Sunday, December 13, 2020

Right Brain/Nature Brain

I've wondered if the Cain and Abel story, like the fall of man story, in the bible is about the change in the way humans comprehended the world that was wrought by language and writing. Language fractured the comprehension of reality in multiple pieces. The apprehension of the whole is not lingual. If you do any drawing, you know that mode of consciousness. While you're engaged in depicting a form on paper, you don't think in words.

Symbolic/word based thinking is fairly limited by the mechanics of speech, and ultimately it's limited by the wavelength/frequency of the tones we use to communicate, and the serial nature of speech and hearing. In information theory terms, the bandwidth of our speech and word based thinking is only in the range of tens or hundreds of symbols per second.

Symbolic apprehension ultimate relies on an either algorithms or forms of compression that utilize pre-learned dictionaries of concepts. That is, it relies on toy models of reality rather than reality itself.

Planning and organizational activities are generally model based. When a farmer plants crops, for example, the planning of that activity is based on historical information, like soil temperature as a function of time of year, and demand for the crop that's really based on caloric needs of the people he'll be feeding.

Those models are really the basis of our civilization. They tie into the technology toolkit of our people, plus cultural traditions and behavioral expectations. Those models are really "the matrix".

Can we discard those models, at least in part and rely more on direct experience of the world that's generally thought to be the province of the right brain? I've been thinking about this for years... chances are it's not possible to write about it. It might be more of an image based form of thinking. 

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