1. Introduction

I agree with John Searle in this, and it is critical that what he calls “the framework” be established from the outset in any discussion, however speculative, that purports to deal with how the human mind relates to and presents what we call the real world -- what I call The Way The World Is (TWTWI.). This paper presents ideas on how our modern thought and language may have come about as a result and only as a result of the physical milieu during our evolution. I do not wish to bring up the old philosophical arguments dealing with whether or not there actually is such a thing as that world; they have been written about and discussed for millennia, and most of us will find ourselves on one side or the other as to this question. It quickly becomes an ontological, not an epistemological argument, and from the outset it should be made clear, lest the reader wish to avoid going where he or she doesn’t want to travel, I must make it quite clear that I am what is typically called a naive realist. I believe there is a physical world in which we have evolved, along with all organisms on the planet, and further, that that world -- TWTWI. -- has shaped not only our physical, but our mental morphology, how we see the world, think about it and speak about it.

We come to theories about how we think, speak and function from a variety of experiences and learning, and many of us eventually come to believe that we are right, and that our voices should be heard. I personally believe that any suggestion by any thinker that there is such a thing as some ultimately right or correct theory about thought and language is wrongheaded from the outset -- it being the nature of theories to be overtaken by subsequent ones, especially as progress is made in the sciences. As for the need to be heard, I believe that this amounts to the announcement of our search. The search for these kinds of things is a journey, and it is the journey that beckons — not only the objective. There is something in the human mind that compels us to hold forth our ideas, place them before others, test them against all criticism, and defend them as best we can.

In one sense, this is a paper about realism. Simply put, realism (or “naive realism”) is the belief that there is a real, independently existing, sensible world, in which we human organisms have evolved to have the ability to represent and deal with that world symbolically and physically. We are members of the animal kingdom, having no privileged position that affords us some cosmic superiority. "Superiority," in this context, is a concept we have invented to assure ourselves stature above all other animate and inanimate entities in the world. In a wider sense it is a paper about how TWTWI. has influenced human thought and language from the very early Hominids and even before them. It is my hypothesis that not only is there a real physical world, but that the characteristics of that world, and its macro-features, have been the shapers of how we think and speak. Further, I assume that language and thought are inextricably bound together as a result of this influence. To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Die Sprache ist ein Teil unseres Organismus” -- “Language is a part of our organism.” While we are not privileged in some cosmic order, we are privileged to the extent we can articulate among our species what we experience, make models of the goings on in the physical world, and advance ideas pertaining to those experiences and models -- these things no other organism can do.

Our cognitive powers have evolved over millions of years, and though they offer us a special dominion among our animal kin, it remains to be seen how such a position will be maintained throughout the ages to come. We know that some species of microbe could annihilate all humanity in a short time, defeating all attempts by science and medicine to eradicate it before our demise. In that case, where does the idea of "special dominion " and "superiority" come into play? This fact should keep us humble. No doubt it will not.

This paper is a presentation of ideas regarding the evolution of human thought and language. I connect these two attributes of our minds with the specific intention of focusing the reader’s attention on them as integrated phenomena in the modern mind of Homo sapiens. It is too easy to imagine the very early minds and thought processes of Homo sapiens and their precursors, Homo habilis and Homo erectus, as being very much like our own. They surely were not. While it is impossible to know with any certainty what those minds and thoughts were like compared to ours, if we are to ferret out the evolutionary process that has led to our modern mind and language, we must try to place ourselves as close as possible to the survival milieu of their time, and use our imagination to make reasonable conjectures. This requires that we eliminate as much as possible all cultural, intellectual, and logical assumptions and biases as to how the ancient Hominid mind worked. This in itself is quite difficult, simply because those very aspects are the ones we now use to think through problems and deal with life. This does not mean beginning with an all inclusive Cartesian suspicion and doubt about what we can know, a completely presuppositionless stance that renders all points of approach inapplicable -- such a stance is impossible, and unnecessary. But it is essential that whatever personal presuppositions we bring are bracketed, held aside as an understandable part of the way we think, and not necessarily a part of the way our early forebears did.

The main thesis of this paper is that, like all organisms, we have evolved in the environment of this planet and everything about our species has been biologically shaped by that environment and our relationship with it -- including the way we think and verbalize those thoughts. All our actions, especially those of our early forebears, were geared to dealing with TWTWI., and it is my belief that our thought and language had no evolutionary choice other than to comport with it. This means that TWTWI. was, and still is to a large degree, both the shaper and the constrainer of our evolved physical and mental morphology.

I always start my thinking on philosophical matters with the awareness and statement: “We are animals.” I try hard to maintain this as my guiding principle throughout. If I lose sight of it, the lurking temptation is to confer upon humans some transcendental characteristic, something mysterious, or spiritual and thus inexplicable. While it may be necessary or perhaps convenient for some to think of humans as a very different creature, blessed with "God-given" capabilities and a uniqueness that strains any credibility of us being like our cousin animals, I maintain that such thinking thwarts objective investigation -- in fact, stops it cold. All issues concerning our thought, language and behavior must be based on a combination of clear evidence and reasonable, imaginative speculation. There is nothing wrong with conjecture and speculation provided it is grounded in premises which can be well defended without recourse to pure dogmatism -- religious or otherwise. It is obvious that any discussion on the origins of language and reasoned thought must be speculative, since those human characteristics evolved long before the written word, or any real evidence that indicates the nature of their existence in times long past. When I read about what it means that Neanderthals buried their dead in non-random positions, I am struck by how we so easily analogize those activities to our own burial rituals, and assume that they are indicative of, for example, some awareness of an afterlife. The key premise of this speculation is that what they did is like what we do. This is a risky assumption. We have not the slightest idea as to the meaning of why a person was buried in a certain position. What if the original reason for burial was to prevent predators from devouring the dead, not because the dead were in some way especially regarded, but for the sake of safety of the clan? What if the reason they were buried in a certain position was related to the fact that the surviving kin had a strong empathetic and thus protective feeling about them? When looking into the distant past of human evolution, it is necessary to begin with an attitude of de-analogizing, at least as much as possible. Sure, there are undoubtedly many characteristics we have in common with Homo erectus or Habilis, but we must be careful as to which of these are arguably irrefutable, such as bipedalism and our general physical morphology, etc.

Therefore, it is the set of premises which present the guiding vector of investigation and reasoned speculation. It is difficult, though clearly necessary, to attempt a separation of one's personal nagging predispositions and core beliefs from a set of premises which are supposed to be objectively founded. How do we arrive at sound, defensible premises, if they do not come from our core beliefs? I believe that they are necessarily a combination of what we have read and studied, experienced and imagined, together with aspects of our world that can be realistically deemed indubitable. We each have our own uniquely personal view of the way the world works and our role in it -- this is unavoidable. But we must be on guard that none of these influences dominate and completely dictate our approach, and that we end up as apologists or antagonists for or against certain preordained and dogmatic prescriptions of what language and reasoned thinking is and how it originated. The following are my going-in premises. I have given them much thought over the years; I claim no degree of originality.

The Premises:

Each of these demands elaboration, since they are the foundation of what follows in this paper.

We Are Animals

This appears to be self evident, however many will place Homo Sapiens in a category that is quite separate from other forms of animal life. There is absolutely no evidence to support this position. While we clearly have certain skills which, taken as a whole, far exceed those of other animals, they are a matter of degree, not type. Many animals build habitats and have means of communication; some species of ants even harvest their food; some animals build and use tools. I will not get into the key differences between humans and other animals, except to say that we do the same kinds of things listed above that other animals do, but usually with reasoned intentionality, and for purposes that may be different from the basic animal needs of Sustenance,

Shelter, Procreation and Defense (SSPD). (The more recent human need of expressiveness is discussed in Appendix 2).

We Evolved

All organic life on the earth has evolved from a previous state, and we are no different. Some animals, such as sharks and cockroaches, have existed in their present state for many millions of years, apparently having reached a point of evolutionary stasis -- that is, they are seemingly in evolutionary equilibrium with their environment. While we Homo sapiens have existed as a species for only a few hundred thousand years, fossil records allow us to trace evolutionary lineage back several million years. Our relatively speedy evolution to an animal with a proportionally large brain, capable of reasoned, intentional thought and language, may be an incorrect interpretation of the capabilities of our progenitors. Language might have evolved in previous species, such as Homo erectus and Homo habilis -- there is no way of knowing for sure. It may be the case that the conflation of evolving thought and language, combined with continually increasing complex life styles, socialization and problem solving, induced a kind of positive feedback in the development of our cognitive and language skills. This is discussed in later sections.

Our Cognitive Capabilities Evolved

In this paper I make no distinction between the functions of the physical brain and the mind -- or thought process. When I refer to the mind, I am talking about the brain-mind. Cognition is the process (carried out by the electro-chemical activity and physical synaptic connections of the neurons) executed within the physical brain, but related in complex ways to the rest of our body. I stress process, since I wish to avoid any suggestion that the mind, i. e., our thoughts, is some disembodied entity which animates the activity of thinking via the physical brain. Process can indeed be separated, for purposes of discussion and analysis, from the physical host that is animating the processing, but it cannot exist without the host. Nor does the host have any real functionality as the host without the process it executes and embodies. As for the evolution of our cognitive capabilities, I see them as co-evolving with the physical brain -- especially the neuronal and synaptic connections, or "wiring" of the brain. The process of reasoned thought is one that no doubt began with simple problem solving and gradually (or rather quickly relative to geological time!) became more and more complex as the requirements of social and physical life became more complex and demanding. The Features of TWTWI.

The various features and processes of our physical environment are the shapers and impeders of the evolution of all organic life. Together with genetic mutation and natural selection within environments these features are the permanent surrounding forces that both guide and constrain the mental and physical morphologies of all organisms.

These premises form the foundation for what follows in discussing TWTWI. and its relationship to the evolution of our thought and language.

A word is in order regarding whatever vestiges of the idea of the ghost in the machine, deus ex machina, may remain in the minds of philosophers and perhaps even neuroscientists and others in the field of cognitive science: Since the early Greek thinkers, there has been a lingering belief that there is something like a sixth sense that operates to organize our perceptions into conceptions -- conceptions about our very perception. It is perhaps natural to endow ourselves with this sixth sense because it feels like it is there -- surely there is an innate or a priori organizing agent that brings together the matrix of our perceptions of appearances into a whole and can itself be perceived! Indeed, there may be such an agent, but I think it unreasonable to assign it, whatever it may be in some physical sense, some kind of aloofness above and beyond the evolutionary results that surround perception itself. In a very general way, our human life begins with perception from the senses, and proceeds through a process of producing more things to be perceived, valued, judged, used, added to, and improved upon, within the human community of language, building and action. Whatever we do is related, to varying degrees, to TWTWI..

2. The Way the World Is -- TWTWI.

The reality of the world should require no explanation, since very few, if any, in their behavior, act in ways that exhibit any real doubt. They can philosophically chew on questions that our language and our imagination allows us to ask, but at the end of the day, they go to sleep in a real bed, awake to a real breakfast, go to a real place of work, driving a real car. Their entire life is lived in a milieu that not only suggests such reality, but demands that it be accepted. All organic life senses and reacts to the real physical world. The evolution of all life is a function of how the process of replication is affected by chance mutation in relation to the physical environment. What exists and occurs in the physical world today, has been so since the origins of the earth, and is TWTWI.. It is a matter of investigative choice as to what level of process and ingredients are chosen for analysis. Biologists focus on the behavior of organic cells and their mechanisms; physicists focus on sub-atomic particles and force fields; paleontologists focus on the evidence of prehistoric life via fossils, etc. These are all epistemic, in that the investigators come to their conclusions and speculations as a result of their own cognitive process, and their investigations are founded on and bounded by a great many assumptions garnered from research and from the cognitive processes of others. They generally do not deal with the highest, or the macro level of TWTWI., but rather with levels of process and matter well below the surface. They investigate how the world is the way it is, at the micro, not the macro level. Nor do I propose to deal with why TWTWI. is the way it is. This why is the purview of metaphysics and religion. It is the case that two atoms of hydrogen combine with one atom of oxygen to form the molecule we call water. The process of this combination -- the allowable sharing of electrons -- and the reasons for the existence of water in various states (solid, liquid, gas) is an example of the micro level of TWTWI.. The fact that water always flows downhill, is an example of the macro level.

All organic life senses and reacts to various aspects of the physical world. The behavior, morphology, and organic processes that comprise any organism have been shaped by how that organism, given its capabilities, functions in relation to the physical world. That physical world demands, by its various aspects, that the evolution of organic life be constrained in certain directions, and allowed it to be free in others. One might even say that all organic life evolves along a path that is both directed and bounded by TWTWI. As Charles Darwin so eloquently said in The Origin of Species:

It is tempting to call TWTWI. the result of a set of “laws of nature.” The term “law” represents the concept of either a natural or man-made principle that must, for some reason, be universally adhered to. So-called natural laws or laws of physics suggest immutable principles that exist independently of what they govern. While I hold that TWTWI. is indeed immutable, I attach no laws to it -- the source or reason for its existence and processes is of no concern here, and I will say why. First, I believe such inquiries are ultimately metaphysical in nature. Second, I have serious doubts that the laws of physics, for example, exist independently of what they govern, and independently of our cognition. If we assume that the origin of the cosmos began with the “Big Bang,” prior that event there was supposedly nothing -- no time, no forces, no matter as we know it. If there were laws of physics they would have to have existed prior to the Big Bang in order to effect the changes that occurred at and after that event. But this means that those laws were somehow cosmically codified and existed as laws even “before” time itself. But all such laws all deal with causality -- and causality is a temporal process, at least as we know and experience it; we have defined what such laws are and deal with via our cognitive process. It may be the case that these “laws of physics” came into being (as we see them) as the result of the seminal interaction of matter and processes and were created by the process -- not the other way around. In any case, I do not find the so-called laws of nature or of physics to have much if any bearing on this paper -- even if they do exist, it is of little consequence in terms of the way sentient creatures react to the world, and one can surely rest assured that no such creature has any a priori or a posteriori cognition related to them.

(Roger Penrose, in hisThe Emperor’s New Mind, presents mathematics as among what he considered “God-given” laws or realities of the universe. For him, there are indeed transcendent mathematical truths that exist independently of the human mind. Indeed, Frege had a similar concept regarding number. I consider this to be a position fraught with difficulties for many reasons. I address this briefly in the Appendix 1 to this paper.)

TWTWI. is defined herein as a collection of properties of the worldly milieu of all organic life, from the beginnings of organic life -- whenever, and however that occurred. It began with the replication of organic molecules, for reasons that are so far unknown. It is taken as a given (after Darwin) that such an event did occur and commenced the ever increasingly complex development of a wide variety of organic life over billions of years. With each replication, there was sometimes a slight variation in the genetic composition of the resulting organism, and each resulting organism had to function within the environment it was born into. One overriding element of such an environment was the presence of what we call gravity. There are many such elements, and these are discussed below.

The Elements of TWTWI.

It is vital that when developing and thinking about the composition of TWTWI. we do not impose (or try hard not to!) epistemic or human cognitive origins to them. We have names for them, but it must be kept in mind that these are elements that are, to varying degrees, experienced by all organic life, and not the product of human invention. Organic life is aware of the presence and effects of these elements by virtue of their sensory capabilities, and I use awareness cautiously to mean the ability of an organism to sense and react to some aspect of TWTWI.. Some organisms are blind in that they have no sensory means to react to the presence of photons of light using a retinal system. But all plants are not blind since most do react to light by virtue of their molecular composition. Not only do they synthesize light for metabolic purposes, sessile plants behave heliotropically, either growing toward or away from a light source. Thus, I maintain that they possess a kind of “awareness” of the presence of light -- even as much as this is a purely chemically induced “awareness.”

Organisms have the ability to be aware of and react to some or all of the following elements of TWTWI.: (later referred to as the first tier of the elements):

[It is important to state here that I do not assign these eight elements of TWTWI. some ontic reality or existence. But I do claim that they are perceived as existing, even if the nominalists would argue their real existence.]

These elements are discussed below:

The Effects of Gravity

Gravity should be put in quotes. A seed planted on a slowly revolving table, will grow in a direction that is aligned with the resulting vector of the force of gravity combined with the centrifugal force affected by the rotation of the table. Thus, the plant is aware that, due to its genetic make up, it will progress in its growth in a direction that has always gotten it above ground, to the light. It is constructed to grow in an opposite direction to the force vector it encounters. This force vector is normally pointed on a line that goes to the center of the earth --i. e. to the center of gravity of the earth. The rotating table fools it into an awareness of a different direction of that force vector. Other organisms deal with gravity in a multitude of ways, their general behavior being governed by what they can and cannot do in terms of their mobility and activities. Our own bodies are built to deal with the effects of gravity. For example there are tiny valves in the veins that prevent the flow of blood from going the wrong way due to the effects of gravity. We maintain our balance in walking through a mechanism in the middle ear that senses the direction of the vector of gravity -- or any force that artificially creates the sensed awareness of gravity. Birds fly as a means of defeating the effects of gravity, and so on.

The Motion of Objects

Objects move in the world, and the movement of objects is an aspect of TWTWI.. Many organisms have the ability to discern the motion of objects. We sometimes call this ability pattern recognition and change detection, i. e., the ability to distinguish one kind of pattern from another, statically and over time. We know that many animals have this ability, and we know that objects do move. All sensed motion is relative motion (that’s the only kind there is) in that either motion is observed relative to other objects, or relative to the observer.

The Relative Magnitude and Characteristics of Objects

Objects in the world are of different sizes and of different composition. Mountains are larger than pebbles, and many organisms have the ability to discern these differences in magnitude. In addition, objects in the world have characteristics that may be said to possess magnitudes of those characteristics -- such as color and temperature. (While color does not exist, per se, in the world, the causal effects of different wave-lengths of light on many organisms are unquestionable -- as is the case of different temperatures.)

Phenomenal Persistence and Change

It is the case that many objects and their characteristics have a persistent state. In fact phenomenal persistence is one of the most overriding aspects of TWTWI.. Mountains are always “larger” than pebbles; the effects of gravity are always present; hummingbirds do not ever suddenly become locomotives. Due to the earth’s rotation, angle of tilt and annual orbit around the sun all organisms experience diurnal and annual changes -- to greater and lesser degrees of awareness and reaction.

Morphological Persistence and Change

All organisms depend on the fixity of many aspects of their environment. The squirrel depends on the persistent shape and composition of a tree to remain that of a tree. While many things do change morphology, location and composition, such as water, for the most part organisms are dependent on a high degree of a persistent environment.

Spatiality

Many organisms have the ability to sense spatiality, in that they can discern two objects do not occupy the same location at the same time. Put another way, all objects in the world are not all bunched up, forming a single object. Some animals are quite adept at gauging the space or distance between two or more objects.

Causality

David Hume, following the ideas of the second century skeptic, Sextus Empiricus, refuted the existence of causality (and Bishop Berkeley refuted the existence of all sensed objects in the world!) and offered an interesting argument against it. Hume said:

Thus, for Hume, causation is an epistemic, not factual event or process. Yet we know that animals other than humans deal with causality all the time, and unless we confer on those animals the same kind of human perception and cognition we possess, his argument is flawed. It is quite easy to imagine that the world is a grand hallucination of the human mind, but such a position leads us no where in terms of understanding ourselves and our surroundings -- it is a dead-end, solipsistic belief. We know that many organisms use the existence of cause and effect, without what we would call the kind of cognition humans possess.

Is it possible to separate out our human cognition, imagination, our deductive and inductive logic from the fact of causation in TWTWI.? Since causality is such a ubiquitous part of our existence, not only do we take it for granted, we assume that it is really not in the least problematic -- unless we are bent on a mission similar to Hume’s, and have a further assumption: that everything we see and relate to is merely and only a product of our minds. I maintain that causality not only is a reality in TWTWI., but all organic life is dependent on it for existence. It is the sine qua non of all organic and inorganic processes in the cosmos. No other idea has been shown to adequately characterize causality beyond the proposition: Every effect has a cause. [In no way is this a defense of “determinism” which, in its broadest interpretation, means that precise predictability is, in theory, possible. I do not accept this.]

I believe the intellectual problem surrounding causality arises from our ability, and sometimes philosophical inclination, to question and refute what is most obvious in our world and what has gone before in terms of explanation. Hume refuted Aristotle; Kant refuted Hume; modern epistemologists refute Kant; deconstructionists/post-structuralists refute just about every thinker of the past, in some way. Many of these modern thinkers assign nothing more to aspects of TWTWI., including causality, than to the realm of the invention and use of symbols as a means of representing and using the world, in a community of language users. Many eschew any kind of theory that is based on assumptions which they believe to be merely products of the human mind and language. But this in itself is a theory, based on their assumptions. This proclivity and necessity for making assumptions is inescapable, regardless of the final position one ends up with. The final test that one can apply, in the case of causality, is to demonstrate at least one example where causality fails as a means of explaining some process or phenomenon related to TWTWI.. I have yet to see or hear of such a demonstration.

When I speak of causality, I do so in connection with the observable or sensed macro-world, ignoring the possibilities that lie within the emerging discoveries in quantum physics (See Appendix 4). One can postulate all kinds of metaphysical challenges for causality, but in terms of our evolution and that of all organisms on the planet, I do not think it profits one to deny that causality is perceived to exist -- no matter what their metaphysics is.

Plurality

The issue of “plurality” opens the entire question of what should really constitute the elements of TWTWI.. My original thoughts on this matter went something like the following: What are the aspects of the world that not only exist in the absence of any organism’s awareness (via sensual contact) of them, but are instrumental in exciting such awareness in the presence of those organisms? It seemed rather straightforward at the time of my original thinking -- my intention (based purely on a hunch) being to establish a very fundamental set of natural forces and conditions that both constrain and allow for the various evolutionary directions of life, especially Hominid life, and eventually Hominid thought and language. I thought long and hard about what those elements might be, trying to avoid any anthropomorphic applications -- something that is rather hard to do, since I must see and deal with the physical world through the lens of my humanness. Perhaps some of the elements can be challenged on the grounds that I have indeed stepped over the line -- for example. “The relative magnitude of objects” can be challenged, since it is sentient creatures that cognitively discern relative magnitudes -- they do not exist in the absence of such sentience. Or do they? While it requires an awareness of differential magnitude to establish that, could it be established without the very existence of differing magnitudes? My initial answer was, and remains no. The basic tenet being: Things in the universe are of different magnitudes/sizes -- without any sentient awareness of this. This is obviously open to debate, but in the absence of any convincing argument I will keep to my opinion.

Now, regarding plurality, I see this as related to differential magnitude in the following way: “Many” may be seen as “large” in the sense that large is a composite of arbitrarily separable entities. (This gets into atomism, infinitesimals, continuums, etc -- it is unavoidable). Of course this is rank anthropomorphism -- we are undoubtedly the only creature that ventures such abstract ideas about objects in the world. But is it only an anthropomorphic take on things? “Quantity,” (a term Aristotle used) in my opinion is a poor choice of words, since it implies enumeration, or counting. It seems reasonable to assume that a characteristic of the world (or the universe) is that it is not one solid thing – but, rather, composed of separate entities, separated by space. If one wishes to call this a bold and unprovable assumption, then so be it. While “space” is not necessarily material (though that is possibly arguable) it is measurable, in that two separate locations of an object implies spatial differentiation, and in any arbitrary coordinate system this can be determined. All of this points to a plurality of objects in the world and the universe as an inherent aspect, and one that is not simply an anthropomorphic deduction. The question arises as to the perceptibility of this attribute -- does it exist in some organisms, and if so, is it purely a perceptive or also an epistemic process at work in discerning multiplicity? And, does it really matter? I am beginning to think that it probably does not matter, even though one could claim that I have overreached my criteria of perception. Further, I could argue that the combination of magnitude and spatiality are the formative ingredients of perceiving multiplicity. In any case, I have come around to the conclusion that, for purposes of this paper, it should be included.

One may ask why, if I have included spatiality have I not included temporality. The reason I see is simple: no animal senses time; we do not deal with time in the same way we deal with space. Space can be physically measured, while time is a construct of the mind, and even if we have an internal “thalamic clock” that ticks at about 40 cycles/second our ideas of time arises from the relative motion of objects, and it is motion that we observe, therefore time is an internally created awareness.

The existence of “time” as an independent feature of the universe has been debated for a very long time, with little consensus as to what time actually is -- if it is anything. I have claimed that motion is an independent feature, one that is present in the absence of any sentient cognitive function, and thus the point rebounds to a discussion on the relationship between motion and time. If we can assume with reasonable surety that motion is indeed an independent feature of the TWTWI. (or indeed of the universe) then it is my belief that time is an epistemically created parameter that prescribes a way to deal with motion – and, more specifically, relative motion. When confronting motion we today can represent it in terms of a vector, a parameter with magnitude and direction, and can further ascribe to a moving object any derivative such as acceleration, in vector form. But in defining the (scalar) linear distance traversed by a moving object, we use the familiar (first order) equation D = V x T -- or distance is equal to the velocity of the object times time. But that time must, in turn, be defined as a function of some other motion -- that of a clock, which is nothing more than a moving object with a known and predictable state of motion. The equation above is not only an invented tautology; it implicitly embodies two parameters that are elements of TWTWI. -- spatiality and motion, though neither have explicit nomenclatures. The equation is circular. If T is the ratio of distance to velocity, time is on both sides of the equation, since velocity is distance traveled per unit of time! Thus we see that the variable time has been invented to relate motion and distance, both of which are elements within TWTWI.. This is not suggesting that the variable time is useless or without meaning -- it certainly is useful and meaningful in terms of explaining phenomena, and Einstein considered time as the fourth dimension, one that is orthogonal to the other three Cartesian x, y, z, coordinates. But this too is a construction of the human mind, useful in explaining the behavior of the universe.

It is clear that elements of TWTWI. have no ready classification or parametric name. Motion means the relative change in location of objects, but cannot be pinned down as to any useful meaning until the introduction of the parameter of time. If we think about motion we see that it is both a simple and a very complex phenomenon -- things move, that is simple enough, but to lay out the constituents of that activity, to define what it is becomes quite difficult and we resort to those things for which we have models or descriptions that seem to be appropriate. We are forced to introduce time because that parameter is seemingly stable over all instances of motion -- time is seen as an absolute. But in reality, time is nothing more than the linear demarcation of motion along a chosen and arbitrary axis for which we have control -- namely, some kind of clock  -- including our internal “clocks.” We cannot describe motion in any perfect system, with complete accuracy, because we are not privy to all the various forces at play in that motion, nor will we be ever to do so -- we are not omniscient gods. All remains approximation. It is simple because we see it happening around us all the time and it is part of our world. It is complex when we try to assign it a functional prescription that gives us predictability and surety, and we end up realizing that there is always something left over, some little piece of uncertainty that lingers beyond our grasp.

Much has been said about time -- how strange it is, how difficult to define and deal with. IMO motion itself is far stranger and it is, along with causality, the heartbeat of all science.

Concluding Thoughts on the Elements of TWTWI.

At the beginning of this section I said, regarding the elements of TWTWI.: We have names for them, but it must be kept in mind that these are elements that are, to varying degrees, experienced by all organic life, and not the product of human invention. One might argue that I have simply broken my own rule here, by claiming that something that is a product of my cognition has a fixed place in the cosmos -- something very close to Platonism. My rejoinder for this is to confess it to be so -- but with the caveat that were one to doubt the existence of these elements they would be faced with explaining the most basic things all organisms experience. As I mentioned previously, assumptions and speculations, i. e. products of our human cognitive process, are to be taken as something on which to build a system of explication, and must be reasonable and even indubitable. Further, I believe that my singling out the specific elements of TWTWI. is an act of direct connectivity to those elements through my experience and observations, and have not been arrived at as abstractions that were dreamed up out of whole cloth. An interesting exercise would be to compare my thesis, regarding the unquestionable omnipresence of the elements of TWTWI., to Kant’s views on what “knowledge” consists of. While I claim that these elements are self evident, Kant might disagree, claiming that they are nothing more but a posterior synthetic judgment based on my personal experience, mediated by my a priori synthetic knowledge. How can I speak of “causality” as an irrefutable aspect of nature without bringing into play my own concepts of what causality is? And are those concepts not merely the result of inductive reasoning from experience? Well, he has a point. But while he considered those mediating a priori synthetic judgments as transcendental, I consider them the result of my ability to articulate what all animals deal with, but cannot articulate -- there being nothing transcendental about it. My basic assumption is that I can have basic assumptions -- not absolute truth, not transcendental knowledge. His basic assumptions were that certain flavors of assumptions rise above mere assumptions to a level of transcendental indisputability. I am not nearly so presumptuous. I am an animal, and like all animals I deal with and take in TWTWI., but, being a human animal, I can speak them out in words.

(Another element, that of the existence of objects, or as Ruth Millikan calls them, “substances,” may be seen as an obvious omission in the list above. I found it unnecessary to have an element that is: Objects exist. This is taken as a given. If we state that TWTWI. is independent of any sentient awareness of it, this implies the existence of TWTWI. in the first place, or, is implicitly analytic).

3. The Logic of TWTWI.

“Logic” here must be put in quotes since I am using it in a different manner than is generally used. The king of ancient logic is considered to be Aristotle, and it has been the subject of debate and analysis ever since Aristotle laid out his opinions on it. Logic is frequently put in the two categories of inductive and deductive, the former being that related to experience and memory, and the latter associated with deducing one event or situation or proposition from another in a way that is independent of experience
--using only the appropriate rules of deduction -- and those within the confines of one‘s thought and language. In this paper, I use logic as meaning the immutability of the processes contained in TWTWI.. This is a rather simplistic use of the term, but it is important, and I believe at the core of how, as a species, we eventually came to have the kind of thought and language we have. It will be easy to criticize this use of the term, but consider it definitional in the context of the paper. I am saying that it is logical that the observable, sensed processes of TWTWI. are fixed. All the ingredients of TWTWI. listed in the previous section are permanent characteristics -- there are never any revolutionary changes in them, nor can we expect there ever will be. (One might call this “extreme realism!”). It would be, as this term is defined, impossible for a tree to become a not-tree. It would be impossible for water to suddenly start flowing uphill. Such impossibilities I call illogical.

Given that TWTWI. is composed of objects and processes (at the macro-level of sensibility) whose existence and behavior are fixed in their constitution, it is quite reasonable to assume that all organic life evolved within the constraints and functional and physical allowances of TWTWI.. Variations in the genetic composition of organisms, due to mutation, resulted in different morphologies that dealt with TWTWI. -- either successfully, or not. Successful adaptations resulted in the continuation of an organism’s genetic characteristics -- successful, in that they adapted well to the environment and produced similarly successful progeny. But in every case of adaptation there was the requirement of an organism’s capabilities to operate, to solve problems related to survival, within the ingredients of TWTWI.. All successful adaptations had to conform to those ingredients -- there was no choice in the matter. The evolution of organisms under the heading of phylum Chordata, for example, (those with spinal chords) was both guided and bounded by the requirements of gravity and those related to movement of the organism in search of sustenance, shelter, procreation and defense. (SSPD). One might then say that such an evolution was a logical process, given those constraints and requirements. If an organism, via mutation, acquires some heretofore nonexistent feature, such as claws or the precursor to what we call claws, such a feature allows that organism to defy the effects of gravity to some extent, allowing it the ability to climb, or grab hold of something if falling. It is then more capable of avoiding predators and obtaining additional food sources, etc. Had it not been for the ubiquitous presence of the effects of gravity, the utility of such a mutation might have been problematic, or not necessarily advantageous. Had it not been for the ubiquitous diurnal presence of light, the advantage of vision would be problematic, as would the process of photosynthesis.

4. Problem Solving

I have tried to set the stage for this move into considerations of our species as it relates to TWTWI.. This is not an easy job for two reasons: First, much of the above is speculative and definitional in nature, and second, it is always the case that using my thought and my language to discuss thought and language as a common human characteristic is fraught with complications. My thesis is that TWTWI. is intimately connected to the way we modern humans think and use language, and, put even more strongly, we could not think or speak any differently than we do because of TWTWI., and what I have called its logic. This is quite an assertion, and impossible to prove. However, consider this: Can anyone imagine us humans possessing a cognitive process that is not restricted to the facts and influences of TWTWI.? Had our cognitive functionality evolved in someway that did not comport with TWTW, I doubt very much that we would even exist as we do today -- or exist at all. Our minds have evolved in no way different from the way our liver or heart evolved -- responding to the allowances and restrictions placed on us by TWTWI. and as a result of genetic changes that gave us survival advantages within those allowances and restrictions.

It is necessary to begin at a point in the far past, and discuss what I mean by thought. This is a tricky subject, since there are many, widely varying meanings for thought, and one must “put their cards on the table” regarding their assumptions and presuppositions leading up to any definition. In addition, the rather chimerical consciousness may come into play, exacerbating things even further. I go back to my original and very fundamental axiom in all this: We are animals. Indeed, we consider ourselves to be very special animals, particularly in this modern age with all the gadgets that make us more productive and supposedly better entertained, but all these modern conveniences do not alter the fact that we are simply biological organisms that have evolved, going our special way, as did the palm tree and the mongoose. It is my belief that certainly most, if not all organisms, “advance” in terms of capability as the result of two things: Evolution, through variation and natural selection, and what I call problem solving. What are problems? A Problem exists when a given situation, demands, for whatever reason, that another situation be attained which alters the first one.

Problems can be simple or complex, depending on the situation one wishes to change. If one is hungry, the first situation, one finds something to eat. However, in finding something to eat other problems often come into play, since other situations must be dealt with. One may be without money to buy food to assuage the hunger, therefore, a secondary situation, that of being broke, may arise to be altered, and so on. A more complex problem may be to change the situation of not knowing something one considers vital, for some reason, such as a scientist not knowing the mass or charge of a subatomic particle. We may therefore divide problems into convenient categories: those that deal with physical needs or situations, and those that deal with acquiring knowledge that may or may not be directly related to physicality. By physical situations, I don’t mean necessarily those that deal with SSPD, but, in general, those that deal with changing a physical situation, such as building a bench, or rearranging the furniture. I call these two kinds of problems Physical Problems and Knowledge Problems, and they are clearly not mutually exclusive.

Animals solve problems too, and we can envision early hominids dealing with problems that are not that far removed from those solved by other animals, in their dealings with SSPD. I believe that all of these early problems were physical in nature, and this is why I call them Physical Problems, as opposed to Knowledge Problems -- to be discussed later. Physical problems are those that deal with immediate physical needs and physical objects and processes in the environment at hand. A crawling insect, encountering a rock or some other impediment, will normally go around it, maintaining their general direction. They alter their direction in order to cope with the obstruction they have sensed. Every aspect of dealing with SSPD requires some kind of physical problem solving. In the lower forms of life, I refer to the solutions as reflexive as opposed to reflective, in that no apparent thought is gone into the solution, but rather a simple reflexive alteration of a situation. While gardening, upon unearthing an earthworm, I witness it struggling to get back into its earthy home, solving the problem of being exposed to an environment it has evolved to avoid -- a nearby robin will take quick advantage of its failure to return home.

All organisms have evolved to use the problem solving abilities they have acquired. (Ruth Millikan refers to these evolved abilities as “proper functions.“). When a situation is encountered that cannot be solved, depending on the objective at hand, relative to survival, they will either perish or luck out. Thus, the acquisition of problem solving skills is paramount in the ability to pass on genetic material. Better problem solvers survive; poor ones usually don’t. I am not suggesting that there is nothing more to evolution than that -- many other factors come into play. However, as we work our way up the chain of complexity of organisms, more and more broad spectrum sensory systems, a larger and more complex nervous system, and ultimately to what we normally call brains and thinking, we find that problem solving becomes more varied and more complex. Finally, in Hominids, problem solving abilities eventually outweigh the value of physical strength and physical adaptation to environment. The environment can be altered; nature can be used, as opposed to only dictating behavior and placing restrictions.

So, I see the stage was set for what we call reasoned thought in the distant past, when problem solving was simply reflexive. What happened to allow early Hominids to engage in reflective problem solving? Was there some single mutation that conferred some such ability to a single (genius) human, who then spawned a race of reflective problem solvers? I doubt this for the same reason that I doubt any such single advantageous mutation is the cause for the general process of evolution. Many such mutations have to occur, simply due to the probabilities of success being no doubt low, for any single individual to accomplish the task.

I see the process of evolving thought beginning as far back as, for example, the origins of the spinal column, when organisms reacted purely on the basis of a very tight stimulus-response feedback loop. By that I mean the physical responses to sensed environmental stimuli happened quickly and automatically -- as in the case of the quickly retracting tentacles of the sea anemone when touched. If it could be sensed, it was generally reacted to; that was the result of the evolved sensory system in the fist place. If food was present and sensed, it was grabbed; if a threat was present and sensed, it was avoided or dealt with, and so on. With but a sparse, if even existent “brain,” there were no decisions made based on anything more than what was sensed, relative to what the organism was designed to use and cope with. (I use “design” not teleologically, but rather the design evolution conferred). So, there was a built in correspondence of stimuli to an advantageous response. Some animals from the Ordovician period (about 500 million years ago) had spinal chords, which are evolutionarily linked with our own vertebrae. For the same reason, we are also linked evolutionarily with those prehistoric creatures who possessed only reflexive response to stimuli. We still have reflexive responses, such as the eye blink when something comes at the eyes, the quick reaction to grab something we have dropped, our physical fight or flight responses if attacked, etc.

But what happened next? The answer is simple: complexity. The evolution of organic life has seldom if ever produced more simple organisms, but advances toward higher complexity. The reason for this must be that coping with the environment produces adaptations that go a notch higher in complexity if the organism is to survive. Genetic variations in progeny are not always (and probably are seldom) advantageous to survival, but those that are add a component to the capability repertoire of the organism, and this added component means added complexity of the organism. Eventually this complexity reached a point at which the relatively simple reflexive problem solving was not sufficient to deal with what was encountered in the environment. But how is the complexity of morphology and general functionality, such as the increased complexity of the spinal chord, the lungs, the circulatory system related to increased complexity and capability in the area of problem solving? I maintain that there is no difference in the causes, and no difference in the effects -- i. e. the organ that begins to solve physical and eventually knowledge problems in more effective ways evolves in the same manner as the stomach, evolving to cope with more and varying foods in terms of metabolism and nourishment to the body. All organs of the organism are solving problems of different kinds -- why should the brain be any different?

In very broad terms, our brains have the functions of: vision, memory, thought, language and the autonomic nervous system, and each of these deals with a wide variety of problem solving in maintaining the health and well being of the body. It is a mistake to draw a firm line between the brain and the rest of the body in terms of functionality and behavior, since the whole organism evolved as one, and the interrelationships are legion between them. Physical problems are generally solved using the eyes, arms, hands, fingers, and memory. As Gerald Edelman points out, a complex of mappings occur in regards to our abilities to form stable concepts of objects and events. Memory is not like a file cabinet into which we store what is witnessed, but a far more complex interaction of various areas of the brain, which result in a coalescing of what may be called the identification of a thing or process. Upon each additional encounter with something, the categorization of that something is reinforced. (I like the analogy of concrete getting a bit harder each time it is wet) What then of problem solving?

In early hominids problems were encountered that mainly dealt with SSPD, and I would assume required immediate attention. Solutions no doubt were a combination of accident and invention, but accident played a large role early on. We know that many animals, not only primates, can be taught things. Behavior can be shaped by various means, such as reward or punishment, which indicates that certain encounters will elicit certain behaviors -- i. e., a fixed mapping of relationships becomes established. But without any directed management of this process (i. e., as in training an animal to perform or react in a specific way) encounters with problems of survival, reflecting TWTWI. to a particular animal, could have a similar effect. Problems that are frequently encountered become installed as an identifiable condition, and solutions, by chance or accident, also become an identifiable process, or part of the repertoire. The two, problem situation, and successful solution, become a paired process, wherein encounters with the same or similar problem situations will trigger the same solution, since they are connected via neural mapping mechanisms in the brain. Thus, situation initiated training has occurred. One might say that a selection repertoire has been formed.

Nowhere in this argument has intentionality been discussed; things happen in the external world in conjunction with bodily activities and are automatically brought into the internal organism. We generally do not picture thinking as being this kind of mechanistic and automatic process. We modern humans do many things with the intention of doing them. We solve problems by various means, supposedly using deductive and inductive logic. But the roots of this thinking skill lie in the distant past, when all problem solving was reflexive and dealing with physical situations. We can look at this process as the conflation of TWTWI. with survival requirements. In what way is this conflation constructed?

Problems that were encountered were all composed of some or all of the eight TWTWI. elements. For example, if one slips on the edge of a precipice, made to fall by the effects of gravity, one instinctively reaches for something to hold onto -- a reflexive solution to the situation. Each of the above elements will come into play in one form or the other as animals deal with surviving. Eventually associated neural memory mappings of the element or combination of elements with the successful solution is established, and the species is thus trained (over long periods of time) to cope with similar situations in the future. None of this is memorized or identified in their own right as abstractions, but only as they relate to their association with surviving and the successful solutions -- if they occurred.

The issue now is how to move from purely reflexive and automatic training, to what we now call reflective thinking -- intentional behavior related to problem solving. We cannot leap too far, as in leaping to the belief that an awareness of causality was a recognized process in nature, but can only assume that the effects of causality were experienced and utilized. How did this experiencing and automatic training eventually move into intentional behavior? That is the big question.

First, it is helpful to distinguish the real differences between reflexive and reflective problem solving. It is easy enough to simply say that the latter is intentional -- this simply begs the question as to what intention means. I believe that reflective problem solving began when a novel problem was encountered -- one that the reflexive or automatic solution could not deal with. There are two approaches here: First, reflective problem solving could be seen as an extension or modification (or evolution) of reflexive, or second, it could be seen as an entirely different process in the brain. But processes in organisms don’t spontaneously appear out of nowhere, they evolve. It could it be the case that after millennia of dealing with TWTWI., its elements became installed as associative maps for their own sake, so to speak. This would mean that there existed in the brain some ready ammunition to deal with novel problems, by an associative process. Put another way, this can be seen as a selection process, as opposed to an instructional one. While TWTWI. presents problems, it also presents solutions because it has become part of the repertoire of representations in the brain that can be drawn upon for problem solving. I believe it could be that as this repertoire became complete, to some degree -- i. e., many of the problems associated with the elements of TWTWI. had become permanently installed -- the stage was set for intentionality. By this I am suggesting that given an encountered problem, representing one arrangement of TWTWI., the repertoire of other elements of TWTWI. was drawn upon intentionally -- “searching” for a solution that matched the problem. Such searching I will call our first reflective problem solving -- i. e., our first intentional thinking. Here’s a very simple example:

Digging for roots a large rock is encountered, impeding the search for food. If the dealing with the effects of gravity, relative magnitude, movement and causality are in the repertoire, the large rock perhaps can be moved to continue the search. Without such a repertoire, the animal may simply continue to dig around the rock, making no attempt to move it. The TWTWI. elements of magnitude, gravity and existential persistence were the ingredients of the problem, and other elements combined to provide the solution.

The issue remains of the transition point, when such a selection process was used, therefore introducing intentionality. How did such a point arrive? Concomitant questions have to do with the animal’s awareness that it had the ability to use such a selection process, and thus the question of consciousness.

Innateness

It is necessary to say something here about innateness. I have claimed that dealing with the first tier or macro level elements of TWTWI. is innate to the extent organisms appear to possess the ability to function with regard to those elements with little or no (self) training. Their whole system, bodies/brains, are tuned to, and built for, dealing with those elements. Lenneberg in a 1968 paper in Science, points out the four criteria used to determine innateness -- they are (paraphrasing):

These criteria are useful to a certain extent; however the last one, discussing the necessity for an organic correlate is somewhat problematic. Organisms that have little or no similarity between their organs, nevertheless have an innate connection with and response to the first tier elements of TWTWI..

5. The Evolution of Thought

Thought is an ambiguous term, meaning different things to different people. We normally consider thought to be volitional and conscious, however this is problematic. We are doing a kind of thinking when we dream, and we clearly do things, as we drive our car, for example, that we do not, seemingly. consciously think about. In addition, the brain is busy executing a multitude of activities that are never made conscious, such as its job of controlling bodily functions, not to mention the billions of processes occurring within the cells of the body. When we encounter an object of a certain color, do we think about it being that color, or is that perception at some other layer of our awareness? When we experience pain, is that experience thought? So, it is an over simplification to say that everything the brain is engaged in is thought. But it is not an over simplification to say that all thought is biological and physical, since we now know that neuronal and synaptic activity are the mechanisms for thought. The idea that thought is some disembodied agent is by now passé, at least in the cognitive science community. This has been admirably discussed by Lakoff and Johnson. [Philosophy in the Flesh]

As discussed in the preceding section it is convenient to divide the issue of thought into two parts: (1) intentional or reflective problem solving, and (2) reflexive problem solving. The definition of thought I will be using herein is the former. This definition makes dreaming a bit problematic in that there is no physical or knowledge-based problem at hand. However the dream creates its own set of situations and problems, using our memories and the often seemingly helter-skelter productions of the unconscious. Lest one think (1) is too restrictive, let me elaborate. Unfortunately, it is necessary to involve consciousness. That is a state or condition of the mind that has produced a multitude of theories over the ages, and remains a matter of some disagreement among philosophers and scientists alike. It is easy enough to state when we are not conscious, but more difficult to state when we are. We are not conscious in a coma or dead. I believe it is reasonable to state that we are conscious when we are capable of stating or knowing we are conscious. This is not as silly or as circular as it sounds. I say, knowing, since even though a global aphasic may not be able to tell us in words he or she is conscious, they probably know it. Language is certainly not a prerequisite for consciousness -- but what is? I think it safe to say that human consciousness is the demonstrable ability to reference one’s self as an object. Are apes such as chimps conscious? I recall reading about an experiment in which a chimp was anesthetized and a smear of white chalk put on the top of the animal’s head. Upon waking and, some time later confronting itself in a mirror and seeing the chalk smear, it rubbed it until it came off. It immediately knew that the chalk was on its head, thus, it knew that the reflection in the mirror referenced its self. In my estimation, that chimp was conscious and thinking -- it was demonstrably able to reference itself as an object.

For millions of years, the animals belonging to the line of evolution leading up to Homo sapiens, experienced and reacted with TWTWI.. In doing so, the elements of TWTWI. not only influenced the way they lived, but were reflected in the development of their whole morphology, including the brain/mind. There can be no explanation other than this for how such morphology came about. The effects of gravity are the most obvious, since all animals live in a gravitational environment, and in a sense, gravity poses a continual problem that the body solves in various ways. The motion of objects -- the fact that objects can and do move about -- made it necessary for mobility in the pursuit of food and escape from predators. There is no such thing as a truly stationary or immobile animal, [with the possible exception of the coral] and the majority of animals perceive the motion of objects around them to greater and lesser degrees. The perception of relative magnitudes, common to many animals was originally related to distinguishing threats, mates, hiding places, the size of food, etc. Each of these elements eventually became part of the brain’s repertoire of expectation of its daily milieu. Without such a built-in repertoire of expectation there would have been continual confusion and the inability to survive. That repertoire of expectation became a physical part of the brain -- instinctual and permanently fixed in the animal. I must add here, that as it relates to thought and the precursors of thought, the brain’s complete functionality is not instantly created at conception, and is not “complete” in its maturity until some later point in an animals growth. By that point, and it varies widely among animals, the repertoire of expectations is fully formed -- or at least formed to the point where a very minimal self-training period is required for a full and useful repertoire. This aspect of the brain is different from, say, the lungs or the liver, organs that require no equivalent kind of training to acquire full functionality.

A slightly different but very related take on the expectation repertoire is discussed in Michael Gazzaniga’s Nature’s Mind, when he presents the finding of Elizabeth Spelke. Her research indicates the ability of infants, (4-5 months) to display awareness of an expectation when presented with various object situations. Gazzaniga states:

Thus it is seen, via experimentation, that we are born with certain “wiring” of the brain that provides a ready made foundation for understanding the world in terms of its constituent features -- what I have called the elements of TWTWI.. I maintain that this innate preconditioning is the result of the continued contact with TWTWI. over millions of years.

This evolved, built-in set of expectations of TWTWI. provided the means to have reflexive problem solving abilities. All problems in one way or the other, are associated with the elements of TWTWI., and without the repertoire of expectations at hand, those problems could not be solved. At some point the means of problem solving changed -- no doubt quite slowly -- but in a profound way, to the point that it became more than merely reflexive. This change was to reflective thought. Instead of automatically using only the repertoire of expectations, an intermediary or augmenting process evolved that altered the animal’s ability to solve problems. How did this change come about?

Additional Repertoires

As mentioned earlier, organisms evolve to more, not less, complexity. This in itself is a curious matter -- why should they do this? Actually it is rather simple. Organisms that fail to survive as a species, for whatever reason, have failed to adapt. Adaptations are additions to an organism’s complexity, seldom if ever a reduction. (Fish that lose their sight after very long periods in a subterranean water home do lose the complexity associated with sight, however other adaptations are no doubt required to deal with a dark environment. In addition, the adjunct mechanisms, such as dealing with space and objects that were present during the sighted period will remain and have influence over behavior and other adaptations.) Therefore it is reasonable to assume that successful adaptation demands additional complexity. If evolutionary stasis is reached, and the organism is in evolutionary equilibrium relative to its environment, this means that additional complexity is not required or useful. Or, if genetic mutations do occur, they do not enhance survival in any way since the prevailing survival problems have already been solved. Hence, for any organism to evolve and acquire additional complexity, it must be challenged by its environment. Evolutionary problems have to be dealt with, and higher complexity due to genetic variations is the result. Humans are apparently at the top of the complexity list -- not so much in our general physical morphology, but in our brains. It has been reported, and by now is general knowledge, that the DNA for chimps is around 99 percent identical to that of humans. That one percent difference is undoubtedly almost all in the brain.

In tying the evolution of thought and language to TWTWI., it cannot be forgotten that the brain does not evolve alone; it evolves in conjunction with the rest of the body, and indeed cannot be separated from the body in terms of the (obvious) physical connections that are present in all organisms. Lakoff and Johnson, in their Philosophy in the Flesh, present the concept of the “embodied person.” I quote from their book here, interspersing my take on their ideas, as they relate to the thesis of this paper (their quotes are in italics):

Yes and those perceptual and motor systems do what they do in problem solving in direct connection with TWTWI.. There is no choice in the matter.

I read “every understanding that we have of the world” to mean what I have called “awareness” by the body/brain of TWTWI.. In the following paragraphs I present an additional level of that awareness that is acquired from the increasing complexity of interactions with TWTWI. by the body/brain.

The question boils down to the type of complexity that occurred in Hominids to provide them with much improved problem solving capabilities, and eventually the ability to think and to reason -- as I have defined thinking to be. As I mentioned above, additional complexity is the result of successful adaptation for solving the problems of survival. If the problems remain the same over long periods of time, there is little opportunity for new adaptations. But if the animals migrate, for example, due to diminishing food supply, predators, competition with other animals or changing weather conditions, a new set of problems arises due to a new environment. The genetic variations that were heretofore ineffectual in terms of useful adaptations are now active and additional complexity of the organism takes place. An environmentally stressed population must either adapt, gain in complexity or perish (or relocate) If early Hominids were a migrating species, for which there is considerable evidence, it makes sense that they would be more likely to require more adaptations, thus more complexity than static ones. So it is possible that speciation in the Hominid line occurred as a result of great increase in complexity -- primarily in the brain and its capabilities. What had TWTWI. to do with such an evolutionary event?

Hominids, along with all animals, having acquired an expectation repertoire, reflecting the first tier elements of TWTWI., must have acquired another kind of repertoire, one that provided a greater increase in problem solving abilities. Such a repertoire was probably one of a finer degree of distinction within the various elements of TWTWI.. Let us take the example of morphological persistence and change. Many animals have the instinctual ability, for example, to expect a tree to remain a tree. This is not a conscious, or thoughtful act, but rather the way their brain works when encountering trees. Each time the squirrel approaches a tree there is no confusion as to it being a certain kind of thing it is familiar with and expects to be the same as it was a few minutes or even days before. In one sense, to the squirrel, all trees are more or less the same. If we move to higher animals, we see that monkeys prefer certain trees over others -- they make distinctions based on how they use the tree. Moving to still higher primates, us, we use trees for a wide variety of purposes, hence the distinctions we make are many and often quite fine grained in detail -- not only the species of tree, but the details of individual trees. Pines and firs are useful in construction, balsa is not. Thus, it is very likely that the ability to make finer distinctions among objects was an important survival mechanism. This in turn means that some mechanisms had to evolve in the brain that allowed such distinctions to be made. As these distinctions were made they had to have a neural mapping to accommodate them, and not only them, but also the functional means to create and manage the mappings. The following section on Language deals with this process.

What kinds of evolutionary stresses would have resulted in adaptations that led to such neural mappings? There was a shift towards another level or kind of relationship to TWTWI.. I believe that this is where the concept of consciousness comes into play. If consciousness is the demonstrable ability to reference one’s self as an object this introduces a level of TWTWI. that includes the behavior of the self and that of others. It introduces a finer degree of differentiation among not only objects and events, but of others of the same species. Another way of stating this is that TWTWI. begins to include a wider variety of phenomena that includes the self. What might have caused this transition?

We can envision the complexity of Hominids reaching a point at which that complexity must be managed, and the enhanced survival would be the result of effective management. This suggests that those individuals who best managed it were more apt to solve problems associated with survival. What would have to happen to instigate such a management capability? I believe it would be selection for neural mappings that made finer distinctions possible, organized those distinctions, and used such organizations for beneficial actions. Thus, a second tier of expectation repertoire was required. While the same elements of TWTWI. were used, they became graduated into what we typically call categories. The following are some of the possible second tier set of elements:

These are examples of second tier elements of TWTWI. and would have provided a more detailed interaction with the environment. But the difference between these and the first tier elements is this: They were not instinctual, but were communally or culturally inculcated, and they had to be learned; they represent the first true concepts. In addition the means had to be available for accurately communicating such concepts or ideas.

I reject the homunculus theory -- that there is a little person inside the brain at the controls of thought and behavior -- as tempting as this is. However, if I assume that some kind of management of complexity is going on, the idea of management suggests some managing agent in the brain. What could be a possible paradigm for management that does not involve an homunculus?

Michael Gazzaniga, in his The Mind’s Past, discusses the interpreter, a reasonable replacement for the homunculus concept and has a sound basis that deals with observable phenomenology of the physical brain.

The brain is not infinite in size or in the potential number of neural connections. There was no doubt competition for neural mappings in terms of space. Everything sensed and conceptualized could not be tossed into some large unorganized set of neural groupings as today we might, given a very large hard drive, pay little mind to how much or in what way we store information. Space and organization were important aspects of the added complexity demanded by the second tier of TWTWI. elements. The critical point here is that a dramatic shift must have occurred in behavior that accompanied the shift in cognitive organization and management. Early Hominids became more social, no doubt due to the higher degree of required cooperation. More socialization was added complexity, but it also demanded a more stable second tier and communally communicated organization of the world. Agreements as to meaning and utility of objects led to stability of concepts within a community, and eventually within a species. It was during this period of transition into the ability to form concepts (second tier elements of TWTWI.) that language, as we know it, began, and I suggest that it was language that was the organizing feature of thought. The ultimate stability of second tier elements (concepts) was provided by a common symbolic system of communication -- words, and the arrangement of words -- i. e., language.

6. The Evolution of Language

So far I have attempted to move from the elements of TWTWI. to their relationships to animals, to a finer level, the second tier of detail of those elements among early Hominids, to the possibility of the organizing function of language in the brain of Homo Sapiens, and possibly earlier Hominids. This section is devoted to these latter hypotheses. Lest the reader imagine that I am going to adhere to what is typically called “ontological relativism,” that depends on what that term means relative to this paper. If it primarily means that language influences thought, then I am but partially guilty. I would say that: language-influences-thought-influences-language! Or, more precisely, the mechanisms that are the foundations for language -- that make language possible -- are the same as the foundations of thought as it exists today. Manifestations of that mechanism are to be seen most readily in language, since we cannot see thought.

The question arises: which came first, the ability to form concepts, the finer details of TWTWI., or the ability to assign meanings to symbols? Could “water” have had a name prior to its recognition, within a language community, as a conceptual or universally recognized entity? We know that research has discovered that vervet monkeys have distinctly different calls signaling different kinds of predatory threats, but is this phenomenon the same as naming water or fire, and can we expect that vervet monkeys have a concept of snakes and leopards, in the same way we conceptualize water or fire?

To start this section, I quote Terrence Deacon:

I maintain that what Deacon calls “a common adaptive content” is the ability to form and recognize elements of TWTWI. and eventually the second tier of those elements. Not only did language arise out of this convergent evolution as such an adaptation, its functional substrate concomitantly served as the organizing principles of what I am calling thought, or more appropriately, reasoned thought -- the two being inseparable as evolutionary processes. In other words, the functional substrate that provides for language is bound by the elements of TWTWI. in much the same way as any evolved morphology of the body. We cannot think or use language in any way that does not, fundamentally, comport, at a very basic level, with TWTWI.. The obvious reason language (and thought) is a convergent evolutionary process is that all languages must adhere to the formative conditions and forces of TWTWI. that are common to all organisms -- thus, to all humans.

Language and the Second Tier of TWTWI. Elements

Recall an example of a second tier was:

While many organisms can be aware of morphological persistence and change in terms of their physical needs, these are inculcated in the physiology of the whole organism -- not necessarily or only in the brain. But when distinctions among things becomes essential to survival, and must be recallable, the brain is far more active and responsible for making these distinctions.

At some point finer distinctions among sensible entities in the world became necessary because such distinctions became vital to survival. I do not mean only things like the ability to distinguish a poisonous plant from a non-poisonous one, but rather distinctions that were made for intentional utilitarian projects -- such as making containers for food, chipping the best flint stones, using appropriate materials for a hut or a weapon or a boat, or some ornamentation. The array of utilitarian possibilities among objects in the environment is large, and the variety of objects is also large. Therefore it is reasonable to conjecture that selection for distinction making, remembering and categorizing distinctions must have been important. In order for the distinctions to be useful for the community they would have to have some kind of designation --a name or some other symbolic representation. This is a critical point in my thesis, since acquiring a name or symbolic label is the beginnings of language.

Five things have to exist in order for this process to occur:

This process would eventually result in neural mappings in the brain that are organized to accommodate the association of symbol-to thing -- or, the signifier to the signified. A relationship is constructed such that upon hearing (or seeing, in the case of a gesture) a word, what it signifies is brought up imagistically -- and upon seeing an object, the corresponding word or gesture is brought up when needed for use. This means that the physical brain has been “trained” to organize inputs in a certain way, a way that is configured by symbolic correspondence, or bilateral association. This bilateral association was the formative stage in language.

Naming objects, events, people and processes would clearly provide an enormous communal as well as individual survival advantage, but the next stage in language would provide far more. Once the brain is capable of bilateral association of names with things, the stage is set for the ability to bilaterally associate not only names, but actions, processes and modifiers. All modifiers, what we typically call adjectives today, were the result of distinction labeling, but were also locational labels as well. A thing might be heavy, or light, or hot, or sharp, but it would also have a relative location and distance label to be most useful, and it would most likely have an association with a utility that required the use of the body.

Another key point: while bilateral association suggests a correspondence theory, I should add that I seriously doubt that there is a single location in the brain that represents an object, by name. Within the brain, the various associative mappings are unique to individuals. I call these multilateral associations, and an observed object conjures up a host of different associations which are different in different brains. This means that there really is no one-to-one correspondence between the signified and the signifier, but rather a pattern or matrix of brain activity that forms the end result concept of the signified. In fact, I picture the process within the brain as a somewhat  turbulent, or quasi-chaotic, electro-chemical activity that I discuss in Essay 24 of Volume I.

The step from what I have said above to the structure of language, its syntax, requires that we see the brain/mind not as a computer with various storage mechanisms, but rather as an organ that deals primarily (or only) with responding to stimulus -- and not only sensory stimulus from outside the body, but what might be termed second order, or internal stimulus. While language is uttered and received linearly in time, there is no reason to necessarily assume that it is constructed in a linear process, prior to or during the utterance. Multilateral associative mappings occur more or less simultaneously, in a parallel fashion, and only when a thought or an idea is made public is its structure organized linearly. The question is: is that structure in any way related to TWTWI.?

Noam Chomsky holds that all languages of the world share a common substrate of grammatical organization that is innate, and I share this belief. I suggest that commonly shared organizational substrate was originally a mechanism that dealt with not only representing aspects of TWTWI., but with organizing how it was dealt with in problem solving. I hold that the human mind is primarily a problem solving organ, and that to solve problems, be they physical or knowledge problems, or social/human ones, an organization of the repertoire of problem solving tools had to exist. A solution to a problem is not found by some logical steps, but rather by the selection of a possible solution from a variety of solutions. Language, or the substrate of the organization of language, provides the means to consider problems, to express them, to analyze them and to solve them. I am not claiming that one uses language in the actual solution thought process, but that the underlying mechanism of the solution uses the substrate of the language mechanism of organization in that solution. How does this relate to the elements of TWTWI.?

All physical problems contain one or more of the eight TWTWI. elements, and all solutions to problems also contain them, as well as the second tier elements. In dealing with TWTWI. language would have eventually evolved the symbolic representation of these elements in various forms.

While we can only be aware of and deal with these elements, we eventually dealt with them as a cooperative community, and that dealing had to involve communication of the symbolic representation of TWTWI.. The development of second tier elements was carried out by language, thus language was the agent for organizing thought in dealing with TWTWI.. We do not sense that one tree is a maple and another is a birch, but we have acquired the ability to distinguish that they are not the same species of tree, and can assign them different names. We are aware that a mountain has larger size than a pebble, but “larger than” is an invented expression that codifies this kind of awareness in symbolic form. We do not sense directly that one object is “behind” another object, relative to us, but we invent that word/concept to represent that condition of TWTWI. as we see it

Regarding the order of language development, Derek Bickerton says the following:

I believe Bickerton is right about this -- lexicon came first. But what behavioral, social and the requirements of SSPD resulted in syntax? I believe one way to construct a scenario that was conducive or even essential for the development of syntax, or the useful concatenation of words is to align the elements of TWTWI. with SSPD. Ignoring expressiveness for the moment, I suggest that the four key requirements surrounding communal and individual survival dealt with the elements of TWTWI., and in so doing created a lexicon that sufficed for the purposes of: command, warning, identification and proper names. Learning skills such as making fire, flint axes, huts, performing in the hunt and so on, do not require a language since these can be acquired by watching others perform them. But when larger enterprises were undertaken, such as coordinated attack on prey or enemies, constructing more complex dwellings or water craft, perhaps engaging in communal rites, the use of words would have been quite beneficial. The following is a possible breakout of the (English equivalents) kinds of utterances that might have been typically associated with the elements of TWTWI. as relates to SSPD:

In addition, commands and warnings would have been part of the lexicon, perhaps being the oldest ingredients. Such commands would have been simple, unambiguous verbs such as go, come, fetch, wait, hit, take, and give, and so on.

I have omitted Causality from this list. I believe that causality was such a ubiquitous feature of the world it was not recognized until the Hominid mind was capable of having it as an idea or concept. The making of fire, for example, the cause-and-effect relationship of rubbing two sticks together, was probably not seen in those terms, but more or less as Hume explained causality, i. e., the conflation of two acts being seen as one process associated with the emergence of fire -- not the cause of fire, as we typically understand that process. I recall a story by a sociologist who studied American Indian myths and hunting practices. It was the case that at the beginning of a hunt, the Indians would shoot arrows into the path before them, and then proceed with the hunt. When asked if that practice was something that might cause the hunt to be successful, the answer was no, it was simply a part of the hunt. A word must be said about the list of candidate utterances under the various elements of TWTWI.. Except for the names of things, people and events, all the “words” listed require a subject -- they must predicate something or someone, therefore it is natural to assume that such a combination would comprise a proto-language -- a few connected words to represent a complete thought or command; thus, syntax. I believe that merely the names of things and people came first, along with warning signals, and perhaps commands, and that the concatenation of words/signs was a seminal development in early Hominids. The very act of expressing a complete thought or command was representative of the process of thought being so organized by the agent of language itself. The burning question is, since no doubt people went about their daily activities, moving things, doing things, building, hunting, preparing meals, how could the predicates above, indicating those activities, come into being in addition to the names?

When I have suggested that language evolved concomitantly with reasoned thought as an agent that facilitates thought, I realize that it is a difficult concept to entertain. I will try to explain it here.

We cannot escape the use of language and reasoned thought to deal with the world and other people. We take this ability for granted, and possibly assume that early Hominids likewise had a similar ability. But if we look at Homo Erectus and consider for the moment that they were but slightly above the bonobos and gorillas in terms of cognitive survival mechanisms, trying to imagine them in their small communities of wandering groups, it is easier to picture them with just enough reasoning power to get along. But a community would have been better equipped to survive if it had the means to connect the group by signs and signals that were understood by all, and that provided not only protection, but facilitated the daily responsibilities of group cooperative functions. Simply having names for things, people and events would have provided a degree of knitting the group closer together -- one can imagine, following a successful hunt, the group chanting the name of the prey roasting on the fire. Such an event, around the fire, would serve two purposes: it would have more deeply instilled, especially in the young, the connection of the utterance with the prey, and it would have given a cohesion to the group in terms of all involved having an inner understanding of the connection of word/utterance to the referenced object. By the connection of the signified to the signifier, through a continuing use of that process, the brain became one that readily accepted such a connection and was ready for the next step -- that of connecting words/signs together to form an enlarged state of expression and awareness. The word or command to hunt! could eventually be connected with boar, so that the full command would be hunt boar! I maintain that when this connection occurred, it was the critical event that commenced a cognitive developmental feedback process that yielded up language. But it also yielded up a more capable thought process as well. Before something could be uttered, it had to be structured in a certain way that was amenable to communication with the lexicon and syntax available. Thus, thought and language were bound up together in a developmental movement that led to an enriched lexicon and a more varied syntax. The second tier I have mentioned consisted of adjectival modifiers that brought more and more precision to expressions, and was built from the same process as with the more simple subject-predicate structures.

Chomsky has suggested that all modern humans are predisposed to acquire language, since all languages of the world display universal similarities. The brain is organized to allow for quick acquisition of language, and this is logical since it would have been highly beneficial for the young to learn communication skills as soon as possible so as to support the community. After over a million years of language development, if one includes Homo erectus, for example, it makes sense to assume that the “wiring” of the brain was such so as to facilitate fast learning of words and grammar. But it must be remembered that acquisition of language goes hand in hand with immediate association of words with TWTWI..


7. TWTWI. for Modern Homo Sapiens

While TWTWI. is fixed for all organisms on the planet, humans are born into a very different cultural milieu from those of the early Hominids. When a child is born, the first seminal event in that child’s life is when it stands up and takes its first step, analogous to the first bipedalism of our forebears. But the second seminal event, and equally joyous for the parents, is when the child utters its first word -- analogous to the beginnings of language in the hominid line. Today we are not only born into TWTWI., but into the world of language and all the things language accomplishes. In addition, we arrive in a world that has a vast, rich history that is preserved in words and the creations of humans -- what Karl Popper calls World 3. Not only does this modern world possess this accessible history of human works, the problems one faces upon entering the world are usually quite different from those of ancient humans, at least on the surface. Our language not only provides us a strong connection with those in our language community, it gives us access to great stores of knowledge as well as access to those in other language communities. Though there are several thousand different languages in the world today, all of them can be shared via translation, and, as Thomas Mann said: “. language is above languages.” It can be said that language is by now an integral part of being human. The fact that we can translate our languages means that there is a common element of verity among them that can be sought and found, often with some effort and diligence.

But do we see the world differently as a result of possessing this complex skill? Is the world shaped by our language in that we view it through a kind of language lens? Benjamin Lee Whorf claimed that we do, that we are to some degree confined in our thinking to certain possibilities because of the nature of language. He thus separates language from thought in the sense that language is seen as a mechanism that not only supports, but guides thought. This has been called linguistic determinism, or linguistic relativism. While Whorf’s science was on shaky grounds, he had a valid point for thinking as he did. Once codified in law and our governmental constitutions and becomes embedded in tradition, the word is frequently seen as an authority that guides or constrains our thoughts, opinions and actions. Those who ardently support the ownership of fire arms resort to little else but our constitution that provides the legal grounds for such ownership; wider and far more significant moral and social concerns are set aside. But Whorf meant something different -- he meant that the language we are born into and are forced to use to become a part of our language community imposes, by its nature, its construction, and certain strictures that guide our thought process. He explained his position as follows:

Stephen Pinker derides this position by taking issue with how Whorf supposedly arrived at it, but not by taking it apart logically, or disproving it based on the findings of cognitive or neuroscience. Pinker has an entirely different take on the matter, believing that we possess an inner language, he labels mentalese. This mentalese is a “language of thought” that is the precursor cognitive function that somehow produces the output language used in speech. Pinker says: “Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. “His model is one that looks like the following:

THOUGHT <= MENTALESE <= SPEECH

But there is no evidence for this position either -- it is simply Pinker’s speculation.

The issue boils down to this: Are sentences or propositions that deal with the world true or false as a function of language we use, or a function of the cognitive connection between the mind/body and the world (or both)? And: Is there an intermediary language process in the mind that prefigures the output language to suit the particulars of a specific language community? While Whorf and Sapir believed that language may constrict our thinking to certain channels by the strictures of the finite possibilities of word meanings and word arrangements within the rules of the particular language, Pinker believes that the key is mentalese, the language of thought that is the same for all humans, and not subject to any such strictures. I would guess, using Pinker’s position, that language translation, then, would be the mechanism for using mentalese as the source of ferreting out the accuracy of the shared meaning of two different languages – or, the substrate of universal verity. When any two languages say the same thing, that same thing must then be the shared mentalese of both speakers. But how is this arrived at -- how do we get at this mentalese?

In my opinion, Pinker makes the mistake of bifurcating language into a two-stage process, and separating it, from a process standpoint, from thought. Actually, Whorf does the same thing with different results. Who is right?

Pinker says:

Therefore, mentalese is innate -- it would have to be -- and it is then bound to be the genetically conditioned lingua franca of the human species. Of course this ties into Chomsky’s ideas about language but let me suggest another possibility.

I do not doubt at all that the human brain is preconditioned to acquire a language, and do so easily and quickly. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this paper, it would certainly have been of great communal survival advantage for the very young to learn communication skills at the earliest possible age, since the life span of ancient Homo Sapiens was quite short compared to ours today, and the young are quite capable of many activities that would assist the communities’ survival. There is undoubtedly synaptic/neuronal wiring in the modern brain that provides a framework for such early acquisition, but does that necessarily indicate the presence of a mentalese? It seems far more likely that our ability to perform reasoned thought and to have a language are inextricably bound up together in a complex matrix that, taken as a holistic process, provides for such thought and language. We can certainly think without words -- most of our thought is without words; words become necessary when we are required or choose to make our thoughts public. However, I believe that we learn to think as we learn to speak and understand language. I say this because in the process of learning words and the associations they engender, that associative mapping that occurs is surely part and parcel of thought -- reasoned, intentional thought.

My oldest daughter, who went from the bottle to the pacifier, hearing us use the word “pacifier” as we fetched it, acquired one of her first words: pa-fooh, and used it when she wanted the device. Not only was she associating the pacifier with the name, she used the name (her name -- pa-fooh) to utter a command or express a need. By getting it, she learned [new “wiring”] the fact that her words had an effect -- they were intentionally chosen and the cause-effect relation of the utterance to getting the pacifier was further instilled. I say “further instilled” since I believe that causality, like language, had a preconditioning wiring resulting from millions of years of evolving within the milieu of TWTWI.. This whole process, association of an uttered sound with an object, witness of the causality, and perhaps equally important, her awareness of a connection with other sound-making objects (my wife and I), was one that was the beginning of her thought-language abilities. I see this development in her as containing the following more or less simultaneously occurring things in the mind:

Her incomplete speaking skill was witness to her immature vocalized mimicking ability, but the other things I mentioned were sufficiently mature to take hold in her very young brain. If there was some intermediary language between her felt need for the pacifier, a bodily/mental function, what purpose could it have served that was not served by the utterance: pa-fooh? Does Pinker suggest that, regardless of the object in question -- be it pacifier or bottle, or rattle, or mother, or doll -- there was a ready made mentalese signifier for that object, and that a process was in place to transform that signifier into a particular sound? It does not make sense to me. We, being very analytical creatures, have the inclination to structure things that make the most apparent sense to us, to lay out flow-diagrams, hierarchies and connections that are seemingly the most logical, without stopping to suppose that perhaps the mind does not work that way. I see the mind as a highly non-linear system of multilateral connections, with lots of feedback. Such a system cannot be so ordered, and is not reducible to a linear model, even if that model may seem to make a great deal of sense. I see no need to bifurcate or trifurcate the thought/language process into some kind of linear flow of information -- it is a single, whole process, even if there are identifiable sections of the physical brain (e. g., Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas) that have been shown to be highly involved in using and understanding of speech.

If I doubt Pinker’s take on this issue, what about the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis of linguistic relativism? Does language guide and constrain thought and the formation of concepts? I believe, as contrary to current thinking on this matter (a la Pinker and others), that there is something to the W-S idea, though perhaps not the way those men considered it. When my very young daughter yelled out: PA-FOOH, and got the response she wanted, it didn’t take many times of this occurring for her to inculcate the fixed idea of her actions producing something from her parents, i. e., a causal request-response relationship. But this was brought about by an utterance, or word -- it was that utterance that was the critical element. Her merely thinking about the pacifier (a physical need related to an object) was not sufficient. To me this indicates that the word (or sound she made) was the connecting element -- thus, words became important and valuable to her. In fact, one could say that words defined or helped to define the problem at hand; her problem was to get the pacifier, and her solution was to utter pa-fooh. If words are valuable and important, then they acquire a power in the mind to make things happen, to connect, to explain. But does this suggest that words provide constraints on what we can think? That is the question regarding the W-S hypothesis.

Edward Sapir, who was Whorf’s mentor, said the following:

What, if anything is wrong with this idea? I see the key problem as being one of a tacit belief that language is separate from thought, and that language fundamentally does not represent the real world accurately. Let us take a hypothetical case, wherein I tell my young child, say, at age three, that when they drop a ball it will go up, and I do this every day so that eventually they connect “up” with the ball in reality, going down. This means that the child will end up associating “up” with what everyone else associates with “down.” If the entire language community did likewise, then in that language community “up” means down. But if I am the only one instilling this association in my child’s mind, it won’t take long, in that “real world,” for the child to seriously question the situation as to what “up” really means, since her use of the word will be in conflict with that of others. I see the overall associative or representational process of a language community being well tuned (through necessity) to deal accurately with the real world, and that the representations formed in language are, by and large, adequate to deal with TWTWI.. If they didn’t, the things we build, such as bridges, airplanes, houses, would not work well or at all. The fact that bridges don’t usually fall down and that airplanes fly so well indicates that language has captured the concepts, manifested in the design of things, with sufficient accuracy to use them throughout a language community.

I believe the acceptance of the W-S hypothesis is tantamount to seeing language and thought (or conceptual thought) as two separable operations, wherein language has a prescriptive function of structuring what can be thought -- a kind of gate keeper to thinking. But this model breaks down if one considers that language is a part of thought. If I hear the word “Houston”, I am not constrained to think only of the city, Houston, but I am aware, depending on the context of it usage, of a myriad of associations related to the word -- I have a “selection repertoire” available. In my case here are but a few of them: (since I was raised in Houston)

I am not constrained, except through context, to focus or depend on any one of these -- there is a soup of associations available to me. Whorf’s example in his book Language Thought and Reality, deals with the case of a worker at a plant, upon seeing the sign reading EMPTY on a large gasoline container, felt no need to be wary of smoking there because the sign EMPTY constrained or guided his thinking to the concept of there being nothing to be concerned about in the container. Empty meant “nothing” to him. However, the container did contain residual vapors of gasoline, and he started a fire from a flipped cigarette. I agree with Pinker’s analysis of this example of the hypothesis, in which he points out a fallacy -- namely that the situation had little to do with language managing thought, but, rather, the man with the cigarette was not being especially bright.

A recent study at the University of California, by Aubrey L. Gilbert, showed that, at least so some degree, the W-S hypotheses may not be entirely off base. The study indicated that language does have an impact on making certain determinations. In most languages, the same word is used for the colors blue and green. In speakers whose native language is English wherein there are two different words for these colors, the distinction between them is more perceptively pronounced. The researchers wrote: “It appears that people view the right (but not the left) half of their visual world through the lens of their native language, providing an unexpected resolution to the language and thought debate.” Whorf may be smiling from his grave.

The Elements of TWTWI.

My very young daughter, upon dropping her pacifier, while standing, holding onto the edge of her crib, sees it fall, and cries out PA-FOOH! As usual, we pick it up for her. But the event, her dropping the object -- and no doubt her dropping other objects -- makes her aware of the effects of gravity; things let loose, typically fall down. She watches the mobile, suspended over her head, gently moving; she observes and becomes aware of objects moving. She reaches for something, a toy bunny or the mobile, and is aware of the space traversed by her hand; she sees her mother’s face hourly, coming and going, but usually not changing; she is aware of phenomenal persistence; she is aware of darkness that comes every night; she is aware of phenomenal change. She is aware of her mother’s or my face, bending down, smiling or making a face, and she is aware of morphological change. And I have mentioned that her calling out PA-FOOH results in the cause-effect event of someone bringing the pacifier to her. Each of these occurrences reinforces the innate wiring of the brain regarding the first tier elements of TWTWI..

Regarding Plurality, I remember clearly the occasion in which I gave her two pacifiers. She chose one, put it in her mouth, but held the other one in her hand. I tried to take it from her and she resisted. While not being able to count, she undoubtedly knew or was aware that there was more than one object she was associated with.

I do not see the first tier elements of TWTWI. being immediately connected to language -- they remain as a substrate that is intensified by our experience in the world and may or may not appear in language early on. But they are profoundly influential in how we approach, understand and use the world.

I have probably fallen short of discovering providing reasonable speculation about, the connection between TWTWI. and our modern language. The reason is that the connection has long since been clouded over by the development of thousands, perhaps millions, of languages over a long period of time. It may be as difficult, from a reductive standpoint, as tracing the evolution of the retinal system of any creature on earth to the first replications of the first organic molecules. Even if one holds there is a universal schema at the bottom of all human languages that might, in the distant past, have some connection to TWTWI., finding that connection is impossible. But I contend that if we start looking at the possibilities of such a connection, holding the elements of TWTWI. as given aspects, then perhaps we might at least get to a workable model that holds water. Just because (as I maintain) all that we do must comport with TWTWI., including the way we use language, does not necessarily mean that we can find ready evidence of that in today’s language and thought. It requires that we strip away what might be considered superfluous aspects of language (if there are such aspects) and find a core “remnant” of a proto-language that perhaps might give such evidence. In attempting this, I feel it is dangerous to use modern young children in their language acquisition period (0 to age 6) as analogous exemplars of a proto-language users -- the reason being that their language environment is filled with all the trappings of modern language that are bound to influence children in their learning.

As I have pointed out, when my young daughter wanted her pacifier, she called out PA-FOOH! --her representation of the pacifier – the best she could do with her mimicking of the word we used. Her tone was sufficient to indicate her need, and her utterance sufficient to identify the object of her need. There was no need, nor did we enforce it upon her, to say: “I want the pacifier.” Adults fully comprehend this highly truncated language, and there is no reason to believe that a proto-language differed greatly from quite simple utterances to make a demand, give a command or instruct, perhaps even form a question. I am not using this anecdotal case to break my own rule, stated above, but simply pointing out that a very parsimonious language can be quite enough, even today, to get a point across. In addition, it may be reasonably assumed that body motions, signals, hand and eye signs were used in conjunction with early language as a means of both intensifying and clarifying the meaning of the utterance. We still do this.

A logical question of the above is: Do we not know what is intended by the parsimonious language of a child because we have more developed language skills? I think the answer is no -- we know what is asked for because of the word (or sign or sound) used in the context of its use. The child does not know it, but she has entered into a tacit agreement about sounds going to and from her, and we are part of that agreement. We know what pa-fooh means, and we respond, and by responding we further inculcate the agreement and the other things I have mentioned.

8. Conclusion

As mentioned early, this paper is about realism, and how humans have evolved with thought and language in the midst of the sensed elements of TWTWI.. The key tenets of the paper are:

The basic thesis of this paper, the relationship between TWTWI. and the evolution of humans, stems from my personal convictions, and those convictions are in turn based on only two things: What I experience and observe in the world, and what I have garnered from study. I have done no laboratory research, depending on the investigations of others in the field of cognitive science to give me guidance and support for my ideas.

As a trained mathematician, I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool Platonist, believing that there is a transcendent existence to ideas that we humans appear to discover. This is a comfortable position, and demands less in the way of explanations for things in the world -- much as religions do. Fortunately I changed this belief in favor of one that claims that ideas about the world, the cosmos and its processes, are inventions of the human mind, based on the real, sensible milieu of our physical existence and our relationship with it. I maintain that we think and use language in a way that must comport with TWTWI.. I cannot imagine us doing otherwise, since we are, through the process of our evolution in that world, connected in a vast historical web with the sensible attributes of TWTWI.. We have managed, through the evolved complexity of our brains and its functionality, to invent a vast labyrinth of tools we use to deal with TWTWI., language being the most significant, and mathematics, a subset of language, the next.

The Appendices

The following appendices are tangentially related to the thesis of the paper on TWTWI., and are a collection of thoughts and speculations that occurred to the author during the writing of the paper.

Appendix 1: What about Mathematics?

Are numbers a part of TWTWI.? Are mathematical truths truths about the world that exist independently of us humans? Do mathematical truths exist at all? It would be quite interesting to have Roger Penrose and George Lakoff over to dinner and toss out these questions! Penrose is an unabashed Platonist when it comes to math, and Lakoff is unabashedly un-Platonic in all matters, including mathematics. In fact, Penrose goes so far as to call the existence of mathematical truths “God-given.” What I find most interesting about Penrose’s view, is the existential reality of the Mandelbrot set -- all those beautiful human created arabesque patterns that infinitely echo their own shape no matter what degree of mathematical magnification. I suppose that one could claim that anything a human invents has some kind of cosmic reality, but in my opinion that is trivializing reality, having it, by extension, include my imagination or all imaginations of all humans. If I invent a mathematical function that, for example, draws some kind of pattern or curve that has never been seen before (something that is quite easy to do) can I claim that that mathematical function at the instant of its execution becomes as real as elements of TWTWI., or, put a better way, possesses an objective, external reality that is independent of the inventor? I say no.

It is natural that, given the premises and conclusions of this paper, I should at least touch on mathematics as it may relate to TWTWI..

Recall the element:

The relative magnitude of objects and characteristics of objects

                                                       -Size characterizations -
                                                         Types of characteristics

The size characteristics suggest the development of measurements -- surely an eventual finer definition of relative magnitude. (All measurements are relative) We assume that cardinal numbers came about from counting, and that measurements eventually used numbers to denote the measurements relative to some standard. Area is another kind of measurement, dealing with two-dimensional space, volume still another, dealing with three dimensions. Can we call number, as used in this way, a real, objective characteristic of TWTWI., since number is used to quantify aspects of real objects? Is number, used as such a feature naming aspect of objects, the same as color or temperature? Or is number purely and only a product of the human mind, having no reality outside that mind? If the answer is yes to this last question, then any proposition dealing with number is also only a product of the human mind, having no external reality. The only truth content of any mathematical proposition or description of a physical process is a product of the human mind.

I think the solution to this issue is quite simple: Try to find number in the world. It cannot be found. We can find color, since it is the result of a certain frequency of electromagnetic radiation, called light, and it induces a physical reaction on our retinal system. We have a physical connection to the sensed spectrum of electromagnetic radiation -- light. I am amused by the contention that the Fibonnocci series of integers: 1,3,5,7,9,11. is manifest in the growth pattern of certain plants, wherein the leaf growths are approximately isomorphic to that series. To some, this indicates that the plant genetically embodies the series. Another example is the famous logarithmic spiral, whose shape is seen in some sea shells -- again, indicating to some that the logarithmic formulation is embedded in the genetic material of the animal. My imagination soars to an alien creature who, upon finding one of those kinds of sea shells here on earth, exclaims: “Ah! They have logarithms here too!” Then a companion joins in with: “Wow -- I bet they also have the Pythagorean theorem!“ Penrose probably would not find this humorous, since he seems to believe that logarithmic spirals are a cosmically formed reality -- God-given.

But if I do not ascribe number to part of TWTWI., where does number come from? Numbers arose from counting, and counting arose from labeling or naming aggregates of real things as relates to measurement of some aspect of TWTWI.. But all aggregates are made aggregates by the human mind, and the human mind assigns a number
(name) to them, thus assigning them, as an aggregate, the invented quality of numerosity. It is easy to imagine the survival value that obtains with the ability to count things. As communities became more socially complex, properties such as the quantity of animals, land area sizes, the number of wives and children, etc., became important within the culture of that community. It is easy too, to see that the evolution of counting and the naming of aggregates as numbers was a convergent evolution in thought. All cultures of the world, to greater and lesser degrees, have names for numbers. In some extant cultures, the numbers only go up to two or three -- quantities beyond that may be called “many.”

But there is a significant difference in the names of aggregates, and the names of trees, animals and food. Those things exist; the names of aggregates only exist at the moment of naming, or counting and are merely symbols that reference something that is ephemeral -- and assigned an arbitrary symbol for the quantity. While there may be three apples, there are apples, but there is no such thing as “three”

I maintain that number and all manipulations of number are subsets of language, but a very special kind of subset. What is fascinating to mathematicians is the great diversity of things we can do with numbers, and the fact that the manipulations of numbers and symbols representing numbers, yield up a phantasmagoria of interesting results that are a part of what is called mathematics. Mathematics is, by its very nature, Platonic. We define the circumference of a circle by a precise formula -- precise, that is, until it must be used physically. C = 2 pi R, where C is the circumference of a circle, pi is a constant and R is the radius of the circle. Now, to the mathematician, this representation is Platonically ideal as it is symbolically stated. However, pi is an irrational number that is defined either by the above equation, or by an infinite series that has been designed to calculate it. Even so, the equation itself has a ring of purity about it, even though it can never be absolutely proven to be true. Why can’t it? Because though the equation has that ring of purity and perfection, there is no known perfect circle and its radius that can be used to solve for the exact (if that is even an apt term) value for pi, nor is there a circle’s circumference that can be perfectly (exactly) stated using the equation.

It is pretty much axiomatic that equations such as the one for C are indeed perfect symbolic representations of a mathematical truth. Few if any doubt its veracity. And yet it is nothing more than capturing the way the human mind works vis-à-vis symbols and propositional relationships. The number pi does not exist in the world; it is the creation of the human mind. I say that numbers and mathematics are a subset of language. It has been said that mathematics is the language of physics -- yes, but mathematics is not physics.

[Now, since I have said that numbers, integers, were originally only the names of finite aggregates, what are numbers like pi? They are abstract symbols that conveniently represent the reality we perceive – therefore, they are not really numbers at all. The fact that pi is “irrational” meaning it cannot be represented by any integer fraction, suggests that at best, it is an impossible number. In the attempts to find a pattern or an end to the expansion of pi, computers have produced billions of numbers, and no pattern has been found, and certainly no end to the expansion.]

A word is necessary on what is called “pure mathematics,” or the study of mathematics that supposedly in no way relates to TWTWI.. (in contradistinction to “applied mathematics,” dealing with the practical problems of the world.) Of course such investigations can be put in the category of knowledge problems, and are problems that reside only in the mind, and related only to what the mind has put forward as a problem. Once we have developed the idea of equations such as the one above, there is no end to what the mind can do with them. The axioms of mathematics or geometry, assumptions that appear to be self evident can, in the human mind, lead to a staggering array of mathematical propositions, as witnessed by Russell’s and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica , a huge compendium representing the logical extensions of those axioms. The human mind, once it acquired the ability to solve knowledge problems, also acquired the ability to create them, and carry the various “logical” ramifications as far as the mind could take them.

The element of Plurality was added to the list of elements of TWTWI. after much thought and concerns over whether or not the awareness of plurality isa purely epistemic, anthropomorphic process. I concluded, as I mention in the body of the paper, that it is independent of any sentient organism as a feature of the world. However, plurality does not mean numerosity. It merely means that objects can be differentiated spatially and possess the characteristic of not being unitary in their existence. Experimentation has shown that some animals and very young children are aware of plurality. Appendix 2: Evolution into Expressiveness and Individuality

Lest there be any haunting suspicion that I have undone the accepted paradigm of mind-body unity or what Lakoff calls the “embodied mind”, let me set things straight. Within the realism of TWTWI. in its fullest and most embodied awareness, I brought up what human consciousness means in this context, defining it as: human consciousness is the demonstrable ability to reference one’s self as an object. This ability has special significance in humans, and at first glance may seem to echo some elements of mind-body duality. I hope the echo is quite faint. There is little doubt in my mind that TWTWI. is entirely distinct from the human mind, yet it is risky to place the human self/body in some distal relationship to the mind since indeed the “mind” is physical in its process and the host of that process. There is the seeming “catch 22”, i. e. either the human self (whole body-mind entity) can be treated as part of TWTWI., thereby assigning it simply as another category of “things” in the world, or the human mind can be treated as some special agent of “intelligence” that makes this whole investigation have life. Can it be both? I say yes, in a way, it can, and I say this is not a paradoxical situation at all.

Philosophy has always grappled with the problems of humans analyzing human thought and language. It is often, if not usually, forgotten that “objectivity” is an invented concept, invented to have a convenient way to deal with TWTWI.. Therefore we create a conundrum, and then spend enormous time and energy on trying to undo or understand the conundrum we have created! (The same situation is present with concepts such as infinity, truth, meaning, numbers, subjectivity, etc.). We do ourselves a great disservice by not throwing out absolute objectivity altogether, not only because it is philosophically messy, but because it is not necessary. We are an integral part of TWTWI., historically, evolutionarily and physically enmeshed in its grasp. When we speak, no mater what we say, or what it is about, there is implicit in all our utterances a connection to TWTWI. that is impossible to break. In analyzing the world we cannot avoid the fact that we are also analyzing ourselves -- we just don‘t usually think of it in those terms. However much we may come to accept the fact that we and our thoughts and language are biological products, there is often the lingering feeling that what we think and imagine is somehow trans-biological -- disembodied.

In the paper I discussed Physical and Knowledge Problems as the two categories of mental activities, the latter being a peculiarly human endeavor. When the ancient Greeks began to explore these Knowledge Problems, they arrived at the possibility that there were truths, facts and consequences that were seemingly outside the purview of our understanding -- that we sensed and dealt with a once-removed real word, not that world directly. Thus, the creation of abstractions that were immutable and irrevocable, and beyond complete awareness or understanding, i. e., Platonism. This is very close to a religious attitude, and indeed there were influences from those Greeks into Judeo-Christian and Islamic dogma, since intellectual reinforcements of monotheistic supremacy could be found and justified. Knowledge Problems eventually became problems dealing with abstractions that had little if anything to do with the sensed world -- or so it was believed. But in fact this was a false belief. All Knowledge Problems are traceable to some physicality, some aspect of TWTWI.. The fact that our minds separate distal from proximal realities is merely the way in which the brain has become organized. A distal reality is simply one that is invented or inferred; a proximal one is one that is sensed. The mathematical constant pi is a distal reality -- it has never been observed in the world, and yet many of us believe in its existence -- certainly most mathematicians do. And yet this constant was invented as a consequence of observing relationships that occur in the world, and we gave those relationships a name, and a fixity -- a reality that appears to transcend the senses. The same has been done with numbers and a great variety of scientific and mathematical concepts. But this process of transcendentalizing things is not limited to science and mathematics -- we have never seen or sensed “love” or “evil” or “hatred,” and yet to most, these are concepts that are spoken of and used as realities that have an existence outside our human domain of sensible experience. Yet, a very little examination of all such terms or concepts will reveal that they are also traceable to some aspect of physicality of TWTWI..

I have tried to suggest that thought and language grew out of our biological connection with TWTWI., and that the underlying mechanisms that make language possible, are also the ones that make our modern thought possible. Adaptations that grew the complexity of our brain and its organization were all, without any exceptions, the product of our physical interactions with TWTWI.. What I have called the “logic of TWTWI.” transferred into the “logic” of language as expression of the facts of that world and its processes. While, by now, our language has evolved to the point that we can, and often do, express what is illogical, imaginative, fanciful and indeed impossible, this merely means that our language has been “over-designed,” as mentioned in regard to the redundancy of language as a fail-safe mechanism. As distinctions became more and more fine-grained, as utilities became more varied, and as human utility of the environment and cooperative projects more demanding and complex, language played the role of providing process structure and organization. But, in doing so, it turned out that that evolved process of a variety of neural mappings, with its organization and built in bilateral associations, became one of multilateral associations. When this occurred (and it may have been a result of unorganized connections between mappings), humans could speak of things that were in the future, physically impossible, tell lies, shift meanings through the ambiguity that naturally arose. Language became, in addition to its original function -- that of organizing and communicating facts – a somewhat free-wheeling process. We were allowed to say things that could be said in many different ways; we were allowed to speak in hyperbole and metaphor; we were allowed to misrepresent things. We were allowed to be poets.

In short, language that had originally come about as an adaptation that provided for immediate, clear and unambiguous representations, became one that was capable of quite ambiguous meanings. (Indeed, Sir William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity discusses this in regards to literature). What survival purpose could such an adaptation serve? By the same token what survival value could art, ornamentation, poetic and musical expression serve? If to the four requirements of survival -- sustenance, shelter, procreation and defense -- we add expressiveness, because archaeology has uncovered remnants of evidence of it, what are we to make of it? What role could it possibly have played, if any, in the continuing development of language?

If we were to see the depictions of animals such as the Paleolithic paintings in the caves in France as contemporarily done art, I have the feeling they would be termed impressionistic. They are highly representational, but there was clearly no intention of exactitude; they seemed to have been executed quickly, with an eye to giving an immediate sense of the animal, not a “photographic” representation. We know today exactly the species of those creatures -- a photo would have not served us much better in our identification. This suggests that the mind of that period was capable of dealing in accurate impressions. If this was the case, is it not possible that language could have also been used impressionistically? What possible value would impressionistic language have? Perhaps language, along with the arts in general, (as given in ornamentation for example) grew from blunt, concise and immediate dealings with TWTWI. to an enriched depiction of various aspects of TWTWI.. This suggests that the strictly utilitarian purposes of language gave way to highly personalized depictions of things since, as Deacon points out, neural mappings are different in all humans -- multilateral associates would be unique for each person, and what had originally been rigid correspondence of words to TWTWI. became less rigid, and potentially far more ambiguous.

This seems to fly in the face of language becoming more exact, with the addition of structure that provides more precision, not less. Modifiers and connecting words are capable of adding specificity and disambiguity -- how does this jibe with that same language being used in expressive, not necessarily exacting ways? I believe it means that the ability this affords to expressiveness in language was instrumental in shaping individuation among humans, and providing them with an awareness of such individuation. It became clear that each person saw TWTWI. differently because of unique multilateral associations and, in a way, there occurred a loss of representational purity or agreements of meaning. The stage was eventually set for someone to question this disparity of meaning -- thus the eventual birth of philosophy.

As to the survival value of the disparity of meanings and the awareness of individuality among people, it is possible that the freedom of thought and action this afforded was a significant aspect of “progress” in that humans became capable of seeing more than one possibility for a solution. They possessed a larger and more varied repertoire of selectable choices because of their unique multilateral associations. The world became one of possibilities -- not one of rigidity and iron-clad representation.

The meaning of this development for a community or a culture is quite interesting to explore; it sets the individual, now aware of the potency, value and utility of such individuality, apart from the community, creating a dichotomy -- i. e. the self, the known self, versus the rest of humanity, or the individual versus society. This dichotomy remains the source of both consternation and health for a society, since it is the individual, in all walks of life, that spearheads the new, and it is society that either follows, by agreement and imitation, or is in conflict.

Hannah Arendt says there are three basic mental activities: thinking, willing and judging and, further, that these are independent autonomous functions of the mind. I disagree with this division. If one sees the activities of the brain-mind as a vast, quasi-turbulent electrochemical process, some of it manifested in conscious thought, words and actions, and some of it subliminal and unconscious, separating out those “basic mental activities” is creating an arbitrary set of processes that surely cannot be so uncoupled from one another. The activities of the brain-mind are a huge complex of interrelated responses to internal and external stimuli, resulting from the multi-lateral associations that are constantly operative in the formation of thought. Much of the time we cannot know exactly why we say and do certain things, or say and do them in specific ways. We believe that there is an “I” that is the arbiter of our intentionality, when it might very well be the case that there is no such mental entity, but rather a kind of democratic operation at work, wherein what is decided is the result of a host of parameters, many of which we are completely unaware. (This phenomenon can perhaps be compared to a swarm of insects or bees, wherein there is no leader, but a connected, collective “urging”). We have “self identity” because we have the demonstrable ability to see ourselves as an entity in the world, to know our unique make up in the world of others and other things. Thus it is we have what we believe to be our “I.” But as to “who is in charge,” there is no single autonomous agent in the brain-mind that has that identity. Our individuality is a precious thing and, as I have suggested, the awareness of that individuality at some point in our evolution was undoubtedly a seminal event in terms of allowing us “permission” to be different, to explore and let our thoughts and actions range over an ever widening spectrum of possibilities. This, in the context of a human community was invaluable in giving rise to the utility of many minds to solve problems in differing ways -- thus enhancing the chances of a successful solution being found.

Appendix 3: Religion, Morality and God

Introduction

In the last chapter of Karen Armstrong's excellent book, A History of God, she quotes a poem by Thomas Hardy. The poet, when walking through the forest, hears “an aged thrush” singing, and the last stanza of the poem is:

This sad poem remarks on the angst that derives from the absence of meaning and “blessed Hope” in life, and supposedly juxtaposes man’s lack of these things to the natural and unconcerned behavior of another kind of animal. I say “supposedly” since one can also read into the poem a connection between the poet and the Hope of the bird -- even though this abstraction “Hope” is anthropomorphized, it is none the less felt and becomes, through the poem a kind of realization. Man becomes aware, but impotent when it comes to expression, and, as both Wittgenstein and Buddha have said, one must be silent about those things for which there can be no words. But in poetry there are words, and though they may seem to comment on their own ineptitude, that very act is a sign of meaning and connection to the inexpressible.

Humans have the proclivity to use hope and find meaning in life, while the bird and all other creatures on earth merely go about living in ways their genes are programmed. We thus see these other animals as being innocent -- as in before “the fall” and living in the same world as we do, but dealing only with sustenance, shelter, procreation and defense (SSPD) and nothing more. Why have we evolved this proclivity for hope and meaning -- these abstractions that have been and continue to be the bane of philosophers and psychologists, not to mention their importance in our lives? This question is related to, or perhaps the same as: Why do we have any concept of, or need for “God?” I believe it is a rather simple matter that need go no further than observing that we have become aware of Causality. I mean this as not only an awareness of the connection of temporally/spatially contiguous events, but awareness of the causal ingredients of such events. The first of these is no more than Hume’s version of causality; the second is a deeper grasp of causality as a phenomenon. This appendix explains this position.

God and Causality

It may seem odd to mention religion in conjunction with the development of reasoned thought and language; however, I think it important to touch on this subject since it remains a prevalent dimension in the cultures of the world. Many historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, theologians and philosophers have written at length about the origins of religion. They discuss the various theories dealing with ancient and primitive cultures’ penchant for animal worship, a host of deities, transcendental mysteries, mysticism, asceticism, and other early forms that led up to the four dominate religions of the world today: Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. But seldom is the more fundamental aspect of these early beliefs discussed -- namely that at some point in our evolution we grasped the most ubiquitous feature of the TWTWI.: causality. I have discussed causality in the body of the paper, and consider it axiomatic and indubitable that nature functions through causality, but this fact was not embraced by very early Hominids until they had a cognitive system that was capable of inculcating it. Very young children learn of its presence quite early in life, much as they do language, and therein lies an important connection that I also discussed in the body of the paper.

When Hominids finally did grasp the existence of causality as a ubiquitous phenomenon, it became the spring board for becoming what we now call being human. No other animal on the planet understands causal relationships, even though they may utilize causality in their dealings with TWTWI.. At the point Hominids did fully grasp it, they assumed, henceforth, that everything had a cause, that all effects were preceded by some thing or event that resulted in the effect. Much of what they observed could be explained by what can be called first order causality -- the fact that rubbing two sticks together results in fire, but not the facts surrounding the effects of friction, the nature of oxidation, and so on. These first order causal relations were usually sufficient for dealing with the world (i. e., the macro-world), but there were many events in daily life for which no cause could be observed or understood -- such as the falling of rain, the eruption of volcanoes, sickness and death, the changing of the seasons, etc. Since everything apparently had a cause, these events also surely had causes, but those causes were unknown, merely assumed to exist. It was not much of a logical leap to assign to such events a causal agent of some kind, and what would be most at hand for representing such an agent? Surely it would be one or more of the following: an invisible person, or persons, an invisible animal, or even some animating agent behind the growth of flora and the birth of children. The reason I choose these is because it would have been witnessed that both animals and humans did indeed cause things to happen, thus it was a short step to creating the invisible existence of a human or animal spirit or force that animated the strange events that were otherwise inexplicable.

But in a more general sense, it was probably the case that anything that was observed to undergo phenomenological or morphological change (two elements of TWTWI.) might be either the causal agent or the immediate manifestation of some precursor animating agent. Such things are legion -- all forms of water, rivers, the seas, rain, the transformation of seeds to plants and trees, the rising and setting sun, moon and planets, the apparent motion of the stars, lightening and thunder, the wind, and so on. Any of these would have been candidates for the manifestation of an invisible causal agent. With the grasp of causality there was also the accompanying awareness of human intentionality -- one could choose to hunt, or fish, to sleep or eat, to procreate or not, to fight or not, etc. Such intentionality was no doubt assigned to the various agents of witnessed events in the world, and thus, eventually practices surrounding appeasement and propitiation of those agents appeared, and exist today. Just as humans can be appeased, so it was believed that the gods could also.

The history of primitive religions is replete with examples of the above agents, and Christianity can be traced to a combination of various forms or stages of ancient ritualistic practices and beliefs. But tracing the lineages of any religion will end up with the causa causans, being that of assigning the causality of events, or lack of them, to invisible forces that possessed unknowable intentionality. This reductive thinking led Aristotle to reach the conclusion that everything that exists, matter and process, had an originating point -- his Unmoved Mover -- beyond which there are no causes. Or, the causal chain is finite, terminating in what the religious minded call God. His thinking was incorporated nicely into the ideas of Western religion.

Appendix 4: What about Quantum Physics?

Two seminal events in the 20th century should have philosophers thinking harder about how the mind relates to the world: The discovery (invention) of quantum physics and the undecidability proof offered by Kurt Gödel regarding axiomatic integer mathematics. It is relatively easy to grasp the ramifications of Gödel’s proof, but those of quantum physics remain illusive and far reaching, and surely profound in their potential influence on philosophy and cognitive science. While the various axioms and proofs that exist within mathematics can be viewed as purely epistemic, the experimental results of quantum physics are bound to draw us into the world of micro-phenomenon which are not only far beyond our normal senses, but offer up counter intuitive results that make some question our basic assumptions about how the world and the universe function. As I have mentioned in the body of the paper, I do not hold to the existence of what are called the “laws of nature” or the “laws of physics,” and I have explained why. We fit models to phenomena that make sense -- and that “sense” is one that is tied to our embodied evolved cognitive process. When the so-called wave-particle duality was discovered, it provided evidence of events in nature that seemingly defy the macro functions of TWTWI.. It has been these macro aspects of the world that have shaped, through evolution the way we think and see the world. The counter intuitive aspects of quantum physics are counter intuitive because they don’t comport with our embodied awareness of how the world operates. The question that relates to this paper is: How do the discoveries of quantum physics change the way the human mind relates to the world -- if they do? While today’s physicists are increasingly not surprised by the seemingly odd and counterintuitive behavior of sub-atomic particles, they would surely be surprised to witness a butterfly instantly becoming a locomotive, or water flowing up hill or a mountain instantly vanishing.

To me, this indicates that if we are to include these new findings into the mind-world relationship, we must come up with new ways of seeing and thinking about the axiomatic basis for all philosophical, mathematical and scientific endeavors. Our intuition has been formed out of our evolved cognitive expectation repertoire, and that repertoire is universal. While it may be unreasonable to imagine that quantum physics will alter that repertoire in any appreciable way it is not unreasonable to imagine what possibilities might obtain if we change the axiomatic paradigm for what is “right” and what is “wrong” in terms of physical phenomena.

To do this it may be necessary to embark on very wild imaginative excursions that free us up in terms of what we allow and disallow in our cognitive system. The so-called “law of the excluded middle” which seems to be as sound as the pervasiveness of gravity, may not be “right” and it may not be “wrong.” It may, in fact, be meaningless. What does this kind of admission bring to science and philosophy? I do not believe that it brings either pure solipsism or relativism, but rather the desire for a new way of seeing the world. If there is indeed a real physical world out there that has endowed us with the cognitive system we own, we have the choice whether or not to adhere in all areas of our lives and imagination to the constraints of that world. But we are up against millions of years of evolved cognition. Simply calling some law meaningless does not really accomplish much unless we come up with a satisfactory replacement. Our species depends on order, predictability and laws or models of how the world works in relation to us. Societies make laws to establish order; scientists develop hypotheses and theories to overlay order onto processes in order to understand, predict and control them. To bring this point into a relationship between the ramifications of quantum physics and the mind-TWTWI. connection it seems to me that we must change the way in which we use such laws of order and predictability. We must come back to the age old question of what it means to know something.

TWTWI. proceeds at its macro level as always, but the findings of quantum physics do not fit within the expectation repertoire that has been inculcated as a result of our connection to TWTWI.. Does this mean that the philosophical questions that may be raised as a result of these findings are aloof from the ordinary philosophical issues, and may be kept at a safe distance from them? Or does it mean that if philosophy is to retain any usefulness it must incorporate such findings as a part of the whole spectrum of human relationship with TWTWI. and the cosmos? I believe it must be the latter, for the following reason: Being aware of micro behavior of physical phenomena demands that such awareness be made a part of a holistic philosophy, and demands also that concepts such as truth, meaning and knowledge be so understood as to incorporate the ramifications of quantum physics, or of any scientific finding. We must include what it means that very counterintuitive behavior of subatomic particles is as real as the falling of snow or the eruption of volcanoes, or the firing of synapses. (Indeed the firing of synapses is possibly related to quantum phenomena). If this means that we must reexamine age old axiomatic standards of reasoning and logic, then so be it -- philosophy must grapple with what changes may be needed to deal with this.

Having said that I must say that this paper is concerned with how we got where we are vis-à-vis our evolutionary connection to TWTWI., and not concerned with this new world of quantum physics. I am merely pointing out that the reason physicists find quantum phenomena counter intuitive is simply because the mind expects things to work in a certain way, and that certain way, at the macro level, is apparently quite different from that of the micro level. It may in fact turn out, when all the dust has settled around the quantum issue, that at some final level of causality, things behave the same way, and the scientists have just not found that final level yet, if indeed it does exist.

According to quantum physics, if Plank’s constant was anything different from what it is, our physical world, if it existed at all, would be quite different. In other words, Planks’ constant (relating energy to electromagnetic radiation frequency) is by now a part of the so-called physical laws of the universe, i. e., E = hf is a law, as is the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But we must remember that these laws have been borne out of the human brain, and depend on the apparent rock-solid verity of mathematics -- also a product of the human brain. There is an accepted quid pro quo between mathematics and physical phenomena -- if things don’t work out mathematically (such as the nasty appearance of infinities), then something is wrong with the theory and variables will be changed, perhaps other hidden variables assumed so that the mathematics does work. This is not playing with reality but, rather, playing with what works; and what works does so within the human brain and according what the human brain accepts as “right”

As regards those chimeras of truth, meaning and knowledge, I maintain that they have grown out of our thought-language system and have served us relatively well in ordinary matters of living, but have always been problematic in terms of the high minded world of philosophy and science but: We will still seek them, but only within the cognitive, thought/language system with which we are endowed.

Coda.

Ontology and food for thought:

We behave according to our genetic composition, environment and relationships to other humans. We act in accordance with how we deal with the four main requirements of organic life: sustenance, shelter, procreation and defense. As humans we also have an additional vector in our makeup: expressiveness, that produces our art, poetry, music, etc. If one wishes to learn something about a ancient culture they look at what that culture has produced in the way of artifacts, architecture, clothing, tools, etc. What is spoken or thought is forever hidden and lost, and what is written is usually sparse and of less importance than what was built.

What moves and animates a society is how it deals with its environment and how its people deal with one another. It deals with the environment by making things that provide sustenance, shelter and defense. It also deals with the environment through developing its ethos or ontology and together with that ontology it develops rituals and various constructions related to the rituals. All ontology is made real, visible and felt – not left to words alone. Greek statuary of Zeus or Athena as well as the head dress of the Shaman or totem poles of in Inuit make manifest the ontology of gods. Without those trappings, such ontology is either weak or nonexistent.

Today, the world of physics tries to pin down what is, and the illusive what is seems to keep moving ahead and continually out of reach. Definitions grow like weeds; laws emerge; new particles are needed; great machines are built to ferret out the secrets of what is. Without those great machines we can find little; our thoughts alone do nothing. Our “ontology” is based on what we can build and observe; it always has been.


Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah –The Life of the Mind, Harcourt Brace, Jonanovich
Armstrong, Karen –A History of God, Ballantine Books
Bickerton, Derek –Language and Species, University of Chicago
Chomsky, Noam – Language and Problems of Knowledge; The Managua Lectures; MIT Press
Churchland, Paul –The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul, MIT Press
Deacon, Terrence –The Symbolic Species, Norton
Dehaene, Stanislas –The Number Sense, Oxford University Press
Edelman, Gerald –Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, Basic Books
Feynman, Richard –Q.E.D, Princeton University Press
Gazzaniga, Michael –Nature’s Mind, Basic Books
Hume, David –An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Prometheus Books
Lakoff and Johnson –Philosophy in the Flesh, Basic Books
Mann, Thomas –Joseph and His Brothers, Knopf
Millikan, Ruth –On Clear and Confused Ideas, Cambridge
Penrose, Roger –The Emperor’s New Mind, Penguin Books
Pinker, Stephen –The Language Instinct, Harper Perennial
Russell, Bertrand –A History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Shuster
Ryle, Gilbert –The Concept of Mind, University of Chicago Press
Searle, John –The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press
Tuchman, Barbara –The March of Folly, Ballantine Books
Whorf, Benjamin Lee –Language, Thought and Reality, MIT Press