Excellent article, Stephen, you are pointing at our brains and you are showing how we are using them in distinct manners.
Allow me to add two positional aspects that are structural in nature.
First, in science, we start with the data/the evidence, and from that information we work our way up to the larger views.
Second, in religion, we accept the larger view first and then we investigate what we can use to support that view, and in some cases this will change our larger view (often with margin effects).
So, the brain can perform a bottom-up approach (science) and a top-down approach (religion).
Neither is perfect, because Gödel already showed us that starting at the bottom leads to having to accept an Incompleteness in top position. There is simply no concept available at the top level that has both feet on the ground.
We also know that starting at the top means we have accepted a perception a priori, and made it true (for ourselves). A belief is ultimately not something we can prove, only something we can understand as being correct (for ourselves).
The differences between both approaches are stark, but hidden to us in plain sight. We start at the bottom and can’t make it to the top. We start at the top and we can’t find solid footing on the bottom. As soon as we pick one, the other must be wrong.
Therefore, the proffered addition to your excellent article is pointing back at the tool we are using to understand the reality we live in. Our brains are tools; they do not contain the truth. Our brains contain words and concepts, structures and ideas. Our brains do not hold the truth itself.
We all know that there is no truth unless a context is also provided. The example I always use is blue, which is quite dependent on the context. In the paint store it means something truly different from being on the couch with the shrink. So anyone saying the word blue and nothing else has not spoken any truth because we cannot know what got expressed.
The brain is a tool. We cannot expect the tool to hold the truth. We must accept that a context is always present for whatever out brain conjures.
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Structurally, there is a category of 1, which makes for an interesting category indeed. These words encapsulate all there is, either in general or in a specific context. The group with 1 words is actually quite small:
Everything, whole, all, Nature, Life, God, universe, Mankind, these are all examples of 1 words. There aren’t many like them.
As you can see with Mankind, it can be perceived as specific, but it is of a generic all-inclusive nature. Anything human, and it is automatically part of Mankind. Yet have a title like 'Mankind and the 20th Century', then we have two different kinds of structure used in one title. The 1 word Mankind points us to something human and not something else, while the 20th Century points us to something specific, in this case a time period.
Mankind does not have two feet on the ground. It has just one foot on the ground: us people.
The second we say something outside the 1 word, we jumped away from the 1 word into a different structural system that allows our brains to entertain specific categories instead of the generic concept.
So, that is our brain. We entertain many different structures all at the same time, often not knowing we are jumping between structures like acrobats.
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The worst structure that can really capture us, imprison us, is applying the 1 word structure to the detailed structures. Some people do it all the time.
Physicists, for instance, think that the universe is a unit of some bizarre kind. Their brains warp themselves to accommodate the 1 word idea that all is unified somehow, as if the universe is God for all these scientists.
The strange part is that all agree (or almost all) that we live in a result. So, we can't be living in a 1 word reality that has (all) its feet on the ground. We wouldn't be here if the original 1 hadn't broken apart, right?
So scientists are contradicting themselves, but they do not know it. They want the omelet to be like the original egg somehow. Their brains don’t want to deal with the breaking of the egg.
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I hope you write more on this, Stephen. We, common people, need to understand how our brain can make assumptions based on incorrect structures. The more we see ourselves correctly, the sooner we turn this planet of apes into a planet of humans.
