacts besides chairs, and is therefore more abstract than the word chair. Furniture in turn is a species in the genus of human artifacts. We can continue this process of naming broader classes of things until we get to the word universe or God, containing everything that exists.
How about imaginary things, which presumably do not exist, such as unicorns and leprechauns? Anything we can imagine does in a sense exist;it becomes part of the universe when we have thought of it, since we are parts of the universe. Certainly this is so when we externalize our imaginings, putting them in some more durable form such as a piece of writing, a painting, sculpture, or any object we make from materials in nature. In our modern world we are constantly living with products of the human imagination, from televisions, cellular phones, computers, millions of artifacts, constantly emerging. We have thus become creators as well as namers of abstract things.
Abstracting is a process of composing a larger entity from smaller elements. This is the case in music, where we have an infinite variety of themes developed from the seven musical notes: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. The song you enjoy so much is simply the composer's abstract thought set to music. Similarly, a beautiful mosaic picture is made up of thousands of small colored pebbles. Seurat painted his sublime canvasses using points of paint, an art called pointilism. Van Gogh created his masterpieces with a few simple strokes of his brush. Hemingway did the same with small, simple words of the English language, yet his effects were very compelling in "The Sun Also Rises," "A Farewell to Arms," and "The Old Man and Sea." Hemingway crafted big effects in his stories with small words.
Words from a natural language like English are like field stones: they have different shapes, colors, materials, sizes; computer words are bricks or cement blocks, manufactured, not grown from living experiences. The author builds a structure with care using natural words, a thing of beauty and meaning, a new abstraction.
The point is: abstraction and creation emerges from putting together simpler elements, called primitives. What enters the composition in this synthesis of elements is the ineffable breath of design which gives it life, a breath from the spirit of the creator, human or divine. Analysis breaks down the design into its basic parts, isolating each part from the other parts, robbing it of vitality. Analysis can be very instructive to the designer, like reverse engineering by imitators, but for the rest of us criticism is decay, devoid of joy, with a bad smell. We are left with elements which amount to almost nothing, ghostlike, like the remains of matter left from supercollider experiments at CERN or Fermilab.
As to the most fundamental elements, the primitives in any composition, what are they and what faith can we place on these elements? In geometry we accept the existence of what we call a point and a line without providing any definitions for these. With the point and the line taken as given, together with a few other such undefined elements and unproven truths called axioms, Euclid build up his entire structure of geometrical theorems. When we analyze anything, eventually we get to precepts and truths we accept on faith. These have been called inborn, or God-given truths. Induction, for example, in logical thought is a mental process common to all humans not mentally impaired.
Take a look at the sequence of numbers: (2,3,4) (3,4,5) (4,5,6). What comes next in the sequence? Any human will use the inborn trait of induction to reply (5,6,7). The most intelligent chimpanzee, although capable of the most incredible feats of temporary memory, will fail this test for induction. A human child will pass it readily.
Besides induction, we naturally accept as valid the mental process of exhaustive search. When we enumerate all possibilities in a problem, and we select one or more to use, we believe we have a valid approach. From this springs the value of truth tables, which we employ extensively in logic and digital design to prove the truth of an expression of variables. We assign a value of true (T)or false (F) to each input or variable, and a value to the output. For example, we define the logical function AND for two inputs (A, B ) by the truth table:
A B A.AND.B
F F F
F T F
T F F
T T T
In other words, we accept that logically the output is true, only when both inputs are true.
Similarly, we accept a double negative as positive. We say, if someone is not dishonest, that person is honest.
Such notions are common sense, the endowment of every normal human being when mature enough, as Plato shows in his Socratic dialogue of "Meno." With simple questions, Socrates guides an illiterate slave boy to prove a non-trivial theorem in geometry.
We can assume that our ability to employ basic precepts, logical or of other kinds, evolved as we evolved as a species, or if we are religious, these precepts were granted to us by our Creator. As an impartial observer in the arguments on religion, I have no doubt that our bodies have evolved together with our primate cousins, but at some points in time factors entered the evolutionary equation for humans from a realm outside ordinary reality. Our minds, not our bodies, are the result of this influence.
We can begin to see now how to grow and expand our minds, seeking new words and concepts: by keeping busy creating, composing, synthesizing; going into analysis only to learn structures as they exist now, then freeing ourselves from old disciplines to build something new with the use of our inborn precepts. In this process we escape from logical, established, thinking and use our right brain to explore problems in a non-linear, wholistic or integrated fashion.
What we prize most in somebody's work is not something done to perfection, following tradition, an old recipe, or formula, valuable as those may be, but something from the spirit of the worker, different as the worker is from others, different, and new, and wonderful.
Yet, observe carefully around you, most of us are content to think as we were taught in family and school with all the well-tested concepts handed down to us through the ages; we live by the habits we acquired in childhood, refusing to change even when these habits of thought and behavior lead us down to perdition. Why is this so? Change is shaky ground for most of us; it is fearful, uncomfortable, even painful. How many of us seek adventure and knowledge with a passion? For an adult, change in established habits is very, very difficult, almost impossible. Yet, the will operates like a rudder on a supertanker. A few people recover for life from addictions, such as alcoholism, overeating, or gambling, somewhere between one to five percent. We are all slaves to our habitual thoughts which may have served us or our ancestors well in the past; we are prisoners inside a steel cage of entrenched concepts.
I too am a prisoner and find it virtually impossible to change my ways, even when I see that I desperately need to do so. I am trapped in a web of concepts, woven for me by others in the past, yet I refuse to accept my situation. I dig tunnels in my prison to escape. I seek the clarity of reason, now and until my end, searching for more efficient concepts. I seek to adapt, to form new ideas and behaviors, slowly, painfully, breaking away from harmful habits of thought and behavior to improve myself.
I want to explore the world of ideas, to find new models for the data available to me, new paradigms, or patterns. I conceive new patterns by focusing, concentrating on the problem I face; concentration may be the main difference between the innovator and the hack. Can you think of anything of importance somebody achieved without possessing great passion? A genius is a smart person who struggles fiercely to achieve, focusing the attention on a subject with a laser light until a meaningful pattern emerges; thus the clever person improves in mind and life.
We improve and evolve into new worlds of thought and language, submerged in a different state of consciousness of deep meditation. Language is a left-brain activity, while mental exploration, creativity, is a right brain activity. It is their combination that leads us to pose new problems and locate their solutions, with the right balance of disciple from our left brain and freedom to dream from our right brain; a balance that also works well for a creative society.
I suspect our ancestors diverged form other apes when they began to meditate: to enter into an alternate state of consciousness, leading to greater awareness, perhaps contacting a source of wisdom much greater than ourselves, and acquiring new concepts doing so.
A new concept is something we see clearly in our minds, a pattern we recognize that we had not sensed previously, a model derived from a collection of input data organized in a meaningful form, to which we give a name. Computers, in spite of their enormous computational powers and memories, are still unable to equal humans in pattern recognition ability, even in apparently simple tasks such character or speech recognition. Programmers keep trying to develop systems to do such functions and to perceive structures in data, but progress is slow in this field. There is a barrier to progress in machine intelligence; we are getting closer to the design of a smart computer, but the difficulty of designing it seems asymptotic, as if God does not yet want us to get to it. Our inborn precepts or truths will not transfer to our machines so far.
Now as to these native, wired-in, precepts and axioms, how can we acquire new and more advanced ones? Our inborn truths are God-given or Nature-given, representing our basic capabilities as human beings. As a male peacock has fine tail feathers, as a song bird has lovely notes, as a seagull has great wings for flying, so us humans possess our basic precepts of certain fundamental facts to guide our reason and feelings. Computers at the machine level can perform a number of operations on switches, turning them off or on, that we represent as 0 or 1. Each computer design is capable of a certain repertoire of such binary manipulations; it cannot exceed its repertoire of what it can do, no matter how sophisticated a high-level language we employ in our programming. Yet, employing operations on 0 and 1 on memory registers, computers can do an enormous lot of activities, which we all experience today in appliances, cell phones, in movie graphics, and the Internet. In 1946 Alan Turing showed that a elementary digital machine with the simplest memory, a stored-program computer, could do any computation imaginable, given good programming and sufficient time. It is the same with humans; although limited in our capabilities by our internal wiring, with good programming we can achieve great things as individuals and as a species.
To do more than we are wired to do, we will need to redesign our brains, which may be possible with the new technologies of bioengineering. Presently we are stuck with our inborn precepts. As flies keep buzzing to get through the glass of a window, so we butt our heads against some problems we cannot solve given our mental equipment.
In the meantime, we have our current powers of analytical (logical) thought, and of meditation, which two powers most of us use too little to achieve much of value in our lives. Excellent treatises are available, from Aristotle to Carnap, on symbolic logic; as for meditation techniques, we have Herbert Benson's "The Relaxation Response," and "The Breakthrough Principle." Dr. Benson was a Harvard medical researcher, but these techniques are available to us in many good sources for tapping our native powers of creativity. Basically, to augment thought we need to sweat out the details for quite a while, observing nature, collecting data, recording, experimenting, measuring--doing good old science almost to exhaustion--then, relaxing with walks, music, baths, etc., until we get our breakthrough to our discovery or invention. If the breakthrough, the main insight to the solution of our problem, does not yet come, we repeat the above.
The above cycle of work can be distributed between different people. For example, much progress in physics is done through the collaboration between experimental physicists and theoreticians, such as Leon M. Lederman at Fermilab and Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech. One collects vast amounts of data with ingenious experiments, and the other studies the accumulation of fairly raw information and models thoughts to fit, providing explanations. Consider the collaboration of Carl Friedrich Gauss in the eighteenth century, cranking out mathematics in Göttingen all his life, with of his contemporary world traveler, measuring guru, Alexander von Humboldt. Together they contributed much to our understanding of magnetism. The gauss is the unit of magnetism.
Similarly, Einstein is credited with many important advances in theoretical physics, which he would not have achieved without the data provided to him by experimenters. Could a mind such as Einstein's think without words, without symbols? Yes, but not very well, very far, or for very long. In his youth Einstein left high school and traveled to Tuscany, Italy, where in the clear light of the country he conceived special relativity. He described those gossamer early notions later in his twenties using the language of mathematics. At the time of his death, his blackboard at Princeton was covered with equations on general relativity, equations still preserved by the Institute of Advanced Studies. Einstein needed to write down his thoughts to make progress and conserve their memory. The story is told of Gauss jumping out of his wedding bed to record an equation that occurred to him while making love to his young wife.
It is clear we need symbols which we manipulate like things in order to advance thoughts to fruitful conclusions. In mathematics we start with simple numbers: not so simple actually, as explained by Gauss in his monumental "Disquisitiones Arithmeticae," which was his doctoral dissertation at twenty years of age. Anyway, somewhere in our human past we started counting things; numbers emerged and the beginning of mathematics. Numbers were a monumental discovery. Chickens cannot count above two. If a hen has lost a number of her chicks to predators, she's still clucking happily if she has at least two left; or maybe she's just stoical. Indians invented the Arabic numerals we use today, including the powerful zero. The ancient Greeks and Romans, in spite of their advances in mathematics, did not use Arabic numerals but letters for calculations, with a blank in place of a zero. We use letters in algebra, an Arabic word, to solve problems with known and unknown numbers. Algebraic equations were a higher level of abstraction. Then René Descartes in the seventeenth century gave us the coordinate system; we could now represent algebraic equations pictorially. The equation y=mx+b, could be shown to be a straight line intersecting the y coordinate at b and with a slope of m. We now had analytic geometry and trigonometry, a still higher level of abstraction in mathematics. Moreover, mathematicians devised a solution for the square root of a negative number, inventing complex numbers, which were given the unfortunate name of imaginary as opposed to the old real numbers.
In the same fruitful seventeenth century, Newton and Leibniz invented calculus independently. Newton was looking for a practical tool to calculate motions, while Leibniz developed calculus from a rigorous mathematics viewpoint. Calculus, which had puzzled the Greeks, including the superlative genius of Archimedes, in the squaring of the circle, pi times r squared, includes the fantastic notions of the infinite and infinitesimal; the number pi could now be calculated to any degree of accuracy, instead of being estimated. Differential equations emerged from calculus, with much more power of abstraction than algebraic equations; scientists could now apply differential equations widely to explain precisely previously intractable scientific phenomena, such as electromagnetism. With differential equations in vector form Maxwell could state the laws of electromagnetism concisely and elegantly, covering a vast array of physical eventualities in such phenomena, which could be investigated by integrating the equations. That's abstraction.
In the twentieth century we saw parallel developments of abstraction in other disciplines: psychology, sociology, economics, and the arts of painting, sculpture, music, and the theater. Progress continued in dealing with random phenomena and the previously intractable problem of probability, which were now placed on a firm footing of mathematical rigor, thanks mainly to French, German, Indian, and Russian thinkers, who discovered fitting axioms and proved theorems now bearing their names.
Again, the point is: we need language growth not only to communicate better with each other, but mainly to think better individually and together with other well-trained minds.
It is said that Nikola Tesla, the genius of alternating currents, could visualize mentally complex electrical machinery in every detail; however, his designs had to be put down on paper to be fabricated and tested. In the award-winning movie, "Amadeus," Mozart is depicted with entire symphonies in his head, later writing down the notes for the music without the smallest error or correction. Were those cases thinking without symbols? No. Mozart and Tesla could retain in the mind large amounts of the symbols in their discipline with the right organization or structure. I suspect Mozart did a lot of rewriting in his head before coming to the right form for a symphony or concerto. Actually, the structure of the symbols made the retention of the information possible for the two creative geniuses, thanks to their superb intellect and training.
Will computers every develop intellects such as Mozart's or Tesla's? Can we program digital machines to organize data and think as humans do? Over forty years ago, I. J. Good, a British mathematician, predicted the development of intelligent machines, which would help us design even more intelligent ones, an evolution resulting in machine super intelligence, surpassing our own by far, by the year two thousand. Arthur C. Clark, a British physicist and science fiction writer, wrote the novel 2001, with HAL, an intelligent computer as the protagonist. At the end of the story, HAL fails, but its astronaut companion grows to a superhuman with the help of an alien power, and returns to earth as a star child. That was advancing evolution with Deus ex machina.
We have seen many advances in digital machines in the past few decades: vast, super fast memories and central processing units, sophisticated programming for personal computers and main frames, and computer communications such as the Internet, all in very small packages; following Moore's Law, this progress continues. We have not seen smart machines, although we do have readers and speech recognizers with a 95-99% accuracy after training. We are seeing more of an integration of human and machine capabilities in many fields, with the human mind augmented by computers. We do much of our fact finding today with the help of Google and other search engines, collecting data from innumerable sites on the Net. We are getting closer to a superhuman-machine entity rather than a separate machine or human super intelligence.
With computer languages becoming ever closer to human ones, we are reaching the point when we will be communicating with our machines much more effectively, integrating our minds and bodies with their circuitry, and starting on the road to evolving as Homo digital.
Basil Gala, PhD.
(5557 Words)
The Christian bible says "in the beginning was the word, and the word was God." Word is the translation of "logos" in Greek, the language of the Bible used by educated people in the times of Christ, "logos" referring to Jesus. This is a prime example of the importance of language in human life. Recently, researchers in human evolution have found that the development of speech and the speech center in the left hemisphere of the brain played a critical role in the emergence of humans as a distinct species from the common primate ancestor of Homo sapiens and chimpazees. A large vocabulary, much larger than the thirty of so sounds chimps make to communicate, was the beginning of human divergence from the common primate stock. Over a period of about twelve million years pre-humans and true humans expanded their vocabulary to an average of sixty thousand words today. A powerful language was more important to human evolution than walking on two legs (bipedal locomotion), or using hands on tools and weapons. As an organ of nerve cells (neurons) in the back of the brain (the medulla oblongata) grew substantially in size and complexity to handle balance and stability on two legs, as the motor center center grew to allow more adept manipulation of objects, so did the speech center become enlarged and more capable to deal with words. More power with words meant better thinking to plan, to remember, and to communicate, granting a major survival advantage to those possessing it; the genes augmenting this power with words spread quickly in the population. Humans evolved with the use of language at an accelerating pace. Individual minds evolve similarly in childhood and adulthood, in social interactions and formal schooling. Can we make this evolution of mind a partly conscious and controlled procedure? We are beginning to understand much better how language works to make us more effective, and in the near future we will be able to control the process of creating new concepts for our natural language, thus expanding our minds in unimaginable ways.
Language evolves; we see that in children who replay the entire evolution of life from the womb outwards. At about two years of age or so, children begin talking with simple and halting words and phrases. After a few months of baby talk, connections are established in the brain (as they are for walking), and talking usually comes out with a rush, a replay of human verbal evolution. As the child grows into an adult, language becomes more complex and effective, reflecting the evolution of the brain. In old age, language, writing, and brain activity deteriorates back into childhood patterns. Sometimes, language, thought, and behavior degrade before old age; we see evidence of that on walls covered with graffiti, airwaves filled with rap music, and theaters crowded for the violence of films with cartoon superheroes. Overall, however, as long as civilization continues on our planet, language and thought are advancing in effectiveness, nobility, and power. Evolution to more powerful modes of language does not need to come to an end.
Language is made up of words, which are strings of symbols, such as letters together with other special characters. Symbols make it possible for us to communicate better with each other and with ourself, but gestures work well too as you can see if you are watching deaf mutes or Italians. Gestures are symbols too, as are postures. Are symbols necessary so that we may think? Not at a basic level, because we can think with pictures, also configurations of sounds, even of scents, tastes, and tactile sensations. We can guess how prehumans thought before symbolic language emerged. In many cultures the first written words were pictorial, such as the early hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, which were later stylized, and eventually became brief symbols, similar to what we use today to form our words and sentences. The paintings on the walls of the Altamira caves in Spain, exquisite as they are, were prehistoric expressions of language. Advanced, more complex and effective, thinking requires abstract concepts and their corresponding words, such as justice, science, evolution, computation, history, integration.
What exactly is a concept? A concept is a classification of sense data or other input to the mind into organized groupings so you can respond appropriately for your survival to a challenge from your environment. For example, you may see certain moves by someone which you recognize as threatening and respond by taking defensive measures. You have conceived you are being threatened; classifying the sense data you have received, the concept you have derived is that of threat. Alternately, other moves you see, you may classify as humor or love. Concepts thus defined are similar to Emanuel Kant's categories, a major feature of his philosophy of logic.
I am concerned here with advanced concepts of abstraction, a high-level natural language. In computer science, researchers developed a number of high-level languages to program computers with greater ease, such as FORTRAN, Pascal, and C++. My aim here is not to get strictly technical and discuss languages for calculations, symbol manipulation, and picture processing, but what we have learned from computer linguists can be of some use in understanding natural languages. A natural language is much more extensive and versatile, capable of dealing with a great variety of subjects including feelings, than a computer language limited to just a few hundred words and symbols that put the machine into a few digital operations . English has millions of words, capable of dealing with every thought, sensation, and emotion we can experience; a natural language is constantly changing and expanding in response to new experiences and challenges facing a human population.
Today we are facing such fearsome challenges as we did when as a small band of Homo sapiens we emerged in arid East Africa a hundred thousand years or so ago, challenges which threaten our existence again as a species. I expect if anything can save us now that has to be a new and transcendental way of talking, writing, and thinking. Transcending old ways of dealing with the world and with each other, we reject confrontation, exploitation, and destruction, to greater cooperation among ourselves and with the web of life on our planet. The age-old ways of speaking and thinking worked well when populations were small around the earth, tribes hemmed in by powerful predatory animals and a harsh nature with what appeared unlimited resources: vast forests, deep oceans, and unscalable mountains.
From an orbiting satellite, the Pacific Ocean looks like a pond, and Mount Everest a mere molehill. The forests are burning everywhere to make room for fields and buildings, or being cut down for fuel and lumber. The challenges are: destruction of human habitats, depletion of natural resources, planetary pollution, overpopulation, intractable epidemics, and warfare with ever more powerful weapons. We have to stop doing what we habitually do, and think with new concepts and words, suited to our present predicament.
Words or other symbols refer to things or concepts, which are called referents. Words represent referents; they take the place of referents in communication and in thinking. Using words we can do work in the mind without dealing with the actual things they represent, like mentally traveling on a map instead of the actual terrain, looking at hazards, time constraints, and destinations. Words allow us to organize, plan, command, entertain, motivate ourselves and others, lead, woo, impress, but mainly words allow us to think on an abstract level. Words can also mislead, so conditioned are we to them after many years of using them daily. Say the word lemon, visualize the fruit, and your mouth fills with saliva. Recite your national anthem, and your heart fills with pride, ready to drive you to battle.
What comes first, the word or the concept? Clearly, the concept. First we form concepts, such as pride, pointing to the emotion, then we configure the word or symbol to represent it. Conceiving new concepts is the creative part of language. There are now words for every concept so far conceived by humans. Where do I find new concepts of value? How to I spur the mind to bring forth a new concept of importance?
Such was the concept of science, the scientific method. René Descartes and Francis Bacon conceived the scientific method in the seventeenth century A.D. Two thousand years earlier, in the sixth century B.C., Democritus and Thales did science without formalizing a method for it. A century later, Plato and the Socratic philosophers gained influence with idealism, which overwhelmed early science in Greece. Idealism spread with Christianity and the Romans to all of Europe. The idealists deal with ideals and ideas: words often without referents, without end, without observations, measurements, or experiments.
We know now that when we question Nature with experiments and carefully observe her answers, that is how we arrive at new and useful concepts. We don't need to exclude our own minds as objects of observation and study. Our minds are part of Nature also; we can study our minds with introspection and meditation as the ancient Indian gurus learned to do long ago, making vital discoveries about our spirits. Combining Eastern wisdom from meditation with the practicality of Western science, connecting the immense outer universe with the equally vast inner one, human evolution may reach levels of thought we cannot even imagine today, with our most potent concepts yet to be conceived.
Again, how do we conceive concepts? When I think about a problem on any subject, words and symbols spring to mind which I have not coined. Am I thinking my own ideas or rehashing those that I have read? But if I have a new or unsolved problem and if I come up with a unique solution, then I can coin words to fit the concepts I have discovered in the struggle for the solution. Posing a question is the way to discovery, learning and evolution. Sometimes the question is foisted upon us by nature; it is a natural challenge for survival, as it is imposed on simpler animals and plants, a challenge to which we must respond by changing ourselves to be fit the solution. Bees, ants, and other social insects have hit on the solution to their survival problems; they have stuck to their social devices for millions of years, the queen mother, workers, and warriors, without much change in behavior. Birds build their nests in the same stereotyped way for each species; the cuckoo bird has its own peculiar way of taking care of its young, and so does the wasp planting its eggs in a tarantula. Such animals don't deviate much from their habitual behavior.
Advanced people explore and deviate from what they are accustomed; they keep posing questions to themselves out of curiosity; they do not rest until they have answers or they have died.
Such was Carl Friedrich Gauss, interested in the statistics of disease and death, working for the life insurance fund of the German government. He posed the question: Can we predict how many people will live to what age in a large population of insured individuals? It was important to fix these statistics to determine premiums for policies. Studying this problem Gauss came up with the concept of a frequency distribution, called today Gaussian, commonly known as normal or bell shaped. Pose an important problem, find the answer; if the answer is new and original, you have a concept you can name, or your name becomes a suitable word for it.
How do we produce suitable words? Who were the people who invented the words in Websters dictionary and how did the use of the new words spread in the population, becoming standard English? Many of the words scholars imported from Latin, Greek, and other languages, used them in their books and speeches and gradually the circle of their use expanded among educated people and later to the population at large. This explanation only translates the problem to other countries. How did the Greeks go about about inventing their words? Spoken language predates its written form by many thousands of years. Many words are imitations of natural sounds: murmur, screech, whistle, crash, bang, etc. These phonetic words don't take us very far into the dictionary. I can imagine that some bright fellow, a leader or primitive intellectual of an ancient tribe, woke up one day and got the notion of naming objects not previously named by the tribe. That person picked up a rock and called it such; a piece of wood, the same; then a handful of water. Later the leader talked to fellow tribal members and instructed them using the new words. Everyone imitated the leader as monkeys do today, the new words accepted and their use spreading quickly because they were useful for communication and survival.
Today scientists and engineers do similar feats with language when they observe new phenomena in their researches. Consider the language of organic chemists, describing combinations of atoms in compounds, with words made up by compounding the names of the elements in a molecule or that of physicists explaining the structure of subatomic particles with bosons, mesons, leptons, gravitons, and quarks.
Naming things, such as objects, sensations, even feelings, is not creating abstract concepts. This way we are using concrete words, which are fine in literature, especially in metaphors. We get abstraction when we name classes of things. In this sense the word chair is abstract, unless we are pointing to a particular chair, because it names pieces of furniture with legs and a top on which we sit. Furniture is the genus to which the species chair belongs; furniture includes many other artifacts besides chairs, and is therefore more abstract than the word chair. Furniture in turn is a species in the genus of human artifacts. We can continue this process of naming broader classes of things until we get to the word universe or God, containing everything that exists.
How about imaginary things, which presumably do not exist, such as unicorns and leprechauns? Anything we can imagine does in a sense exist;it becomes part of the universe when we have thought of it, since we are parts of the universe. Certainly this is so when we externalize our imaginings, putting them in some more durable form such as a piece of writing, a painting, sculpture, or any object we make from materials in nature. In our modern world we are constantly living with products of the human imagination, from televisions, cellular phones, computers, millions of artifacts, constantly emerging. We have thus become creators as well as namers of abstract things.
Abstracting is a process of composing a larger entity from smaller elements. This is the case in music, where we have an infinite variety of themes developed from the seven musical notes: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. The song you enjoy so much is simply the composer's abstract thought set to music. Similarly, a beautiful mosaic picture is made up of thousands of small colored pebbles. Seurat painted his sublime canvasses using points of paint, an art called pointilism. Van Gogh created his masterpieces with a few simple strokes of his brush. Hemingway did the same with small, simple words of the English language, yet his effects were very compelling in "The Sun Also Rises," "A Farewell to Arms," and "The Old Man and Sea." Hemingway crafted big effects in his stories with small words.
Words from a natural language like English are like field stones: they have different shapes, colors, materials, sizes; computer words are bricks or cement blocks, manufactured, not grown from living experiences. The author builds a structure with care using natural words, a thing of beauty and meaning, a new abstraction.
The point is: abstraction and creation emerges from putting together simpler elements, called primitives. What enters the composition in this synthesis of elements is the ineffable breath of design which gives it life, a breath from the spirit of the creator, human or divine. Analysis breaks down the design into its basic parts, isolating each part from the other parts, robbing it of vitality. Analysis can be very instructive to the designer, like reverse engineering by imitators, but for the rest of us criticism is decay, devoid of joy, with a bad smell. We are left with elements which amount to almost nothing, ghostlike, like the remains of matter left from supercollider experiments at CERN or Fermilab.
As to the most fundamental elements, the primitives in any composition, what are they and what faith can we place on these elements? In geometry we accept the existence of what we call a point and a line without providing any definitions for these. With the point and the line taken as given, together with a few other such undefined elements and unproven truths called axioms, Euclid build up his entire structure of geometrical theorems. When we analyze anything, eventually we get to precepts and truths we accept on faith. These have been called inborn, or God-given truths. Induction, for example, in logical thought is a mental process common to all humans not mentally impaired.
Take a look at the sequence of numbers: (2,3,4) (3,4,5) (4,5,6). What comes next in the sequence? Any human will use the inborn trait of induction to reply (5,6,7). The most intelligent chimpanzee, although capable of the most incredible feats of temporary memory, will fail this test for induction. A human child will pass it readily.
Besides induction, we naturally accept as valid the mental process of exhaustive search. When we enumerate all possibilities in a problem, and we select one or more to use, we believe we have a valid approach. From this springs the value of truth tables, which we employ extensively in logic and digital design to prove the truth of an expression of variables. We assign a value of true (T)or false (F) to each input or variable, and a value to the output. For example, we define the logical function AND for two inputs (A, B ) by the truth table:
A B A.AND.B
F F F
F T F
T F F
T T T
In other words, we accept that logically the output is true, only when both inputs are true.
Similarly, we accept a double negative as positive. We say, if someone is not dishonest, that person is honest.
Such notions are common sense, the endowment of every normal human being when mature enough, as Plato shows in his Socratic dialogue of "Meno." With simple questions, Socrates guides an illiterate slave boy to prove a non-trivial theorem in geometry.
We can assume that our ability to employ basic precepts, logical or of other kinds, evolved as we evolved as a species, or if we are religious, these precepts were granted to us by our Creator. As an impartial observer in the arguments on religion, I have no doubt that our bodies have evolved together with our primate cousins, but at some points in time factors entered the evolutionary equation for humans from a realm outside ordinary reality. Our minds, not our bodies, are the result of this influence.
We can begin to see now how to grow and expand our minds, seeking new words and concepts: by keeping busy creating, composing, synthesizing; going into analysis only to learn structures as they exist now, then freeing ourselves from old disciplines to build something new with the use of our inborn precepts. In this process we escape from logical, established, thinking and use our right brain to explore problems in a non-linear, wholistic or integrated fashion.
What we prize most in somebody's work is not something done to perfection, following tradition, an old recipe, or formula, valuable as those may be, but something from the spirit of the worker, different as the worker is from others, different, and new, and wonderful.
Yet, observe carefully around you, most of us are content to think as we were taught in family and school with all the well-tested concepts handed down to us through the ages; we live by the habits we acquired in childhood, refusing to change even when these habits of thought and behavior lead us down to perdition. Why is this so? Change is shaky ground for most of us; it is fearful, uncomfortable, even painful. How many of us seek adventure and knowledge with a passion? For an adult, change in established habits is very, very difficult, almost impossible. Yet, the will operates like a rudder on a supertanker. A few people recover for life from addictions, such as alcoholism, overeating, or gambling, somewhere between one to five percent. We are all slaves to our habitual thoughts which may have served us or our ancestors well in the past; we are prisoners inside a steel cage of entrenched concepts.
I too am a prisoner and find it virtually impossible to change my ways, even when I see that I desperately need to do so. I am trapped in a web of concepts, woven for me by others in the past, yet I refuse to accept my situation. I dig tunnels in my prison to escape. I seek the clarity of reason, now and until my end, searching for more efficient concepts. I seek to adapt, to form new ideas and behaviors, slowly, painfully, breaking away from harmful habits of thought and behavior to improve myself.
I want to explore the world of ideas, to find new models for the data available to me, new paradigms, or patterns. I conceive new patterns by focusing, concentrating on the problem I face; concentration may be the main difference between the innovator and the hack. Can you think of anything of importance somebody achieved without possessing great passion? A genius is a smart person who struggles fiercely to achieve, focusing the attention on a subject with a laser light until a meaningful pattern emerges; thus the clever person improves in mind and life.
We improve and evolve into new worlds of thought and language, submerged in a different state of consciousness of deep meditation. Language is a left-brain activity, while mental exploration, creativity, is a right brain activity. It is their combination that leads us to pose new problems and locate their solutions, with the right balance of disciple from our left brain and freedom to dream from our right brain; a balance that also works well for a creative society.
I suspect our ancestors diverged form other apes when they began to meditate: to enter into an alternate state of consciousness, leading to greater awareness, perhaps contacting a source of wisdom much greater than ourselves, and acquiring new concepts doing so.
A new concept is something we see clearly in our minds, a pattern we recognize that we had not sensed previously, a model derived from a collection of input data organized in a meaningful form, to which we give a name. Computers, in spite of their enormous computational powers and memories, are still unable to equal humans in pattern recognition ability, even in apparently simple tasks such character or speech recognition. Programmers keep trying to develop systems to do such functions and to perceive structures in data, but progress is slow in this field. There is a barrier to progress in machine intelligence; we are getting closer to the design of a smart computer, but the difficulty of designing it seems asymptotic, as if God does not yet want us to get to it. Our inborn precepts or truths will not transfer to our machines so far.
Now as to these native, wired-in, precepts and axioms, how can we acquire new and more advanced ones? Our inborn truths are God-given or Nature-given, representing our basic capabilities as human beings. As a male peacock has fine tail feathers, as a song bird has lovely notes, as a seagull has great wings for flying, so us humans possess our basic precepts of certain fundamental facts to guide our reason and feelings. Computers at the machine level can perform a number of operations on switches, turning them off or on, that we represent as 0 or 1. Each computer design is capable of a certain repertoire of such binary manipulations; it cannot exceed its repertoire of what it can do, no matter how sophisticated a high-level language we employ in our programming. Yet, employing operations on 0 and 1 on memory registers, computers can do an enormous lot of activities, which we all experience today in appliances, cell phones, in movie graphics, and the Internet. In 1946 Alan Turing showed that a elementary digital machine with the simplest memory, a stored-program computer, could do any computation imaginable, given good programming and sufficient time. It is the same with humans; although limited in our capabilities by our internal wiring, with good programming we can achieve great things as individuals and as a species.
To do more than we are wired to do, we will need to redesign our brains, which may be possible with the new technologies of bioengineering. Presently we are stuck with our inborn precepts. As flies keep buzzing to get through the glass of a window, so we butt our heads against some problems we cannot solve given our mental equipment.
In the meantime, we have our current powers of analytical (logical) thought, and of meditation, which two powers most of us use too little to achieve much of value in our lives. Excellent treatises are available, from Aristotle to Carnap, on symbolic logic; as for meditation techniques, we have Herbert Benson's "The Relaxation Response," and "The Breakthrough Principle." Dr. Benson was a Harvard medical researcher, but these techniques are available to us in many good sources for tapping our native powers of creativity. Basically, to augment thought we need to sweat out the details for quite a while, observing nature, collecting data, recording, experimenting, measuring--doing good old science almost to exhaustion--then, relaxing with walks, music, baths, etc., until we get our breakthrough to our discovery or invention. If the breakthrough, the main insight to the solution of our problem, does not yet come, we repeat the above.
The above cycle of work can be distributed between different people. For example, much progress in physics is done through the collaboration between experimental physicists and theoreticians, such as Leon M. Lederman at Fermilab and Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech. One collects vast amounts of data with ingenious experiments, and the other studies the accumulation of fairly raw information and models thoughts to fit, providing explanations. Consider the collaboration of Carl Friedrich Gauss in the eighteenth century, cranking out mathematics in Göttingen all his life, with of his contemporary world traveler, measuring guru, Alexander von Humboldt. Together they contributed much to our understanding of magnetism. The gauss is the unit of magnetism.
Similarly, Einstein is credited with many important advances in theoretical physics, which he would not have achieved without the data provided to him by experimenters. Could a mind such as Einstein's think without words, without symbols? Yes, but not very well, very far, or for very long. In his youth Einstein left high school and traveled to Tuscany, Italy, where in the clear light of the country he conceived special relativity. He described those gossamer early notions later in his twenties using the language of mathematics. At the time of his death, his blackboard at Princeton was covered with equations on general relativity, equations still preserved by the Institute of Advanced Studies. Einstein needed to write down his thoughts to make progress and conserve their memory. The story is told of Gauss jumping out of his wedding bed to record an equation that occurred to him while making love to his young wife.
It is clear we need symbols which we manipulate like things in order to advance thoughts to fruitful conclusions. In mathematics we start with simple numbers: not so simple actually, as explained by Gauss in his monumental "Disquisitiones Arithmeticae," which was his doctoral dissertation at twenty years of age. Anyway, somewhere in our human past we started counting things; numbers emerged and the beginning of mathematics. Numbers were a monumental discovery. Chickens cannot count above two. If a hen has lost a number of her chicks to predators, she's still clucking happily if she has at least two left; or maybe she's just stoical. Indians invented the Arabic numerals we use today, including the powerful zero. The ancient Greeks and Romans, in spite of their advances in mathematics, did not use Arabic numerals but letters for calculations, with a blank in place of a zero. We use letters in algebra, an Arabic word, to solve problems with known and unknown numbers. Algebraic equations were a higher level of abstraction. Then René Descartes in the seventeenth century gave us the coordinate system; we could now represent algebraic equations pictorially. The equation y=mx+b, could be shown to be a straight line intersecting the y coordinate at b and with a slope of m. We now had analytic geometry and trigonometry, a still higher level of abstraction in mathematics. Moreover, mathematicians devised a solution for the square root of a negative number, inventing complex numbers, which were given the unfortunate name of imaginary as opposed to the old real numbers.
In the same fruitful seventeenth century, Newton and Leibniz invented calculus independently. Newton was looking for a practical tool to calculate motions, while Leibniz developed calculus from a rigorous mathematics viewpoint. Calculus, which had puzzled the Greeks, including the superlative genius of Archimedes, in the squaring of the circle, pi times r squared, includes the fantastic notions of the infinite and infinitesimal; the number pi could now be calculated to any degree of accuracy, instead of being estimated. Differential equations emerged from calculus, with much more power of abstraction than algebraic equations; scientists could now apply differential equations widely to explain precisely previously intractable scientific phenomena, such as electromagnetism. With differential equations in vector form Maxwell could state the laws of electromagnetism concisely and elegantly, covering a vast array of physical eventualities in such phenomena, which could be investigated by integrating the equations. That's abstraction.
In the twentieth century we saw parallel developments of abstraction in other disciplines: psychology, sociology, economics, and the arts of painting, sculpture, music, and the theater. Progress continued in dealing with random phenomena and the previously intractable problem of probability, which were now placed on a firm footing of mathematical rigor, thanks mainly to French, German, Indian, and Russian thinkers, who discovered fitting axioms and proved theorems now bearing their names.
Again, the point is: we need language growth not only to communicate better with each other, but mainly to think better individually and together with other well-trained minds.
It is said that Nikola Tesla, the genius of alternating currents, could visualize mentally complex electrical machinery in every detail; however, his designs had to be put down on paper to be fabricated and tested. In the award-winning movie, "Amadeus," Mozart is depicted with entire symphonies in his head, later writing down the notes for the music without the smallest error or correction. Were those cases thinking without symbols? No. Mozart and Tesla could retain in the mind large amounts of the symbols in their discipline with the right organization or structure. I suspect Mozart did a lot of rewriting in his head before coming to the right form for a symphony or concerto. Actually, the structure of the symbols made the retention of the information possible for the two creative geniuses, thanks to their superb intellect and training.
Will computers every develop intellects such as Mozart's or Tesla's? Can we program digital machines to organize data and think as humans do? Over forty years ago, I. J. Good, a British mathematician, predicted the development of intelligent machines, which would help us design even more intelligent ones, an evolution resulting in machine super intelligence, surpassing our own by far, by the year two thousand. Arthur C. Clark, a British physicist and science fiction writer, wrote the novel 2001, with HAL, an intelligent computer as the protagonist. At the end of the story, HAL fails, but its astronaut companion grows to a superhuman with the help of an alien power, and returns to earth as a star child. That was advancing evolution with Deus ex machina.
We have seen many advances in digital machines in the past few decades: vast, super fast memories and central processing units, sophisticated programming for personal computers and main frames, and computer communications such as the Internet, all in very small packages; following Moore's Law, this progress continues. We have not seen smart machines, although we do have readers and speech recognizers with a 95-99% accuracy after training. We are seeing more of an integration of human and machine capabilities in many fields, with the human mind augmented by computers. We do much of our fact finding today with the help of Google and other search engines, collecting data from innumerable sites on the Net. We are getting closer to a superhuman-machine entity rather than a separate machine or human super intelligence.
With computer languages becoming ever closer to human ones, we are reaching the point when we will be communicating with our machines much more effectively, integrating our minds and bodies with their circuitry, and starting on the road to evolving as Homo digital.
An Inquiry into the Flowering of Cultures
An Inquiry into the Flowering of Cultures
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
All cultures are valuable and worthy of study, Margaret Mead would say. All cultures are equal, interesting, and must be preserved for posterity; each contains unique elements which may prove essential to human survival and growth; that’s the truth indeed. Yet, some cultures flourish at times in human history above the norm. We had the splendor that was Greece, and the might that was Rome. Barbarian tribes nearly destroyed all that and Jewish theology put the finishing touches to the advent of the dark ages. Renaissance finally dawned in Italy, giving us da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Galileo. Then the new flowering of culture spread to the barbarian lands of Holland, Spain, France, England, Germany, Russia, and smaller nations in Europe. The proud nations of Europe later discovered other cultures of great importance that had flourished in the past: in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, Middle America, Peru, Indochina, and other lands. What was the common thread that gave rise to such extraordinary growths in art, science, technology, politics, and religion? How was this thread cut, leading to decay, apathy, ignorance, and the death of the creative mind? The thread was the reach of leading noble citizens for creativity, for excellence, and for the divine; the thread was cut when barbarians, from home or abroad, brought down those citizens.
The word in Sanskrit for noble is aryan, a word debased by Nazi ideologues. In Hinduism arya is a title of honor and respect, meaning noble or spiritual. In Greek the word “arete” was used to describe what was best in anything, indicating superlative ability and nobility, from which derived aristos (best) and aristocracy. Aryan is also related to Iran (Persia) and Zoroastrianism, a germinal religion of ancient times which gave rise to the belief in the immortality of the spirit. Being noble is to seek the best things in life. Excellence is the passion to achieve great works, in fierce competition with equally talented antagonists. The divine, the ultimate nobility, is that state of being which is full of peace, contentment, creativity, power, wisdom, great knowledge, compassion, and joy--the attributes of God.
In the past, people believed attributes of nobility were passed on to offspring through breeding, or blood. Nobles bequeathed their wealth, titles, and powerful positions to their first sons, who were sometimes idiots; the smart second or third sons went to America to build wealth for themselves. Today, genetics provides some explanations for the transfer of hereditary traits. Certainly some physical characteristics are inherited: for example, the color of eyes, hair, and skin, even stature of body and size of brain. Spiritual qualities may be a different matter. King David gave birth to Solomon; but Marcus Aurelius to Commodus. Moreover, many great men and women have come from humble backgrounds, from commoners or even serfs. Yet, with the rise of democracies throughout the world, perhaps we have swung too far in neglecting birth and breeding. We should honor and support nobility no matter what the source of it. The British are wise to confer knighthoods to people, such as Ben Kingsley, actor, son of an East Indian, who tap their source of nobility and contribute to society something of value and importance.
In 1919 Munich, the Thule Society discovered the source of nobility in Atlantis, which sank they claimed in the Northern Atlantic Ocean a million years ago; The Thule attributed much virtue to the blond, blue-eyed Nordic strain of humans. The Society sponsored Deutsche Arbeirpartei, which became the Nazi party under Adolph Hitler. Teutonic people were the master race, and every other type of human was inferior. That would leave out the ancient Greeks, and the modern European Jews, who have contributed greatly to civilization. Jesus, the Jewish carpenter, was not light skinned and blond; neither was Einstein. In every field of civilized life, European Jews excelled, yet Hitler decided they had to be exterminated. I am not a Nordic type, and most likely, you are not either. Even Southern Germans are not very blond. Blond men may be superior, but popular opinion holds that blond women are dumb. Disregarding eugenics, gentlemen prefer blonds, so blonds have more fun; that’s why so many silly women become blonds, and with contact lenses, blue-eyed too.
Blond or dark, certain strains of humanity build civilization better than others. We should encourage them to continue doing this and discourage those people who tend to destroy culture. The best way to discourage barbarians from destroying the fruits of culture is to civilize them. Ancient Romans in the West were successful to some extent doing that with the French, Western Germans, and the Anglo-Saxons; they failed in Eastern Germany (and Scotland, where Hadrian built a wall to stop them); eventually, the barbarian armies sacked Rome and took over the Holy Roman Empire. Many centuries later, in the East, the Byzantines made progress with the Arabs, but were overwhelmed by the Turks. Barbarians usually win the conflict in the end, because barbarians live in tough circumstances, become strong and aggressive, and have higher birthrates. Civilizations degenerate from ease and weakness; then barbarians destroy them. Barbarians are always charging at the gates of the city with high culture.
The French call it “haute culture,” when talking about clothing fashions. I refer to culture that noble people create, which has little to do with clothing, wooden masks for ceremonies, the igloo, or the boomerang—good things as these may be. High culture is when noble people strive to reach God, the ideal of perfection. I realize you may dispute the distinction between high culture and low. What is fine music, great painting, good science, useful technology, powerful religion or politics, all are subject to taste and fashion. But for now let us accept the opinions of teachers or critics. They instruct us to admire the achievements of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and before them the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians who invented writing and other arts. We can see in National Geographic about archaeological discoveries in Middle and South America and admire the remains of the Mayan and Inca civilizations. In the East, we can tour in person or by travelogue Cambodia’s Angkor Vat, India’s magnificent temples, Japan’s Kyoto treasures, and China’s Ming artworks. What brought about such achievements?
Nobility is essential for great achievements, but not sufficient; wealth is also necessary. You can hardly be noble without money. You cannot indulge in the arts and sciences, when you are struggling each day for bare survival. Civilizations don’t emerge in villages and farms. A good river is almost always there for a city to grow big and prosperous. A coastline with a natural harbor helps too. The Egyptian civilization was the gift of the Nile, and Babylon the gift of two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates. It seems that each great city is next to a river flowing by to supply water for irrigation, drinking and sewage disposal. Rome, Tiber. Paris, Seine. London, Thames. Vienna, Danube. Palestine, Jordan. Ancient Athens had Cephissus, small but competent. The plains of Attica were fertile, growing olives, grapes, wheat, and vegetables, which formed the early wealth of the city. The harbor of Piraeus was close and the road to it was walled in. The Athenians ventured out to the Aegean and beyond to trade with their olive oil, wine and other products. Later Athenians acquired slaves, set up factories, and exported manufactured products. Athenian navy allowed people to travel to Egypt and other centers of civilization, which were already ancient in their time. During the Persian wars the Athenians led the Greeks in victorious battles and later formed the Delian League of city states, collecting taxes and tributes for the common defense against Persians. The Persians caused no further trouble, so Pericles, elected city leader for over thirty years, used the money to create splendid cultural monuments on the Acropolis and elsewhere for the enjoyment of the people and to impress visitors. The age of Pericles is known as the Golden Age of Greece.
Pericles was a democratic leader, descended from aristocratic families, especially on his mother’s side. He was accused by enemies of being a populist, because he gave the vote to poor people and provided free theater seats for them with city money. But the plays he sponsored were tragedies by Aeschylos, Sophocles, and Euripides, with some comic relief from Aristophanes.
The sculptor Pericles favored was Phidias. Phidias was also a great painter and architect, seeking perfection in everything he created. Once he was asked why he bothered to make the backs of statues in front of walls as carefully as the fronts, since people could not see the backs. Phidias answered that the Gods could see the backs. Like da Vinci and Michelangelo in the Italian Renaissance, he was probably gay.
Being gay may give some men and women a special sensitivity that allows them to excel in the arts. Not being burdened by a family to support, gay persons may fully dedicate their lives to their art.
With the efforts of gays or straights, culture branches out, growing like a tree to any size, sprouting in all directions to infinity, eventually becoming the Deity. There can never be an end to artistic or scientific innovation. Limits occur only in the minds of spiritless people, who give up too soon. The popular arts always persist in their charming but pointless existence. Folk songs and dances go on. The handicrafts continue and philosophy becomes a collection of old sayings. When the leading people, the born aristocrats, stop striving, when they turn to pleasures and futilities, neglecting self discipline and hard work, abandoning total dedication to their chosen fields, these people decline and their society quickly follows into decay. Then tyrants, dictators, autocrats of the state take over, boxing in minds, depressing and oppressing those who would freely create new ideas. In the tree of culture whole branches dry out, dying. Perhaps most of the tree of culture withers as in the Dark Ages. But the roots seem to persist and the tree sprouts again on some other land, in some other age, when freedom of expression is again allowed.
In America, in 1776, freedom and democracy came to life again after many centuries of autocratic rule in the Old World, and with these blessings came the flowering of culture in the thirteen colonies, such as we have not seen since. Benjamin Franklin was a statesman, businessman, author, inventor, and scientist, one of the founders of electrical science. Thomas Jefferson, besides being a plantation owner and statesman, was an architect, a writer of renown with his Declaration of Independence. John Adams was an attorney and statesman with a major intellect. The bona fide genius was the elitist Alexander Hamilton, one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who perished in a duel with his political enemy Aaron Burr before he became 50. Hamilton contributed to the formation of a strong federal government and chief executive in the form of a president. James Madison, a political theorist, was one of the framers of the Constitution and its chief author, designing checks and balances in the distribution of federal power. George Washington was no genius but a man of immense character, an able general, and the first president; he declined to become a king as he was urged by his admirers. The U. S. was fortunate indeed to have such people who founded a republic with a reasonably good balance between freedom and discipline. Culture has flourished in America at least in science and technology.
The fine arts instead have not done as well. Artists require patronage from people of noble vision, who support contemporary work, not the classics only. The classics, traditional works, are fine to admire up to a point. I suggest that half of the support money should go to honor the classics, and the other half to support the work of living artists. Most wealthy collectors in America pay millions for the paintings and sculptures of artists long dead on the advice of their experts, and do very little to patronize living artists of merit. Our orchestras play old symphonies and operas and very little of contemporary works.
Don’t we have contemporary artists of great merit? We probably do, but these people prefer to go into business to make some real money. They are unwilling to work for fifty cents an hour like Michelangelo when he was creating the Sistine chapel’s decorations for Pope Julius II. Perhaps we don’t have patrons willing to pay even that much for art they cannot resell for profit. Anyway, egalitarian societies such as ours are not likely to give rise to fine culture. Populist or socialist societies do even worse. What came out of the Nazi socialists or the communists? They produced nothing worthwhile except for better weapons. Good artists made a run out of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union whenever they could. Creative people and oppressive governments don’t go well together. Yet, too much freedom leads to degradation and triviality, the art of urinals. Creativity depends on a sound tradition to build on, but enough freedom to reach out to new spaces for the tree of culture. Massive, centralized, governments do not advance civilization very much.
In ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, and eighteenth century Germany, people had a great flowering of culture in a political environment of city states, with noble rulers patronizing creative talent in competition to outshine with each other with great monuments for own glory and that of their city. Prime examples of such rulers were Pericles, Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence, who patronized da Vinci, Hungarian Prince Esterhazy, who supported Joseph Haydn to produce 106 magnificent symphonies, Mozart’s Prince-Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg and Emperor Joseph II in Vienna. Mozart created great operas in Vienna, such as The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni, until he fell into hard times during the Austro-Turkish War of 1787, when prosperity dropped and aristocrats were giving less money to the arts.
In hard financial times or when aristocracies fall, we see a decline in cultural growth. But a too strong, centralized government is a worse calamity for culture. In America we would do better making counties the centers of our political power and wealth, in the form of city states. Elected officials in the county, well known to the local people, may elect state governors, and governors elect the president; the same process can apply to other branches of government, the judicial and legislative, with only the most basic and necessary functions relinquished to state and federal entities. You can be sure local leaders will not give up too much power to the central governments as popular voting does in our current system. Prominent citizens may thus perform the roles of democratic princes, like Pericles or Lorenzo, each county governed by a city of modest size, certainly less than a million people. Massive urban centers, like New York or Chicago may support the arts, but not their creation as much. Most of the money goes to popular entertainments with little artistic merit for the masses.
Artistic merit prevailed in Paris during the eighteenth century; Paris was the center of the world in culture, and it was a large city; but the artistic center of it where intellects thrived was very small. Learning and creativity were nourished at the Sorbonne. The same could be said for London in the seventeenth century with Oxford and Cambridge, which produced modern science, Shakespearean theater, and other fine arts with money from exploration, the raiding of Spanish galleons by privateers, manufacturing and trade. The Dutch in Amsterdam, rich from trade, followed a similar route with the English, producing Rembrandt (patronized by Prince Frederik Hendrik), Huygens (mathematician and scientist), and Spinoza, one of greatest philosophers of all time. This was the Golden Age for the Dutch and the English.
If we want a Golden Age for planet Earth, not any more isolated flowerings of culture that quickly wither, we who know where the roots of culture are, let us remember the lessons of History and apply them to our private and social lives. An individual grows and bears fruit with a firm purpose in life, working hard to achieve it, never weakening, never giving up. The civilized person needs to be not only smarter and better trained than the barbarian, but also stronger, producing and raising children to be the same. A society, a world society today, constituted by such noble persons of birth or aspiration will prevail over the barbarians that abound everywhere in great numbers, and lead humanity to a shining future, here on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe, where astronauts may travel to build the city of God.
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
All cultures are valuable and worthy of study, Margaret Mead would say. All cultures are equal, interesting, and must be preserved for posterity; each contains unique elements which may prove essential to human survival and growth; that’s the truth indeed. Yet, some cultures flourish at times in human history above the norm. We had the splendor that was Greece, and the might that was Rome. Barbarian tribes nearly destroyed all that and Jewish theology put the finishing touches to the advent of the dark ages. Renaissance finally dawned in Italy, giving us da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Galileo. Then the new flowering of culture spread to the barbarian lands of Holland, Spain, France, England, Germany, Russia, and smaller nations in Europe. The proud nations of Europe later discovered other cultures of great importance that had flourished in the past: in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, Middle America, Peru, Indochina, and other lands. What was the common thread that gave rise to such extraordinary growths in art, science, technology, politics, and religion? How was this thread cut, leading to decay, apathy, ignorance, and the death of the creative mind? The thread was the reach of leading noble citizens for creativity, for excellence, and for the divine; the thread was cut when barbarians, from home or abroad, brought down those citizens.
The word in Sanskrit for noble is aryan, a word debased by Nazi ideologues. In Hinduism arya is a title of honor and respect, meaning noble or spiritual. In Greek the word “arete” was used to describe what was best in anything, indicating superlative ability and nobility, from which derived aristos (best) and aristocracy. Aryan is also related to Iran (Persia) and Zoroastrianism, a germinal religion of ancient times which gave rise to the belief in the immortality of the spirit. Being noble is to seek the best things in life. Excellence is the passion to achieve great works, in fierce competition with equally talented antagonists. The divine, the ultimate nobility, is that state of being which is full of peace, contentment, creativity, power, wisdom, great knowledge, compassion, and joy--the attributes of God.
In the past, people believed attributes of nobility were passed on to offspring through breeding, or blood. Nobles bequeathed their wealth, titles, and powerful positions to their first sons, who were sometimes idiots; the smart second or third sons went to America to build wealth for themselves. Today, genetics provides some explanations for the transfer of hereditary traits. Certainly some physical characteristics are inherited: for example, the color of eyes, hair, and skin, even stature of body and size of brain. Spiritual qualities may be a different matter. King David gave birth to Solomon; but Marcus Aurelius to Commodus. Moreover, many great men and women have come from humble backgrounds, from commoners or even serfs. Yet, with the rise of democracies throughout the world, perhaps we have swung too far in neglecting birth and breeding. We should honor and support nobility no matter what the source of it. The British are wise to confer knighthoods to people, such as Ben Kingsley, actor, son of an East Indian, who tap their source of nobility and contribute to society something of value and importance.
In 1919 Munich, the Thule Society discovered the source of nobility in Atlantis, which sank they claimed in the Northern Atlantic Ocean a million years ago; The Thule attributed much virtue to the blond, blue-eyed Nordic strain of humans. The Society sponsored Deutsche Arbeirpartei, which became the Nazi party under Adolph Hitler. Teutonic people were the master race, and every other type of human was inferior. That would leave out the ancient Greeks, and the modern European Jews, who have contributed greatly to civilization. Jesus, the Jewish carpenter, was not light skinned and blond; neither was Einstein. In every field of civilized life, European Jews excelled, yet Hitler decided they had to be exterminated. I am not a Nordic type, and most likely, you are not either. Even Southern Germans are not very blond. Blond men may be superior, but popular opinion holds that blond women are dumb. Disregarding eugenics, gentlemen prefer blonds, so blonds have more fun; that’s why so many silly women become blonds, and with contact lenses, blue-eyed too.
Blond or dark, certain strains of humanity build civilization better than others. We should encourage them to continue doing this and discourage those people who tend to destroy culture. The best way to discourage barbarians from destroying the fruits of culture is to civilize them. Ancient Romans in the West were successful to some extent doing that with the French, Western Germans, and the Anglo-Saxons; they failed in Eastern Germany (and Scotland, where Hadrian built a wall to stop them); eventually, the barbarian armies sacked Rome and took over the Holy Roman Empire. Many centuries later, in the East, the Byzantines made progress with the Arabs, but were overwhelmed by the Turks. Barbarians usually win the conflict in the end, because barbarians live in tough circumstances, become strong and aggressive, and have higher birthrates. Civilizations degenerate from ease and weakness; then barbarians destroy them. Barbarians are always charging at the gates of the city with high culture.
The French call it “haute culture,” when talking about clothing fashions. I refer to culture that noble people create, which has little to do with clothing, wooden masks for ceremonies, the igloo, or the boomerang—good things as these may be. High culture is when noble people strive to reach God, the ideal of perfection. I realize you may dispute the distinction between high culture and low. What is fine music, great painting, good science, useful technology, powerful religion or politics, all are subject to taste and fashion. But for now let us accept the opinions of teachers or critics. They instruct us to admire the achievements of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and before them the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians who invented writing and other arts. We can see in National Geographic about archaeological discoveries in Middle and South America and admire the remains of the Mayan and Inca civilizations. In the East, we can tour in person or by travelogue Cambodia’s Angkor Vat, India’s magnificent temples, Japan’s Kyoto treasures, and China’s Ming artworks. What brought about such achievements?
Nobility is essential for great achievements, but not sufficient; wealth is also necessary. You can hardly be noble without money. You cannot indulge in the arts and sciences, when you are struggling each day for bare survival. Civilizations don’t emerge in villages and farms. A good river is almost always there for a city to grow big and prosperous. A coastline with a natural harbor helps too. The Egyptian civilization was the gift of the Nile, and Babylon the gift of two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates. It seems that each great city is next to a river flowing by to supply water for irrigation, drinking and sewage disposal. Rome, Tiber. Paris, Seine. London, Thames. Vienna, Danube. Palestine, Jordan. Ancient Athens had Cephissus, small but competent. The plains of Attica were fertile, growing olives, grapes, wheat, and vegetables, which formed the early wealth of the city. The harbor of Piraeus was close and the road to it was walled in. The Athenians ventured out to the Aegean and beyond to trade with their olive oil, wine and other products. Later Athenians acquired slaves, set up factories, and exported manufactured products. Athenian navy allowed people to travel to Egypt and other centers of civilization, which were already ancient in their time. During the Persian wars the Athenians led the Greeks in victorious battles and later formed the Delian League of city states, collecting taxes and tributes for the common defense against Persians. The Persians caused no further trouble, so Pericles, elected city leader for over thirty years, used the money to create splendid cultural monuments on the Acropolis and elsewhere for the enjoyment of the people and to impress visitors. The age of Pericles is known as the Golden Age of Greece.
Pericles was a democratic leader, descended from aristocratic families, especially on his mother’s side. He was accused by enemies of being a populist, because he gave the vote to poor people and provided free theater seats for them with city money. But the plays he sponsored were tragedies by Aeschylos, Sophocles, and Euripides, with some comic relief from Aristophanes.
The sculptor Pericles favored was Phidias. Phidias was also a great painter and architect, seeking perfection in everything he created. Once he was asked why he bothered to make the backs of statues in front of walls as carefully as the fronts, since people could not see the backs. Phidias answered that the Gods could see the backs. Like da Vinci and Michelangelo in the Italian Renaissance, he was probably gay.
Being gay may give some men and women a special sensitivity that allows them to excel in the arts. Not being burdened by a family to support, gay persons may fully dedicate their lives to their art.
With the efforts of gays or straights, culture branches out, growing like a tree to any size, sprouting in all directions to infinity, eventually becoming the Deity. There can never be an end to artistic or scientific innovation. Limits occur only in the minds of spiritless people, who give up too soon. The popular arts always persist in their charming but pointless existence. Folk songs and dances go on. The handicrafts continue and philosophy becomes a collection of old sayings. When the leading people, the born aristocrats, stop striving, when they turn to pleasures and futilities, neglecting self discipline and hard work, abandoning total dedication to their chosen fields, these people decline and their society quickly follows into decay. Then tyrants, dictators, autocrats of the state take over, boxing in minds, depressing and oppressing those who would freely create new ideas. In the tree of culture whole branches dry out, dying. Perhaps most of the tree of culture withers as in the Dark Ages. But the roots seem to persist and the tree sprouts again on some other land, in some other age, when freedom of expression is again allowed.
In America, in 1776, freedom and democracy came to life again after many centuries of autocratic rule in the Old World, and with these blessings came the flowering of culture in the thirteen colonies, such as we have not seen since. Benjamin Franklin was a statesman, businessman, author, inventor, and scientist, one of the founders of electrical science. Thomas Jefferson, besides being a plantation owner and statesman, was an architect, a writer of renown with his Declaration of Independence. John Adams was an attorney and statesman with a major intellect. The bona fide genius was the elitist Alexander Hamilton, one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who perished in a duel with his political enemy Aaron Burr before he became 50. Hamilton contributed to the formation of a strong federal government and chief executive in the form of a president. James Madison, a political theorist, was one of the framers of the Constitution and its chief author, designing checks and balances in the distribution of federal power. George Washington was no genius but a man of immense character, an able general, and the first president; he declined to become a king as he was urged by his admirers. The U. S. was fortunate indeed to have such people who founded a republic with a reasonably good balance between freedom and discipline. Culture has flourished in America at least in science and technology.
The fine arts instead have not done as well. Artists require patronage from people of noble vision, who support contemporary work, not the classics only. The classics, traditional works, are fine to admire up to a point. I suggest that half of the support money should go to honor the classics, and the other half to support the work of living artists. Most wealthy collectors in America pay millions for the paintings and sculptures of artists long dead on the advice of their experts, and do very little to patronize living artists of merit. Our orchestras play old symphonies and operas and very little of contemporary works.
Don’t we have contemporary artists of great merit? We probably do, but these people prefer to go into business to make some real money. They are unwilling to work for fifty cents an hour like Michelangelo when he was creating the Sistine chapel’s decorations for Pope Julius II. Perhaps we don’t have patrons willing to pay even that much for art they cannot resell for profit. Anyway, egalitarian societies such as ours are not likely to give rise to fine culture. Populist or socialist societies do even worse. What came out of the Nazi socialists or the communists? They produced nothing worthwhile except for better weapons. Good artists made a run out of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union whenever they could. Creative people and oppressive governments don’t go well together. Yet, too much freedom leads to degradation and triviality, the art of urinals. Creativity depends on a sound tradition to build on, but enough freedom to reach out to new spaces for the tree of culture. Massive, centralized, governments do not advance civilization very much.
In ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, and eighteenth century Germany, people had a great flowering of culture in a political environment of city states, with noble rulers patronizing creative talent in competition to outshine with each other with great monuments for own glory and that of their city. Prime examples of such rulers were Pericles, Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence, who patronized da Vinci, Hungarian Prince Esterhazy, who supported Joseph Haydn to produce 106 magnificent symphonies, Mozart’s Prince-Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg and Emperor Joseph II in Vienna. Mozart created great operas in Vienna, such as The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni, until he fell into hard times during the Austro-Turkish War of 1787, when prosperity dropped and aristocrats were giving less money to the arts.
In hard financial times or when aristocracies fall, we see a decline in cultural growth. But a too strong, centralized government is a worse calamity for culture. In America we would do better making counties the centers of our political power and wealth, in the form of city states. Elected officials in the county, well known to the local people, may elect state governors, and governors elect the president; the same process can apply to other branches of government, the judicial and legislative, with only the most basic and necessary functions relinquished to state and federal entities. You can be sure local leaders will not give up too much power to the central governments as popular voting does in our current system. Prominent citizens may thus perform the roles of democratic princes, like Pericles or Lorenzo, each county governed by a city of modest size, certainly less than a million people. Massive urban centers, like New York or Chicago may support the arts, but not their creation as much. Most of the money goes to popular entertainments with little artistic merit for the masses.
Artistic merit prevailed in Paris during the eighteenth century; Paris was the center of the world in culture, and it was a large city; but the artistic center of it where intellects thrived was very small. Learning and creativity were nourished at the Sorbonne. The same could be said for London in the seventeenth century with Oxford and Cambridge, which produced modern science, Shakespearean theater, and other fine arts with money from exploration, the raiding of Spanish galleons by privateers, manufacturing and trade. The Dutch in Amsterdam, rich from trade, followed a similar route with the English, producing Rembrandt (patronized by Prince Frederik Hendrik), Huygens (mathematician and scientist), and Spinoza, one of greatest philosophers of all time. This was the Golden Age for the Dutch and the English.
If we want a Golden Age for planet Earth, not any more isolated flowerings of culture that quickly wither, we who know where the roots of culture are, let us remember the lessons of History and apply them to our private and social lives. An individual grows and bears fruit with a firm purpose in life, working hard to achieve it, never weakening, never giving up. The civilized person needs to be not only smarter and better trained than the barbarian, but also stronger, producing and raising children to be the same. A society, a world society today, constituted by such noble persons of birth or aspiration will prevail over the barbarians that abound everywhere in great numbers, and lead humanity to a shining future, here on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe, where astronauts may travel to build the city of God.
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