The nature of Ideation?

We have often been paying attention for a long time on the bottom up emergence of properties of matter and associate laws of nature. But it is important to keep correcting our own methods so we do not become victims of our own interpretations. As we have already to an extent encountered that the universe and knowledge about its states are not independent to the way questions are framed and our inquiry constantly posits limitations which allows for certain aspects of truth to unveil. Excessive reliance on any specific orientation to inquiry about the nature will lead only to affirmations about the Hypothesis which allows to frame the inquiry, unfortunately these affirmations will last only to an extent where the influence of elements which we choose to neglect, can itself be ignored or considered noise or anomalies. But if one persists earnestly, then the inquiry is bound to encounter revelations and insights which undermine the initial hypothesis and all the findings which the process of inquiry unveiled. This either leads to denial of one’s own findings and hence an internal conflict or else an abandonment of the very pursuit which comes with disappointment. 

Taking lessons from history of human beings pursuit of knowledge and also from many individual failures of pursuing extremities, one began to develop the intelligence and sensitivity required for approach towards reality by the middle path. Here one constantly balances the perspectives of internal with the external, the microscopic with the macroscopic, the material with the experiential and the very many other extremities which the mind, by its very structure of being fragmentary and biased, tries to impose on the knowledge it has of the world. 

We may for this reason try to make sense of the experience from an entirely different perspective and see where our paths collide with our previous prepositions. What we will encounter can be expected to be something contradictory, but having understood the inference of orientation of inquiry on the revelations that it begets, we may be capable of reconciling the contradictions into complementary perspectives of the same reality. 

We can go back to our cup on our table. We have managed until now to assume that it is something which can be understood if all its constitution and the interactions of them are understood. We believed like many that it will be made of unique particles which have clear relations between them. But this is far from being true. The capacity of constituents to act as individuals distinct from others will begin to vanish as the attributes associated with constituents reduce. Things will start disappearing into possibilities and ideas about distinct location or any other behavior will become clouded with uncertainty. Yet the cup seems to be very stable in its existence and continues to retain it’s form without any difficulty. From the bottom up approach one may say that things average out to constitute apparent stable macroscopic structures. But we wonder if any necessity of behavior at microscopic scales can lead to creation of a cup? A cup is something I use to drink tea in. It has a very specific spatial configuration which allows it to hold a fluid of some volume proportional to my thirst, and a handle which helps me get hold of it conveniently. We may be capable of explaining complex states emerging from selection pressure and even be able to describe how the human eye happens to be just the way it is, beginning from mere ions in empty vacuum, but the approach does not seem to go as smoothly from there on. What could be difficult to explain about a cup, a toothpick or a pair of scissors after we have explained the universe from the time of the big bang? It seems trivial after all, but we better get into it to make sure we are clear about the final bits. 

But the more one inquires, the less obvious things begin to appear. Capacity to make a cup of tea has no evolutionary selection pressures and we do not have genes which enable us to make cups. There is no reason for molecules to confine themselves in the shape of a cup. Even the material involved has no business being on my table by sheer probability of some random decoherence events. Some of the metal is probably from different iron ore from some remote underground locations. Some may have even come from supernovae or asteroids. After all the existence of a heavy metal is no ordinary accident and needs fusion energy and conditions which only can happen in the heart of a star. Let’s take it that we are all too stoic and indifferent as to how some such thing can happen and feel there is some probability for events like this to happen. But the plastic of the handle is even more complex. Universe simply is not in the habit of synthesizing polyethylene or other long chain polymers which surround me. Someone inclined into habits of opposites and incapable of enduring the pressure of uncertainty which comes on facing our ignorance, may try to jump into the extremity of introducing consciousness. After all, the world with its plastics, and planets and all the stars appear in my consciousness. When I am in deep sleep, the world disappears. So everything is consciousness, and so on and so forth! Unfortunately it does not explain anything beyond the fact that consciousness is the condition for appearance of the world.  To explain how some such thing as a cup of plastic comes about, one needs to understand the elements involved in cognition and how, if at all they are capable of influencing matter. In absence of clarity about such relations one is falling into the pit of solipsism. 

We may, for the aid of people subjected to such delusions about pure consciousness, which is essentially ontotheology in a new packaging, help remind that consciousness which is knowing is always necessarily of something. A knowing which knows nothing, is not a knowing at all. Like a mirror is visible only through the images which it reflects, consciousness too can only be discerned by virtue of what is cognized, and beyond it, there is no way for consciousness to meaningfully exist. Taking the necessary precaution to explore the slippery terrains of subjective experience, we can inquire into the being of phenomena which in everyday discourse is addressed as being artificial. A cup or a scissors may not exist for me if I have no consciousness, but the presence of my consciousness don’t provide sufficient conditions for existence of some such thing. It is very likely that an amoeba is also conscious, but the fact of consciousness does in no way account for being of a cup. One may then have to develop the notion of consciousness to address that it requires a more evolved or complex form of consciousness associated with human beings to allow for the existence of tools and equipment. This naturally creates more difficulties than it solves. If consciousness can evolve or transform, then it is akin to matter and must be treated in same lines as a variable attribute. 

To avoid an engagement in the enormous difficulties that the fact of cognition puts us into, we shall highlight few attributes in its relation which may help us to continue with our inquiry without relying on false assumptions or being pulled into the ontology of consciousness. We have already noted that consciousness is always of something and cannot be conceived independently. We can add to it that the kind of information that is presented to consciousness is already structured by the senses which isolate it from the environment through cultivated sensitivities to particular forms of disturbances. In Sense, we had discussed some of the ways in which this is brought about. Eyes for instance are sensitive to a particular range of frequency of light and sound to a particular range of pressure waves in air. At this point, what we wish to pay attention to, is that consciousness relies on material structures to convey information about the material world. The eye, the skin or the brain are physical structures on which consciousness depends to provide meaningful data. Also the eye cannot hear, nor ears see, there is specialization in structure and organization which allows for isolation of a very specific type of information. The residual images from all five senses can be recalled using material structures like hippocampus in the physical brain. 

One is pointed again to the challenging task of not thinking of consciousness as independent of matter or matter as being independent of consciousness and finally after avoiding the extremities, not falling even in between and claiming the mind is the brain! Sensitive to the potential deceptions of thought, we may inch forward with our inquiry. We can recognize that something like a cup indicates the existence of other people (isn’t it obvious, but is it!). The fact of the cup indicates a past with beings who had needs like mine of having a form of matter which could hold fluids and be held conveniently by a hand like my own. It indicates communication between such beings and this language. It indicates collaborative effort to extract or synthesize materials suitable for efficient construction of such a cup. It requires there to be effective modes of economical exchange between these people to undertake the challenging tasks such as mining. There necessarily were means of transportation and energy sources to fuel them, which led this cup from wherever it was made, to the grip of the hands which I call mine. Surely this and much more is already implied in the being of the cup. It is a very simple structure but the conditions which allow for being of some such thing in a universe of our kind are overwhelming. It is entirely inadequate for me to conceive of it as accidental emergence from collusion of mechanical particles. We can get excited by some patterns generated in cellular automata, but willful engagement of an entire species has variables and contingencies which are more psychological than mechanical. 

If a cup is complicated, what could we say of a computer or a space station? It requires the operation of variations and integration in an entirely different landscape than the one we have engaged for the most part, that is the material. Instead of directly engaging with a complex structure like a computer and losing our way, we may take up the simple cup we are familiar with and progress from there. In order of complexity of organization, a human body or even that of a cockroach, surpasses that of any artificial equipment. But when we look at the ontology of a simple cup, and the conditions which are required to bring it about, we find an already evolved social structure made out of embodied entities which are capable of thought and communication. If we try to understand the likely hood of a cup by starting with our standard model of particle physics and orienting it with the Second law of Thermodynamics, I doubt we will ever reach a cup! Yet in a sense most scientific theories assume a block universe in which all that is going to happen has in some sense occurred. We happen to be only experiencing time which has already happened. Many religious philosophies also have such implicit or in some cases explicit temporal determinism. We may not raise any issues involved with such philosophies besides claiming that they are poor in both observation and imagination. 

We may go ahead with nominating the kind of being possessed by the cup and all artificial objects as Idea. We have pointed at the conditions which allow for some such thing as the idea to at all be in the universe. Even when our planet was populated with dinosaurs and many highly evolved species, capable of being conscious of their environment and responding to it in a very sophisticated manner, we cannot say that they had ideas, at least not in the sense that we indicate here. We have to recognize that the Idea is not merely a category to nominate and contemplate a specific form in which macroscopic matter appears to be organized to human intellect. It is the idea itself which imposes form on matter. The idea of the cup is transmitted through human minds and through his capacity to act on the environment, capable of gathering matter and fabricating a form out of it. The ideas transcend individual humans and ideas of wheels or hammers have outlived human civilizations. From the time of their appearance,they have imposed their design on innumerable lumps of matter through the agency of man. Most of the things we encounter are ideas that have replicated through men to impose form on matter. 

What is it in human beings that makes us a mechanism for ideas to operate and impose structure on the world? And how is it relevant to our understanding of laws that dictate our world? The second question is easier because if we have grasped the significance of matter, we realize that idea is force, not unlike gravitation or magnetism, which imposes form on matter and compels it to behave in a certain way. It does not contradict the action of other forces but finds ways across the limitations it imposes to find its fulfillment. A rocket for instance is capable to escape the gravitational field, not by breaking the law, but by the additive influence of millions of ideas which inform specific limitations and which together act through human agency to organize metals, propellants and every other material basis necessary, in a very specific structural configuration, that is escapes through the narrow window of conditions in which gravity is incapable of holding it back. That there be such phenomena as Ideation, which can propel matter quite against its ordinary propensities, makes it a sufficiently relevant topic for understanding nature. 

That which enables man to be capable of possessing Ideas (or at least be possessed by them!), seems to be associated with the capacity of information processing and memory. But one can say that the complexity of the density of nerves in a chimpanzee is not entirely insignificant in comparison to a human being. This is true but the capacity of communication through language allows for the operation of human brains as nodes of larger computers. Language becomes the wires or the interface for information through which ideas move seamlessly through human brains and keep evolving through permutations and combinations as well as feedback from cases of implications. Failure of some nodes does not seem to destroy the entire functioning of the network just like death of individual neurons in the brain do not disable the  entire brain. A group of monkeys will be incapable of making sense of even a very simple idea because they lack the network of language required to make sense of it. They can be compared to individual neurons and hence their impact as a species on the planet is insignificant in comparison to our own. An individual human brain is also very inefficient in isolation and no man is capable of making something like a computer all by himself, and left alone on a deserted island, a monkey will outlive him. 

We can see that it is not just consciousness but consciousness associated with an organism endowed with specific complexity that Idea as a new force of organization descends unto matter. The fact that we are engaged in an inquiry into the nature of the universe is itself a testimony to the potential that Ideas invoke. But is it appropriate to assume that what is becoming explicit in nature had no role to play prior its becoming manifest. We know that the energies of the explosion lay dormant in an unstable nucleus of uranium long before it exploded in Hiroshima. And even in its dormant form, nuclear energies played a critical role in establishing the structure of atomic nuclei. Is there an implicit way in which ideas existed prior to their liberation in human consciousness? 

An idea like scissor does not point to any specific scissor. It is independent of space and time. Yet it establishes a possible relation between motor mechanisms of human hands, the perception aspect of cognition, the structural inertia of metals, the possible ways of movement under axial constraint and a paper. We may think of the scissor as only the instrument, but it is a relation of all these elements and has no meaning in absence of any one of the conditions which enable it. From this we can see that an Idea is a relation between different attributes. In the case of a scissor it operates as an algorithm which is directed towards a specific goal. In a sense the idea has emerged in reciprocal relation with another element of nature which orients it towards specific outcome, the element of will. Will itself is an empty impulse and depends for its specificity and structure on Ideas, Ideas derive the impulse from Will. Some readers may feel confused as we discuss Will as being constitutional elements of nature like protons and electrons, but if one carefully reflects on the nature of these phenomena, he will discover that they transcend individual subjectivity and are already implicit in the workings of the universe, but concealed in different guise. 

Ideas for instance is an outgrowth of information, stabilized in concrete structures by aid of powers of association and communication of the human mind. But prior to man and apes, even in the primordial bacterium, there were already ideas and will, not of going to the moon or getting enlightened, but indications about directions to avoid or pursue which were parallelly associated with Will to avoid pain and harm and pursue pleasure and nourishment. It might even have a rudimentary concept of food, friend and foe. To this extent we can without difficulty discuss the top down influence of cognitive functions which emerge with appearance of consciousness and in presence of suitable conditions, begin to exhibit their inherent capacity of shaping the universe. But beyond this we can engage in something akin to a speculation and speak of analogy instead of discovery. Will for instance has a nature similar to force and feelings of pain and pleasure appear to be analogous to attraction and repulsion. The relation between information and Ideas appears to be much more concrete and definitely worth pursuing. In each case it seems that the cognitive behavior appears to have developed by perceptional and engagement with the associated with basis elements of physical nature. Alternatively one might conceive the mechanical behaviors to be implicit forms of the psychological elements we encounter. Finally our own suspicion is that these are different ways of looking at the same events based on what is the starting point of inquiry.