I developed a natural distrust towards the new theories that come to the honours of the limelight, because some of those "mathematical certainty" or "scientific" ones I've seen in 35 years of life were suddenly flipped revealing their inconsistency.
I think it is a good thing. I am used to think of knowledge as a vital process, which is now fashionable to call "cognition". And life and mutation walk hand in hand, so I'm not surprised that what is today taken for safe and scientifically proven, tomorrow may be revised and radically reinterpreted in the light of a new theory. When this happens often downward compatibility is retained: the old certainty falls into the new one as its subset, but the general meaning and philosophical considerations that were first descendants radically change. Someone calls it "revolution" and wanted to see - not without reason - even in the history of science and scientific thought a succession of revolutions that has something to do with the theory of catastrophes.
This long introductory hat will certainly distracted attention from my unlikely reader, but helps me to create the conditions for writing this post.
My reflection today concerns the thought. Not the scientific thought, but the human thought.
I can not split the ontological part from the espistemological one: the nature of human thought is myself that is writing, and is paradoxically circular that the human thought attempts to describe itself. So we feel dizzy when we embark upon speeches of this kind. In addition, the tool one uses to know the nature of something is her/his thought. So the means by which I am going to explore the nature of thought is the thought itselt, which is the subject of the investigation. Recalling that who lead the investigation is the thought itself, which is also under investigation, the resulting picture has the same consistency of a drawing of MC Escher. Useless considerations so far, but amusing, and hopefully have the honour to give the idea of the hardship that everyone experience when philosophically pay attention to the very true essence of reality around us. Walking these steps one may have to conclude that an ultimate reality does not exist in order to keep consistent with her/his reasoning, and that everything that we know is the interior projection and processing of an individual perception, and that the representation of the world belongs to the sphere of subjectivity . So the world where I live is certainly different from the world where you live - if you take for granted that the range and uniqueness of sensory responses of my body are different from those of yours, in the words of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.
Yet today a model that helps us to reflect on the nature of human thought is there.
The hypothesis that thought is an expression of property emerging from the very complex organization of neurons that make up the brain and nervous system It is now mature and experimentally supported by neuroscience. This complicated intercellular communications network covers the whole body and collects various kinds of stimuli coming from outside (vision, hearing, but also humidity, temperature, static electricity) and the inner (blood pressure, levels of carbon dioxide, adrenaline, etc.) and from pre-existing configurations that surface due to certain conditions (for example what they commonly call memories and memory).
The first property emerging from such an organization, perhaps the most primordial, is self-consciousness, or conscience. The sense of ego springs up as the contrast with what is perceived as outside us. The close relationship between the neuro-brain system and body extends automatically the self-awareness to the whole body.
The perception of the self is perhaps the most arcane expression of thought, and together the most fascinating and mysterious.
The set of activities that allow the self to differentiate itself from the rest of the world is called cognition, as differentiating it allows you to "know" the world. The cognition is a continuous activity that begins and ends with the individual, hence it is easy to conclude that is the individual self. Someone gave it the name "mind", whereby mind and cognition would have to be synonymous.
At this point it is not difficult to recognize what we call "thinking" as the sequence of different times (or evolution) in the dynamics of the mind.
A model now agreed of complex adaptive system, the one of neural networks, allows to sketch a model for human thought. Indeed, the thought in general, given that cognitive activity, under this light, is not the prerogative of the human species only but it belongs to all so-called higher animals, at least.
We live in an age when for the first time the epistemological and ontological efforts of philosophy found the support of scientific and mathematical theories arising from applied sciences and from the theory of dynamical systems, which have enabled the development of an interpretative model of thought and mind.
A simple model, which I hope will not be celebrated as a scientific truth on which basis re-enunciate the concept of life and of human existence. In fact it is from theories of complexity that we have learned - not without surprise - that diversity, variety, impredicibility and unrepeatability are the properties of certain classes of dynamical systems that we can not but consider "simple" when compared with living systems. Therefore we have no hurry to "universalize" conclusions that we can say valid only in restricted areas of research for the time being . But in the same way we are not afraid to reinterpret the most intimate part of ourselves - our ego, our thoughts, our selves - in agreement with new models that perhaps could lead us far away, and that certainly should not be rejected for ideological or religious prejudices , or for fear of violating a sacred concept of us, which tightly associates our egos and our souls.
I think it is a good thing. I am used to think of knowledge as a vital process, which is now fashionable to call "cognition". And life and mutation walk hand in hand, so I'm not surprised that what is today taken for safe and scientifically proven, tomorrow may be revised and radically reinterpreted in the light of a new theory. When this happens often downward compatibility is retained: the old certainty falls into the new one as its subset, but the general meaning and philosophical considerations that were first descendants radically change. Someone calls it "revolution" and wanted to see - not without reason - even in the history of science and scientific thought a succession of revolutions that has something to do with the theory of catastrophes.
This long introductory hat will certainly distracted attention from my unlikely reader, but helps me to create the conditions for writing this post.
My reflection today concerns the thought. Not the scientific thought, but the human thought.
I can not split the ontological part from the espistemological one: the nature of human thought is myself that is writing, and is paradoxically circular that the human thought attempts to describe itself. So we feel dizzy when we embark upon speeches of this kind. In addition, the tool one uses to know the nature of something is her/his thought. So the means by which I am going to explore the nature of thought is the thought itselt, which is the subject of the investigation. Recalling that who lead the investigation is the thought itself, which is also under investigation, the resulting picture has the same consistency of a drawing of MC Escher. Useless considerations so far, but amusing, and hopefully have the honour to give the idea of the hardship that everyone experience when philosophically pay attention to the very true essence of reality around us. Walking these steps one may have to conclude that an ultimate reality does not exist in order to keep consistent with her/his reasoning, and that everything that we know is the interior projection and processing of an individual perception, and that the representation of the world belongs to the sphere of subjectivity . So the world where I live is certainly different from the world where you live - if you take for granted that the range and uniqueness of sensory responses of my body are different from those of yours, in the words of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.
Yet today a model that helps us to reflect on the nature of human thought is there.
The hypothesis that thought is an expression of property emerging from the very complex organization of neurons that make up the brain and nervous system It is now mature and experimentally supported by neuroscience. This complicated intercellular communications network covers the whole body and collects various kinds of stimuli coming from outside (vision, hearing, but also humidity, temperature, static electricity) and the inner (blood pressure, levels of carbon dioxide, adrenaline, etc.) and from pre-existing configurations that surface due to certain conditions (for example what they commonly call memories and memory).
The first property emerging from such an organization, perhaps the most primordial, is self-consciousness, or conscience. The sense of ego springs up as the contrast with what is perceived as outside us. The close relationship between the neuro-brain system and body extends automatically the self-awareness to the whole body.
The perception of the self is perhaps the most arcane expression of thought, and together the most fascinating and mysterious.
The set of activities that allow the self to differentiate itself from the rest of the world is called cognition, as differentiating it allows you to "know" the world. The cognition is a continuous activity that begins and ends with the individual, hence it is easy to conclude that is the individual self. Someone gave it the name "mind", whereby mind and cognition would have to be synonymous.
At this point it is not difficult to recognize what we call "thinking" as the sequence of different times (or evolution) in the dynamics of the mind.
A model now agreed of complex adaptive system, the one of neural networks, allows to sketch a model for human thought. Indeed, the thought in general, given that cognitive activity, under this light, is not the prerogative of the human species only but it belongs to all so-called higher animals, at least.
We live in an age when for the first time the epistemological and ontological efforts of philosophy found the support of scientific and mathematical theories arising from applied sciences and from the theory of dynamical systems, which have enabled the development of an interpretative model of thought and mind.
A simple model, which I hope will not be celebrated as a scientific truth on which basis re-enunciate the concept of life and of human existence. In fact it is from theories of complexity that we have learned - not without surprise - that diversity, variety, impredicibility and unrepeatability are the properties of certain classes of dynamical systems that we can not but consider "simple" when compared with living systems. Therefore we have no hurry to "universalize" conclusions that we can say valid only in restricted areas of research for the time being . But in the same way we are not afraid to reinterpret the most intimate part of ourselves - our ego, our thoughts, our selves - in agreement with new models that perhaps could lead us far away, and that certainly should not be rejected for ideological or religious prejudices , or for fear of violating a sacred concept of us, which tightly associates our egos and our souls.
