Category Archives: human cell galaxy

abstractions from abstractions, abstractions of perceptions, Basic Life-Pattern, behavior, birth, Collective Human Intelligence (CHI), collective language knowledge, collective linguistic performances, coordination of behavior, experience, free combination of abstractions, generative artificial intelligence, genetic determinism, growth process, human cell galaxy, individual experience, internal working hypothesis, language system, learning, meaning content, memory content, more than random, observable behavior, part of a spatial structure, proprioceptive perceptions, random, reproduction, retrievable abstractions, sensory perception, sequential events, spatial subspace, symbolic language, three-dimensional space, Wittgenstein - Ludwig

Collective Human Intelligence (CHI)

This text is part of the text “Rebooting Humanity”

(The German Version can be found HERE)

Author No. 1 (Gerd Doeben-Henisch)

Contact: info@uffmm.org

(Start: June 22, 2024, Last change: June 22, 2024)

Starting Point

The main theme of this section is ‘collective human intelligence (CHI)’. However, it does not occur in isolation, detached from everything else. Rather, life on Planet Earth creates a complex network of processes which — upon closer examination — reveal structures that are consistent across all forms of life in their basic parameters, yet differ in parts. It must also be considered that these basic structures, in their process form, always intertwine with other processes, interacting and influencing each other. Therefore, a description of these basic structures will initially be rather sketchy here, as the enormous variety of details can otherwise lead one quickly into the ‘thicket of particulars’.

Important Factors

Basic Life-Pattern

Starting from the individual cell up to the most powerful cell galaxies [1] that life has produced so far, every identifiable form of life exhibits a ‘basic pattern’ of the life process that threads like a ‘red thread’ through all forms of life: as long as there is more than a single life system (a ‘population’), there exists throughout the entire lifespan the basic cycle (i) reproduction of Generation 1 – birth of Generation 2 – growth of Generation 2 – onset of behavior of Generation 2 accompanied by learning processes – reproduction of Generation 2 – ….

Genetic Determinism

This basic pattern, in the phases of ‘reproduction’ and ‘birth’, is largely ‘genetically determined’. [2] The growth process itself—the development of the cell galaxy—is also fundamentally strongly genetically determined, but increasingly factors from the environment of the growth process come into play, which can modify the growth process to varying degrees. Thus, the outcomes of reproduction and growth can vary more or less significantly.

Learning

As growth transforms the cell galaxy into a ‘mature’ state, the entire system can enable different ‘functions’ that increasingly facilitate ‘learning’.

A minimal concept of learning related to acting systems identifies the ‘learning of a system’ by the fact that the ‘behavior’ of a system changes in relation to a specific environmental stimulus over a longer period of time, and this change is ‘more than random’. [3]

‘Learning’ ranges on a scale from ‘relatively determined’ to ‘largely open’. ‘Open’ here means that the control by genetic presets decreases and the system can have individually different experiences within a spectrum of possible actions.

Experiences

Experiences gain their ‘format’ within the following coordinates:

(i) (sensory) perception,

(ii) abstractions of sensory perceptions which are generated internally and which

(iii) are retrievable inside the system. The totality of such conditionally retrievable (recallable) abstractions is also called memory content. [4]

(iv) the possibility of arbitrary abstractions from abstractions, the

(v) storage of sequential events as well as

(vi) abstractions of sequentially occurring events, and the

(vii) free combination of abstractions into new integrated units.

Additionally,

(viii) the ‘perception of internal bodily events’ (also called ‘proprioceptive’ perception) [5], which can ‘link (associate)’ with all other perceptions and abstractions. [6] It is also important to note that it is a characteristic of perception that

(ix) events usually never occur in isolation but appear as ‘part of a spatial structure’. Although ‘subspaces can be distinguished (visually, acoustically, tactilely, etc.), these subspaces can be integrated into a ‘total space’ that has the format of a ‘three-dimensional body space’, with one’s own body as part of it. ‘In thought’, we can consider individual objects ‘by themselves’, detached from a body space, but as soon as we turn to the ‘sensual space of experience’, the three-dimensional spatial structure becomes active.

Individual – Collective

In the individual experience of everyday situations, this ‘inner world of experience’ largely forms in a multitude of ways, largely unconsciously.

However, as soon as ‘human systems’—in short, people—are not alone in a situation but together with others, these people can perceive and remember the same environment ‘similarly’ or ‘differently’. In their individual experiences, different elements can combine into specific patterns.

Coordination of Behavior

It becomes interesting when different people try to coordinate their behavior, even if it is just to make ‘contact’ with each other. And, although this can also be achieved in various ways without explicit symbolic language [7], sophisticated, complex collective action involving many participants over long periods with demanding tasks, according to current knowledge, is only possible with the inclusion of symbolic language.

The ability of humans to use languages seems to be fundamentally genetically conditioned. [8] ‘How’ language is used, ‘when’, ‘with which memory contents language is linked’, is not genetically conditioned. People must learn this ‘from the particular situation’ both individually and collectively, in coordination with others, since language only makes sense as a ‘common means of communication’ that should enable sophisticated coordination.

Linguistic Meaning

The system of sounds (and later symbols) used in a language is ultimately decided by those who initially use the language together. [9] Given the fact that there are many thousands of languages [10], one can conclude that there is considerable freedom in the specific design of a language. [11]

This ‘freedom in the specific design’ is most evident in the association between language elements and potential meanings. The same ‘object’, ‘event’, or ‘fact’ can be expressed completely differently by people using different languages. [12] And this ‘difference’ refers not only to the naming of individual properties or objects but occurs within a ‘larger context’ of ‘perspectives’ on how the everyday world is perceived, classified, and enacted within a specific language community. These differences also occur ‘within a language community’ in the form of ‘milieus’/’social strata’, where the ‘practice of life’ differs.

The most important aspect of the relationship between the language system (sounds, symbols, the arrangement of sounds and symbols) and possible ‘meaning content’ is that any type of ‘content’ is located within the person (inside the ‘system’).[13]

As the brief sketch above on the space of experience suggests, the elements that can constitute an experiential space are so layered and dynamic that an assignment between language elements and elements of experience is fundamentally incomplete. Additionally, two different systems (people) can only agree on elements of experience as ‘linguistic meaning’ if they have ‘common reference points’ in their individual experiential spaces. Due to the structure of the system, there exist only the following ‘types of reference points’:

(i) There are sensory perceptions of circumstances in a commonly shared environment that can be perceived ‘sufficiently’ similarly by all participants (and are automatically (unconsciously!) transformed into more abstract units in the experiential space).

(ii) There are internal body perceptions that normally occur similarly in each person due to a genetically determined structural similarity.[14]

(iii) There are internal perceptions of internal processes that also normally occur similarly in each person due to a genetically determined structural similarity. [15]

The more ‘similar’ such internal structures are and the more ‘constant’ they occur, the greater the likelihood that different language participants can form ‘internal working hypotheses’ about what the other means when using certain linguistic expressions. The more the content of experience deviates from types (i) – (iii), the more difficult or impossible it becomes to reach an agreement.

The question of ‘true statements’ and ‘verifiable predictions’ is a specific subset of the problem of meaning, which is treated separately.

Complex Language Forms

Even the assignment and determination of meaning in relatively ‘simple’ linguistic expressions is not straightforward, and it becomes quickly ‘blurred’ and ‘vague’ in ‘more complex language forms’. The discussions and research on this topic are incredibly extensive.[16]

I would like to briefly remind you of the example of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who first experimentally played through the very simple meaning concept of modern formal logic in his early work, ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ (1921), but then, many years later (1936 – 1946), reexamined the problem of meaning using everyday language and many concrete examples. He discovered — not surprisingly — that ‘normal language’ functions differently and is significantly more complex than the simple meaning model of formal logic assumed. [17] What Wittgenstein discovered in his ‘everyday’ analyses was so multi-layered and complex that he found himself unable to transform it into a systematic presentation.[18]

Generally, it can be said that to this day there is not even a rudimentary comprehensive and accurate ‘theory of the meaning of normal language’. [19]

The emergence and proliferation of ‘generative artificial intelligence’ (Generative AI) in recent years [20] may offer an unexpected opportunity to revisit this problem entirely anew. Here, modern engineering demonstrates that simple algorithms, which possess no inherent meaning knowledge of their own, are capable of producing linguistic output by using only language material in linguistic interaction with humans. [21] This output is substantial, structured, and arranged in such a way that humans perceive it as if it were generated by a human, which is ultimately true. [22] What a person admires in this linguistic output is essentially ‘himself’, though not in his individual language performances, which are often worse than those generated by the algorithms. What the individual user encounters in such generated texts is essentially the ‘collective language knowledge’ of millions of people, which would not be accessible to us without these algorithms in this extracted form.

These generative algorithms [23] can be compared to the invention of the microscope, the telescope, or modern mathematics: all these inventions have enabled humans to recognize facts and structures that would have remained invisible without these tools. The true extent of collective linguistic performances would remain ‘invisible’ without modern technology, simply because humans without these technologies could not comprehend the scope and scale, along with all the details.

Preliminary Interim Result

The considerations so far only give a first outline of what collective intelligence can be or is.

[1] Reminder: If we assume that the number of stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is estimated at 100 – 400 billion stars and we take 200 billion as our estimate, then our body system would correspond to the scope of 700 galaxies the size of the Milky Way, one cell for one star… a single body!

[2] We know today that genes can change in different ways or be altered during various phases.

[3] Simplifying, we can say that ‘randomness’ in a ‘distribution-free form’ means that each of the known possible continuations is ‘equally likely’; none of the possible continuations shows a ‘higher frequency’ over time than any of the others. Randomness with an ‘implicit distribution’ is noticeable because, although the possible continuations are random, certain continuations show a different frequency over time than others. All these particular individual frequencies together reveal a ‘pattern’ by which they can be characterized. An example of ‘randomness with a distribution’ is the ‘natural (or Gaussian) distribution’.

[4] The concept of ‘memory’ is a theoretical notion, the empirical and functional description of which has not yet been fully completed. Literature distinguishes many different ‘forms of memory’ such as ‘short-term memory’, ‘long-term memory’, ‘sensory memory’, ‘episodic memory’, and many more.

[5] For example, ‘joint positioning’, ‘pain’, ‘feeling of fullness’, ‘discomfort’, ‘hunger’, ‘thirst’, various ’emotions’, etc.

[6] One then perceives not just a ‘blue sky’ and feels a ‘light breeze on the skin’ at the same time, but also experiences a sense of ‘malaise’, ‘fever’, perhaps even a ‘feeling of dejection’ and the like.

[7] In biological behavioral research, there are countless examples of life forms showing impressive coordination achievements, such as during collective hunting, organizing the upbringing of offspring, within the ‘family unit’, learning the ‘dialects’ of their respective languages, handling tools, etc.

[8] Every child can learn any known human language anywhere, provided there is an environment in which a language is practiced. Many thousands of different languages are known.

[9] The exact mechanism by which a language first arises among a group of people remains unclear to this day. However, there are increasingly more computer simulations of language learning (language evolution) that attempt to shed light on this. Given the enormous number of factors involved in real language use, these simulations still appear ‘rather simple’.

[10] As we know from many records, there were many other languages in previous times that eventually died out (‘dead languages’), and only written records of them exist. It is also interesting to consider cases in which a language has ‘evolved’, where older forms continue to exist in texts.

[11] Language research (many different disciplines work together here) suggests the working hypothesis that (i) the type and scope of sounds used in a language, due to the human speech apparatus, represent a finite set that is more or less similar across all languages, although there are still different sets of sounds between the major language families. Furthermore, (ii) many analyses of the structure of spoken and then written language suggest that there are ‘basic structures’ (‘syntax’) that can be found—with variations—in all languages.

[12] Anyone who comes into contact with people who speak a different language can experience this up close and concretely.

[13] In light of modern brain research and general physiology, the ‘location’ here would be assumed to be the brain. However, this location is of little use, as the research into the material brain in the body, along with its interactions with the surrounding body, has hardly been able to grasp the exact mechanisms of ‘meaning assignments’ (just as one cannot identify the algorithm being executed based on the physical signals of computer chips alone from those signals).

[14] For example, ‘hunger’, ‘thirst’, ‘toothache’…

[15] The ‘remembering’ of something that has happened before; the ‘recognition’ of something sensually concrete that one can ‘remember’; the ‘combining’ of memorable things into new ‘constellations’, and much more.

[16] Parts of this discussion can be found in the context of ‘text analyses’, ‘text interpretations’, ‘hermeneutics’, ‘Bible interpretation’, etc.

[17] Which is not surprising at all, since modern formal logic could only arise because it had programmatically radically departed from what has to do with everyday linguistic meaning. What was left were only ‘stubs of an abstract truth’ in the form of abstract ‘truth values’ that were devoid of any meaning.

[18] His posthumously published ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (1953) therefore offer ‘only’ a collection of individual insights, but these were influential enough to impact reflections on linguistic meaning worldwide.

[19] The list of publications titled around the ‘meaning of language’ is exceedingly long. However, this does not change the fact that none of these publications satisfactorily solve the problem comprehensively. It is currently not foreseeable how a solution could emerge, as this would require the cooperation of many disciplines, which in current university operations are well distributed and separated into ‘existences of their own’.

[20] With chatGPT as an example.

[21] Millions of texts produced by humans for the purpose of ‘communicating content’.

[22] Which ultimately is true, because the algorithms themselves do not ‘invent’ text, but use ‘actually used’ linguistic expressions from existing texts to generate ‘highly probable’ combinations of expressions that humans would likely use.

[23] These cannot be seen in isolation: without extremely powerful computing centers along with corresponding global networks and social structures that make widespread use possible, these algorithms would be worthless. Here, indirectly, what has become possible and functions in everyday life due to collective human intelligence also shines through.

body, context-free phenomena, Everyday Life Fragments, everyday thinking, false, guessing, human cell galaxy, humans, language, Life, meaning, memory, methodological guessing, moment, need for meaning, order, phenomena, planet earth, present, real, science, speech sounds, starting science, stories, Talking, text, thinking, thinking creates relationships, time, true, verifying thoughts, world

Talking about the world

This text is part of the text “Rebooting Humanity”

(The German Version can be found HERE)

Author No. 1 (Gerd Doeben-Henisch)

Contact: info@uffmm.org

(Start: June 5, 2024, Last change: June 7, 2024)

Starting Point

A ‘text’ shall be written that speaks about the world, including all living beings, with ‘humans’ as the authors in the first instance. So far, we know of no cases where animals or plants write texts themselves: their view of life. We only know of humans who write from ‘their human perspective’ about life, animals, and plants. Much can be criticized about this approach. Upon further reflection, one might even realize that ‘humans writing about other humans and themselves’ is not so trivial either. Even humans writing ‘about themselves’ is prone to errors, can go completely ‘awry,’ can be entirely ‘wrong,’ which raises the question of what is ‘true’ or ‘false.’ Therefore, we should spend some thoughts on how we humans can talk about the world and ourselves in a way that gives us a chance not just to ‘fantasize,’ but to grasp something that is ‘real,’ something that describes what truly characterizes us as humans, as living beings, as inhabitants of this planet… but then the question pops up again, what is ‘real’? Are we caught in a cycle of questions with answers, where the answers themselves are again questions upon closer inspection?

First Steps

Life on Planet Earth

At the start of writing, we assume that there is a ‘Planet Earth’ and on this planet there is something we call ‘life,’ and we humans—belonging to the species Homo sapiens—are part of it.

Language

We also assume that we humans have the ability to communicate with each other using sounds. These sounds, which we use for communication, we call here ‘speech sounds’ to indicate that the totality of sounds for communication forms a ‘system’ which we ultimately call ‘language.’

Meaning

Since we humans on this planet can use completely different sounds for the ‘same objects’ in the same situation, it suggests that the ‘meaning’ of speech sounds is not firmly tied to the speech sounds themselves, but somehow has to do with what happens ‘in our minds.’ Unfortunately, we cannot look ‘into our minds.’ It seems a lot happens there, but this happening in the mind is ‘invisible.’ Nevertheless, in ‘everyday life,’ we experience that we can ‘agree’ with others whether it is currently ‘raining’ or if it smells ‘bad’ or if there is a trash bin on the sidewalk blocking the way, etc. So somehow, the ‘happenings in the mind’ seem to have certain ‘agreements’ among different people, so that not only I see something specific, but the other person does too, and we can even use the same speech sounds for it. And since a program like chatGPT can translate my German speech sounds, e.g., into English speech sounds, I can see that another person who does not speak German, instead of my word ‘Mülltonne,’ uses the word ‘trash bin’ and then nods in agreement: ‘Yes, there is a trash bin.’ Would that be a case for a ‘true statement’?

Changes and Memories

Since we experience daily how everyday life constantly ‘changes,’ we know that something that just found agreement may no longer find it the next moment because the trash bin is no longer there. We can only notice these changes because we have something called ‘memory’: we can remember that just now at a specific place there was a trash bin, but now it’s not. Or is this memory just an illusion? Can I trust my memory? If now everyone else says there was no trash bin, but I remember there was, what does that mean?

Concrete Body

Yes, and then my body: time and again I need to drink something, eat something, I’m not arbitrarily fast, I need some space, … my body is something very concrete, with all sorts of ‘sensations,’ ‘needs,’ a specific ‘shape,’ … and it changes over time: it grows, it ages, it can become sick, … is it like a ‘machine’?

Galaxies of Cells

Today we know that our human body resembles less a ‘machine’ and more a ‘galaxy of cells.’ Our body has about 37 trillion (10¹²) body cells with another 100 trillion cells in the gut that are vital for our digestive system, and these cells together form the ‘body system.’ The truly incomprehensible thing is that these approximately 140 trillion cells are each completely autonomous living beings, with everything needed for life. And if you know how difficult it is for us as humans to maintain cooperation among just five people over a long period, then you can at least begin to appreciate what it means that 140 trillion beings manage to communicate and coordinate actions every second—over many years, even decades—so that the masterpiece ‘human body’ exists and functions.

Origin as a Question

And since there is no ‘commander’ who constantly tells all the cells what to do, this ‘miracle of the human system’ expands further into the dimension of where the concept comes from that enables this ‘super-galaxy of cells’ to be as they are. How does this work? How did it arise?

Looking Behind Phenomena

In the further course, it will be important to gradually penetrate the ‘surface of everyday phenomena’ starting from everyday life, to make visible those structures that are ‘behind the phenomena,’ those structures that hold everything together and at the same time constantly move, change everything.

Fundamental Dimension of Time

All this implies the phenomenon ‘time’ as a basic category of all reality. Without time, there is also no ‘truth’…

[1] Specialists in brain research will of course raise their hand right away, and will want to say that they can indeed ‘look into the head’ by now, but let’s wait and see what this ‘looking into the head’ entails.

[2] If we assume for the number of stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, with an estimated 100 – 400 billion stars that there are 200 billion, then our body system would correspond to the scope of 700 galaxies in the format of the Milky Way, one cell for one star.

[3] Various disciplines of natural sciences, especially certainly evolutionary biology, have illuminated many aspects of this mega-wonder partially over the last approx. 150 years. One can marvel at the physical view of our universe, but compared to the super-galaxies of life on Planet Earth, the physical universe seems downright ‘boring’… Don’t worry: ultimately, both are interconnected: one explains the other…”

Telling Stories

Fragments of Everyday Life—Without Context

We constantly talk about something: the food, the weather, the traffic, shopping prices, daily news, politics, the boss, colleagues, sports events, music, … mostly, these are ‘fragments’ from the larger whole that we call ‘everyday life’. People in one of the many crisis regions on this planet, especially those in natural disasters or even in war…, live concretely in a completely different world, a world of survival and death.

These fragments in the midst of life are concrete, concern us, but they do not tell a story by themselves about where they come from (bombs, rain, heat,…), why they occur, how they are connected with other fragments. The rain that pours down is a single event at a specific place at a specific time. The bridge that must be closed because it is too old does not reveal from itself why this particular bridge, why now, why couldn’t this be ‘foreseen’? The people who are ‘too many’ in a country or also ‘too few’: Why is that? Could this have been foreseen? What can we do? What should we do?

The stream of individual events hits us, more or less powerfully, perhaps even simply as ‘noise’: we are so accustomed to it that we no longer even perceive certain events. But these events as such do not tell a ‘story about themselves’; they just happen, seemingly irresistibly; some say ‘It’s fate’.

Need for Meaning

It is notable that we humans still try to give the whole a ‘meaning’, to seek an ‘explanation’ for why things are the way they are. And everyday life shows that we have a lot of ‘imagination’ concerning possible ‘connections’ or ’causes’. Looking back into the past, we often smile at the various attempts at explanation by our ancestors: as long as nothing was known about the details of our bodies and about life in general, any story was possible. In our time, with science established for about 150 years, there are still many millions of people (possibly billions?) who know nothing about science and are willing to believe almost any story just because another person tells this story convincingly.

Liberation from the Moment through Words

Because of this ability, with the ‘power of imagination’ to pack things one experiences into a ‘story’ that suggests ‘possible connections’, through which events gain a ‘conceptual sense’, a person can try to ‘liberate’ themselves from the apparent ‘absoluteness of the moment’ in a certain way: an event that can be placed into a ‘context’ loses its ‘absoluteness’. Just by this kind of narrative, the experiencing person gains a bit of ‘power’: in narrating a connection, the narrator can make the experience ‘a matter’ over which they can ‘dispose’ as they see fit. This ‘power through the word’ can alleviate the ‘fear’ that an event can trigger. This has permeated the history of humanity from the beginning, as far as archaeological evidence allows.

Perhaps it is not wrong to first identify humans not as ‘hunters and gatherers’ or as ‘farmers’ but as ‘those who tell stories’.

[1] Such a magic word in Greek philosophy was the concept of ‘breath’ (Greek “pneuma”). The breath not only characterized the individually living but was also generalized to a life principle of everything that connected both body, soul, and spirit as well as permeated the entire universe. In the light of today’s knowledge, this ‘explanation’ could no longer be told, but about 2300 years ago, this belief was a certain ‘intellectual standard’ among all intellectuals, the prevailing ‘worldview’; it was ‘believed’. Anyone who thought differently was outside this ‘language game’.

Organization of an Order

Thinking Creates Relationships

As soon as one can ‘name’ individual events, things, processes, properties of things, and more through ‘language’, it is evident that humans have the ability to not only ‘name’ using language but to embed the ‘named’ through ‘arrangement of words in linguistic expression’ into ‘conceived relationships’, thereby connecting the individually named items not in isolation but in thought with others. This fundamental human ability to ‘think relationships in one’s mind’, which cannot be ‘seen’ but can indeed be ‘thought’ [1], is of course not limited to single events or a single relationship. Ultimately, we humans can make ‘everything’ a subject, and we can ‘think’ any ‘possible relationship’ in our minds; there are no fundamental restrictions here.

Stories as a Natural Force

Not only history is full of examples, but also our present day. Today, despite the incredible successes of modern science, almost universally, the wildest stories with ‘purely thought relationships’ are being told and immediately believed through all channels worldwide, which should give us pause. Our fundamental characteristic, that we can tell stories to break the absoluteness of the moment, obviously has the character of a ‘natural force’, deeply rooted within us, that we cannot ‘eradicate’; we might be able to ‘tame’ it, perhaps ‘cultivate’ it, but we cannot stop it. It is an ‘elemental characteristic’ of our thinking, that is: of our brain in the body.

Thought and Verified

The experience that we, the storytellers, can name events and arrange them into relationships—and ultimately without limit—may indeed lead to chaos if the narrated network of relationships is ultimately ‘purely thought’, without any real reference to the ‘real world around us’, but it is also our greatest asset. With it, humans can not only fundamentally free themselves from the apparent absoluteness of the present, but we can also create starting points with the telling of stories, ‘initially just thought relationships’, which we can then concretely ‘verify’ in our everyday lives.

A System of Order

When someone randomly sees another person who looks very different from what they are used to, all sorts of ‘assumptions’ automatically form in each person about what kind of person this might be. If one stops at these assumptions, these wild guesses can ‘populate the head’ and the ‘world in the head’ gets populated with ‘potentially evil people’; eventually, they might simply become ‘evil’. However, if one makes contact with the other, they might find that the person is actually nice, interesting, funny, or the like. The ‘assumptions in the head’ then transform into ‘concrete experiences’ that differ from what was initially thought. ‘Assumptions’ combined with ‘verification’ can thus lead to the formation of ‘reality-near ideas of relationships’. This gives a person the chance to transform their ‘spontaneous network of thought relationships’, which can be wrong—and usually are—into a ‘verified network of relationships’. Since ultimately the thought relationships as a network provide us with a ‘system of order’ in which everyday things are embedded, it appears desirable to work with as many ‘verified thought relationships’ as possible.

[1] The breath of the person opposite me, which for the Greeks connected my counterpart with the life force of the universe, which in turn is also connected with the spirit and the soul…

Hypotheses and Science

Challenge: Methodically Organized Guessing

The ability to think of possible relationships, and to articulate them through language, is innate [1], but the ‘use’ of this ability in everyday life, for example, to match thought relationships with the reality of everyday life, this ‘matching’/’verifying’ is not innate. We can do it, but we don’t have to. Therefore, it is interesting to realize that since the first appearance of Homo sapiens on this planet [2], 99.95% of the time has passed until the establishment of organized modern science about 150 years ago. This can be seen as an indication that the transition from ‘free guessing’ to ‘methodically organized systematic guessing’ must have been anything but easy. And if today still a large part of people—despite schooling and even higher education—[3] tend to lean towards ‘free guessing’ and struggle with organized verification, then there seems to be a not easy threshold that a person must overcome—and must continually overcome—to transition from ‘free’ to ‘methodically organized’ guessing.[4]

Starting Point for Science

The transition from everyday thinking to ‘scientific thinking’ is fluid. The generation of ‘thought relationships’ in conjunction with language, due to our ability of creativity/imagination, is ultimately also the starting point of science. While in everyday thinking we tend to spontaneously and pragmatically ‘verify’ ‘spontaneously thought relationships’, ‘science’ attempts to organize such verifications ‘systematically’ to then accept such ‘positively verified guesses’ as ’empirically verified guesses’ until proven otherwise as ‘conditionally true’. Instead of ‘guesses’, science likes to speak of ‘hypotheses’ or ‘working hypotheses’, but they remain ‘guesses’ through the power of our thinking and through the power of our imagination.[5]

[1] This means that the genetic information underlying the development of our bodies is designed so that our body with its brain is constructed during the growth phase in such a way that we have precisely this ability to ‘think of relationships’. It is interesting again to ask how it is possible that from a single cell about 13 trillion body cells (the approximately 100 trillion bacteria in the gut come ‘from outside’) can develop in such a way that they create the ‘impression of a human’ that we know.

[2] According to current knowledge, about 300,000 years ago in East Africa and North Africa, from where Homo sapiens then explored and conquered the entire world (there were still remnants of other human forms that had been there longer).

[3] I am not aware of representative empirical studies on how many people in a population tend to do this.

[4] Considering that we humans as the life form Homo sapiens only appeared on this planet after about 3.8 billion years, the 300,000 years of Homo sapiens make up roughly 0.008% of the total time since there has been life on planet Earth. Thus, not only are we as Homo sapiens a very late ‘product’ of the life process, but the ability to ‘systematically verify hypotheses’ also appears ‘very late’ in our Homo sapiens life process. Viewed across the entire life span, this ability seems to be extremely valuable, which is indeed true considering the incredible insights we as Homo sapiens have been able to gain with this form of thinking. The question is how we deal with this knowledge. This behavior of using systematically verified knowledge is not innate too.

[5] The ability of ‘imagination’ is not the opposite of ‘knowledge’, but is something completely different. ‘Imagination’ is a trait that ‘shows’ itself the moment we start to think, perhaps even in the fact ‘that’ we think at all. Since we can in principle think about ‘everything’ that is ‘accessible’ to our thinking, imagination is a factor that helps to ‘select’ what we think. In this respect, imagination is pre-posed to thinking.

body symphony, brain, center of body, conscious knowledge, coordination of brains, delineated object, everyday language, human being, human cell galaxy, Knowledge, language, learning process, meta-system, nature, normal everyday life, organized system, real knowledge, real world, unconscious, unconscious knowledge

OKSIMO.R – Start . The ‘inside’ of the ‘outside’ – Part 2

eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 13.Januar 2023 – 18.January 2023, 08:08 p.m.
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

Parts of this text have been translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version), afterwards only minimally edited.

CONTEXT

This post is part of the book project ‘oksimo.R Editor and Simulator for Theories’.

Part 2

( This text is an direct continuation of the text  “The ‘inside’ of the ‘outside’. Basic Building Blocks”)

Establishment of First Structures

At first sight, the previously described galactic cell association of a human body does not provide a natural clue for a ‘center’ of some kind. Which cell should be more important than others? Each one is active, each one does its ‘job’. Many ‘talk’ to many. Chemical substances are exchanged or by means of chemical substance exchange ‘electrical potentials’ are generated which can travel ‘faster’ and which can generate ‘impulse-like events’ which in turn activate chemical substances again. If one would make this ‘talking with chemical substances and electric potentials’ artificially audible, we would have a symphony of 127 trillion (127 x 10^12) single voices …

And yet, when we experience our human bodies in everyday life, we don’t see a huge cloud of galactic proportions of individual cells, we see a ‘delineated object’ with a surface that is ‘visible’; an object that can make ‘sounds’, that ‘smells’, that is ‘touchable’, that can ‘change’ and ‘move’. Moreover, it can ‘stuff things into itself’, and ‘gases’, ‘liquids’, and ‘more solid components’ also come out of it. Further it is obvious with longer observation that there are areas at the body which react to ‘light’ (eyes), to ‘sounds’ (ears), to ‘smells’ (nose), to ‘touch’ (skin), to ‘body positions’ (among other things sense of balance), to ‘temperature’ (skin), to ‘chemical compositions of substances in the mouth’ (taste organs in the mouth) and some more.

This everyday ‘experience’ suggests the assumption that the cells of our human body have spatially arranged themselves into ‘special networks’ [1], which show a high ‘degree of organization’, so pronounced that these networks appear like ‘one unit’, like a ‘single system’ with ‘input’ and ‘output’, and where complex processes take place between input and output. This opens up the possibility of viewing the galactic space of autonomous cells in a human body as a ‘collective of organized systems’ that appear to be in active exchange with each other.”[2], [4],[5]

In modern technical systems such as a car, an airplane, a computer, there is a ‘meta-level’ from which the whole system can be ‘controlled’. In the car the steering wheel, the brake, the gear shift etc., similarly in the airplane the cockpit with a multiplicity of instruments, or with the computer the input and output devices. However, for years an increasing ‘autonomy’ of these technical devices has been emerging, insofar as many control decisions of humans are shifted to ‘subsystems’, which thereby ‘self-perform’ more and more classical control performance of humans.[6].

In a human body there exists ‘parallel’ to the different body systems among other things the ‘nervous system’ with the ‘brain’ as central area, in which many ‘signals from the body systems’ run together and from which again ‘signals to the body systems’ are sent out. The brain with the nervous system seems to be a system of its own, which processes the incoming signals in different ‘neuronal processes’ and also sends out signals, which can cause ‘effects in the body systems’.[7] From the point of view of ‘functioning’ the brain with the nervous system can be understood as a kind of ‘meta-system’, in which properties of all other ‘body systems’ are ‘mapped’, find a ‘process-like interpretation’, and can be influenced (= ‘controlled’) to a certain degree with the help of these mappings and interpretations.

As the modern empirical sciences make visible more and more by their investigations and subsequent ‘interpretations’ (e.g. [4],[5]), the distinguishable body systems themselves have a very high complexity with their own ‘autonomy’ (stomach, liver, kidney, heart, …), which can be influenced only conditionally by the brain, but which conversely can also influence the brain. In addition, there is a hardly manageable amount of mutual influences via the immense ‘material flows’ in the blood circulation and in the body fluids.

For the context of this book, of particular interest here are those structures that are important for the ‘coordination of the different brains’ by means of ‘language’ and closely related to this are the ‘cognitive’ and ’emotional’ processes in the brain that are responsible for what ‘cognitive images are created in the mind’ with which a brain ‘interprets’ ‘itself’ and ‘everything else’.

How to describe the Human Being?

The description of the human cell galaxy as ‘subsystems’ with their own ‘input’ and ‘output’ and and including ‘inner processes’ – here simply called the ‘system function’ – can appear ‘simple’ at first sight, ‘normal’, or something else. We enter with this question the fundamental question, how we can describe the human cell galaxy – i.e. ‘ourselves’! – at all and furthermore maybe how we ‘should’ describe it: are there any criteria on the basis of which we should prefer a ‘certain way of description’?

In the case of the description of ‘nature’, of the ‘real world’, we may still be able to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘nature’ (which, however, will later come out as a fallacy)), it becomes somewhat more difficult with the ‘description of ourselves’. If one wants to describe something, one needs certain conditions to be able to make a description. But what are these conditions if we want to describe ourselves? Doesn’t here the famous ‘cat bite into its own tail’?

In ‘normal everyday life’ [8] typical forms with which we describe are e.g. ‘pictures’, ‘photographs’, ‘videos’, ‘music’, ‘body movements’ and others, but above all linguistic expressions (spoken, written; everyday language, technical language; …).

Let’s stay for a moment with ‘everyday language (German, English, Italian, …).

As children we are born into a certain, already existing world with a respective ‘everyday life’ distinctive for each human person. At least one language is spoken in such an environment. If the parents are bilingual even two languages in parallel. If the environment is different from the language of the parents, then perhaps even three languages. And today, where also the environment becomes more and more ‘multi-cultural’, maybe even more than three languages are practiced.

No matter how many languages occur simultaneously for a person, each language has its own ‘rules’, its own ‘pronunciation’, its own ‘contextual reference’, its own ‘meanings’. These contexts can change; the language itself can change. And if someone grows up with not just one language, but more than one, then ‘in the person’, in the ‘speaker-listener’, there can naturally be multiple interactions between the different languages. Since this happens today in many places at the same time with more and more people, there are still hardly sufficient research results available that adequately describe this diversity in its specifics.

So, if we want to describe ‘ourselves’ as ‘part of the real world’, we should first of all accept and ‘consciously assume’ that we do not start at ‘point zero’ at the moment of describing, not as a ‘blank sheet’, but as a biological system which has a more or less long ‘learning process’ behind it. Thereby, the word ‘learning process’ as part of the language the author uses, is not a ‘neutral set of letters’, but likewise a ‘word’ of his language, which he shares with many other speakers of ‘German’. One must assume that each ‘speaker of German’ associates his own ‘individual conceptions’ with the word ‘learning process’. And also this word ‘conception’ is such a word, which as part of the spoken (and written) language normally does not come along ‘meaning-free’. In short, as soon as we speak, as soon as we link words in larger units to statements, we activate a set of ‘knowledge and skills’ that are somehow ‘present in us’, that we use ‘automatically’, and whose use is normally largely ‘unconscious’.”[9],[10]

When I, as the author of this text, now write down statements in the German language, I let myself be carried by a ‘wave of language usage’, so to speak, whose exact nature and effectiveness I cannot fully grasp at the moment of use (and this is the case for every language user). I can, however, when I have expressed myself, look more consciously at what has been expressed, and then — perhaps — see clearer whether and how I can place it in contexts known to me. Since also the ‘known to me’ is largely ‘unconscious’ and passes from ‘unconscious knowledge’ into ‘conscious’ knowledge, the task of a ‘clarification of speaking’ and the ‘meaning’ connected with it is always only fragmentarily, partially possible. The ‘conscious eye of knowledge’ is therefore perhaps comparable to a ‘shining knowledge bubble’ in the black sea of ‘unconscious knowledge’, which seems to be close to ‘not-knowing’ but it isn’t ‘not-knowing’: ‘unconscious knowledge’ is ‘inside the brain ‘real knowledge’, which ‘works’.

… to be continued …

COMMENTS

wkp := Wikipedia

[1] In microbiology as a part of evolutionary biology, one has recognized rudimentarily how the individual cells during the ‘growth process’ ‘communicate’ possible cooperations with other cells via chemical substances, which are ‘controlled’ by their respective individual ‘genetic program’. These processes can very well be described as ‘exchange of signals’, where these ‘signals’ do not occur in isolation, but are ‘related’ by the genetic program to other chemical substances and process steps. Through this ‘relating’, the chemical signal carriers, isolated in themselves, are embedded in a ‘space of meanings’ from which they find an ‘assignment’. This overall process fulfills all requirements of a ‘communication’. In this respect, it seems justified to speak of an ‘agreement’ between the individual cells, an ‘understanding’ about whether and how they want to ‘cooperate’ with each other.

[2] When thinking of complex connections between cells, one may first think of the cells in the brain (‘neurons’), certain types of which may have as many as 1000 dendrites (:= these are projections on an ‘axon’ and an axon is the ‘output’ on a neuron), each dendrite housing multiple synapses.[3] Since each synapse can be the endpoint of a connection to another synapse, it suggests that a complex network of the order of trillions (10^12) connections may exist here in a brain. In addition, there is also the system of blood vessels that run through the entire body and supply the approximately 36 trillion (10^12) body cells with various chemical substances.

[3] wkp [EN], Neuron, URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron, section ‚Connectivity‘, citation: „The human brain has some 8.6 x 1010 (eighty six billion neurons. Each neuron has on average 7,000 synaptic connections to other neurons. It has been estimated that the brain of a three-year-old child has about 1015 synapses (quadrillion). This number declines with age, stabilizing by adulthood. Estimates vary for an adult, ranging from 1014 to 5 x 1014 synapses (100 to 500 trillion).”

[4] Robert F.Schmidt, Gerhard Thews (Eds.), 1995, Physiologie des Menschen, 25th edition, Springer

[5] Niels Birbaumer, Robert F.Schmidt, 2006, Biologische Psychologie, 6.th edition, Springer

[6] Famously, the example of the ‘auto-pilot’ on an airplane, software that can ‘steer’ the entire plane without human intervention.

[7] Thus, the position of the joints is continuously sent to the brain and, in the case of a ‘directed movement’, the set of current joint positions is used to trigger an ‘appropriate movement’ by sending appropriate signals ‘from the brain to the muscles’.

[8] Of course, also a certain fiction, because everyone ultimately experiences ‘his everyday life’ to a certain degree, which only partially overlaps with the ‘everyday life of another’.

[9] When children in school are confronted for the first time with the concept of a ‘grammar’, with ‘grammatical rules’, they will not understand what that is. Using concrete examples of language, they will be able to ‘link’ one or another ‘grammatical expression’ with linguistic phenomena, but they will not really understand the concept of grammar. This is due to the fact that the entire processes that take place in the ‘inside of a human being’ have been researched only in a very rudimentary way until today. It is in no way sufficient for the formulation of a grammar close to everyday life.

[10] Karl Erich Heidoplh, Walter Flämig, Wolfgang Motsch (ed.), (1980), Grundzüge einer Deutschen Grammatik, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin. Note: Probably the most systematized grammar of German to date, compiled by a German authors’ collective (at that time still the eastern part of Germany called ‘German Democratic Republic’ (GDR)). Precisely because the approach was very systematic, the authors could clearly see that grammar as a description of ‘regular forms’ reaches its limits where the ‘meaning’ of expressions comes into play. Since ‘meaning’ describes a state of affairs that takes place in the ‘inside of the human being’ (of course in intensive interaction with interactions of the body with the environment), a comprehensive objective description of the factor ‘meaning’ in interaction with the forms is always only partially possible.