cognition

We (humans) use many expressions in our everyday life related to rhythm:
"Miss a beat"
"Find my rhythm"
"Go at your own pace"
"Get into the groove" ;-)

In my experience, I've noticed that external events can happen either on the beat or the off-beat. Which beat you ask? Well, take a conversation between two people for example. When we speak, we do so at a certain pace, which immediately implies a beat (and associated off-beat). If I want to interrupt you while you're talking, I should choose an opportune moment where you'll be least likely to react in time to continue talking, which is on the off-beat of your speech. There are classic movie moments that illustrate this phenomenon:

Humans seem to organize their thinking in terms of hierarchies, classes and levels. This particular structure is quite useful in tackling problems related to the physical world, where manifestations exhibit a natural order that is intelligible to us. Specifically, manifestations seem to exist as clusters of mostly similar patterns, with few features distinguishable across the classes. This is obviously a computer programmer talking.

Like man organized for example the order of life forms in the phylogenetic tree, it was natural for him to undertake an organization of society, the grouping of man. And thus men were organized (by man) according to their geographical location, state allegiance, ideology, bank account, favourite soccer team, and physical features.

How do I know we're quantum beings? Because we can sense we're being observed.

Jorge Luis Borges writes about the Library of Babel, a library with an infinity of books containing all possible utterances of the alphabet. People are trapped into this library, trying to acquire all the knowledge and never reaching the end.

I've built my own infinite library. I only had to download most e-books available on eDonkey. It has become perfectly clear to me that my lifetime will not be enough to read and absorb all this information. Thus in my personal micro-universe, these 100GB of e-books are equal to infinity.

We are living in an age where societies need to have self-awareness. It is no longer sufficient to react on instinct, tradition, or habit. Society, as a problem-solving entity, needs to know its own strengths and weaknesses in order to survive and succeed in the globally connected world. And for this it needs to face its own behaviour critically and make rational decisions for self-improvement.

Many features of society will be questioned by this new awareness:

"I do what I think is proper, given the symbols I understand."

What if the founding economic principle of the scarcity of resources turned out to be a myth, an unverifiable assumption? The fact that technology hasn't learned yet how best to extract energy from our environment (the universe at large) isn't a proof in itself. The only conclusion is that there is a constant momentary scarcity of resources, brought about by humans onto themselves, as if under the spell of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But the principle of scarcity has important consequences. It establishes the legitimacy of competition as the higher behavioural value at all levels of the individual and society, at the expense of its dual, cooperation. Indeed, the all-importance of competition is currently being questioned by economic scientists and game theorists.

Faith is a powerful human force, always at work even without the awareness of its agents. Like reason or creativity, faith is a human quality that shapes the behaviour of individuals and of societies.

In the western world, faith is commonly regarded as irrational, and discarded altogether from social or psychological discourse. Canadian philosopher and humanist John Ralston Saul, in his social critique entitled On Equilibrium, argues that democratic society must progress by balancing the essential human qualities or forces, to reach global justice with individual freedom. The qualities that he cites are: common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory, and reason. He argues that reason has been the predominant quality in the West, leading to the tyranny of that trait at the expense of loss of balance with other qualities. A humanist message indeed.