Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Brain Duality and the Complexity of Nature

If you look at a cross section of soil in a yard versus a cross section of soil in the woods, or a cross section of tilled soil in a garden, you'll see three completely different things.

The soil at the left is from the woods on our property. Specifically, it's on the edge of the woods. It has a layer of leaves and other debris that's decomposing into humus, and humus that's slowly percolating down into the topsoil beneath. Earthworms  move throughout, and microscopic life teems in the soil. Old roots and living roots poke through the soil at every conceivable angle. It's a big living thing, like a giant animal.

The tilled garden soil will look almost totally uniform. In many cases, the garden, or a lawn will end up sort as a sort of featureless sheet resembling a mathematical concept, like a plane.

Our language using brain doesn't deal very well with natural complexity. The density of information that's present in the natural world totally overwhelms it and it simplifies and generalizes.

Apparently, it's more productive to grow a garden of food in a haphazard natural environment-like setting rather than in the building-block geometric forms gardeners tend to use. What if natural language and formal languages are just mind prisons and are actually really weak and feeble tools for surviving in the world? What if civilization is a trick of the left hemisphere of the brain?

This seems overly simplistic--left brain and right brain Cain and Abel, Moonman, Sunman, Time & the Sun?

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