Both questions concerned the underlying notion of a dividing line between the world of the living (where distinctions are drawn and difference can be a cause) and the world of nonliving billiard balls and galaxies (where forces and impacts are the “causes” of events).
Mind is empty; it is no-thing. It exists only in its ideas, and these again are no-things.
Children in school are still taught nonsense. They are told that a “noun” is the “name of a person, place, or thing,” that a “verb” is “an action word,” and so on. That is, they are taught at a tender age that the way to define something is by what it supposedly is in itself, not by its relation to other things.
Perception operates only upon difference. All receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference.
When somebody steps on my toe, what I experience is, not his stepping on my toe, but my image of his stepping on my toe reconstructed from neural reports reaching my brain somewhat after his foot has landed on mine. Experience of the exterior is always mediated by particular sense organs and neural pathways. To that extent, objects are my creation, and my experience of them is subjective, not objective.
For the creation of new order, the workings of the random, the plethora of uncommitted alternatives (entropy) is necessary. It is out of the random that organisms collect new mutations, and it is there that stochastic learning gathers its solutions. Evolution leads to climax: ecological saturation of all the possibilities of differentiation. Learning leads to the overpacked mind. By return to the unlearned and mass-produced egg, the ongoing species again and again clears its memory banks to be ready for the new.
Whatever “things” may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions).
The words right and left are not in the same language as the words top and bottom. Right and left are words of an inner language; whereas top and bottom are parts of an external language.
Information consists of differences that make a difference.
The living thing escapes change either by correcting change or changing itself to meet the change or by incorporating continual change into its own being.
The concept “switch” is of quite a different order from the concepts “stone,” “table,” and the like. Closer examination shows that the switch, considered as a part of an electric circuit, does not exist when it is in the on position. From the point of view of the circuit, it is not different from the conducting wire which leads to it and the wire which leads away from it. It is merely “more conductor.” Conversely, but similarly, when the switch is off, it does not exist from the point of view of the circuit. It is nothing, a gap between two conductors which, themselves, exist only as conductors when the switch is on. In other words, the switch is not except at the moments of its change of setting, and the concept “switch” has thus a special relation to time. It is related to the notion “change” rather than the notion “object.”
The system will be capable of uniting with other similar systems to make larger wholes.
Is there a line or sort of bag of which we can say that “inside” that line or interface is “me” and “outside” is the environment or some other person? By what right do we make these distinctions?
I want to focus on that genus of receipt of information (or call it learning) which is learning about the “self” in a way that may result in some “change” in the “self.” Especially, I will look at changes in the boundaries of the self, perhaps at the discovery that there are boundaries or perhaps no center.
What, then, is this “self”? What is added to information by obeying the old advice “know thyself”?
The dog is still unchanged dog; the gibbon is still gibbon; the dolphin, dolphin; the man, man. Each retains its own “character”—its own organization of the perceived universe—and yet, clearly something has happened. Patterns of interaction have been generated or discovered, and these patterns have, at least briefly, endured. In other words, there has been a natural selection of patterns of interaction. Certain patterns survived longer than others.
There is thus a larger entity, call it A plus B, and that larger entity, in play, is achieving a process for which I suggest the correct name is practice. This is a learning process in which the system A plus B receives no new information from outside, only from within the system. The interaction makes information about parts of A available to parts of B and vice versa. There has been a change in boundaries.
Exploration is not only self-validating; it also seems in human beings to be addictive.
Today, we pump a little natural history into children along with a little “art” so that they will forget their animal and ecological nature and the aesthetics of being alive and will grow up to be good businessmen.
There is, by the way, another pathway of degeneracy that becomes visible in the comparative survey we are discussing. This is the Aesop-ation of natural history. In this process, it is not pride and ego but entertainment that replaces religion. The natural history is no longer even a pretense of looking at real creatures; it becomes a cluster of stories, more or less sardonic, more or less real, more or less amusing. The holistic view that I am calling religion splits to give either weapons to ego or toys to fancy.
The unity of the combined system is necessary.
We badly need a science that will analyze this whole matter of adaptation-addiction at all levels. Ecology is perhaps the beginning of such a science, although ecologists are still far from telling us how to get out of an atomic armaments race.
No system (neither computer nor organism) can produce anything new unless the system contains some source of the random.
The parallelism between biological evolution and mind is created not by postulating a Designer or Artificer hiding in the machinery of evolutionary process but, conversely, by postulating that thought is stochastic. The nineteenth-century critics of Darwin (especially Samuel Butler) wanted to introduce what they called “mind” (i.e., a supernatural entelechy) into the biosphere. Today I would emphasize that creative thought must always contain a random component. The exploratory processes—the endless trial and error of mental progress—can achieve the new only by embarking upon pathways randomly presented, some of which when tried are somehow selected for something like survival.
It is surely the case that the brain contains no material objects other than its own channels and switchways and its own metabolic supplies and that all this material hardware never enters the narratives of the mind. Thought can be about pigs or coconuts, but there are no pigs or coconuts in the brain; and in the mind, there are no neurons, only ideas of pigs and coconuts. There is, therefore, always a certain complementarity between the mind and the matters of its computation. The process of coding or representation that substitutes the idea of pigs or coconuts for the things is already a step, even a vast jump, in logical typing. The name is not the thing named, and the idea of pig is not the pig.
Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.
The smallest unit of mental process is a difference, or distinction, or news of a difference.
Evidently, the universe is characterized by an uneven distribution of causal and other types of linkage between its parts; that is, there are regions of dense linkage separated from each other by regions of less dense linkage. It may be that there are necessarily and inevitably processes which are responsive to the density of interconnection so that density is increased or sparsity is made more sparse. In such a case, the universe would necessarily present an appearance in which wholes would be bounded by the relative sparseness of their interconnection.