Cause, Effect and the Human Mind

"The human mind is built to identify for each event a definite cause and can therefore have a hard time accepting the influence of unrelated or random factors. Random processes are fundamental in nature and are ubiquitous in our everyday lives, yet most people do not understand them or think much about them." -- Leonard Iodinos in The Drunkard Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives." Molecules fly randomly through space.

The first part of this quote made me think of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). "He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects about which the mind can think must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in terms of causality – which he concluded that it does – then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this that it is possible that there are objects of such nature which the mind cannot think, and so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside of experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. And so the grand questions of speculative metaphysics cannot be answered by the human mind, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind." Wikipedia

Rational Thinking versus Belief

"Our world is too complex, potentially too dangerous, for us to base decisions on what we want to believe, rather than what is actually the case. The scientific method is deliberately constructed to oversome the deep-seated human wish to assume that what we want to be true--what we claim to "know"--really is true. In science, emphasis is placed on trying to prove that what you deeply believe to be the case is wrong. Ideas that survive stringent attempts to disprove them are more likely to be correct." - Ian Stewart in The Story of Mathematics:From Babylonian Numbers to Chaos Theory.

"Consider the honeybee....

...gathering nectar from a flower bed. Although simple in appearance, the act is a performance of high virtuosity. The forager was guided to this spot by dances of her nestmates that contained symbolic information about the direction, distance and quality of the nectar source. To reach her destination, she traveled the bee equivalent of hundreds of human miles at bee-equivalent supersonic speed. She has arrived at an hour when the flowers are most likely to be richly productive. Now she closely inspects the willing blossoms by touch and smell and extracts the nectar with intricate movements of her legs and proboscis. Then she flies home in a straight line. All this she accomplishes with a brain the size of a grain of sand and with little or no prior experience."

Opening paragrah from The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies, Bert Holldubler and Edward O. Wilson, W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.

Musing from Jack London (1876-1916)

"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in manificient glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist, I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."

Passage from Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift

"At this moment I must say, almost in the form of deposition, without argument, that I do not believe my birth began my first existence. Nor Humboldt's, or anyone's. On esthetic grounds, if on no others, I cannot accept the view of death taken by most of us, and taken by me during most of my life--on esthetic grounds therefore I am obliged to deny that so extraordinary a thing as a human soul can be wiped out forever. No, the dead are about us, shut out by our metaphysical denial of them. As we lie nightly in our hemispheres asleep by the billions, our dead appraoch us. Our ideas should be their nourishment. We are their grain fields. But we are barren and we starve them. Don't kid yourself, though, we are watched by the dead, watched on this earth, which is our school of freedom. In the next realm, where things are clearer, clarity eats into freedom. We are free on earth because of cloudiness, because of error, because of marvelous limitation, and as much because of beauty as of blindness and evil. These always go with the blessing of freedom. But this is all I have to say about the matter now, because I'm in a hurry, under pressure--all this unfinished business!"

(as spoken by Bellow's alter ego, Charles Citrine)