From the small child and the madman you will hear the truth.
The Greek word for truth is αλήθεια (α= lack of + λήθη=oblivion).
What did you remember as a child that you forget now?
As young children, we are all philosophers. We wonder about the nature of things. We try to understand the world. We explore.
We do what Alison Gopnik (Philosopher and Developmental Psychologist) describes as high-temperature searches:
“In their quest to make sense of things, their minds explore not just the nearby and most likely, but ‘the entire space of possibilities’. Children’s thinking is less constrained by experience, so they will think even the most unlikely possibilities.
Consciousness narrows as we get older. Adults have congealed in their beliefs and are hard to shift. Children are more fluid and consequently more willing to entertain new ideas.
A low-temperature search (so called because it requires less energy) involves reaching for the most probable or nearest-to-hand answer, like the one that worked for a similar problem in the past. Low temperature searches succeed more often than not. A high-temperature search requires more energy because it involves reaching for less likely but possibly more ingenious and creative answers – those found outside the box of preconception. Drawing on its wealth of experience, the adult mind performs low-temperature searches most of the time.
Low-temperature searches are more likely to quickly lead to “good enough” hypotheses. However, the learner risks getting stuck in a “local minimum”—passing up potentially better but more unusual hypotheses that are further away from his or her initial guess.
Across many species, flexibility, brain size, and intelligence are associated with a long, protected period of immaturity—a long childhood. Human beings have the largest brains, the most flexible intelligence, and the longest childhood of any species. One explanation for this distinctive life history is that an early protected period allows young organisms to explore possibilities in an unconstrained way.“
In Nietzche’s story of the three metamorphoses, the spirit comes to the world and faces the great Dragon with all the Thou Shalt written on its shiny scales. The spirit feels awe and respect for the dragon but in realising its greatness it recognises its own inadequacies. It wishes to learn everything that it must do so it can take part in its greatness so it becomes the Camel, carrying all the ‘Thou Shalt’ of societal norms on its back.
When the camel realises it carries the burden of all the values and rules of another, it wishes to be free.
It rebels and rejects all the rules it once admired, becoming the Lion – standing against tradition and the status quo. To overcome the dragon, the Lion needs to let go of a part of itself.
But if destruction is possible, so is creation. And the Lion becomes the Child.
“The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’ For the game of creation… a sacred “Yes” is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.”
Logos eirini posits that the three metamorphoses Nietzche described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra are accessible to everyone, at any point in time.
We all see the Great Dragon, the grown-up. We fear and admire it and in our desperate efforts to become like it we transform into Camels, carrying the burden of societal norms on our back.
When one realises they carry a foreign burden, they can transform into the Lion.
The Lion represents the constant fight with the environment, a fight to regain one’s ‘Narrative Creating Power’ : Will.
Norms are narratives (both descriptive and prescriptive norms; formed by either our own observations or what we are told by ‘authority figures’), that *when cultivated* shape our perception of reality.
They help us move from hot to cold-temperature searches as we grow up and help us navigate the world.
We become more efficient, but less creative. We know more but explore less.
Isn’t the mental power of norms as narratives we reproduce underappreciated in everyday life when even young children understand to an extent the conventional nature and special force of social norms?
…children spontaneously created social norms regarding how the game “should” be played. They transmitted these with special force (using more generic and objective language) to novices, suggesting that young children understand to some degree, the conventional nature and special force of social norms in binding all who would participate.
Göckeritz, S., Schmidt, M. F., & Tomasello, M. (2014)
As Gopnik explains in this paper:
Low-temperature searches are more likely to quickly lead to “good enough” hypotheses. However, the learner risks getting stuck in a “local minimum”—passing up potentially better but more unusual hypotheses that are further away from his or her initial guess.
Across many species, flexibility, brain size, and intelligence are associated with a long, protected period of immaturity—a long childhood. Human beings have the largest brains, the most flexible intelligence, and the longest childhood of any species. One explanation for this distinctive life history is that an early protected period allows young organisms to explore possibilities in an unconstrained way.
“[The] world is … what we make of it. Once our mould for world making is formed it most strongly resists change. The psychodelics (sic) allow us, for a little while, to divest ourselves of these acquired assumptions and to see the universe again with an innocent eye.”
Humphrey Osmond, 1957
Can the TIME come to embrace uncertainty and overcome the limitations of probabilities; creating new possibilities?
The time to forget the meaning of the names we have blindly accepted and remember to ask Why again.
The time to remember we are playing a game we half-asleep consented to.
We were fired by the will to become the grown-up, the one we once feared. We put on masks and pretended to be the fear. But we have forgotten.
The real-world philosophical and practical implications of uncovering the illusion of the self lie in the feeling of awe that reminds us we are part of the universe.
We are the Universe becoming conscious.
What separates the speaking social mammal from the rest of the animal kingdom isn’t language, it’s indeed being aware of the logical system within it.
Consciousness is a practice.
‘Evil’, pain and suffering, are not ‘human nature’ but the nature humans are evolving to overcome.
The Universe is evolving through us.
Humanity’s unique potential is free will, expressed through creation outside of the limits of probabilities
– enabling new possibilities.
The question isn’t if there is free will. The question is how do we liberate ourselves from the prisons of probabilistic thinking and become free to – no longer reproduce but – create a new world?
When did you last notice the hidden marbles in the sand?
The Laughter of Time 