Symbols and Actual Reality

Reality arose from the word. That is, a sensible world was partitioned from formless chaos by a symbolic representation. Creation emerged from formless waters that were personified by the Egyptians as the god(s) Nun. It was spoke into existence as the creator god.

Symbols are representations of information. Information emerges from the relationship of multiple distinct things and time. The information is something that's "alive" and in the world, while symbols are dead things that are outside of time. They're like footprints of an animal left in cement. They're the record of information. They're only brought back to "life" by being replayed.

Since there are so many distinct things, there's an infinity of information everywhere in the universe. However, for any animal, the ability to perceive and record via the senses is severely limited. Living creatures all seem to use some form of filtering, and lossy compression to experience external reality. We all seem to have some built in dictionary that's a form of representation of external reality. Indeed the forms of animals and plants are geometric and constructed from underlying molecular machinery that's coded in DNA in some way that is possibly analogous to physical algorithms.

There's a built-in gap between what we perceive and what is. There are a few different schools of belief on this fundamental problem of existence. The solipsistic perspective is there's no external reality at all, and that "the world" is really an expression of our belief, or our inner world. The scientism religion belief is the inner world can be made to exactly match the external world via science and the discovery of underlying mechanisms of nature--then this world can be transplanted into a computer. My personal belief is we can hop across that gap of experience by shifting our consciousness.

In simple terms, we can shift our consciousness from the left brain to be more right brain focused, leaving the realm of language and symbolic interpretation of reality into more of a direct experience... that is, we can think with the outside world and sort of be the outside world. A concrete example can serve to unfold this concept.

Imagine a vulture soaring on thermals. In his action, the bird feels and knows the lift from the rising air coming off a south facing hillside, for example. We can have a sort of similar experience when we do some all consuming physical task, like walking across a log, or carrying a heavy, awkward load over uneven terrain. That task displaces speech based consciousness. The experience of those moments is very complete. There's no model of reality that's being consulted, rather the body and the nervous system dance with reality, or inhabit the external world.

My general feeling is that sort of experience of the external world can be superior to the toy model version of reality for many tasks--specifically for agriculture. That will be the topic of the next post.