Author Archives: André Gaudreault (Gaudwin)

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About André Gaudreault (Gaudwin)

Throughout my life, I have acquired two general BA’s and one unspecialised Masters of Art in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the university of Guelph, to understand, from a generalist point of view, the root cause of our maladaptation as a rational species. However. I have failed to become a generalist, generalists develop understandings of specifics “fields of knowledge” from the point of view of mastered disciplines and I have never (by choice) mastered anything. Throughout the superficial overview of many fields of study, I have constantly investigated the role of knowledge and academics in the the present predicament of humanity. At 70, I have thus become a self proclaimed “artisan of global thinking.” I am presently in the process of writing in absentia a PhD dissertation on the existential problems that we are facing as a species and on on our inability resolve them using the kind of specialized thinking that can but contribute to their aggravation. agaudwin@hotmail.com English is not my mother tongue.

KNOW THYSELF IN QUANTUM TERMS, A COPERNICAN REVOLUTION IN UNDERSTANDING 

Towards a Theory of Everything Based on the Realization that Human Specialization Is an Anomaly of Evolution

INTRODUCTION TO FOLLOW

In honor of Joël de Rosnay, the inventor of the Macroscope.

“If the total scheme of nature required man to be a specialist, she would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it.”
Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1969
“It is the theory that decides what we can observe.” Einstein

During my graduate studies, I often compared my teachers to microscope-burdened cyclops, having gained the ability to understand how colors mixed on the canvas background, the nature of these backgrounds, and how they are attached to the frame of the paintings they made us study while having lost the capacity to look at the whole masterpiece.
 — —

Fig.1 ANIMAL VS. HUMAN PERCEPTION

MY MENTOR’S SUGGESTION:

I suggest adding a similar figure where below “reception” is shown an array of radio telescopes in place of human eyes, below “transduction” a table of many numbers (like ephemerides tables), and below “perception” a scientist reading those numbers and drawing formulas on the blackboard. This is “modern science”.I suggest adding a similar figure where below “reception” is shown an array of radio telescopes in place of human eyes, below “transduction” a table of many numbers (like ephemerides tables), and below “perception” a scientist reading those numbers and drawing formulas on the blackboard. This is “modern science.”

“Radio telescopes” are sense extensions like all other scientific instruments. They only gave us more in-depth data and nothing more. As for “ephemerides tables,” they have nothing to do with the “transduction” happening in our brains, which are biological phenomena transducing sense data into brain states accessible by the mind and from which science creates these tables.

Our minds do not react to the signals sent by the things themselves present in our living environment, to which all other living entities respond instinctively. Our minds, being self-conscious, are only aware of image representations that our brain creates from this data after they have been “transduced” by our sense organs. And, without the support of a society nurturing us after birth, we wouldn’t know what to do with them.
It is these images presented to our consciousness that scientists explain using the theories they draw on blackboards, and not the reality in itself, before it is transduced into image representations by our brains. Are these “images” accurate representations of the external reality? Yes, they probably are…and that is why scientific theories work accurately, but only for humans. The rest of nature, which doesn’t live in our representations, would be better off if these theories had never been produced.
It does not matter the means we use to observe the “things in themselves — the reality functioning under its own rules when not observed, as QM accurately showed us — what our “minds” perceive is the appearances of this reality that our brains decode from sense data, whether received through bear biological means or helped by scientific instruments.
It is only at this point that scientific minds create sets of tables “to explicate” the data that our brain receives from the thing in themselves, from the implicate order, in which reality functions holistically instead of “proactively” as it does for ourselves under our theories. Again, it is them that decide what we can observe.
So, if physical laws are universal, and they are as Newton showed us, and if the Implicate Order exists, and it does as Bohm showed us, then Newton was wrong to say that the absolute is not worthed to be hypothesized about. And it is inappropriate for science to say that appearances are the only thing we can measure and take into consideration, as I will show below.

 — —
Here’s an overview of my generalist perspective, in which the same laws present in principle in the pre-Big Bang apply to all levels of reality while being expressed differently:

Fig.2 ERVIN LASZLO’S EVOLUTIONARY GRAND SYNTHESIS (My edit in red)

Here is how these levels emerge at each stage of the evolutionary process:

Fig. 3 HUMAN-PARADIGM SHIT: COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS (Id)
 — — — — –
NB I don’t believe in the “bon Sauvage” either; humans are selfish, as all life is (CF “selfish gene.”) We will succeed in controlling the destructive force of nature that humanity has become when we collectively realize that in an interconnected world, consciously* acting for the good of all is working for our own good, as non-human animals working consciously for their own good is good for the survival of whole species.

*NB And they do act consciously, but for themselves alone, as our brains are “conscious” of what is happening in our bodies but for themselves alone and without any representation, as all members of all species do. Representing the world to our minds is what we do as self-conscious humans.

Fig.4 UTOPIA OR DEATH

To reach this utopia, we need to define the classical world — which is 100% made of elementary particles — using the quantum principles scientists discovered in the micro level of reality, which is the closest we have ever been to “things in themselves.” Things in themselves which were for Newton an “absolute” not worthy of our hypothesizing efforts, and for Kant, following Newton’s steps, a Noumenon out of reach of the human mind.
These 18th-century beliefs materialized themselves three hundred years before we knew anything about the elementary particles composing 100% of all beings, inert or alive.
The problem with scientists today is that they are intellectual prisoners of a scientific method worked out in the next Century, the 19th, by natural philosophers ignorant of modern science, who did swallow hook, line, and sinker these beliefs of their celebrated predecessors of the 18th-century, Newton and Kant.
This uncriticized acceptance of the belief in the impossibility of science to deal with things in themselves, but only appearances, has been the rite of passage of normal scientists, which has created an awkward situation where scientists have come to discover that there is a dimension of reality seemingly not functioning in space and time like our classical world of “appearances” seemed to be.
However, being unconsciously imbued by the belief that there is nothing in this micro world that can be understood in itself, they had to keep on using concepts that work in the classical world, like waves, particles, fields, etc., while tweaking them to fit the data, as Ptolemy did with the notions of crystalline spheres, epicycle, equant, and deferent to explain the planets’ retrograde motion in the 2nd century, for crying out load. No wonder we’re screwed!
For example, modern scientists have been using a mathematical language based on notions of continuous space and time of the “classical dimension” of appearances, which dimensions, as they had to concede eventually, are non-existent in the micro-level of reality they were trying to define.
However, at this point, the intellectual inertia created by the mass of knowledge accumulated on these concepts was so strong, and their “tweaking” worked so well, that the thousands, if not millions, of individuals making a living on these bases were never prompted to alter their way of thinking. That is why when defining what they are dealing with, they cannot do better than to “shut up and calculate.”

Fig.4A NORMAL SCIENTISTS

The one who went the furthest in such an attempt to define reality as it is when not observed was Bohm, with his notion of Implicate Order,” things in themself, and Explicate Order, appearances. However, he failed to make a breakthrough because his theory still used the notion of wave, as a “pilot wave,” a concept which can fit the data, but cannot be supported nor function in a unidimensional and atemporal dimension of reality that is the implicate order in which the noumena, the thinks in themselves, exist.
 — -
THE MACROSCOPE
I will present you multiple histogram plackets, which will give a timeline of how humanity became the “ecological catastrophe” that it is at the moment, a catastrophe brought about by people such as Einstein, Planck, and others, who have all accepted the beliefs of their founders that the only things science can define are the appearances.
Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1963

Fig.5 SPECIALISTS

BACK TO THE MACROSCOPE
First, since life is homeostatic, let’s accept that at his level of reality, everything functions as waves in time:

Fig.6 LIVING ORGANISMS

When we “observe” life, we only see static entities, whether whole living embodiments or their specific life data such as temperature, blood pressure, etc., and not species as such.
And since “species are individuals,” for reasons you can see here, they also function as waves in time:

Fig.7 INDIVIDUAL SPECIES

As we can see here, the limits of species are exterior in space for their members, but interior in time, within the niche of species themselves, as they are for all living entities.
And the fact that the Biosphere is a living organism is the reason why James Lovelock called her Gaïa:

Fig.8 GAЇA

Here, I don’t specify the limits of the biosphere, which are “ecological disasters” as the one that terminated the dinosaur’s era, because it is in this zone that we evolved as Homo to become one of these disasters of our own making as sapiens modern, as I will show below how it happened in evolution. However, we were not from the start. I will show you below how we became such a disaster for the Biosphere.
To set the stage, here is how the Earth looked like before the event of our genus Homo:

Fig.9 THE BIOSPHERE BEFORE HOMO

I here specify the Biosphere’s limits because they already existed for dinosaurs, eons before the event of Homo. I excluded humanity from this ecological zone of disaster for the moment because, at first, we were not such a disaster for her but mainly “parasites” on her surface. Why? Because having to “objectify” sticks and stones to defend ourselves in space and use them as tools to survive in time, we were no longer an integrated part of its life functions but had to “transcend” them while feeding from her, as “parasites” do on our skin. Contrary to all other living entities composing the Biosphere that also feed from her but live in the instants in states of competition, cooperation, or mutualism with all the other entities of their niche.

Science is correct to say that we cannot know the Biosphere in itself but only observe and measure its apparent components. However, I will show below that we can measure her in terms of appearances when we take her into consideration.
We indeed needed the notions of space and time to create the distinctive realm of appearances in which we “securely” evolved as Homo. Why securely? Because being the only species living in these spatiotemporal appearances, we had and still have no competition.

THE SAVANNAH INVASION

Before we entered the Savannah, there was no such realm of appearances because all living entities functioned in the instant for themselves, and no life existed in space and time, which are the dimensions we had to assume unconsciously for millions of years to “objectify” our living environment. Here is how it happened in the Savannah:

Fig.10 HOMO IN THE SAVANNAH; COMMUNICATION IN SPACE

The important thing to see here is that by objectifying” our environment in space and time, we entered our own “stasis,” in that, we quit being an integrated part of life homeostasis as a new living entity while needing to openly communicate among us using language to remain such viable independent entities living in appearances. We thus became analogous “parasites,” not contributing to the homeostasis of the Biosphere on which we stood while still living off it like microorganisms do on our skin.

THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION

Fig.11 SAPIENS OUT OF AFRICA; COMMUNICATION THROUGH TIME

And much later, after the agricultural revolution, we became local inflammations for the Biosphere. Why? Well, when parasites start digging into our skin to feed themselves and grow, they produce local inflammations, don’t they? So, let us do good science by naming things objectively for what they are. Let us diagnose Homo sapiens for what they have become for the Biosphere after the agricultural revolution, “localized inflammations” while digging into the biosphere “skin” to feed themselves.

CIVILIZATION

Then civilization, rendered possible by the agricultural revolution, led us to invent the most significant means of communication after language: writing and printing; writing to keep track of what we were doing in space; and later, printing, which allowed the masses to communicate through time. The printing press was significant for civilization because it created a collective process of “positive feedback,” which has become antagonistic to life’s negative feedback:

Fig.12 POSITIVE FEEDBACK

This newly acquired power to communicate through time allowed science to make us enter an era of “growth,” which has chronically alienated us from the process of natural homeostasis in which all unobserved phenomena function 1) as processes for life and 2) as waves, on probabilistic or other forms, for matter. Instead, we enter a process of growth, alienating us even more from the natural world.
Here is how it happened with the help of science:

Fig.13 ROLE OF SCIENCE IN HUMAN SOCIETIES

The previous histogram shows what science did for progress while creating a “method” to control the efficiency of its “unidirectional” growth. However, I positioned the name ‘science’ in the same color and line as parasites and local inflammation, the living entities that live off the environment without contributing to its “homeostasis,” to allow me to replace “progress” with “pollution,” in the following histogram, which is the inevitable byproduct of science and the activities it induces when considering the Biosphere as an externality that doesn’t need to be taken into consideration as the thing in itself that it is.
Indeed, science, and the economic activities it induces, have become for the Biosphere a “generalized inflammation” mainly expressing itself in plastic and antibiotic pollution, plastic and antibiotic which contribute to humanity’s increase of quality of life while diminishing its “quantity” in the Biosphere:

Fig.14 EFFECTS OF SCIENCE ON THE BIOSPHERE

Scientists, the custodian of knowledge while only considering the appearances in which we live and, thus, allowing their business financiers to use their intellectual products with no concern for the environment, have allowed them to become a chronic inflammation to the Biosphere. Scientists are not directly responsible for this situation but are fundamentally accountable for it.

Fig.14A RESEARCH MONEY

I am an “extraordinary” scientist, in Kuhn’s terms, who has never benefited from this situation because I realized some fifty years ago that we could not keep progressing the way we were then while not accepting our primordial responsibility of caring for our living environment.
And that at the age of thirty, after seeing firsthand that 80% of the bodies of water I had swum growing up had been polluted by the mid-70 by progressive activities enriching the wealthy to the detriment of everything else.
I then decided to undertake a carrier of independent generalized research to formulate the problem in solvable terms after having read in Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth that,

“Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.”

And after reading later in Konrad Lorenz’s Behind the Mirror, that specialists, by knowing ever more and more about less and less, will end up knowing everything about nothing, and philosophers, by knowing less and less about more and more, will end up knowing nothing about everything.

Inspired by these euphemisms telling me that specialists don’t know what they are talking about when it comes to defining the whole picture, I then decided to undertake a second general BA after an eclectic first BA equivalency acquired within a hippie mentality at the age of 27, to become a generalist while keeping the middle ground as a learned-ignorant independent researcher in a life-long calling to formulate in solvable terms the problems created by the existential crisis into which modern science would inadvertently bring humanity. At the time, I thought that this crisis would happen in the 22nd Century. I was 75 years off at the time, not having to consider computers and the Internet, which have multiplied by at least ten our growth capacities.
Here is how I have come to define ourselves as the ecological disaster that we have become for the Biosphere.

DIAGNOSIS OF A GENERALIST DOCTOR IN ANTHROPOLOGY:

Fig.15 MY DIAGNOSIS

I know. It’s never easy to be diagnosed with cancer. However, when it happens, one must trust one’s doctor and listen to him when he says that he knows the cause, which, in the case of humanity, is “philosophical,” i.e., on which foundation knowledge is founded, as it is often genetic for biological individuals, i.e., on the information contained in their genome at conception.

In our case, it happens that the cause resides in the fact that science, and particularly Quantum Mechanics, have mindlessly followed their 18th-century natural-philosopher founders’ uncriticized acceptance that the “absolute,” for Newton, is not worthy of our hypothetical efforts and that Noumenon (the domain of things in themselves), for Kant, is unknowable to humans.
Here’s what it looks like when considering the Biosphere as a noumenal reality as it functions as a whole in relation to a domain of appearances in which humans primarily serve themselves as individuals.

Fig. 16 QUANTUM MECHANICS: THE LEADING AGENT OF THE PRESENT EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

As you can see in the last figure, we need to unify both levels of reality in quantum terms since all reality is 100% composed of elementary particles, and quantum mechanics is the domain of science studying them. And it has done very well for itself. Its only limitation is that it is still working on the wrong premise that the things in themselves cannot be measured. As I have shown in this figure that they can: We know about the number of species that we have irradicated in the past and that we will in the future if we do not find ways to replenish the Earth collectively. We could also compare the amount of living time that humanity has gained in life expectation to the same amount living time lost by the species we have irradicated in this process of bettering our quality of life and increasing its expectation. It should be the same because the biosphere is a zero-sum living phenomenon.

MY PROGNOSTIC

Fig.17 MY DISSERTATION: THE DESIGN OF A CURATIVE PROGRAM

As you can see for yourselves, science, and especially quantum mechanics, computers, and the Internet, will become therapeutic agents if it is accepted that the reality in which we live is not the objective reality independent of our perceptions but a reality that exists only for ourselves, as the heavens are indeed revolving around the Earth when we observe them day and night, but only for us.
How are we going to do that? I know as much about that as Copernicus knew about the coming scientific era when he understood that the anomalies that Ptolemy resolved with epicycles would resolve themselves when we realized that the Earth revolves around the sun.


My dissertation will present a possible avenue for the modern sapiens that we are to evolve into sapiens novus and become therapeutic agents collectively taking care of the existential crisis in which we are now. My theory will be a “theory of collective mind,” allowing us to get out of the “terrible two” stage of evolution that has been the 20 and 21st Centuries and enter an era of collective consciousness allowing the human species to live in unison with the Biosphere, the living entity of which we are the nervous system. As three-year-olds finally understand that they are part of a society of individuals who also have selves of their own.

For now, before I write an introduction describing how I came to become the generalist doctor for humanity, I am. And a conclusion that will show the fundamental error on which all human knowledge is founded and which prevents us from finding solutions for the existential crisis science has created, the only thing I can tell you is that whatever brilliant person you may be or whatever Ph.D. you may have, if you haven’t realized by now that you, as a shortsighted (sic) specialized individual, are an anomaly of evolution, which I doubt you have, you are as relevant to control the destructive force of nature that humanity has become in the 20 and 21st Centuries such as Ptolemy were relevant to discover these forces in the 2nd Century.

ONCLUSION TO FOLLOW

© André Gaudreault

The Failure of Science: Its Built-In Inability to Recognize the Maladaptive Nature of Progress.

An Attempt to Save the World from Specialists’ Narrow Mindedness and Philosophers’ Plagiarism of the Past.

“Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.” Buckminster Fuller (Spaceship Earth: Manual of operation, Circa 1965)

 

“By being specially adapted to acquire a particular kind of information, most structures [species and specialists] are tied to a very narrow, rigid program, their inbuilt computing mechanisms containing `hypotheses’  to which they blindly adhere. If circumstances arise that were not `foreseen’ by the adaptive process that produced them [evolution and Academia], a structure may transmit false information which it cannot be taught to correct.” (Konrad Lorenz, Behind the Mirror, “1973) (My brackets)

What were we thinking?

Source Edited by Andre Gaudreault

KANTIAN RHINO:

“…let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition.” Kant Vs A priori knowledge rhinos use to define their reality.

What are we thinking?!

dechet

The ultimate consequence of living in a reality defined for our own sake while using uncriticized “a priori” concepts: More Plastic Than Fish in Our Sea

After the work of Copernicus and others had demonstrated that the earth was not the center of the universe but only a part of a much larger system, the world began to change its vision of reality. The process took hundreds of years. Today, because humanity has become a dominant influence on earth, we are faced with another such change: from nature being a convenience for people, to people being a part of nature. The scope is similar. The practical significance is of far greater consequence than the Copernican revolution but we have only a generation to complete the change.  ~Mike Nickerson, Change The World I Want to Stay On, 1977.

A CRITIQUE OF PURE PROGRESS by Andre Gaudreault (aka Gaudwin or AGaudwin)

Progress has become a maladaptive anomaly of nature because it has transformed the human economy — our collective behavior initially in tune with the fundamental principles of nature — into an alienated mode of profit production, beneficial for a developed minority, detrimental to the rest of the human race, and destructive for the whole planet.

Academics, politicians, and business people are failing because all their analyzes of this state of affairs are based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of space and time that precludes them from understanding that specialization and everything that ensued from it (science, progress, and the growth-economy) is an anomaly of nature. 

If it were not the case, they would define humanity’s present existential crisis in solvable termswhich they evidently cannot! And the reason why they are so clueless is the fact that  “There are few ideas that, like our notion of time, shape our thinking about literally everything, with major implications for physics and beyond—from climate change to the economic crisis” (Lee Smolin, Time Reborn) 

You do not understand how your ingrained notion of time is affecting your understanding but you will when I formulate my theory. If I cannot tell you now before I formulate it it is because time is to our understandng which is uique for all individuals while space is to our perception which is the same for all individuals.what space is to our perception.

And this relation is antithetical in that we can move in space, but nobody can be at the same place simultaneously. In contrast, we cannot move in time, but everybody is at the same instant, notwithstanding Einstein’s who has it wrong, according to my theory.

Perception and understanding are in the same dialectical relation since everybody perceive the same think when at the same place while eventhough everybodies is at the same instant in time their understanding are idiosyncratic.

 

We have all the resources to solve the problems created by our inconsiderate behavior. To use these resources in the most efficient and economical manner, though, we must gain a fresh perspective of ourselves and of our relations to nature (I.e., Know thyself as a species as in “Species are individuals”). What we need a human paradigm shift that would allow us to “evolve” a collective consciousness,  a theory of everything (ToE), enabling us to use all the resources at our disposal to solve the existential problem that our selfish uses of modern science have created in the twentieth century. And this paradigm is based on a new understanding of time allowing us to “perseive” our onenesss with the universe. Boudhists monks get in touch individually with this oneness true meditation, we have to do it collectively true a scientific understanding.

***

Dumont club of rome

These illustrations of the state of the world touched me personally since I had already been aware, in the mid 70s, that 80% of the bodies of water in which I had swim 20 years earlier were polluted.


Blind leading protection

“L’anti-economique” Jacques Attali, (1974), Caricatures Maya.

NB As you can see, my background is French. So don’t look at the overall style of this introductory preamble, nor at the odd structure of some sentences, but rather at their content.

It is my coming across these illustrations in the mid-70s that prompt me to go back to the university after an eclectic BA equivalency, to find out what is wrong with us humans that we cannot use the knowledge that we have to solve the problems created by progress. I decided to undertake this search as a generalist theoretician, after reading in the late 70s in Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual of Spaceship Earth that: “…specialization precludes comprehensive thinking,” And after having been secured in my apprehension to undertake such a major project at the advanced age of 34 by Konrad Lorentz’s saying that: “Specialists, by knowing ever more and more about less and less, will finish knowing everything about nothing.”

 

***

To find out as a species from a new perspective what is our true relation to reality, we need a human paradigm that would be significant to all honest people, whether sexes religions, or nationalities they would be. “Karl Popper defined scientific paradigms as shared belief systems.

As science progresses, scientists realize that these beliefs are mostly false and move to a new paradigm.” (Source, my emphasis) Now, what is fundamentally wrong for all of science and humanity is the deep-rooted presumption underlying the scientific method and the whole edifice of human reason, that reality is “objective,” that there is a reality “out there,” independent of us.

For a paradigm shift to become necessary, an anomaly of knowledge that exists with respect to earlier theories needs to be recognized (Popper). I will show in the graph below that the unrecognized anomaly preventing us from solving the actual humanity’s existential problems is progress itself, due to the inability of science and philosophy to define its proper role in evolution.

Exponential progress:

limits of progress

This is the graph I presented to the late Nora Cebotarev of the University of Guelph ca 1988-9, who accepted me in the Master program of Sociology and Anthropology without me having follow one course of anthropology or sociology in my previous two general BA.

To execute such a “shift” in our collective behavior, as we absolutely must at the moment, we need to question and revolutionize our ways of thinking about our relation to reality. Three hundred years ago, Immanuel Kant already acknowledged that humanity needed to undergo such a revolution. However, his understanding of evolution was lacking. Indeed, he did not make his Critique of Pure Reason within the context of evolution, as he surely would, had evolution been an established fact at the time. And neither was he aware of the ill effects that progress would have on our living environment. — To which ill effects, his “incomplete” Critique ( not taking evolution into consideration) contributed in grand part, as I will show in my dissertation.

Today, if specialized scientists do not recognize progress as an anomaly of evolution, it is because their research grants prevent them from acknowledging the truth about the ultimate side effects of their work. Or, as Michael Lewis already said more succinctly about the profiteering Wall Street workers who, for their part, create the economic crises: “ If you pay someone not to see the truth, they won’t see the truth.” (Source)

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the-dark-side CI

“Learned Generalist” was added to the original

In passing, I must say that of course, scientific research is good for humanity. However, in nature, everything that is beneficial for a species, within a given habitat, inevitably creates pressures on the other competitive species of the same natural habitat, forcing the latter to vary their behavior evolve or go extinct, and the former to adapt to these new variations.

We are social animals. Our natural habitat is the whole earth. Our collective activities create pressures on all the other species of the planet. We don’t have any competition anymore. Nothing can regulate us. We absolutely must develop” convivial tools” to govern ourselves globally and adapt locally as a species, without destroying or misusing our natural environment. For this, we need to use all of our intellectual resources to “evolve” a collective (organic) consciousness allowing us to “objectify” the human species as a single individual (Species as individuals), thus “dialectically” becoming a type of “homo novus” aware of being one (entangled in modern terms) with our fellow human beings and with nature, and change our collective behavior accordingly.

I say “dialectically” because this understanding of our oneness with reality will be the “antithesis” of what we had to do when we leave the security of our native forest because of climate change—or the original sin for believers—for the open and unknown Savannah. In which we had to evolve into individuals able to “objectify” our living environment and our inner self in terms of space and time. That, to be able to use tools of our own making to survive in the Savannah and to defend ourselves against feline predators, not having evolved in our previous rainforest habitat the biological means to run away from them, as antelopes do in the open Savannah.* To eventually, after some 3 million years, let our “species-serving” economy create virtual profits from a well-known but impoverished global environment while using the same unconscious assumptions about space and time that we were using in the Savannah, but which are now irrelevant to our survival. It is these unconscious assumptions that we need to lay bare if we want to have any chances to find ways to control the destructive force of nature that modern specialized science allowed us to become.

*NB I will demonstrate in my dissertation how this could have happened by “Chance and Necessity” (Jacques Monod, 1971) while developing my “security-stick hypothesis” synthesizing the climate-change and the Savannah hypotheses.

 

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FORMS IN NATURE NO CAPTIONS

The jungle images on the left are used coasters that I bought for a quarter in a garage sale in1990 while doing my MA in Zoo-Socio-Anthropology. These blew my mind since I was then tinkering about the concept of “form” in evolution.


Webp.net-resizeimage

Sam! Sam! Don’t do it! There’s good news! A really big war’s just broken out!

Now that we have no more competition, being the only species conscious of living in space and time and in dominant societies while still being guided by our primitive drives, we need to “create enemies,” so we keep producing new armament to feed our global ” war-economy.

These caricatures lead me to infer the following dialectical relations between nature and nurture.FORMS IN NATURE 20th century text on;y nature nurture

***

My theory Why Jane Goodall is wrong to conclude from her anthropocentric observations that chimpanzees use “tools.”

Analogies of forms in nature and nurture:

I present this example below of tool-use in nature as a preamble to my argument that Goodall is wrong in her conclusion that chimpanzees use “tools” as we do. I will show that the “objects” that many animals use to accomplish some tasks are not “tools,” but unconscious exosomatic extensions of their bodies, which they cannot “refine” no more than they can alter the biological resources (claws, teeth, etc.) acquired through their evolutionary history.

1) Jumping insects vs.manufactured gears:

gears composit

Figure 1 The gears at both ends are examples of gears that flees use to synchronize the triggering of both their back legs. Without these gears, flees indeed would not be able to jump in straight lines. The center image is an example of how we use the same lever principle in tools.

The figure above, insects vs. mechanical gears, supports my long-held contention that Jane Goodall was wrong to have concluded, from her anthropocentric observations, that “chimps use tools.” They don’t. Their use of “rocks” to crack open nuts stemmed from their evolutionary acquired ability to imitate. Indeed it is undoubtedly with stones that Homine was cracking open nuts in Africa millions of years ago. A practice that must have been eventually observed many times by chimpanzees, successfully put to use by some of them, and transmitted by imitation since then with no improvement whatsoever for all these years; like we did with our tools while discovering their underlying principles, intuitively for a long time, and then formally with science.

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“TOOLS” BUILT USING THE SAME PRINCIPLES

Chimps do not use tools to crack open nuts like we do; it is a habit they have acquired through imitation. When they finally “get it,” it simply becomes a biological extension of themselves. Adult chimps cannot teach youngsters how to use rocks, no more that they can teach them how to grow teeth. Cracking open nuts for chimps is an “exosomatic” biological process. That is why there is “no active teaching” and “adults never teach.” (see 4:55 in the video below)

Young chimpanzees have to learn for themselves at each generation. I will show in my dissertation that the reason for that is that all living entities from genes to chimpanzees live in the instant for themselves, without any spatiotemporal conceptualizations,which are the sine-qua-non conditions for conscious tools-making and teaching. What chimps use to survive are not tools but their acquired ability to imitate.

* Maybe, they don’t even have spatiotemporal “representations” of their surroundings. They don’t have image representations as we do; they are “one” with it as our brain is with our body, and they react instinctively to the signals they receive from their environment like our brain with those receive from our body. This could explain that when something is changed in their environment, dogs don’t realize it (see below). Not receiving any stimulus from what is not there, they behave as if it was still there, having no immediate representation of their surroundings but ingrained habituations:

In accordance with Kant’s claim, non-human animals would not be able to know objects. Animals would only know impressions on their sense organs, which Kant mistakenly called perception. Kant had erroneously asserted that full, perceived objects, not mere sensations, were given to the mind by the sense organs. Perception, however, according to Schopenhauer, is intellectual and is a product of the Understanding. Perception of an object does not result from the mere data of the senses. It requires the Understanding. Therefore, if animals do not have Understanding, in accordance with Kant, then they have only Sensation, which, Schopenhauer claimed, gives only raw sense data, not perceived objects.

“For Kant, there is absolutely no knowledge of an object unless there is thought which employs abstract concepts. For him, perception is not knowledge because it is not thought. In general, Kant claimed that perception is mere sensation.

In accordance with Kant’s claim, non-human animals would not be able to know objects. Animals would only know impressions on their sense organs, which Kant mistakenly called perception. Kant had erroneously asserted that full, perceived objects, not mere sensations, were given to the mind by the sense organs. Perception, however, according to Schopenhauer, is intellectual and is a product of the Understanding. Perception of an object does not result from the mere data of the senses. It requires the Understanding. Therefore, if animals do not have Understanding, in accordance with Kant, then they have only Sensation, which, Schopenhauer claimed, gives only raw sense data, not perceived objects.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_the_Kantian_Philosophy

We are the only species living consciously in “space and time” and in organized societies. It is in both of which that we have gained the ability to “use tools” and transmit our knowledge through teaching. It is indeed this ability to “objectify” space and time and to recognize ourselves in it, unconsciously for millions of years as hominids, and consciously for thousands as sapiens sapiens that have given us the transformative abilities to speak live in society and create tools.

Chimps are not “transformed” by their capacity to crack nuts with rocks; they will never invent nutcrackers; they are simply animals who have learned to use rocks to eat nuts, for millions of years probably. The only one who’s been transformed by their habit is Jane Goodall.

Sorry Dr. Goodall, but if my refutation of your conclusion is correct, and I am sure it is, it has to be exposed as false, since your mistaken identification of chimps to us because they use “tools” has been detrimental to humanity, since we are mental entities as different from biological animals as our everyday reality is from quantum reality. And because of this fact, which I will expose in my dissertation, your specious “findings” have had many adverse implications on our social and scientific capacities to formulate our present existential problems in solvable terms. Disturbing implications that I cannot “describe” until I formulate my theory of universal evolution in which humans are not seen as “other animals,” but as an emergent class of mental beings antithetical to instinctive animals. We are to the animal world what life is to matter and matter to energy.

Next section: De evolutionibus res naturas: A treatise of universal evolution (Work in progress)

“It is the theory that describes what we can observe.” Einstein

Work in progress

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