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ã 2003
Human nature is a part of the order of the universe. We are
learning to understand this order. We have wonderful intelligence. This genetically
determined intelligence gives us the ability to make use of information. As
humans we must learn about our environment in order to learn how to use our
intelligence. We are capable of discerning knowledge from our environment, and
make intelligent decisions about the meaning of this knowledge. How is it
that we are able to learn? How do we acquire knowledge?
We are born ignorant of most knowledge. The knowledge we are born
with is called instinct. Instinct means we have both the intelligence and
knowledge necessary to perform some act without previously having become aware
of it. For example, a new baby is genetically programmed with the intelligence
and knowledge necessary to learn to identify its parents' faces. What the baby
must acquire by observation are the differences in detail distinguishing one
face from another. The genetic intellectual ingredient is that the baby's mind
already knows where to find the details and what to make of them.
This is an extremely important talent. It points to the fact that
we have a natural, innate, interpretive talent. We know how to recognize
information and determine meaning for it. We talk, and we write. How is it that
other’s appear to learn from our words? How do words bring forth understanding?
How does the listener know what our words mean? Why do our words have meaning?
If written, the words are only drawings. If spoken, they are only sounds. Both
the drawings and the sounds are arbitrarily chosen. Our words can only be
signs. Words are signs because they point to something that will bring us
understanding. They direct our attention to a place where we can find their
meaning. That place can only be located within the very core of our being.
We choose words and they, like magic, bring forth understanding.
It is not clear why. Teachers communicate with their students through their
words. We all feel we have something to teach to someone. We talk and write
words and, because others appear to learn from us, we conclude we are teaching.
Because we believe we are teaching, it is generally believed our true learning
comes through our senses. In other words, that which we learn we must acquire
from the outside world.
There are at least three problems with this belief. Firstly, for patterns of information to be logical to us logic must already be under our
individual power. As with all things, we must know logic before we can apply
it. Therefore, logic must already be in our possession before we learn from
even our first experience. The second problem results from the fact we cannot
learn experiences through signs. Knowledge of experiences must be stored inside
our minds before the signs signifying that experience can have meaning.
Experiences must be anticipated by our minds or the signs signifying them can
have no meaning.
Thirdly, to postulate that learning comes from experience fails also,
because experience comes to us through the intermediaries of photons. The
learning experience involves only photons. If we are to believe we understand
intelligent meaning communicated to us by photons then we must credit photons
with signifying information going beyond change of velocity. If we persist in
our mechanical interpretation of the universe, and say photons cause only a
change in velocity, then our search for the cause of understanding cannot
proceed in a meaningful way.
Photons are signs of an event for which we must internally decide
how to experience. Photons signify extremely truncated pieces of a very
complex whole. The photons are not the experience. They are communicating the
experience. The photons tell us tiny bits of an intelligent event that has
occurred, but only by signifying it. Our bodies are constantly bombarded by
photons coming from an immeasurable number of sources. They are each striving to
tell us what little information they know. Of all the photons irradiating us,
we somehow already know which ones to use to interpret relevant information. Of
all the photons impacting upon our senses, we know how to choose what
information is most pertinent.
The photons signify something to us causing us to search inside
our being for the store of true knowledge already there. The knowledge we
acquire from photons wakens our genetically inherited intelligence. We instinctively
react and put the intelligence inside us to work. The photons notify us of
which parts and in what order we should choose to use our inherited
intelligence. We absorb this knowledge coming from mixed sources of the
universe tiny piece by tiny piece.
In this sense we have never experienced continuity in incoming data. For example, no living creature has ever really seen a continuous line. The concepts of a line or of continuity in general are things that had to have come from genetically programmed intelligence inside of us. The most impressive thing we do is to add what we perceive to be missing information. These are examples of inborn intelligence. All of our intelligence is contained within us. What we receive from our environment is data delivered to us by photons interacting with subatomic particles. The data cannot carry intelligence with it. It does not yet have meaning. It must be decoded, rerouted and analyzed internally.
We add the intelligence. We must decide within our subconscious
minds what relationship the data has to our inborn intelligence. We are free to choose what to believe and what not to believe. It can sometimes be very easy and other times very difficult to
make a correct association between our absorbed information and our genetic
intelligence. When our eyes are observing events, our subconscious mind is
working wonderfully well at telling our conscious mind what we are probably
seeing. An incredible amount of always new data is being logically analyzed
faster than we can see.
On the other hand, if we are trying to learn concepts such as
those contained in the formulation of calculus, it may take quite some
repetitious effort before the matter becomes clear. However, an association
must be made before a conclusion is reached. It is the subconscious mind that
reaches the conclusion. When this evaluation process is completed, our
intelligently interpreted knowledge becomes a conscious thought.
A physical feeling is communicated along with the thought. Some
thoughts are accompanied by a feeling of confusion. Other thoughts are
accompanied by a good feeling indicating they appear to make sense. If it
weren’t for this feeling we wouldn't know the difference between a good thought
and a poor one. This stimulation of emotion is an important part of the means
of communication of our subconscious mind with our conscious mind. In this
sense, it is emotion that guides us through a learning experience. Our physical
eyes supply us with data that does not yet have meaning.
The emotions I am stressing now are special. They are emotional
responses clearly programmed into us. There is another kind. For example, we
can learn to feel happiness from possession of material things. It is certainly
common to desire a special material object, and upon gaining possession of it
to feel very happy. We may smile, laugh or shout triumphantly. This kind of
emotional feeling is trained, tenuous and is not the instinctive emotion I am
reaching for here.
I am reaching for the emotion of happiness that is unique and has
permanence. I will refer to it as real joy. Real joy is very different from the
happiness of learned pleasures. Real joy is the feeling you experience while
witnessing the birth of a loved baby. There are many more examples that could
be given; however, it is the uniqueness of the emotion I wish to clearly
identify. The emotion is unique because of the response it elicits from us.
The emotion of real joy does not cause us to laugh. It causes us
to cry. It does not cause us to squeal with delight. It causes us to become
mute. Even if we try to speak, we may find we have lost that ability. It does
not cause us to leap into the air. It is likely to cause us to feel weak in the
knees. It does not cause us to act proud and haughty. It reduces us to a
posture of humility and humbleness. It is a different and wondrous feeling
indeed. It is the feeling that this joy is different from the other emotion
called happiness. It lets us know this is the real happiness we are programmed
to know.
This is an example of our being naturally directed to fundamental
truth. There is a general process by which natural truths are revealed to our
conscious minds. We still have to learn how to use it to its fullest extent. We
are not programmed to always cry when a fundamental truth is being revealed.
The process is more complex than that. However, there must be preset physical
responses, if we will recognize them, for confirming truth.
If we allow our thoughts to be guided along this natural path of
intelligent thought, then we can understand everything we are capable of
knowing. Our ideas are not only products of our environmental conditioning.
They can also result from internal pre-existing ideas waiting to be discovered.
This discovery process is often referred to as intuition. Sometimes it is
called foresight. People who produce these inspired thoughts are described as
having moments of brilliance.
These are the thoughts that free us from being in bondage to
knowledge of the past and propel us into the future. I describe these thoughts
in this manner. They are thoughts that prove to be logical but cannot be
predicted by logic. They are not logically predictable because the products of
logic are always products of what is already known to exist. This is because
all parts must already be known for a logical statement to be formed.
Our ideas come from the genetic intelligence born within us.
However, our ideas are not necessarily predestined. The evaluation process is
very often one of making our best guess. This is why optical illusions work. We
are free to interpret the data rightly or wrongly. We are free to reach wrong
conclusions concerning the usefulness of our newly acquired knowledge. Even if
the knowledge is correctly interpreted, we are free to reach wrong conclusions
due to the incompleteness of our collection of facts. When we reach seemingly
good conclusions, we can expect they are probably only temporarily good. This
is because until we have acquired complete knowledge we cannot reach truly
final conclusions.
Our intelligence is programmed into us in a manner that can
sometimes make accessing it difficult. It is not in the form of language or
symbols. This internal communication process is not the same kind as that which
we develop for social purposes. It must be directly related to the way things
really are. It must involve imaging. If we cannot construct it in our minds
into something we recognize, then our minds can't use it.
The raw data in the form of signs is collected and compared to
genetically generated images already existing in our subconscious mind. The
subconscious mind attempts to find the most probable comparison. It searches
for familiar shapes and patterns that appear to be predominant. The mind moves
from shapes and patterns to images. Images are the symbolism of ideas.
The mind fills in what it guesses to be missing parts. This is why
still pictures can be used to create the illusion of motion. There is nothing
about motion pictures that includes actual motion. The motion is only suggested
to the mind and it is formed in the mind. The mind anticipates motion because
that is the only kind of data it ever receives. Mechanically speaking, motion
is all it understands. Intellectually speaking, it can understand ideas.
There is a connection between the mechanical and intellectual
ideas of the mind. Even in intellectual ideas there is the anticipation of
change. The subconscious mind searches for ideas that can be extrapolated from the
current level of thought. When it finds an idea that seems related to the ideas
formed by current thought, the idea is pushed forward into our conscious mind.
The idea does not have to perfectly fit the pattern of logic contained in our
current thoughts.
There is only an incomplete and mixed message about reality coded
into the photons. Photons are a discontinuous mixed delivery system of
information. The reality received is not exact. It contains uncertainty. It is
always being delivered in new arrangements that are never duplicated. The mind
cannot know with certainty from the incoming data what exactly has occurred.
However, the mind already knows in general what can occur. The mind forms, by
its own source of knowledge, a best guess concept of reality. It does this by
selecting and interpreting bits of information received via photons. It then
superimposes continuity onto the most prominently interpreted bits of
information.
It then compares the incoming data in a subconscious search for
the kinds of events possible. When the mind has decided what may have occurred,
it then draws an imagined reality and communicates it to our conscious mind by
activating our senses. I am saying the activation of our senses, as we are made
aware of them, comes after the mind has made its determination of what has
occurred.
It is certainly the case that photon information is picked up by
our physical senses. However, before it can be used our mind decides upon our
sensory reaction. It does this after its interpretive process has been
completed. Our senses act in the reverse order of what we feel they do. We do
not truly sense the outside world by separate means. In the cases of sight,
touch, smell, taste and sound we receive information delivered by
electromagnetic means.
Our minds interpret this information before causing a reaction. I
do not refer here to reflex responses that are not interpreted and triggered by
the mind. We first interpret the outside world. The mind decides what it thinks
the outside world is like. It then reacts by activating our awareness of
sensory reactions to communicate its perception of reality to our conscious
mind. This is why large screen movie theaters can produce the experience of
motion. The body never moves, and yet the mind decides the body must have
moved. The mind then activates all involved senses to communicate bodily
motion. The result is we feel that we experience motion.
Our minds can fail to understand the information photons are
trying to communicate to us. If the mind is missing a part of the knowledge of
what reality can be, then it cannot interpret that part of reality. The mind
will not understand when the universe communicates data pertaining to that part
of reality. All the senses can be working perfectly; however, the data cannot
be successfully interpreted. The information is there. The senses are not the
cause of failure. It is the incomplete prior knowledge of the mind that has
failed us.
Even when our minds do contain the information necessary to gain
understanding, we can fail to correctly interpret information. The problem is,
the data is not precise and is too voluminous. The ideas accepted as being
probably correct are just that. They are only probably correct. The mind
compromises exactness because there is nothing physically known with
exactness. Even so, we are programmed with the concept of exactness.
Thinking is a process of multitudinous bit-by-bit discovery and
best-fit evaluation. The mind will even disregard good data in favor of what it
expects to see. It is this trial and error prone evaluation process, through
which new
knowledge must pass, that permits us the freedom to make choices. It is
the rationing of knowledge that gives rise to human free will.