Cold turkey

Huh, I guess people are bored.

Anyway, tapping away at my keyboard on something other than my bio essay, due about 31 hours ago. This has to be a bad idea. Sleep is an awfully precious commodity that should be husbanded carefully. I've gone and blown it on a 3 day binge, so I guess I'm going cold turkey tonight. Let's get on with it then.

Aristotle, I think, said, or wrote, that first principles of scientific thought are these things that cannot be proven. This makes perfect sense, by the way. If we have a set of first principles, and taking any individual one of them, if it can be derived from any of the others, then it is extraneous. It can be removed from the set. Of course, if it can be proven to be wrong, then it really shouldn't be included in the first place. The idea is to reduce all ideas to the basest forms. The collection of ideas from which all others can be derived. So if anything can be derived from anything else, then it cannot be considered a first principle. If something in your set of first principles can be derived from something not in your set, then you obviously don't get it.

This makes perfect sense from the point of view of constructing a way to look at the world. For any structure to be built, some sort of basic building blocks have to be chosen. Any and all structures more complex than the most base of these materials has to be considered in terms of its composition. In fact, this idea is necessary to the very foundations of any reasonable thought.

So what bothers me? The thing that bothers me about this is the idea that these first principles cannot be proven. Yes, I am aware that I just went through very simply the reason and necessity of their being impossible to derive. However, when you think about it, this means that everything we think about, the very way we think in the first place, is built upon, in the end, some sort of principle that we cannot even think about. We cannot think about them because it is impossible to use the structures of thought we possess to assess themselves at the most basic level.

Let me put it this way. Taking lego as an analogy. You can build infinitely many things from lego bricks. In fact, we have. Walk into any lego store, and you'll be quite amazed at the complexity of some of the constructions. Setting aside the cheater's toys such as the little men, the basic building block of the multi coloured bricks provide a means to construct essentially anything larger and more complex than a brick itself. So what happens if you want to build a brick? You can build a larger brick, but you cannot build a smaller brick. No matter how ingenious you may be, it is impossible to construct something smaller than a brick by using bricks. You cannot tell me how to build a brick. In fact, it is impossible to even describe the composition of a brick. No, I'm not counting breaking the bricks. I've tried it as a kid, and I can assure you that lego bricks are tough little buggers. Note that here I'm taking the bricks as indivisible.

So it is impossible to think about a brick and its composition. Fine if you're only looking at the entire history and structure of thought, I suppose, but what happens when a fellow gets interested in more? Alright, that's not possible too. Not till we encounter some way of completely changing the structure of thought. Which would involve altering the first principles of thought. Which would completely invalidate the previous mode of thought since the first principles upon which it was founded are no longer valid as first principles. Which would mean the entire history of civilisation of the human race would have been a waste of time.

Assuming we're ok with that, let us examine how the first principles of thought came about in the first place. To do that, we have to consider what they might be. Now, this is actually quite a hard thing to imagine. Language is obviously out of the question, being far too complicated. Religion is a pretty sophisticated thing, really, having to conceive of something that is other than the self, which would require a conceptualisation of the self as separate from the universe. Ditto for society. Math? Basic math seems ok for starters. 1+1=2 seems pretty basic. Cut up the relationships, left with the numbers. Is 1 then a reasonable first principle? Nope. Where does the concept of one come from? The sensory perception of things being separate from each other. Instead of things in general, there is a thing in particular.

I could keep trying to work this out forever, and I would never know when I reached the end. So I'm going to skip to what I think is a reasonable approximation of the first principles of our thought. Sensory perceptions seem to be reasonable. We think of things in terms of our senses. While our senses may not agree on everything, or anything, for that matter, each person conceives of things in terms of previous sense experiences. I do not believe it is possible to conceptualise anything in a way that does not utilise any sense perception at all. Go ahead try it.

Let me guess, you tried math. Math is fine, but are you sure you can conceptualise math without using any aids that you have ever experienced? No arabic numerals, no sounds, no symbols, nothing? Or how about some sort of divine entity? I'm pretty sure you can't think about God without the aids of the Bible, or the thought of some entity hanging out in space, or some sort of mind analogous to our own, or a burning bush, or a ghost or whatever. If you can, then I guess my approximation doesn't work.

Even people who do not possess certain sense perceptions rely on the description of such to relate the unknown sensory experiences to those that are possessed. The blind may not be able to accurately understand the complete truth of colours, but presumably some concept of different colours does exist, and the contrast between them would be thought to be similar to the differences between, say, textures.

So assuming that sense experiences are the base building blocks for thought, the first principles, then the problem arises of how reliable they are. Physical senses are far from consistent, as we all know, so if we use them as the first principles by which all thought is derived, then our system of thought must be suspect. All knowledge is based on sense experiences, but if each individual experiences his or her senses differently, then how can knowledge be considered to be universal? By this train of thought, there is no such thing as a universal, but only a consensus to a common acknowledgement of ideas, which in themselves cannot be trusted to be reliable.

I need to write a biology paper now, so I'll stop. I shall continue on the application of this to concepts of divinity and the impossibility of anything other than the lowest common denominator of concepts when society's structure of thought can only exist as an individual's structure, not a common one.