A speculative look into a fundamental process at a time when it is sorely lacking. And setting the stage for another initiative.
If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and reflections on reality and knowledge have menu pages above.
Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check regularily and it will be up there.
This isn't part of the ongoing streams like the arts of the West or the new positive posts - though it is connected to both. It's more of a process piece from some ideas bubbling around that and anticipation of a whole new level of challenging project to come. It's also been a bit since one of our more speculative posts - art is fantastic but these are the ones that keep us fully engaged.
We'll start with some of the things that led into another off-beat post and where we are planning on going with this.
Lead-in One - Themes of decline and de-moralization in public discourse.
This is obvious from even a cursory glance at print culture or "serious" public discourse. As simple as words per page in a newspaper. Pop entertainment was always vapid - if less satanic - but that's the de-moralization part of the problem. First you remove the moral anchor then the degeneration follows. It is possible to have elements of logos behind simple thought, but that certainly isn't the case now. Popular discourse is at a nadir of wickedness and stupidity. Literacy is poor. Base skills are non-existent.
Keep in mind that these are the beast's own numbers. One thing we have learned over the last year is that official numbers are more unreliable than even we thought.
This graph is couched in terms of educational failure which is real and typical of how the beast converts its previous crimes into opportunities for new ones. Modernity writ large is the actual problem. The whole dysgenic, manipulative, stupefying human degradation machine with it's grasping time-limited materialism and spiritual walking death. Education is just one face of that. Beast solutions always involve more bigger systems.
Systems are the cause. Declining intelligence is the real effect.
No one on either side of the spectrum disputes this. What varies is the degree of nonsense in the explanations and investment in the mythical "Flynn Effect" - when changing the criteria changes the results!
The globalists call for more of the same secular transcendence and authoritarian systems that got us here. That is because they are accelerants for the problem, not possible solutions. But their entire parasitic existence is predicated on people thinking that they're here to help. Some of their own NPCs even think they can. So every problem gets a singular cause that beast "programs" can rectify on paper. None of it is real and the problems are never solved but lots of cash is infused to fund beast priorities. That's why the causes are "necessarily" environmental or reparable with "the new eugenics" - ignore the contradiction! Beast Science! will save us.
But the beast system is a fake mouse utopia built on masturbatory lies. It's Science! is narrative service that is less predictably replicable than a coin flip. It works so long as there is abundance to bail out monstrous errors and keep everyone fat and happy. But when reality intrudes, the fake tools are as useless as the assurances of Elena in the Covenant posts.
Lin Wenjun, Symphony - Requiem
The beast can't pinpoint the cause because there is no one cause other than the conditions created by the beast system itself. Even a 200 IQ can't see where a shoebox is if it is stuck inside the shoebox.
It can only repeat it's own false assurances that lead to the same dead ends. Environmental failure is part of it. So are dysgenics home and abroad from removing environmental pressures for positive trait selection.
Ironically, making things easier is making them worse. You'd think TENS-huffers would get that. But "getting" things implies consistent truth.
Globalists need to make up single environmental factors to justify seizing power. But because the cause is fake and the power the real goal, nothing improves. But that isn't the point here. We are less interested in causes than the fact that the world is getting dumber and that that will impact thought.
Less beast-compatible sources go different directions. Generally beating their own particular one-note drum of a solution - just one that not allowable in beast terms. Anyone who can think should see the problem when a complex and real problem can't be addressed because different components signify political positions. There's nothing stopping people from reacting like that. It just means the problem won't get addressed.
Here's some more thinking - when the debate is based on false poles, walk away.
A review of an older book that identified the problem much earlier than beast sources. It is dated in some ways and has it's own ideological take, but the data is searingly relevant. And if it is true that between 1962 and 1982, the number of students who scored over 700 on the verbal SAT dropped by more than half...
Just remember that the SAT was a proxy IQ test recognized by MENSA and other bodies until the test was changed to mask declining scores.
That's correct.
See the issues around thinking?
Consider the implications of this sort of credentialism that alters an intelligence test intended to screen for advanced study. Presumably the test was set up as an IQ measure for a reason - that intelligence correlated with potential for university success. This implies it really does, but put that aside. The idea is that fitness is based on intellect. If you change the metric, you've proven that the stated criteria - intelligence - actually isn't actually a precondition of success. Then what would be a better criteria for determining aptitude for advanced studies?
Your conclusions are a test of your own thinking.
The beast muddied the water by "problematizing" intelligence. Subdividing it into imaginary categories that may or may not get imaginary weights. By changing the metric you can keep the same number until the statistical discrepancy is too much to paper over. Click for a bunch of slides overviewing this.
Howard Gardiner's nine types of intelligence is a really common model. Probably because it redefines "intelligence" as "anything you might do". It is true that this is one map of the different aspects of our mental worlds. It's not intelligence though.
Gardiner's imaginary criteria do raise one question though. Why stop at nine?
Some other counts scraped from the internet.
This points out a larger problem with the social sciences. "Researchers" fabricate a "model" to explain something, but the model somehow comes to replace the thing itself as reality.
They're still at it, although the decline makes proliferating subdivisions like "sleeping intelligence" and "nose-picking intelligence" inadequate cover for cognitive decline. Like this bit of hokum to handwave some sobering data away.
...other possibility is that IQ tests haven't adapted to accurately quantify an estimate of modern people's intelligence – favouring forms of formally taught reasoning that may be less emphasised in contemporary education and young people's lifestyles."Intelligence researchers make a distinction between fluid and crystallised intelligence," one of the study's authors, research economist Ole Rogeberg explained to The Times."Crystallised intelligence is stuff you have been taught and trained in, and fluid intelligence is your ability to see new patterns and use logic to solve novel problems."
The problem is that a high IQ is fluid intelligence and whatever else. It correlates to processing speed, not specific manifestations of it. This is one place where the mass misconception of intelligence really comes through. The ultra-high IQ gets confused with the pale, weak "nerd" - a dysfunctional personality rather than intellectual alienation. In reality, the mental and physical reaction speed of ultra high IQs is staggering - reflexes that can seem precognitive once the psycho-kinetic pattern recognition is locked in. And adaptive intellect to the point where they'll eschew formal learning because they figure it out faster in real time.
When intelligence correlates to family success, populations get smarter overall.
The Victorians used reaction time as a proxy for intelligence and were way smarter on average. Way smarter. Possibly ~14-15 IQ points - a full human standard deviation - smarter. In fact, the 20th century appears to have reversed a long trend towards more intelligence.
Modern society is moving more and more towards what we liken to Mouse Utopia. A condition where prospects of any kind are minimal, but food and entertainment are provided as the wages of compliance. And where anyone with a smidge of foresight can see collapse is inevitable even if the overseer doesn't pull the plug prematurely. Anyone at all concerned with the elites' stated interests in population reduction would be wise to ensure you're not part of the easily culled.
The "dumbing down" of society is by design. A less intelligent, more dependent populace presents less obstacles to control.
Social and political policies have favored dysgenic outcomes that are well known for generations.
The catch is that the beast system is vast and pervasive - many of its servants are unaware of the overall malevolence. Or even that they serve. So there is no shortage of well-meaning interventionists who actually serve the materialist secular transcendence of the beast system but think they're doing good. Like the ones who endlessly note and cluck about declines in "critical thinking" without ever being able to do anything.
It's fair to say that one of the few things "the left" and "the right" - two claws of the secular transcendent beast - agree on is the importance and decline of critical thinking.
Makes sense on the surface. We do need quality thinking. And a good critic is insightful, discerning - able to pick up on problems quickly. What's wrong with training minds to think their way to critical insights?
It should come as a surprise to no one that the reason so widely recognized a problem is never fixed is the same problem with secular transcendence in general.
It's fake.
Like most beast terms, "critical thinking" creates the opposite impression from the reality. Here's a hint - it's awfully close to Critical Theory. Only instead of the Frankfurt School, the demon in question was iconic a-hole John Dewey.
He's a typical post-Enlightenment mental flyweight blown to outsize influence by the intellectual limitations of most "educators". All that needs to be said of him is that his supposed "neutral" reasoning - the deontologically risable "scientific thinking" - was based on collective epistemological, moral, and ontological delusion. Baselining de-moralization and pre-damning generations... The Band has reached the saturation point with the whole retarded fiction that there is a non-faith-based "neutrality" against which metaphysics can be evaluated.
There is truth in Logos and there is the lie. The mentally-crippled masturbations of smug cretins like Dewey and his ilk serve the latter. For real. The illusion that morality is an assumption and sovereign detachment possible is a diagnosis of psychopathy. Or modern moral relativism. The only real question is if Dewey was too stupid or dishonest to face reality. We'd guess the former, but who knows. What matters is that modern education is a major component in people getting dumber. Maybe it's time to consider alternatives
Everybody's doing it got us here. Start doing otherwise.
So thinking and intelligence are are related but not the same. If we use our old Pierce semiotic terms, thinking is an index of intelligence. It is a sign that an intelligence is present.
Everyone thinks.
We aren't referring to quality of thought, just that everyone does.
Non-humans think.
Avoiding questions of self-awareness, there are neurological processes here that apply old knowledge to new situations.
Thinking is everywhere. Not surprising either. We're not getting into biology or neuroscience but it's not a big reveal that mammalian brains are cellular lattices of electrical impulses that correlate to process we call thinking. As in awareness. Animal processes are relatively simple. It's the upper reaches of human thought that really get interesting.
We need to be explicit that we are not interested in "consciousness". Not even sure we can define it. But forming that objection led us to a new idea - one we can't prove but seems interesting given our efforts to take metaphysics seriously.
Take the question of what consciousness it and how hard it is to model or pin down. The drawing alone is enough to show the prevalence of pop spirituality.
Now consider the limits of discernment from our earlier posts on entropy and the Fall. You may recall our difficulty in getting to other material world limits as well. Things like the edge of space or the smallest thing in the physical world. The dawn of time for that matter.
citrusstree, Soul leaving her body
What these all have in common is that they are points where the material level of a hierarchically-ordered ontology is coming up against the border of the transition into the metaphysical.
The ontological hierarchy has distinct levels, but it is also fully-integrated Creation. That means that there has to be "transitions" between levels of reality as well as distinctions. We suspect that consciousness is one of these places.
At some point intellect crosses into soul. At this point, empirical methods crap out.
Here's an earlier graphic of the ontological hierarchy that has the apprehensional limits at each transition marked.
Transitions levels bring out the limits of the graphic as a representation. What is depicted here spatially are are really ontological gradients. So what looks like moving "down" is really emanating "through". Sorry if the metaphors are irritating - it's just hard to characterize trans-state movement of this kind. God isn't above us physically - He's everywhere. He's beyond us ontologically.
We aren't crossing a line or ceiling - we're transitioning levels of reality.
It's just very hard to visualize or conceptualize what an ontological transition looks like. Very hard as in impossible. Not least because what it is transitioning away from is the possibility of physical semblance. Which is why we can't pin down physical things that approach the transition to the metaphysical. Like origins of space and time. Or the ultimate nature of consciousness. It's so obvious - how do we show it...
If we are correct, questions around consciousness are so elusive because they are in that class that borders on ontological transition and so disappears past discernment limits.
If this is hard to grasp, then it's serving our larger point. The intellectually constipated secular transcendent materialist Flatland that the beast pretends is reality has hamstrung fully-rendered thinking. Thinking that doesn't just define knowledge as describing material phenomena, but considers more fundamental truths that are in front of our metaphorical faces.
The beast likes to confuse metaphysics and magic - all the better to keep us wallowing in the materialist muck like Bunyan's man with the rake.
All the better to dissuade recognition of what it costs...
Transitions as limits of apprehension is also consistent with with faith as the epistemology of ultimate reality. There is a point where observation and logic simply crap out. Call it true eternity, a-temporality, unreality, the unmoved mover - the God beyond the final transition that simply cannot be apprehended directly in any way.
We have no idea how to even address what that is. We simply know we can see where it "starts".
Stay really basic. Intelligence isn't if you think - though it can seem that way. But it does set the parameters for how you think. A less intelligent population can't sustain the same range of thoughts a more intelligent one can.
Here's a helpful analogy.
A computer has a processor, working and long-term memory, uptake and output speeds, etc. Features more clearly defined than a brain, but are applicable to one in the Tolkien sense.
The clearly-defined parts of the computer simplify the less-clear elements of a brain while remaining basically truthful.
By this analogy -
The type of software you can run does depend on your hardware and network capacities - system capacities. But your system doesn't determine what software you use as long as it can handle the demands.
becomes
The type of thinking you can do does depend on your hardware and network capacities - "intelligence" - but your intelligence doesn't determine what you think as long as it can handle the demands.
Intelligence is in quotes because it is a complicated term that needs unraveling. For now note how every complex problem is greeted with facile, one-dimensional answers.
Magical thinking aimed more at soothing distress than solving problems.
The prevalence of this is a sign of diminished ability to think.
Now, whatever infernal intelligences sit at the head table can think. So one might ask what sort of macro system is built on an increasingly shrill, incontinent, detached, and dim population?
The answer is why we are encouraging you to think of ways to not be in the wake when this giant wheezing satanic calliope finally plunges into the abyss.
Along with the luciferian follies of "critical thinking" comes innumeracy on most basic level. It is true that the phone calculator can handle puzzlers like 30% off. But good golly even rudimentary statistics are a bridge too far. Even guesstimating brings the dry-mouthed fear and explosive failure of bomb defusing in oven mitts.
Funny, since guesstimating was the one thing all the boomertastic New Maths were supposed to teach.
But who cares if the children's future thought is compromised? Best to keep sending them to a sociopathic globalist indoctrination studio for "socialization"? And they wonder why we have so much contempt for them. The fact that they complained about the degeneration means they knew! It makes participation compliance.
It was deliberate.
This brings us to a major problem - the power of words vs. judging by the fruits.
Beast dancing is based on capering through forms rather than responding to material reality. Consider this emphasis on schooling we've noted. Consider how much time you were stripped from family and subjected to luciferian mind control. Now consider how much you learned for the time wasted and abuse endured. There was no development of the mind. Just mindlessly clocking hours on things that make us functionally unemployable without... more schooling.
And now consider that all this schooling has left many without even a sense of what 'a big number' of something world-wide means for threat assessment.
The way the entire covid narrative collapses with the simple grasp of what the number of cycles for an accurate PCR test means.
Think about that for a moment.
If abstraction this crude is frightening and opaque, why do we care about "schools" or "teachers"? Why is there a cent for them?
Put another way - numeracy was systematically removed from "education" and no one did anything other than whine that their kids can't add. It's disgusting. How many pulled their children from the system, reoganized their materialist, beast-fellating lives to make it doable, and ensured that vital skills weren't lost? Even remediated? Or protested, organized tax resistance, anything rather than bitch as demons abused the children in plain sight?
But if you don't burn you most vital years in the brainwashing pit you can't have a chit. And the chit is admission to the Beast-Huffers' Ball! Without it, no tiny urban condo and soulless ratrace for you! And no pusher in a white coat peddling drug-addled waking death to cope with the existential void where a soul should be.
The most damning part is how it worked out. All the assurances about chits have us on the brink of systemic collapse. Not least because of collective deficiencies in thinking. The lesson is that the beast isn't trustworthy {gasp}. You reap what you sow. But then again, think of the free time to chase cash when someone else raises your children. Moloch and Mammon unite!..
The power of words and the absence of thinking go hand in hand.
Lead-in Two - Epochal minds
Our Arts of the West posts ran into Leonardo da Vinci and confronted us with a mind of sufficient potency to be archetypal. This was really interesting, though of limited appeal for reasons that will become clear. There were also a ton of problems and assumptions in the idea of paradigm-defining intelligences that got us pondering. Not the least is defining intelligence.
Mana Morimoto, Newton, embroidered photo
It's easy to see someone like Newton standing out when you can look back in time. But what about closer in time and or less lofty? The problem with connecting thinking with intelligence is that it just brings a new term to define.
Genius is another one of these terms that gets thrown around a lot without much consideration - often as a euphemism for smart people. But there has to be something to the idea of genius that sets it apart. There is a push in popular sites to link it to an IQ score - usually something ridiculously low for "genius" like ~140. Rare enough in the population, but a sad bar for genius.
Here's Webster's. It's easy to see that it is a term with a lot of applications.
The connection between spirit and high intelligence is that people used to credit brilliance in something with a divine gift. Think "enlightenment".
A couple of things. Keep in mind that the "average" in America isn't actually 100. Most sources have it at 98. Which isn't a huge difference on an individual level, but is big for a population. And professors are hardly cognitive elite. Consider this research, including the following for lofty Cambridge University faculty.
"The scores range from 110 to 141 with a mean of 126.5 and a standard deviation of 6.3 points".
In other words, pompous midwits who are literally not smart enough to undertake the sort of knowledge building work they claim. Which is how we get things like global warming and covid lockdowns. It also means that because of the 2 SD psychometric gap in communication faculty are literally not smart enough to even understand the extremely intelligent. We'd say imagine extending extending this piffle to a 200 IQ like Chris Langan, but the problem is that most can't even see the disconnect that is there.
It's a cognitive dissonance thing for the masses that universities not only aren't where the exceptionally smart art. Universities actively drive the most intelligent away. And as bloat continues to drop average ability levels, this gets worse.
The history of genius shows that connection between intelligence and spirit.
Roman fresco from the lararium of the house of Iulius Polybius (IX 13,3) in Pompeii
Roman religion was a complex mix of major and minor deities and spirits. In Roman religion, the genius is the individual instance of a general divine nature that is present in every individual person, place, or thing. The genius of a place was known as the genius loci. The genius of a person corresponded more or less to the soul or Greek daemon.
A lararium was a decorated household altar where the different religious obligations were carried out. The lares hold the torches on the outside while an ancestral genius - spirit of the family - is in the middle. The tiny figures would be the personal genii of family members and the snake represents the genius loci or spirit of the physical place. All require proper care to bring good fortune.
Genius of a Roman Official Wearing a Toga, 1st century (Julio-Claudian), bronze, silver inlay, Walters Art Museum
This is a representation of the genius of a person. Romans believed that everybody had one.
Votive inscription to Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the Genius loci by Caius Candidinius Sanctus, Signifer of Legio XXX Ulpia Victrix on behalf himself and his own (legion) during the consulate of Maternus and Atticus (185 AD). Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
The genius loci was the spirit of a place and was often represented by a serpent. It could also just be evoked by name.
The symbol of the genius carried into more modern times but without the Roman religious beliefs. Rather than a reference to everyone and thing it got restricted for exceptional ones. An individual of particular gifts or a special place.
This brings in the connection with special gifts or abilities.
François-Édouard Picot, Study and Genius Reveal Ancient Egypt to Greece, 19th century, oil on canvas, Louvre
Here's an allegorical picture with genius in the guise of inspiration with the torch and hard work. It's the two together - the intellectual leaps and sustained effort that build knowledge - of the past in this case, but anywhere really.
G. M. G. Monti, Genius of the Fine Arts, first half of the 19th century, marble, Biblioteca Bonetta
And a statue connecting the genius to achievement in the fine arts. Note that this isn't an area we would equate with pure intellect - Leonardo notwithstanding. Most great painters were smart, but their success was due more to inspiration and technical skill than brute intellectual force.
It's easy to see the idea of genius as an inspired gift leading to the multiple forms of intelligence we started this post with. But that would miss the point that the historical notion of genius != extreme intellect. It is accomplishment. Brilliance... manifest. And this seems important for any worthwhile definition of the term.
The Band would argue that a true genius has to do something... genius worthy. This does require a certain degree of intelligence, but at the same time there are plenty of very smart people that accomplish very little. There have also been breakthroughs by people who weren't necessarily the smartest. It's a sliding scale
Andrew Judd, Genius, 2009.
Not all high intelligences accomplish much. Not all breakthroughs from ultra-high intelligence.
Genius has to consist of achievement + intellect on some sort of scale.
It is an unfortunate reality that very high intelligence does not correlate to career success. Very high intelligence is poorly understood and a large enough outlier might as well be a foreign language speaker. Alienation and struggle cuts both ways. Beyond a certain point, meaningful communication breaks down - roughly 2 SD or 30 points gets most often used. Idiots like to quibble of course because they can comprehend neither how alienating IQs north of 150 are or how differently you see the world. People assume you're just faster. You are, but as the number of connections grows, the depth of perception increases geometrically.
You use the same words, but the connotation chains and therefore meanings are different.
Like irony?
Here is a classic example of someone who isn't very bright opining in utter ignorance about a shelf top that they can't see. Reading the inanity of their argumentation and trying to imagine how it could accomplish what they think it does is ironic proof of the IQ gap. They are literally too stupid to talk to because they are cognitively incapable of grasping the reality of extraordinary intelligence. And how painful fools like this are. Keep in mind, this is Discover magazine. Itself a proxy IQ test. Beast Science! for the functionally retarded. Of course, when "genius" is a mighty 140...
Note how people who would be apoplectic about "appropriating other voices" in some contexts have no qualms spewing distorting idiocy about intelligence.
There is real anti-intellectual institutional bias - otherwise the faculty IQ at leading universities would be standard deviation or two higher and the institutional culture totally different. Then there's the fact that the extremely intelligent are often disinterested in mass diversions or animal materialism. Their priorities and reward structures are different and psychometric communication gaps mean they can't explain why being alone in a cabin is preferable to being head of an organization.
So when judging genii we are looking at more than a single attribute. It's better to think of ceilings and floors - what looks like genius has to have a minimum intelligence to happen.
Barry Levinson, Rain Man, 1988
Of course savants raise more complications. But we're not trying to define what intelligence is. Just that it is a factor in determining genius and the nature of thought.
By this measure, an Epochal mind would be the extremity of genius with intelligence and achievement maxed out.
That reminds us how different our epochal minds are. All are intuitively logical, but express their grasp of reality differently. Aquinas is primarily textual, Leonardo visual, and Newton quantitative in how they "think". They all write extensively and all easily operate in all the knowledge domains of their day, but each has a natural comfort mode for structuring their thoughts.
Even before we have a picture of what intelligence is, we see it varies. Even at the highest levels.
Lead-in Three - Refining the ontological hierarchy and vertical logos
Tackling this recurring theme keeps us sharp. What started as a simple way to show the interplay of ontology and epistemology has turned into a surprisingly powerful accounting of reality. Each time we have to accommodate a challenge, we have to think about it. And that gets us thinking about our relation to reality. And that's what thinking basically is.
No need for a long treatment of this lead-in since we're always working on it. Click for a recent overview post of the ontology hierarchy. Here's the version with deontological relationships worked in but the transitions left unelaborated.
Right now we are mainly thinking about the transitions between levels and limits of discernment. They are too abrupt in the diagram. But whatever the focus, there's no way to break down what we can know and how we can know it without raising the parameters of thinking.
Lead-in Four - Christopher Langan
Epochal minds and ontological hierarchies led to a chance encounter with the thought of Christopher Langan - perhaps the world's highest living IQ. His score is between 195 and 210 - the accuracy of IQ testing breaks down at the extremes - but he would appear to be in the horsepower class of a Leonardo or a Tesla in the 20th century. That is on the absurd edge of brute intellectual firepower.
There is a ton of hokum around famous smart people - Einstein may be the most overrated genius ever and Hawking's rep is aging about as well as he did.
Still, even with beast numbers at face value you can see what an outlier Langan is.
There are issues around IQ that need addressing, but put them aside for now. It's as good a proxy for general brainpower that we have. And Langan is a cognitive beast. A child of poverty and disfunction, his mental feats distinguished him from childhood. Compare this to the youthful activity of the Madame Toussaud's dummy with the Speak and Spell and it will become obvious.
To put it in terms a more average reader can grasp, Langan easily assimilated Hawking's life work into his larger intellectual framework. The problem is that even if his score is correct, an over 40 point gap means Hawking isn't smart enough to fully grasp what Langan can do. And no one else in the department at Cambridge (if the numbers are accurate) is smart enough to see the difference. And because almost no one can get Langan, he exists in semi-obscurity - known for otherworldly psychometrics and unreal mental feats.
But his larger intellectual framework dwarfs the assumptions of academic physics. You just need the firepower to see it. That and the ability to function in different knowledge domains and discourses simultaneously.
Of course, a figure like this undercuts the beast system's need to present intellect as somehow unmanly and weak. That self-hating emasculate "geeks" are somehow signifiers of intelligence. It is true that we sort children by kinetic or mental interest. This is part of the misconception of intelligence. The classical Greek ideal sought full development of body and mind. Langan exemplifies that.
Just your run-of-the-mill bodybuilding guitarist with a 200 IQ...
He's described the advantage of his extraordinary mental speed in learning to fight and spent 20 years as a New Jersey bouncer. All the while developing a "theory of everything" of vast scope and complexity. It's worth noting Leonardo was also known for bizarre physical strength and wide-ranging skills.
Our interest in Langan was initially piqued as proof-of-concept. We wrote two posts on Leonardo where we hypothesized that an IQ in the 200 range would naturally perceive the interrelation of ontology, epistemology, and morality. Realizing that there was a living person with an intellectual project that shows just that was nice to see.
Then we looked closer into that intellectual project - on the surface it's more ambitious but not totally at odds with the Band is doing. That is, rethinking assumptions about the nature of reality and our place in it. We come from very different angles - Langan assimilates entire knowledge domains and spins them into a moving conceptual meta-structure where he can establish logical parameters. The Band starts with simple observations and chains implications outward into a moving conceptual meta-structure where the possibilities of knowing become clear.
The problem is that we don't agree.
Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) is also familiar in that it is hard to categorize. It's generally considered a "Theory of Everyting". That is, an accounting for every physical property in the universe. We are not attempting anything like that. But we are observing how ontology, epistemology, and morality interact in structural ways. Not what the formulas for the physical universe are, but why formulas are epistemologically inadequate for metaphysical foundations.
There are times when starting at the most basic level is clarifying. The idea that ontological questions can be conclusively answered through quantitative description is a category error.
And if the goal is a quantitative construct that emulates abstract processes that reality already does... Numerology is fun, but not ultimately practical.
Of course physics is only one of Langan's puzzle pieces. Because there is an internal, subjective projected component to his account as well. Something resembling the mutual construction of the self through Lacanian gazes or the meeting of subjectivity and objectivity in textual hermeneutics. The mutually-constituting self and universe conform to a sort of meta-conception of "language" and form a self-contained "supertautology" defined by closure, consistence, and comprehensiveness. Click for his website and the linked paper describing CTMU in detail.
The problem - why we are so uncharacteristically tentative in our description - gets us back to thinking and intelligence. Langan's writing is so densely packed with information. Entire domains are treated like data points and thrown into conceptual matrices. To use the computer analogy, his processor and RAM can hold so much that it is difficult to clearly see the structure beneath the noise.
At a glance anyhow.
We won't say anything about CTMU yet, other than we perceive familiar red flags. And that we will attempt to explain why in a future post. But trying to see something of this scale can't be done in an intuitive flash. We need to break the picture down systematically and maintain at least a ghost image of the overall whole that each piece is part of.
JohnScottGFX, Light From A Blinding Sun
This leads to a problem we have alluded to without really taking up. Engaging the mental world of someone on this level on his terms is like staring at the sun.
The volume of information flows and the number and spread of the connections is short-circuiting for someone who visualizes intangibles. How does someone approach an intellect ~7 SD above the mean when 2 SD is an incommensurable comprehension gap and the gulf between chimp and human average looks ~ 3-4 SD?
As comfortable as we are with the dance of arcane information streams, Langan can work with way more than we can hold at a time. We have to become sequential when he can remain holistic. Our lesser intelligence leaves us with a smaller capacity, and when at the outer limits like this, means we are thinking differently. So how do we deal with this theory?
On a practical level there are two paths to conjoin. First, intelligence - however measured - is unevenly distributed. A baseline can be outside his gap and still have some domains that scrape the bottom of it.
Second, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to notice that "the Band" - in name and pronouns - is collective. Bring more than one of these domains on-stage and there is a path forward. Let's see where it goes.
On a more abstract level, even considering challenging someone this smart raises questions of intelligence and wisdom.
Both are overall positive mental attributes associated with mental fitness and are sympathetic. But they're very different. Sort of quantitative - speed and power - and qualitative - truthfulness and insight. They work best together, but seeing one without the other is everywhere.
To use the computer analogy, intelligence would be the system specifications and wisdom would be the quality of the code. An analogy Vox Day uses that is simpler but more perfect for this context is a gun. With intelligence the caliber and wisdom the aim. Direction and horsepower.
Compare a squirrel skipping over the treetops from a road to a rive and a skidder cutting a road partway through. Which one expended more horsepower? Which one knows you can get to the river?
In any way, the Band can testify to the uselessness of racetrack mental speed and fruit fly wisdom.
Those are the big lead-ins that got us thinking about thinking. A bunch of semi-related things leading to the realization that we need to address Langan. And here we are.
So start with a few things we can say from the above - other than the range and variety of types of thinkers. Thinking is relational and temporal. It unfolds in time and it pertains to something, meaning it is identifying that against some other thing(s). This also means thinking is processual. A process. And the quality of the process is related to intelligence - in that higher intelligence makes qualitatively better thought possible. But it isn't the same.
Aristotle and Phyllis, 1527, carved bench end from the Abbey Church of Montbenoît, Franche-Comté
This popular medieval legend was an apocryphal tale of the great philosopher humiliating himself out of sexual lust for a beautiful courtesan. The moral was that even the smartest can be overcome by desire.
The larger lesson for anyone is that emotion clouds our judgment.
We have to deal with subjective leanings and emotional disruptions as well as external limits of discernment. But that shouldn't be that hard to do. Ideas like 'emotions cloud thoughts' and 'we can only see so far' aren't that conceptually difficult.
So what is thinking? Why is it so badly accounted for in beast models?
The first problem is that it's triggering. Because thoughts are invisible - sort of - and "being smart" is rated "good" in beast society, people have illusions about intelligence that they don't with say height. Or even something like speed or strength that isn't measurable at a glance but is easy to find out.
A dwarf wouldn't argue with a couple of giants about what's on top of a cabinet if they're looking down on it and he can't see. Unless they're on the internet. Because it's obvious.
He has to rely on their description.
Intelligence is the same thing, but you can't see it. And because of the psychometric gap, the suddenly- defensive dwarf can't see the height difference either. But the giants can. So when they try and discuss the cabinet, they trigger crowds of embittered, insecure dwarves and their risible misconceptions of what intelligence is.
It's why media presentations of intelligence are so terrible. The writers can't understand it and don't know it when they do encounter it. It's why we get "smart" kids in suits speaking like pretentious adult mid-wits.
Minkus from Boy Meets World is just one example.
The problem is that these inane caricatures make life more difficult for the actually intelligent. Raising another lesson - one tied into the occult posts on glamour.
People who have taken the beast's dancing lights for reality can only think through media archetypes.
Consider that t.v. is manipulative, morally inverted, and clearly dishonest. The prevalence of media may be the largest reason for the decline in national discourse and intelligence. Watching it is a litmus test for wisdom. But that is just the start. Thought and intelligence are kneecapped by the systemic misunderstanding and terrible proxy measures we've been talking about. School may be the worst.
The desire to avoid responsibility and guilt at the same time is a sure sign of a fallen world. We've seen over and over that people will cling to the most preposterous lies - even feed their children to the beast - rather than give up some perks. And you don't need Langan's IQ to simply consider the designers and overseers.
Mass schooling has always been terrible. Same with mass anything. Beast dancers love bleating about the model when the real factors are human capital.
Any mass solution is substandard relatively. How poor is absolute terms depends on parents, students, and staff. But if you love your kids, take responsibility for their formation. Let the beast prey on other victims.
Even if mass education could operate with sincerity and actually try to meet its goals, the outcome is impossible. The nature of the system means that curriculum has to be measurable, attainable, and comprehensible for the masses. How does one engage an IQ four or five SD above the mean? Let alone seven? The reality of intelligence collides with the comforting fictions of ideology. Triggering ensues.
It does require a certain kind of cognitive fitness or mental floor to do well. But above a certain point it becomes mind-numbing. But we've already mentioned the old water torture. Consider that the average self-made millionaire has an IQ around 120. And this brings us to the addition of new fake "intelligences".
EQ or "emotional intelligence" is a big one. It's not new but it used to be called empathy or sensitivity. It does correlate to job success. But it is non-quantifiable and unrelated to what "intelligence" traditionally meant.
This brings us back to the old beast games of credentialism and magical thinking. That you can change the definition of something and not change the outcome. Sort of like changing the qualifier for the Olympic track team from timed trials and minor meets to knitting speed. You could even keep the same uniforms but the team will have very different attributes.
Emotional intelligence is a parallel but different trait set. Both empathy and real intelligence go into intuition, but they aren't the same. There is a floor that is needed for processing and interpreting non-verbal cues, learning from experiences, and making predictive connections successfully. But it's just a floor and not a high one.
Kinesthetic "intelligence" is even faker because it involves more nebulous and undefinable properties.
There is such a thing as being physically gifted. It's even further from cognitive power than emotional sensitivity.
It actually makes more sense to simplify the nonsense beast term into something closer to reality. The Band is referring to kinetic or physical manifestations of specifically cognitive processing power. It's complicated because it brings together purely physical and mental attributes. Body composition has little to do with smarts (beyond training protocols), but fast-twitch muscle percentage, coordination and agility, skeleto-muscular structure, etc. are physical gifts. They are distinct from the mental speed and flexibility associated with IQ
To extend the computer analogy, this would be the robot body.
At the same time, processing speed also matters. We already mentioned how the Victorians used reaction time as a proxy for intelligence before IQ testing and it holds up pretty well. Because reflexes are by nature not conscious movements, you rule out a lot of psychological and personality confounders and get a pretty clean measure of cognitive speed.
Anyone who has engaged in any kind of sport knows that reaction speed and visual tracking are where intelligence crosses into physical performance. It's why you have distinctions like speed vs. quickness - how fast a body reacts in a small area vs. how fast top end.
Then there's
It's old mascot Prof. X Foucault with some nonsense clouds that we can safely ignore but do muddy up intelligence and thinking. Intelligence for the mix of triggering and psychometric gap we were discussing before. Thinking because discourse is secular transcendent and therefore ontologically and epistemologically stillborn. It's designed to make Truth impossible to even look for from the jump. Hard to think usefully when consideration of reality is ruled out a priori.
We saw out of it.
George Grie, Lost City of Atlantis, digital art
But it wasn't easy.
The reality is that mass education can't teach thinking - critical or otherwise - because it's not really designed to. There are tons of types of learners, meaning tons of types of thinkers. Tons of quirks and neuroatypicals and along the spectrum types, functional mental illness, outliers of every kind.
And when things are so chaotic, do as usual and go back to basics.
Simple cause and effect.
It implies a world comprised of sense datum that supports apparently stable correlations between elements in it.
If we consider thinking as a temporal relational process it is more than recognition. Cause and effect is a simple two-step logic that assumes consistent and stable relations in the physical world. At the most basic level then, thinking is connecting bits of information. With one qualifier - it's conscious. Neural networks are continually connecting pieces of information - even when we're asleep. We aren't dismissing dream vision and other sorts of subconscious thought and both of these cross into conscious awareness. At which point they become thought.
We aren't interested in trying to pin down the subconscious other than to note the internet tells us it's connected to icebergs and random number generation.
Seriously, it is real. It's just vague in ways that don't fit a discussion of thinking.
Theorists can't even agree on the number of Venn circles. This is because they are trying to systematize a description of something that is pervasive and unsystematic.
We'll treat the subconscious as one of those things that impacts conscious thought without being the same as it.
Thinking as conscious connections sounds trivial, but when you... think about it... connecting buts of information encompasses everything from the racoon with the latch to the layers within layers of CTMU. Neuroscientists are fixed on how the electrical flows through neural networks turn environmental inputs into the stuff of thought. This seems interesting but vaguely pointless. Because it's just refined description. And it's likely that we are butting up against another metaphysical boundary.
Petrus van Schendel, Divine Inspiration, 1844, oil on canvas, private
The ultimate origin of thought looks like the ultimate origin of consciousness - something running up into ontological transition. Thoughts aren't physically tangible, but they are a phenomenon in the material world. Better understanding how the brain works will allow us to better predict why we act the way we do, and perhaps help deviants.
But it has no more to say about where thinking originates then understanding muscle contraction defines the meaning of life. Always differentiate the claims and desires from the outcomes. Real or potential.
Recurring limits of origins leads back into the problems of our finite-fallen natures that we discussed in earlier posts. The world and all its possible connections is far too vast to dream of grasping and we are too "short" to see vertically. And while temporal reality runs on causal connections, the darkling glass - valley of shadow cloud over clear seeing makes applied abstract thinking imperfect. Blurry patterns and limited data sets meet countless chaining butterfly effects.
Then there's the problem of belatedness. Not in the Nietzschean sense that history makes us feel small as latecomers. That's the gamma timorousness of that keyboard warrior shining through the transparent tough talk. But that no matter how big we are, we always come into something way bigger than us that is already going on. From the moment of first awareness we are playing catch-up with something always over the horizon. Trying - trying to piece out something holistic that is ongoing and all around.
Life opens in medias res
We understand connections by contextualizing them, but context is more belated connections. From the outset, our world views form as part of a larger world and in the terms of that larger world. Either positively or negatively. Consistencies like object permanence, the laws of physics, etc. do more than teach us that the material world is causally predictable, if somewhat murky and practically uncertain. Our thoughts are temporal and inherently relational - where and against what background this unfolds matters. Which means one more place with general commonalities and endless individual variation. Sort of like humanity...
Other than being temporal and relational, what other generalities apply to thinking? Here's an important one, with downstream implications for the Langan project
Is non-linguistic thought possible?
It depends how you define language.
If we are thinking designated human languages like English or Java the answer is obvious. You learned whatever languages you speak, so that connections were happening before you had the words to verbalize them - even internally.
A better question, and one more relevant to CTMU is if non-representational thought is possible?
The border between language and picture is a pictogram. Standardized denotation like a word but no syntax or grammar to standardize expression,
We'd say no. Thinking is connective and therefore relational. Therefore it must include mechanisms for subject distinction and identification. And the very act of identifying something to think about is representational, regardless how.
Reiterating that thinking is temporal. Thinking "about something" implies temporal sequential processing. Not surprising, since all human experience is temporal. But it clarifies why we can't think our way to ultimate origins no matter how highly we think of ourselves.
The inherent limitations of temporality preclude conceptualizing
ultimate reality qua ultimate reality.
It's the Elena-Hile Troy problem from the Land. No matter how much she praises him up, she has no control over the outcome and therefore her opinions and assurances are irrelevant. Her material limits preclude the ability to touch Foul's abstract reality.
Attempting to conceptualize a timeless state with a temporal vehicle is more futile.
A way to try and picture it that doesn't involve having to grasp shifts between levels of reality is to imagine contextualizing a box - in any way - when sealed inside the box.
The thinking outside the box metaphor you often hear refers to man made limits. Organizational or social boundaries. Not a condition that contradicts the essential quality that makes thinking even possible.
The problem of "True" eternity in ultimate reality is something we've become increasingly aware of. Not the infinite in a mathematical abstract sense. The created finite nature of material reality means that endless quantities like infinity the "number" or eternity as years literally without end only exist as abstractions. Still real, just a step "up" from the material.
Go back to the hierarchy because it's clearer with a visual.
Start - we have a fallen, finite - in terms of empirical limits - material world that we inhabit at the bottom. Conceptual absolutes - like infinity or eternity - can't actually be observed. They're too "big". They are abstractions - more pure, less material.
Think about transitioning metaphysical states like origins of consciousness. It looks like this is another way to picture it - mathematically instead of verbally. Ask yourself this -
How does a number line actually go from tallying physically tangible quantities to literal infinity?
Not in symbolic notation like an arrow on the end of a number line. The real crossing from a count to the infinite.
Consider - quantity to infinity is a conceptual continuum mathematically. But how do you see the whole of it in the same material, empirical, sensory terms of the starting quantities?
You can't. Somehow it crosses out of material reality. And you can only represent it with a symbol.
This is illustrative but not the main point. What matters here is that abstract things that we can't perceive materially are concievable in material terms. We don't need to be able to see a calandar with no end or a number line without limit to get what it is. It can be expressed imperfectly within the terms of our fallen, finite, material intelligences.
The same does not hold for ultimate reality.
The break between abstract and ultimate reality represents an limit of empirical and logical discernment. Which is why the idea of rational, as in non-mystical theology inherently incapable of insight into God qua God. At best it's symbolic permutations of the semiotic vehicle He made Himself known through. That is, not Him.
Logic can tell us it's "there", but not what it "is". The verb isn't even really relevant. Theologically, it conforms to the Fall - the absence of certainty in our perception of the material world. If limitlessness & certainty are ceilings for the material, what blocks the transition to the ultimate?
Pretend that isn't an impossible question. One thing would be temporality or the applicability of essentially temporal sequencing to... anything, really. "True" eternity - the condition of timelessness - is not concievable the way infinity can be thought of as a count that keeps going. There is no "ing" - the gerund implying something ocuring right now. As in in time. Temporally. We can't picture it, but can describe the transition from abstract to ultimate reality and where temporality-compliant absolutes like infinity cross into true timelessness.
We've come to think this absolute-ultimate transition is critically important to conceptualize the relationship between God and creation in a more sophisticated way than "faith". We can see the implications for epistemology - but can't even begin to picture what non-temporal thought would be.
It's become clear that we the limits of discernment and transitions between states need to be worked out better. But if thinking as we understand it is relational connections temporally sequenced, "reasoning" in any way our way to God is inherently contradictory. Aquinas was right. There is a place that requires a different way of knowing.
We can think about material and abstract reality since they are temporally comprehensible. This is where we can make the connections that comprise thought. And since temporal reality is causally driven, thinking maps onto reality - it becomes accurate - when the mental connections align with the real causal ones. The way we think isn't the same as ontological causality but it is homologous. Close enough to apply abstract direction to a fallen materiality.
Intelligence sets the size and resolution of the causal matrix that can be encompassed with cognitive connections.
It's not thinking, but how "big" the thoughts can potentially be. How many parts, connections, pieces, levels, etc.
This impacts the nature of the thought by determining the type of relational constructs that are possible and what they can tie together.
To continue the computer analogy, raw intelligence corresponds to the hardware/system specs - processor speed, memory, data uptake, etc. It determines how big a program the system can run, not what programs you choose. Thoughts are like software - endless variations of subject under a performance ceiling.
These are symbiotic in that increasing the number of connections changes the qualitative nature of the thought as well. The more and different types of things that can be connected, the more comrehensive and nuanced the idea. A ToE connects everything, at least in potential. Because every "thing" - object, idea, memory, impression, anything you can connect - comes with it's own forest of connections. Associations, meanings, connotations, with the only limit being the number you can be aware of at one time. That is, intelligence determining the extent of the thought.
The graphic isn't bad if you imagine it as being in more than three-dimensions. The important thing is that increasing intelligence increases the potential connections in a more-than-linear way. Stacking networks of cross-thematic connections means increases in intelligence increase the generic potential for thought more geometrically or logarithmically. Some more rapid expansion anyhow - it isn't quantifiable that way.
Now look a little closer at "things" - as in the things we identify and connect when thinking. We're not even touching ontological distinctions here and staying as general as possible. Literally anything we can conceive of. Just the number of concepts and linkages. What does this look like in practice?
At the most basic level we have the simple cause and effect pattern recognition and other associative thinking seen in animals that we've already mentioned.
Human thinking is processed through complex linguistic and other representational structures. It has levels of abstraction and self-reflexivity - even in the most obtuse - that are inherent to the fully-formed human brain. If it were possible to pin down the transition into the metaphysical - the soul - it is probably around here. But we digress. Leave it at this - the Band is surprisingly undecided on the question of animal souls and there is a uniquely human thought continuum that we are interested in.
Start with the simplest human cognitive connectivity. Old bête noir binary thinking.
This is simple either-or thinking, and like most problems isn't inherently bad. Many things are yes or no situations. Sometimes a multiplicity of options hide a single fundamental choice.
Here's some irony -
People who universally dismiss binary thinking are engaging in binary thinking.
It becomes a problem when binary patterns are applied to complex situations that don't resolve into a higher-order polarity. Like what do you want for dinner?
The Band has called binary thinking a modern plague because it's so often misapplied and not because it's always wrong. Orange man bad is an especially simple-minded version of it because it reduces complicated scenarios and imperfect information into a reductive fake moral binary. Fake because there is no actual deontological grounds for the judgment. Just a mixture of negative impressions also reduced into an inappropriate good/bad binary. It's not even a question of "right" or "wrong" in the conventional sense of "being the correct answer to a question". It doesn't even apply. It's a thought pattern that is too simplistic to map onto the subject in question and categorically can't offer any insight. Therefore it is wrong in the practical sense of being misleading and less than useless as a result.
Put it in terms of thinking as making connections, the binary pattern looks like this.
Easy to see how reducing inherent complexities to binaries is distortion to the point of error.
The simplicity of the structure and the fact that certain fundamental things are either-or explains why the very intellectually limited can be very moral. They do need clear precepts that are consistently followed in stable contexts. But if given these, they can follow general rules that incline towards black and white.
Raise the complexity and you get what the Band calls a linear thinker. Someone who can see the figurative shades of gray or fuzzy edges around binary structures, but still approaches complex things from a bi-polar structure.
Shades of gray is a good metaphor. Came across this guy who calls it "directional thinking". It's a similar continuum-based expansion of the simple binary.
The important thing to remember as we complicate the connections is that more complex structures add onto simpler ones. They don't replace them. Being able to see that some things are more varied does not prevent making a binary judgement when one is appropriate. It means you aren't trapped in one when it isn't.
What does linear thinking look like in terms of connection making?
The notion of continuum and the retention of either-or.
Think about how blurry the entropic fallen world with it's limits of discernment and uncertainties in real measurement. Then think about the presence of abstract absolutes that allow us to draw conclusions and morally reason. Linear thinking is objectively a more accurate fit for those conditions.
Next up in complexity is multi-linear thinking. This refers to seeing more that one pair of possibilities around a given thing.
This isn't a bad graphic except it's too flat. Imagine the connections in multiple "dimensions" and you get a better picture.
Coming back the the intelligence - thinking relationship. Whether you can think in a multilinear way, how many connections you can make, and how broad a scope are all factors of intelligence. Whether you do is wisdom.
Multiple variable thinking is where you start seeing interactions between oblique and tangential things, chains of causality, and all sorts of other patterns. If we use our computer model with intelligence as the system specifications, we can think of thinking as a balance between breadth and resolution. If we want granular intensive analysis, we have to narrow the scope. A big picture view is necessarily limited in detail.
The more breadth and detail the brain can hold, the more complex patterns become visible.
Keep in mind - just as an inadequate computer can't run too large a program, a mind needs a certain level of intelligence to even see the lattice of connections. A complex explanation of a multi-linear problem requires too much storage and processing. It doesn't compute and the information content becomes equivalent to the Charlie Brown teacher. This is the communication gap we were discussing earlier, only visualized in terms of cognitive computing power and connection-making.
But it gets worse. Multilinear thinking is multi-variable but still linear. It's still constrained by existing structures, making it hard to recognize paradigm-shifting problems and errors.
Visualize. Only 2D but so is the screen. Lots of pieces and lines making an intricate patterned structure.
If you're stuck with the pre-existing lines you can illuminate the pattern. Find unexpected beauty and insight. But you're still stuck with the lines you received.
Capable of complex thinking but still pre-programmed in ways on a higher level. This brings us just beyond the upper levels of the midwit discourse zone - a couple of standard deviations of IQ above the mean. Significantly above average but not extraordinarily smart - this is where your professors actually are. ~120-130 depending on faculty. Billionaires come in a little higher on average - ~130-140.
Makes sense when you think about it - smart enough for complex thought, but inside or near the communication gaps for both the average person and highly intelligent quants, strategists, etc. This isn't new. What is new is that looking at connections further clarifies why this zone is optimal for success within the system. The multi-linear thinker performs complex thought but in preexisting chanels. This means that their insights are beyond an average mind to reach, but occur within the conventional understandings that average minds can relate to. In other words, they innovate within the system. This means maximizing potentialities that are already in play. The conceptual infrastructure is there. Masses can see the benefits, so popularity and success indices follow. "Genius" inside the gap.
It became an idiot commonplace that operating within the system is bad. And that mindless resistance to efficacy is a path to something other than the societal-level degeneracy we see today.
Beauty is ordered - it is the Logos of Creation manifest as logos in material techne. It is the ontological hierarchy in practice. Multilinear thinking may be restricted in ways, but how does that possibly make anarchy and atavism even options?
Crisis in thinking indeed.
Whatever limitations that multilinear thinking presents, they aren't fixable with the hominid equivalent of poo-flinging. Creation is ordered. If you want to jury-rig a lean-to to keep the sun or rain off, there are things you have to do or it won't work. You can scatter the materials about or pile them in different places in defiance of "the lines", but you're going to get wet or sunburnt.
There is another thing to remember. Our thinking modes are additive not substitutive. The linear and multilinear thinkers can address binary problems in binary terms. They don't supersede the limits of binary structure claiming "there is no structure!". They understood structure better. Same goes for the limits of multilinear thinking.
Visualize. It's like a big complex building like Versailles that was built in stages over a century and more. The multilinear final stage has more room and functionality. But the original binary court in the center never stops being used either.
The problems with multilinear thinking isn't that there is no order in Creation. It's that the pre-existing sets of assumptions and connotations - the "lines" that connect disparate things in thought - are built from human perceptions and experiences. They're too limited and rigid to map onto the data fields that comprise reality. Data fields that - as we already explained - necessarily supersede our in medias res asses selves. Because we can't take it all in, any structures - any lines - we are using are intrinsically incomplete. Mapping them onto reality conceals more than it reveals.
Creation is ordered. Which is why atavism is not only not the answer, it's a fully satanic 180. But the scale - the breadth and detail of "things" - beggars the imagination. It's a perspectival limitations thing in the fallen finite world. We get glimpses of structure through logos - abstract reasoning works. But the full ontological continuum is to much. So it's not that there's no Logos in Creation.
It's that...
Non-linear thinking eschews established pathways for real-time consideration of clouds of "things". That is the observations, ideas, impulses, knowledge points end everything else that makes up a conscious mental world. Connections and patterns then emerge from the amorphous clouds of information. There are lines of a sort, but connections that are generated by describing what is actually there and significant. Not by fitting data points into a fixed, pre-formed world view.
It is incredibly fluid - the relationship configurations change as new information enters the clouds. Implications of something are registered almost instantly in disparate areas. Of course the information is never complete, bringing pattern recognition in.
Visualize - it's a bit like spotting constellation figures from certain groupings of stars. If the figures weren't predetermined and the stars moved around a lot more.
Freed from fixed constraints, this is where the paradigm-shifting connections happen. It also explains why it can take a while for them to trickle down. The patterns do not follow any pre-set chain of assumptions. They are generated within the data itself and move and change as it does. So ideas can simply not signify within the available conceptual channels for people to process them.
It's not hard to see why this is a bit different from the color outside the lines mental scribblers. This is high pattern-recognition "outside the box" thinking. It is operating in a different world from any sort of linear thought. You need to be able to hold and process enough information - make enough connections - that pertinent glimpses of the actual logos of the situation become clear. Not the whole thing. Just a tiny fraction. But even so, the intelligence required only kicks in on the east end of the bell curve.
Use the computer analogy again. Here's a really fast one. It takes a lot of working memory and processing speed to generate predictive glimpses of logos out of the swirling chaos of reality. Bandwidth too, because high-speed uptake is needed to assimilate connotative connection fields.
The communication gap means often being the only one who gets it. And you can be spectacularly wrong. But the understanding maps closer onto reality than any set of pre-existing lines.
Visualize and recap...
Binary Thinking
Linear Thinking
Multilinear Thinking
Non-Linear Thinking
The last thing to consider are the qualitative types of thinking - beyond the number and types of possible connections. Recalling our epochal minds - different individuals have preferred or default modes of making those connections and drawing out patterns.
We won't attempt to chart all the types of thinking. The post started its critique of education by pointing out the impossibility of this. But think back to the epochal minds and recall how they tended to operate in different broad modes - visual, verbal, mathematical. Not to say that the mathematical thinker can't interpret a picture or turn a phrase. It's that quantitative expression is where he is most comfortable working through his most intricate thoughts.
We do need to say a word about artistic intelligence - one of the shimmering numbers of fake intelligences from the start of the post.
Claude Lorrain, A Mediterranean port at sunrise with the Embarkation of Saint Paula for Jerusalem, 17th century, oil on canvas, private
There is truth in art and sometimes shocking insight. Like a Claude painting where a Christian journey, a new dawn, and an almost elegiac feeling of the old world passing blend into a trail-blazing blast of logos and beauty. But it seems more like mysticism than cognition - a refined observational sensitivity that reveals truths almost unconsciously. But it isn't the same as a towering IQ.
Leonardo, Mona Lisa, begun 1503, oil on canvas, Louvre
Of the handful of historical figures at Langan's level, Leonardo is the only one with artistic ability even close to his intellectual power. And while he was the smartest man of at least his century, he wasn't the best painter in his town.
A bit disingenuous perhaps, but reason to watch for the arts of the West posts. And Leonardo? He's an extreme cognitive outlier who happened to be a Christian visual thinker.
Thinking is inherently relational and therefore necessarily representational in some way. Perhaps not linguistic, but able to distinguish and connect. The question is what mode of representation comes most naturally? Every mode has inherent characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. They tend to serve some topics better than others. Langan's CMTU includes visual diagrams and he was absorbing theoretical mathematics and physics from his early teens. But he writes in remarkably direct prose for the density of information conveyed that the pressure his ideas put on the language. Given the choice, he opts for verbal representation.
This is where the limitations of IQ as a metric really come in. Not in determining overall cognitive firepower, but in accounting for different types of thinkers. Trying to sort someone who solves complex equations in their head and someone with an eidetic memory.
Nikola Tesla at rest and a Tesla coil from a double exposed photograph
What we can say is that neither of them are going to make much sense to most people and will probably seem crazy if they try too hard.
That's it for now. No big answers - unfortunately the only cure for cognitive devolution is environmental pressure. And while that is coming, it is outside our hands. But some implications to consider from things swirling around and some mental housekeeping around Band HQ. Although it may turn out to be the case that we aren't thinking about homologies between ontology and cognition for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
Something to think about...
No comments:
Post a Comment