Saturday, August 4, 2012

Wouldn't it be fun

Wouldn't it be fun to discover the origin of binary thought at a pre-human level?? Binary thought, that great weapon for dividing the external world; binary thought is responsible for the obvious progress of man in manipulating the external world. Without binary thought there would be no way to imaginatively consider alternatives to features of the natural world of which we are such a significant part. These alternatives allow testing, experimentation, and brilliant alternatives that leverage our external world to better support, protect, and grow our species. All of this depends on the ability of human cerebration to consider the visible world as amenable to improvement and the means to achieve this: binary thought. Something is either this or that. Two choices, that is all you get with binary thought, along with the reality crushing ignorance of the way things interact and interpenetrate. Any point under consideration must be this or that, and thus we have air conditioning, frozen food, cyberspace, and the ability to heavy mighty machines at the sky. 

Our reach is extended, our grip empowered, our vision acute beyond that of any other species. The example Jan Cox used once or twice in conveying this aspect of mental processing, was the example of diverting a river to run uphill via a watermill structure. You have to be able to imagine how things might be different, and how rearranging the external world could achieve a greater potency. Without binary thought, we'd never be able to consider getting off this planet, much less how it might happen. To achieve our special species goals we have to pretend that one and two are distinct numbers, without any fluff on the right of the decimal, or whatever point you specify as the edge.Binary thought, the focus must be on this or that. Two choices.

And what flashed on my mind was that a hunting animal, say a stalking cat, was displaying this kind of binary mental capacity on the level of four paws, slouched body, straight tail.Slow movement. And I say binary because that attention is focused on one thing, so you have the object, and everything else. The either/or capacity is necessary for the cat to successfully seize the bird. The feral cat does not eat without this ability to divide the world.

Wouldn't it be fun is there was a connection between hunting cat and thinking man?