As the year comes to a close, I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking.
Having explored books on topics covering neuroscience, consciousness, free will and logic this past year, I’ve come to appreciate more than ever how much a bunch of smart people have been thinking far more deeply about thought than I’d ever dared.
Ironically, the more I learn from them the more it seems there’s ever more that remains unknown to me. At least it feels that way. Apparently, even a little knowledge can be a humbling thing.
As luck would have it, a few months back I came across an ingenious statement that directly addresses this circular paradox.
Attributed to the renown physicist, Dr. Emerson M. Pugh (by his son, Emerson W. Pugh – a distinguished scientist and research engineer in his own right), the elder Pugh was a professor of physics from 1921 to 1965 at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where documents relating to his work on the WWII Manhattan Project remain archived.
As for Pugh’s statement, its self-referential simplicity is sheer elegance:
“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”
– Emerson M. Pugh /1938
If nothing else, Pugh’s insight helps to ease me off the hook.
Being dazzled by knowledge to the point of more fully appreciating one’s ignorance is less about the constraints of understanding and more about the human condition in which we’re all trapped.
I am not suggesting that understanding the human brain – and, by extension, how our minds work – isn’t worth striving to more fully expand. It simply means that our ability to grasp the fullness of objective reality becomes increasingly diminished the more we glimpse the vastness of how much we cannot perceive – and therefore cannot know.
Nonetheless, although time spent thinking about thought can leave one feeling increasingly daunted, the associated sense of humility leaves me convinced that it is time well spent.
I quite enjoyed reading your ruminations on ruminating.
I have been reading up on the subject of consciousness, which neuroscientists have imagined to be a product of biochemical factors and microtubules in the brain. So the brain is the origin of consciousness.
Increasingly, however, theoretical physicists of the quantum physics variety are positing the idea that consciousness precedes matter and energy. To quote Niels Bohr, “everything (matter + energy) we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”
Combine that idea with the “spooky action at a distance” of particles that communicate at faster-than-light speed, or better yet, the reversal of cause-and-effect so that the effect occurs before the cause, it seems that time itself is not real, but only our perception.
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At the cutting edge of quantum physics, more and more it seems that Consciousness is the ultimate reality. You might say that the whole cosmos is an idea in holographic form.
As to the human brain, then, it is not the originator of consciousness, but the recipient of consciousness, rather like a radio that receives electromagnetic signals and reduces them to an audible wave.
If all this seems boggling, then I take comfort in the words of Nobel laureate Richard Feynman who said that anyone who says he understands quantum physics is either lying or crazy.
What a great place to be. Enjoy the vastness.