We believe that there is the world around us. Without my existence, should the world remain? I think I never know. I assume something lasting before my birth and after my death as the world, based on an educated guess. But I never know that. Importantly, I do not even know my world is the same one to yours.
The world exists because we sense it. We, humans, have five senses, sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. It is easy to conceive something we can sense like rocks, trees, water, wind etc. We sense them and then recognize them as existence. On the other hand, we are not sensing everything around us. The sensors limit the information we can receive and cognize. Eyes cannot hear. Human eyes cannot see ultraviolet and far-red lights, and so on.
The summer of 2022, I had a great experience at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory. I was an instructor of the Mouse course and stayed there for one month. The location is beautiful at the inlet of the Oyster Bay. From the lab, we can walk down to the beach where there are a lot of marine organisms. I scooped sands and sea water with 50ml Falcon tubes and brought them back to the lab. The lab had fancy microscopes with a UV light source, allowing us to see something invisible by naked human eyes. I damped the samples on a petri dish for looking at them under a microscope. At first glance, just a lot of sands. Occasionally, something small or a worm was passing the view. But what occupied in my microscopic view is just sands, nothing else. Then, I changed the light filter to green. Amazing view! A lot of tiny green emission! They were likely coming from autofluorescence of keratin, a unique biological material consisting of our nails. Little green signal from inanimate. Almost all green signals were parts of live organisms like tips of appendages, shells or spiky something. It was amazing to realize if you only sense this green light, nothing but only live-organisms can be detected. All other obstacles blocking my sight like sands were not visible at all. The view of sands for my normal sight transformed into the view of lots of small marine organisms.
Each our sensing organ such as eyes, ears, skins, nose, or tongue, selects the range of information we can detect and discard other ranges of information. Reducing the original information into sensible ranges of the information. Humans reconstitute the world around us as the integrated information of five senses. The world we conceive is only for us, humans. Other organisms like small marine organisms would have completely different ones.
Then, we, humans, do something more than sensing. In case of sight, we recognize objects based on focal depth and movement. Like something moving together within a narrow focal depth should be one object. A camera can capture an image but cannot recognize objects within an image. A surveillance camera recognizes something in the view based on other sensing devices, like ultrasounds. Interestingly, we can recognize objects in a photograph that has no movement and no focal depth. Various levels of outlines, like an outline of eyes, an outline of a face and an outline of a person allow us to recognize them as one specific person, even in 2D photographs. Sketching and cartooning are amazing human activities. A combination of outlines displays something we can recognize.
Then, the cognition does something more interesting. Please imagine the famous illusion drawing of an old lady or young lady. The one single drawing shows either an old lady or a young lady. Interestingly, it is impossible to capture both simultaneously. Of course, the drawing itself is not changed at all. Just our cognition recognizes one thing and excludes the other possibility. Similar to sensing, the cognition reduces the information and discard the others.
This is not limited in visual information. Hearing does the same thing. We are good at capturing speaking noise and rhythms from audible information. Interestingly, languages work like outlines of drawing to reduce the audible information. In my knowledge, chickens crow in the same way all over the world. However, each language has own sounds to imitate chicken crowing. The imitated chicken crowing in different languages usually cannot cross the language boundary without translation.
Our sensors reduce the information. Our cognition further reduces the information. We are good at reducing the information from sight and hearing but not as good as at reducing the one from touch, smell and taste. Languages also play important roles to reduce the information and to build cognition patterns. With languages, we share the selected reducing strategy that creates one cognition pattern in a community.
Development of letters permits keeping the selected reducing strategy beyond time as well as deepening it. Writing is essential for deepening the cognition pattern. Writing allows to fix and temporally freeze the thoughts. Then, the next time, someone else or the same person can start from that frozen point. Stabilizing the cognition patterns. I think this is the emergence of the logic. Therefore, the logic is constraint by the reduction strategies. On the other hand, the logic permit to share the cognition patterns in a community and generations
Another interesting property of this is that two reduction strategies at the same level have often no compatibility at all, like visual and audible information. On the other hand, a nested structure of a second reduction strategy can be fit in under the first reduction strategy like outline cognition in human sight. Religion, cultures, traditions, ideology etc. create further nested reduction strategies. Some reduction strategies have no overlap with others, some are mutually exclusive, and some others have a lot of overlaps with minor differences.
The logic cannot describe outside of logic. The logic only works within the reduction strategy but not allows us to cognize its outside, like sight and hearing have no logical commonality and cannot guess the existence of the other. On the other hand, in the nested logical structure, the logic working at upper-levels must work in lower-level reducing strategies. But not always the other way around.
Discoveries in modern science are the history of challenging the constraints of our conscious or unconscious reduction strategies. Recognizing the presuppositions. I can list some, like 1. Geocentric vs Heliocentric in the concept of the universe (i.e. the earth never moves), 2. Lamarck vs Darwin in biology (i.e. the God made each species), 3. Newtonian physics vs Quantum physics and relativity in physics , 4. Discovery of X rays (i.e. a light cannot penetrate solid materials) etc. Because the logic is constrained by each reduction strategy with presuppositions, those discoveries are based on illogical ideas or illogical observations at the moment of discovery.
These days, I have crazy ideas. When I share them with others, everyone asked me if I have any prove. It seems that the proves are more important than new points of view. I understand their argument, but the same time, I think that the vision of potential wrongness of the current logic is sometimes much more valuable. Christopher Columbus had never proved the presence of a continent at the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. At the infancy, the new vision looks vulnerable, selfish, and crazy. The dogma and shared vested interest in the majority create resistance. I am trying to explain my illogical ideas using the current logic. I have carefully examined and identified the diversification points of my ideas from the current logic. Those points are subtle and overlooked. I hope, one day, I can take someone along with me.
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