A Journey Beyond The Universe
[EXCERPT]
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen
and thinking what nobody has thought.
![]() Albert Szent-Györgyi von Nagyrapolt
We are about to undertake a challenging journey to rediscover a mental continent that was lost nearly a century ago. Past explorers of that continent did not have the benefits of the technology and knowledge now available to us nor did they have our newest point of view. Those benefits will enable us to see what they could not envisage, and to travel where they could not go; but, our journey would not be possible if we had not begun life with a rich information inheritance and an inborn desire to examine the world about us.
![]() Much of our acquired knowledge is derived from the cultures in which we are immersed. From the time we are born we are exposed to a hierarchy of cultures. The traditions specific to our immediate family are the root of our cultural inheritance; but even that root has already been compounded with the more remote levels of the cultural hierarchy in which the family lives: the cultures of ethnic groups, religions, local areas, and nations. Though most of us live our entire lives in a single cultural hierarchy, many are equally at home with other cultures, and some are citizens of the world.
![]() The cultures in which we live strongly influence our thoughts and our ways of thinking because a culture includes a substructure of beliefs and a base of knowledge of reality. Our only certain knowledge of reality is what we have individually sensed and perceived. Any knowledge beyond direct experience involves beliefs.
![]() A belief is an idea that we consider meaningful and which we consciously accept as being true because it has met an emotional or rational test to our satisfaction. With so many things that we cannot sense, our beliefs are as important as our direct experience for the governing of our lives. For example, though we cannot have direct experience of the future we believe that we will be alive in the future and use that belief to plan actions in the present to achieve future goals. Furthermore, our lives are limited. We cannot be everywhere nor can we experience all of reality; therefore we often believe, within limits, claims of direct experience by others of things we have not personally experienced.
![]() When we directly experience something we do it with our senses, and most of the time with only one or a few of our senses. The light and heat of the sun are things that we can sense; but, we cannot hear, smell, taste, or touch the sun. Furthermore, what we do sense of an object is most often limited to a few of its attributes. Our experiences with flowers, for example, most frequently involve their visual pattern, colors, and aroma. We may occasionally touch them, but we rarely taste them or attempt to sense their weight.
![]() The real attributes of an object or event that we sense and perceive do not usually depend on each other; the red or white color of a carnation does not affect its fragrance, nor do we need to see the color of a flower in order to recognize its aroma. In that sense our direct experience teaches us that reality often includes some independence. Beliefs, however, are often built one on the other to form a belief system. Our belief that we will be alive in the future is not a primary belief; it is based on our general belief in object persistence. During infancy we create the belief that objects seen at certain times continue to exist between those times.
![]() The belief in object persistence is the strong supporting foundation for an elaborate belief structure. At a higher level of that structure are Aristotle's laws of logic which describe the rules of reasoning—the laws of identity, excluded middle, and non-contradiction. Nearer the top of that structure are the laws of conservation which express our beliefs that matter, energy, or angular momentum can be neither created nor annihilated.
![]() In order to understand and explain the world around us we construct models based on our knowledge and beliefs, and theories based on those models. Many models have been founded on the belief that there is such a thing as the universe. When it was believed that the earth was the center of the universe, that belief was the basis for designing models with everything in orbit around the earth. Underlying that notion was the belief that the universe could have a center. However, even the idea of such a center had the prerequisite that the universe be thought of not only as a real thing, but also as a thing with a boundary.
![]() The more recent view was that the universe is a finite but unbounded, centerless thing. It was assumed finite because to consider it infinite is to open a Pandora's box of nasty problems—such as, how could anything resist its infinite gravitational field? The universe had to be centerless. All prior attempts to give it a center failed since there is no evidence of a center and because Hubble's law would otherwise seem to put us in the unexplainably unique (and hence very unlikely) position of being in the exact center of an expanding universe. Finally, it had to be unbounded else it would have a center. That more recent view also presumed that there is such a thing as the universe.
![]() The structures and connections in our brains, however, physiologically limit our views of reality and of purely mental things. We would be mistaken to think that our range of thought is all encompassing, enormous though it is, or that our brains will evolve no more. Our epistemology is neurologically determined; and, since our quest in this book involves not only what we know, but also how we know it, let us briefly examine the roots of all our knowledge and the underpinning that gives it meaning.
![]() If there is one ability that we must have above all others in order to acquire knowledge, it must be the ability to be conscious. So long as we have a healthy brain, when we are awake we have no doubt about whether we are awake or not. In a fully awake state we are aware of all the stimuli to which our senses are responding and perceive the meaning of those responses; we are mindful of all kinds of things other than ourselves. To sense and perceive the external reality—the things outside of our own minds—is the meaning of consciousness.
![]() As for the things that are solely of the mind, we can perceive them awake or asleep; and as we do, we know them to be purely individual experiences belonging to ourselves alone. We also know that we have an awareness of self: self-consciousness. The self is like both an anchor and a compass; it keeps us from being swept away by a sea of sensations and thoughts and it directs us when we make choices.
![]() For each of us the self of which we are aware is only one level of a hierarchical relationship of brain functions. There are self-levels of which we are not directly cognizant. For example, neurological research has shown that there is a level of self that seems to make a decision a measurable time interval before we are aware that we are making a decision. The self makes the decisions or choices of what it wants to be aware of, of what to think about, and of what to do. The world in which we live almost incessantly presents us with alternatives from which to choose. We must make the choices that will ensure our present and future survival and that will minimize discomfort or maximize pleasure. However, we cannot make choices without knowledge; and much of childhood and youth is spent acquiring knowledge and learning how to think and to make choices.
![]() Ancient philosophers believed that we are born with an empty mind, as devoid of impressions as a clean, blank tablet-tabula rasa (scraped tablet) was the 16th century word for it. We now know that they were wrong, not only because the mind is far from void when we are born, but because the mind can not even come into being without its share of genetically transferred knowledge imprinted on it. That pre-wiring of the mind has two main effects: it causes many predispositions and it provides sufficient information to allow the mental system to begin operations.
![]() All normal newborn infants share many identical predispositions known as reflexes. There are a number of them including the rooting reflex, sucking reflex, Moro reflex, blink reflex, sneeze reflex, crowned extension reflex, and the doll's eye reflex. Some of those reflexes are present even in premature infants. These reflexes vanish according to type in a matter of days, months or years. Some of these reflexes are controlled by the brain.
![]() The start-up information in the mind gives ready evidence in the infant. One of the first communications from the newborn is a cry, not a cry of joy but one of great displeasure. It says "No! This is not how I want to feel!" The newborn not only knows that it senses some displeasing, painful things, but also finds meaning in what it senses. It knows that those feelings pertain to itself. Its mind identifies the nature of those feelings—determines that with which it is the same. For its first experience of pain, the only thing with which it can be the same is a genetic template for pain.
![]() The template for cognition of pain is a genetic imprint on the mind, as are also the templates for the remaining eight senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, hot, cold, and proprioception. Cognition of consciousness and self-consciousness must also be initialized as genetic templates. Perhaps the term pre-wiring is more suggestive of the neural circuitry involved in such templates. The analogy seems a good one since the infant reflexes disappear because of the process of myelination—a process that insulates a neural fiber, so preventing signals from flowing into it.
![]() We can liken these genetic mental templates to the program of a computer that enables it to begin operations when it is powered up. That program, a permanent, unchangeable part of the hardware known as the bootstrap program, is invoked only at start-up or re-start; it sets a number of bi-stable circuits to specific states. Without those instructions computer memory would not be allocated and initialized for the various functions it must serve; the computer would not be able to execute any instructions.
![]() Mental templates, the genetically transferred memories of the human race and its predecessors, are at the base of all our knowledge. They provide our first means of identification and are the primary contexts that make all our sensations meaningful. None of our subsequent knowledge can be meaningful if it does not relate to our genetic templates; it would have no context.
![]() All our subsequent knowledge is created by our abilities to abstract information and to find associative, conceptual, and analogic relationships between our experiences and our genetic or acquired memories. Each such discovered relationship is stored as a new acquired memory. We have elaborated on our inherited memories until we were able to fly to the moon, find superclusters of clusters of galaxies in the heavens, and deduce that while there are approximately one tenth as many neurons in the brain as there are stars in a galaxy, the synapses of the brain outnumber those stars by a factor of a thousand.
![]() Awesome as the number of components of the brain may seem, without connections to the world outside it would be unconscious and totally useless. Senses provide the connecting links between the mind and everything else. Our proprioceptive sense lets us know if an arm is extended or retracted, and how much; if that arm is pressing against an object, and with how much force. The same sense lets us know if our eyes have moved relative to each other to allow the images from the two eyes to fuse. That knowledge of eye positions provides a means for estimating the distance of the object seen, and a way to know whether the seen object is directly in front of us or to the left or right.
![]() Though sensory experience might seem to be fundamental to knowledge of our environment, it must take a secondary place. Genetic mental templates are the primary basis for our knowledge of the world about us. Sensory experience is secondary because it must use the hereditary templates for context-to give meaning to experience.
![]() Just as all normal infants have the same reflexes, they mostly have the same mental templates. All of us, then, share virtually the same context for our experiences and have almost the same limitations on what is possible for us to experience. That is why we share so much first hand knowledge. Those limitations leave us with no way to identify new experiences and knowledge other than with reference to older ones. Indeed, we can describe the unfamiliar only in terms of the familiar.
![]() When we attain new knowledge, whether by discovering it ourselves or by learning from others, we place that new knowledge into its proper hierarchical mental niche. A new direct physical experience—a new flavor not tasted before, for example—does not require any mental abstraction to identify its meaning; its meaning is given by our genetic templates with a sense of complete certainty. We may want to know more about that flavor or its source, but we do not question the validity of the experience.
![]() However, much of our knowledge is not what we have directly experienced. Most of it is synthesized into conceptual knowledge by the mental process of abstraction. Our notion of flavor, for example, is an abstraction of what the tastes of various substances produce in common: a response of our taste buds and olfactory system. Like our concept of flavor, some of our conceptual knowledge is derived directly from sensory experience; but much of our knowledge consists of concepts derived from other concepts.
![]() When a concept has other concepts as its immediate base it is often the case that the base also rests on another level of concepts. Many of our concepts are far removed from sensory experience. We can get a good sense of the common depth of many concepts by considering the words in their definitions and by seeing how close the defining words are to sense experience.
![]() The word honesty is defined as uprightness, integrity, trustworthiness, truthfulness, sincerity, frankness, and freedom from deceit or fraud. Let us follow the trail of truthfulness, the meaning of which is conforming to truth. Truth, in turn rests on conforming with fact or reality. We will omit the trail for the concept of conformity, because it, too, has a long path to sensory experience. Reality is closer; it is that which has existence outside of the mind. The Latin root of the word exist means stand forth. Finally, if something stands forth in the world outside the mind, it is not hidden; we can sense and perceive it. There—we have reached the level of sensory experience. The chain connecting honesty to the senses has many links.
![]() If there are two ideas that all humans have in common, it must be our awareness of the two very different worlds of experience in which we are immersed and the great meaning of that awareness. Those worlds are our exterior and interior worlds: our world of reality and our world of the mind. Still, perhaps we would view them better as our internal and external realities, since for each of us our mind is every bit as real as our body and the other things beyond the mind. We should not, however, jump to the conclusion that those two realities in which we live result from some kind of dichotomy, and certainly not from a division between the mind and the body.
![]() There are many things of which we are aware and have knowledge; we need mentally remove only one of those things, our self, to be left with our knowledge of the world in which we live. The self is a mental process through which we are aware of those two worlds. Through that process we are aware of the external world, the world that includes our bodies. As each of us knows, the self can also be aware of itself; but the self cannot live in itself. The processes of self takes place in the brain, and more specifically in those parts of the brain in which the processes of mind takes place; that is the immediate world of the self.
![]() We think about subjects of our outside worlds or our inside worlds. Those worlds are unique for each of us. I am a part of your outside world and you are a part of my outside world; but I cannot be a part of my own outside world, nor you of yours. As for our inside worlds, any sensations, physical pleasure, or pain we may experience and any thinking we may do are exclusively our own experiences and thoughts. When we want to share our inside worlds with others, the most we can resort to is limited by whatever powers of description we possess.
![]() We each have our own view of the world and our own viewpoint. Furthermore, we each have varied physical capabilities by birth and by the varied courses of our lives. We all do not see equally distance-wise nor do we all see the same colors. The same is true for our senses of hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and, no doubt, for our senses for heat, for cold, for proprioception, and for pleasure and pain. From these vagaries of life it follows that the worlds in which we live are not identical and our views of reality cannot be the same.
![]() Twentieth century neurology has shown us that what a creature can know of reality is determined by its sensory and perceptory endowment. The neural system is the epistemological basis for all creatures. A neural system consists of sense buds, nerves, neurons, axons, dendrites, synapses, brain cells, and their network interconnections and chemistries. The human brain contains about ten billion brain cells. The right and left halves of the brain are connected by about two hundred million nerve fibers, while many of the brain cells are interconnected within each half brain. Each connection is mediated by a synapse and there are about one hundred trillion (one followed by fourteen zeros) synapses.
![]() Many synapses are function specific because of their unique chemistries; and, therefore, many brain functions are predetermined by the evolution of the chemistries of the neural system. The rhythmic beating of our hearts, our breathing, our sensations of hunger and thirst, for example, are outward manifestations of chemically evolved brain functions. A more recent evolution has involved not chemistry but communications: the evolution of connections enabling different parts of the brain to selectively communicate with each other.
![]() Intra-brain communication allows us to think about our thinking, so letting the objects of our thought be the subjects of our thought. We think about our experiences as we have perceived them; and when we think about our perceptions we can identify things that percepts have in common, and so create concepts by the process of abstraction. For example, we can think of the common feature of a piece of bread, a slice of cheese, and an apple: they all satisfy hunger. We need not employ any words to create the concept of hunger-satisfying-things because bread, cheese, apple, and hunger satisfaction are perceptions that can become perceptual memories that can subsequently be recalled and directly examined mentally.
![]() Thinking about our concepts similarly leads to the creation of higher level, more abstract concepts; but since what a group of concepts may have in common can no longer be a perceptual memory, it requires some form of symbolic representation: a name, a word. Most animals use symbols to present their experiences to other animals usually of their own kind. Danger signals, calls, mating displays, and even the hive dance of bees giving the direction and distance of nectar, are all symbolic representations. The first humans did not have to invent symbols; it was part of their animal heredity. All they had to do was adapt their existing capability of vocalized symbol expression to the labeling of concepts derived from concepts.
![]() That small adaptive step had monumental consequences; it gave humankind the power to think about concepts, to think about abstract subjects such as the relationships of things. Relationships are implicit in questions that begin with what, where, when, why, who, or how. That small step enabled us to invent tools, weapons, and agriculture, to try to discover our relationship to the cosmos, to seek causes, to question the nature of existence and reality, and to fly from the cave to the moon. However, no matter how far ranging or abstract our knowledge may become, we must keep in mind that mental templates and experienced reality are the foundation of all knowledge.
![]() Although experience underlies all knowledge, experience does not always automatically become knowledge. Often the experience must be interpreted or explained in order to be understood; and usually, in those cases, we hypothesize something both intermediary and beyond immediate experience as a part of the explanation. Those hypothetical constructs are either deemed necessary by deduction or are proposed as possibilities.
![]() When a tree blown down by a gust of wind is examined and the trunk shows extensive internal decay, we need no hypothetical construct to explain the weakness of the tree and its failure to resist the wind. We can see all the evidence we need for a satisfactory explanation. If we next try to explain why the tree fell down after its trunk was broken, we begin to run into problems. Even if we witnessed the whole event we would never have seen that mysterious agent, the force that caused the tree to fall to the ground.
![]() The deeper the layers between sensory experience and an abstraction we may try to create, the more possible it is for us to make errors of abstraction. As I explained in The Universe On Trial, that is exactly what happened in reaching the concept of the universe. For that reason along with many others, we found that the universe concept could have no counterpart in the real world.
![]() After its conception the universe concept did not sit modestly on the sideline; it jumped in with monistic self-importance, offering itself as a base and support for all kinds of concepts. Though many of those concepts have seemed very attractive, we must now re-study and question them because they have lost their foundation.
![]() We will be re-examining some rather basic concepts such as force, motion, mass, inertia, gravity, and energy. When we reach a clear understanding of those five seemingly simple concepts, we will grapple with the seemingly complex subject of relativity theory. Do not be discouraged or frightened by my use of such words as simple, complex, seemingly, or relativity. I will not use esoteric terms, just plain English, nor will I refer to any arcane branches of mathematics. You will not have to concentrate intently so as not to lose the thread of some convoluted reasoning, nor will you need a Ph.D. or even a B.Sc. to follow my meaning. Let us now turn our attention to the concept of force.
[END OF EXCERPT]
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