4.5.1 How Ideas Form

This section about mind and knowledge has tried to explain two things:

1. The criteria of scientific truth.
2. How the brain works.

Clearly, the topics are related. We must not set scientific criteria of truth that the natural function of the brain cannot meet, and we should not explain the function of the brain in non-scientific ways. Only there is danger in mixing these topics too! The human brain does many things; it imagines, fantasizes, and dreams. It has moral intuition, judgment and creativity. It provides basic survival skills, and interacts in the human body as a complete organ. Yet, the criterion of scientific truth is only a requirement that humans in the modern age impose on the brain to increase our options. So, when we explain the brain we hurry to explain it in these terms. But we must be careful. While an explanation of how the brain works must meet scientific criteria, we must not suppose that thought processes of the brain not meeting these criteria are somehow invalid, or do not provide useful knowledge that increases human options.

This problem has bedeviled the history of understanding the brain. Philosophers have always tried to show that how we "ought" to think is how the brain functions, and in broad terms it does. In the Locke-Hume model, the brain gathers data about the outside world via the senses (Locke), but it connects the data into images of reality by psychological association in the higher parts of the brain (Hume). This model stands the test of modern neurology, while the brain organized this way provides maximum options. No circuit of reflex could be designed with sufficient complexity to handle contemplation, but any contemplation would still require verification by sense data anyway. So evolution selected the human brain to optimize the circuits of sense and reflex around specialized functions which they perform best, while leaving the neurology of the higher cortex endowed with great flexibility. This way the higher cortex can provide either a practiced backup to reflex, or abstract contemplation of options, or any combination between. Yet historically, Locke and Hume were not trying to understand everything that the brain did. They only wanted to know everything that provided useful knowledge or, controversially, provided useful knowledge to the English industrial economy of the day. Hume and Locke were actively involved in the reform of English politics, and Hume was a friend Adam Smith, the founder of capitalist economic theory. So, while these men sought to explain the brain, they also tried to impose on it a filter of knowledge, contesting that while the brain contained many ideas, few of them had any scientific value.

The most controversial of these filters was Hume's. Locke had already imposed a drastic filter, saying that all knowledge could only arise from data received by the senses. But Hume said that even this data was connected into an image of cause-and-effect in the brain by nothing than psychological association. It is not that anybody doubts that real-world physical causes produce physical effects. It is just that in the neurology of the brain, images of cause-and-effect are perceived as a stream of sense data, which the brain "re-associates" as connected events in the mind through a grammar of the inner psychology. This grammar of the psychology places the cause before the effect. Just as say, in the grammar of the English language, we place the object after the verb in a sentence. Ironically, most languages place the object before the verb, which appears counter-intuitive to a native English speaker, but few people have problems switching between grammars. This also creates intense debate, because the grammar of sentence structure seems to be naturally and easily grasped by most humans. Some scientists presume there must be a specific language or grammar model in the human brain, though there is no physical evidence of specific hard wiring of such a module.

So, if it is not physically hard-wired at birth, where does this grammar of sentence structure come from? Young children are not taught sentence syntax, but they still get the subject-verb-object relationship right. Or if they do not it would be seen as defect. Just that we would not know initially if this would be a defect of speech as vocalization of ideas, or if the defect would be failure to understand cause-and-effect. Still, if the Locke-Hume model of the brain is correct, and here we assume it is, all knowledge arises from the senses. But if the senses only provide an unconnected stream of data, how from this unorganized data can the grammar of organized thought be perceived within the higher cortex? This was the question posed by the great German philosopher Kant (1724-1804). Kant worried that Hume had concentrated on logical and scientific knowledge, while dismissing moral wisdom, judgment, and intuition as "sophistry and illusion". Kant attempted to retrace Hume's argument with great rigor to discover which knowledge he had overlooked.

Kant first reclassified Hume's abstract and experimental reasoning as forming either analytic or synthetic knowledge, depending on how it was structured in the proposition expressing the idea. "A square has four sides" is an analytic proposition, because the predicate "has four sides" merely extends the meaning of the subject, "a square". But "this square is large" forms a synthetic proposition, because the predicate "is large" adds new information about the subject, "this square". Hume's argument could be restated that all analytic statements can only prove non-contradiction, that a square say, could not have three sides. While all synthetic statements must be verified by evidence of the senses, such as if the square is in fact large. But if all knowledge is either analytical (logic) or synthetical (data), how did logic arise from data, without some organizing principle to sort the data into meaning?

Kant gave a simple example to make his point. If all knowledge is a mere stream of data, how can a mother indifferent to a stream of noise data, instantly filter out the cry of her own child? Kant proposed that while some analytical propositions merely defined meaning more precisely, others might be true a priori ('prior to' experience) to allow data to be processed in the mind. Only Kant attempted to prove his point by demonstrating that the truths of mathematics are true a priori. And this backfired badly. Kant was really trying to prove that morals, judgment, and intuition have a valid role in thinking. Only he chose a poor method by which to prove it, because mathematics is possibly the least thing we know of which it can be proven true a priori. So how do moral, judgmental or intuitive values form in the brain? How, from a stream of data, does the neurology of intuition, taste, morality, judgment and cause-and-effect form?

4.5.2 The Learning Process

Firstly, all Kantian type knowledge in the brain arises from the learning process. Knowledge, including memory, exists at the synapse where each axon connects to a neuron. There are nine billion neurons, each of which has multiple synapses, each with a small amount of memory of what happened before. The association of cause-and-effect also occurs as part of the learning process, but perhaps a more forceful part associated with the actual 'wiring' of the axons to neurons in the upper cortex. Recall that the brain of the human infant is completely rewired between birth and three years old. By demonstration of what this means individuals have no normal recollection of those early years. From an evolutionary standpoint, it would not benefit an individual to recall the early years but that is not the reason we do not remember. Kant's objection to the Locke-Hume brain was that from a stream of sense data, knowledge could not arise without guiding principles of quality, quantity, and relation.

Only sorting sense data into principles of knowledge is exactly what the mind of the newborn seems to do. Recall the problem of the "hard" and "soft" wiring of the brain. Unlike electric wires, the axon and dendrite tubes can flow data once it is introduced, while new research shows that it is this unordered data flow through the new-born brain which modifies it. The newborn brain is non-Kantian, which is why it cannot reason, remember, analyze or determine cause from effect. But it can process the pure streams of data impinging on its senses. And it is from the data stream itself the infant child sorts the world of pure sensation and stimulation into a more orderly process of Kantian categories. Logically Kant was correct in supposing order and relation could not arise from a mere stream of sense data. Only he got his neurology wrong, because in the brain of the newborn infant it is exactly from this stream of sense data that order and relation arise. Again, this is why these early years are important. Kant's most famous book, his Critique of Pure Reason, is probably so obscure that few adult humans today could understand it. Yet, the problem he poses in the book is solved within the brains of newborn infants, between birth and three years old.

Except this issue is much debated today. Theories such as evolutionary psychology, suppose that what are roughly Kant's principles must exist preformed in the newborn mind by evolution. The argument is that the speed at which the newborn acquires skills such as language or classification of objects, or even ethic or esthetic judgments must be preformed in the brain. Only we agree that any neural function that is highly and consistently repeatable will eventually be refined as reflex. Just as in computers functions first programmed in software, such as math co-processing or speech synthesis, also get transferred to hardware once in crude terms, there is a 'market' or value-added benefit for such an enhancement. Only we must wonder how much time was available in humanity's short evolution to evolve highly complex reflex circuits. If a chimp brain has language, speech or logic modules, it would be an easy genetic instruction by paralogous evolution to multiply these circuits for humans. But significant human learning that distinguishes us from chimps, but especially language, seemed to evolve in the last few 150,000 years of human evolution. The big change of neurology that took place in that time was to the highly homologous frontal cortex, the least likely place in the whole brain to find specialized pre-wired circuits of reflex. This conforms to the general theory of this book that sudden, rapid expansion of brain bulk is best realized through the learning neurology. It also conforms to the general pattern of evolution throughout life, that novel tasks are performed first in the learning cortex. Walking among the first land animals was focused in the learning cortex, and only after millions of years did it slowly became solidified as reflex. The most complex tasks any creatures ever performed such as language or ethical judgments are hardly going to first exist in the universe as preformed hard wired reflex. Especially again, they will not form this way in the short evolutionary time that they first appeared, at an advanced saturated stage of life, in a brain that is 85% leaning capable anyway.

The other issue is that because only 100% consistent functions will be converted to reflex, we need an objective measure of what is consistent human behavior. Obviously, if human tribes are to survive, anywhere on the face of the Earth, they must do the things humans perform well, such as use language, reason, obey tribal laws or moral codes, and so on. It is precisely because humans have little instinct as reflex that they rely on language, learning and reasoning to get by. Plus they do not have natural weapons, so tribes that tried to exist as tigers, rather than humans would clearly not survive. Yet we cannot say that because an attribute, like language or moral laws is culturally consistent it is biologically consistent. Only lions in the wild that kill survive as a pride. Yet lion cubs raised in captivity must be re-taught to hunt and kill, so this is not a biologically consistent behavior among lions, though we might mistake it for one if we observed only wild lions. Similarly, a human child raised by wolves would not speak human language or reason like a human. Just as modern children raised in great adversity might never acquire the moral values or grammatical speech a privileged child would. There is even a tragic case of a child who had one eye bandaged for a minor ailment for the crucial few weeks when the eye "learns" how to see, and permanently lost sight of that eye though there was nothing genetically defective in the organ. Until this tragic case was revealed we would have said eye coordination was a genetic, consistent behavior of humans, not dependent on learning at all. People are amazed that newborns can learn language in such as short time without it being pre-wired in the brain. But many complex functions in higher mammals must be learned in a short period after birth, so why should learning to use language be any less amazing? Whichever way, language, ethics, morals and reasoning all had to be "learned" the first time within the last 100,000 odd years. It must be within a truly amazingly short evolutionary time, or a not so amazing postnatal spurt, which is a characteristic of all higher learning.

This is why we also maintain that the highest forms of knowledge, intuitive, esthetic, judgmental and moral, arise in the brain via the learning process. Take a simple cause-and-effect; a hammer striking a nail. In nature, the real world, the hammerhead is solid metal, is strikes with a certain force 'bang' on the nail, driving it into the wood. When we observe the image of this in the brain, the "connection force" is not a lump metal at velocity, but the sensitive neuron electrochemistry of the synapse. We must remember too the nature of the physical connection in our mind, because we will not always be studying hammers striking nails. We will study faint light from distant starts, we will study the trail of micro-particles in a cloud chamber, or the effects of quantum gravity. What we think we see is not always the physical process that exists. Eventually we reach a point where we do not "trust" the electrochemical synapse connection, at least without alternative verification that it is true. This is the essence of how we acquire scientific knowledge.

Only when we come to moral knowledge we are again using the same neural circuits, and the physical connection of cause to effect is in the same neurochemistry of the brain for studying physics as it is for morality. We do not rely totally on the neurochemistry for science, so can we trust it for morality?

There are several issues here. Firstly, the moral issues are more everyday type problems to humans, although they are increasingly complex. Remember, until scientists started studying nature through telescopes and discovered that planets moved in ellipses not circles, nobody was until then aware there was any problem with the neural mechanism providing accurate data: though many mistakes had already been made. But we still assume that if the brain was not evolved from the outset for science, it must have been partially evolved from the outset for moral knowledge. This is because moral knowledge also effects us physiologically, as circuits of reflex. As stated, feeling anger or love is a physiological effect. Plus this "feeling" of moral ideas creates another issue. In science, even the hammer striking the nail, the "physical force" we observe is quite separate from the mental impression in the mind. But the hammer striking is a good analogy of exactly how moral sentiments often effect us, and we cannot dismiss such forceful feelings easily. This is especially true because there is no universal consensus on how we should respond to moral feelings. Especially, morality in terms of accountability is an issue of courts of law, not philosophy. Wittgenstein, Hume, or A J Ayer all reached their conclusions prior to the Nuremberg trials as an historic, defining event in humanity's moral history, so, we must be careful about reasoning grounds for debating moral issues. This is not just the grammar of propositions, it is how humans behave.

Finally of course, there is the issue of judgment and proof.

As the saying goes 'if you have all the facts, decisions are easy'. Our science, rigorously controlled in every other facet, gets life easy here, because without all the facts nobody forces a decision on it! But in the everyday world people are continuously forced to make decisions on incomplete data. For this we must trust judgment. We have nothing else. The Theory of Options helps, by teaching that we should prioritize judgment in the direction of the least amount of facts, but even this calls for judgment of which direction that is. On the other hand we should have some faith in judgment sensibly applied, because it is part of our evolution. We evolved the neurology we did, concentrating our thinking in the imaginative learning parts of the brain. We did this so that from the myriad cause-and-effect events that we observe we can abstract from these general instances, which we can then imaginatively assume for situations not yet encountered. There is a subtle argument here. For life on Earth the Theory of Options appears a century and a half after discovery of evolution. Only the new theory does not appear because some individual dreamed it up, but because humanity has to decide what it wants the original Theory of Evolution for. We cannot be successful as a species, evolving judgment and intuition to a point where we can discover the scientific cause of our being here, only to discover via that theory that we have not evolved a reliable system of judgment and intuition!

Only there is a deeper, subtler issue here. We must remember that in a different world other than Planet Earth with all its social and moral problems, nobody outside of the specialist would care anything about how the brain worked, the correct way to form propositions, the Theory of Evolution or any other highly specialized topic. We happen to care intensely over such issues on Planet Earth however, because they impinge on the great debate over whether the human will is free, and whether humans can be held morally accountable for their actions. We care intensely about this on Planet Earth because things are not going well. There is great moral good in the world, but there is also great evil often on a massive scale. So, want to know if human actions are responsible for the bad things in the world, or if the life of our society is just something that evolves naturally, over which humans have no real control.

The argument that humans are not morally accountable has been buttressed by its supporters through various scientific and philosophical arguments over the ages. In Greek times, the Sophists argued that the world formed by chance, that there were no naturalistic laws of good and evil, and that the teachings of society about moral right and wrong merely reflected the social views of those who happened to be in power. Two centuries ago, a slightly different argument was advanced. This was that far from the world being formed by chance, every particle of existence was following a strict Laplacian trajectory through space, set once for all time. So individuals, who were composed of "nothing but" atoms in motion could be held no more morally accountable for actions predetermined from the birth of the universe than planets were morally accountable for following their fixed orbits.

In the 20^th Century however, the arguments took a different flavor. The primary one is that the brain formed by evolution, which is a mere selective process, or an algorithm, and any algorithmic process is constrained in ways that do not allow for moral choice. A second argument also this century, but it began with Hume, concerns the grammar of propositions. The idea is to destroy the moral validity of all judgmental statements by demonstrating that such statements allegedly lack propositional rigor, in the terms understood within formal logic. "Pornography is degrading" is an analytic statement. It might be a valid statement of social concern, but as formal logic the content of the statement it does not inform us of very much, apart from how the user of the term "pornography" wishes to define it, as "degrading". Now also in formal logic, all this really means is that the statement is a tautology of the class a = a. Only people who attack statements of social or judgmental concern with otherwise irrelevant issues of formal logic are not interested in logic either. They are only trying to buttress otherwise indefensible social views by whatever means. For example, one argument is that if one can expose the proposition "pornography is bad" (degrading, vulgar, evil, etc.) as an analytical proposition a sufficient number of times, then its contrary, "pornography is good" (taste, choice, freedom, etc.) can become a synthetical proposition, true by observation. Except as far as propositional logic goes, the statement "pornography is good" has no more logical value than its contrary "pornography is bad". Either way we cannot resolve issues about the social effects of pornography, or drugs or crime or pollution, by propositional logic. We have gotten into a danger here. Like the little girl who asks "Mummy, do you love me?" and the mother replies "What is love?" The little girl wants emotional reassurance and she gets instead an issue of philosophy. In society today there are many issues requiring moral judgment to decide which choices provide the most social options. But we will not examine the broadest range of options if moral concerns are dismissed on the grounds moral views cannot be expressed with due propositional rigor!

The issue concerns an inability to distinguish between judgment and proof. Clearly, if we have proof judgment is not called for, whereas if we do not have proof, we must rely on judgment. By definition the two are mutually exclusive, but some people feel it would be "better" if one could be proven from the other. This is what the Kant-Hume (they are both long dead) debate is about. Hume, apart from his Scottish iconoclasm, is searching for criteria of scientific proof. Kant is asking 'what role do morals, wisdom, and intuition play?' Or we presume this is what Kant is asking. He wrote so many books on so many topics with shifting perspectives, it is hard to pin him to a consistent line of inquiry entirely. Morals and intuition exist in all human activity, including science, only they are excluded from the final proofs of scientific theory. So, when we pose the Kantian inquiry about the role of morals and intuition, what are we pursuing? Are we talking about the grammar of propositions? Are we examining the neurology of the brain? Are we debating criteria of scientific proof? Or are we asking if judgment, intuition, and wisdom are valid attributes of thought? Kant was concerned about intuition being excluded from thinking, so he tried to prove its need through the grammar of propositions. But to even address this issue humans must first ask if the body of valid human knowledge includes ideas that cannot be reduced to propositions of fact or logic. The vast majority of thinkers contend that the extra knowledge should be included, only like Kant, they have failed to produce a "grammatical" proof of why it should be. Or like Wittgenstein, Hume, or A J Ayer, they have pointed out that such grammatical proofs are not possible within the logic of propositions.

So how does the Theory of Options handle this dilemma?

All knowledge increases options, but knowledge has a hierarchy. Knowledge that provides the most human options is scientific, so it must meet rigorous criteria of validity. This requires that scientific argument must be either analytical, as mathematical, logical or deductive proofs, or synthetical, as facts of observation or other evidence. We have seen this in the debates over evolution. There are many facts of evolution that cannot be explained so easily within current theory, and there are many philosophical or verbal models of what is wrong. Only it is difficult to state these arguments as a concise proposition, such as a mathematical equation, or an assertion of a commanding fact that can be easily checked. While apart from science in everyday situations people often do not have all the facts or logic before them, so they have to make judgment calls based on intuition, experience, or moral principle. Only it is as important to understand the neurology of judgment, as it is to understand how the brain evaluates facts and logic.

In the brain logic and observation represent optimizations of the thought processes, but the human brain is still a living organ formed by evolution. It grows, learns, matures, and interacts. Morals, intuition, judgment, taste, insight, discretion, and creativity are all adjuncts to human thought embracing the entire neural process. Moral feelings as a physiological effect of anger, shame, love or loneliness, are a reflexive reaction to a motive generated in the higher cortex, but which might be triggered from another part of the reflexive data input. We study the brain to find out how it works, and we study the grammar of propositions to understand how to rigorously express ideas. But just as the axioms of mathematics do not create the physical forces of nature, the grammar of propositions does not create the neurology of the mind. It is futile to try to derive the validity of morals from the grammar of propositions when that grammar was developed to exclude moral intuition interfering in propositional rigor!

This is why in the Theory of Options we propose a new theory of knowledge, to overcome the weaknesses in the earlier analytical theories of Hume, Wittgenstein, and A J Ayer. (See Chapter 1.4 Facts, Theories and Options.) The acquisition of knowledge is not a two, but a three-step process.

1. Establish the facts.
2. Prove non-contradiction of facts we know against situations that we hypothesize.
3. Make a choice.

Facts are synthetical knowledge. As the earlier chapter explained, facts resolve into statements of a type which can only be contradicted by other facts, but for which no contradictory statements can be established. Proof of non-contradiction is an original term for analysis, which includes mathematics, logic, reasoning and deduction. If humans were infinitely wise all proof of non-contradiction would be a tautology, just as all analytical statements are either true if they are tautology or false if they are contradictory. Thus, the statements a = a is true, and a <> a (not equals) is false, and both are analytical statements. Propositions of the type "pornography is bad" is an analytically true statement if society already agrees that the word "pornography" is the logical equivalent of "bad", but otherwise the statement has no meaning logically. However, in the new theory we do not cut off serious issues of judgment by arguments about prepositional rigor. In older philosophies, knowledge had no real purpose outside of its own perfection. But in the new theory all knowledge leads to choices, even choices over which things to believe and accept as final proofs. The purpose of knowledge is not its logical perfection but to delineate for humans what their real choices are.

As mentioned too, theories that judgmental statements had no logical value were formulated prior to World War II, and the horrors of the nazi concentration camps. Witness to these events and the judgments of the Nuremberg Trials was itself a huge infusion of knowledge for humans about how they should evaluate choice and responsibility, overriding any one philosophy. Plus it is easy to demonstrate that both analytical and synthetical knowledge are not final perfect forms of it. They are only the limits of knowledge to which humans can proceed before they must turn to the most deeply human form of knowledge, its intuitive, moral and judgmental truths.

The Theory of Options does not turn away from learning, judgment, intuition, moral principle and experience, merely for a misunderstood interpretation of the grammar of propositions. Quite the contrary, it teaches that humanity must examine its full range of knowledge, including its moral, judgmental, esthetic and intuitive knowledge, before it can properly decide, from any range of options, what its true choices really are.