The corpus of human knowledge: the human drive to understand good things and reproduce them

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When humans decided that thinking hard and long was worth it

If we take a step back to contemplate the great history of humanity, it would be fair to say that the emergence of science as a method to understand phenomena and codify these understandings is but one episode under the broader arc of humanity’s great adventure of the mind.

This great adventure consists in our venturing into a more sustained and systematic use of our thinking capabilities.

I evoke the idea of “sustainment” because although we were always capable of thinking, for the greater part of our existence as a thinking species, we seemingly haven’t insisted on thinking further and patiently building knowledge bit by bit when faced with things that were seemingly impossible to understand. To understand this idea, think about this common occurrence in everyone’s daily lives: when you are thinking about something complex, many times you quit that thinking process once you are confronted with a seemingly impassable hurdle. Now imagine experiencing this in times when there were very few resources that we could resort to in order to find answers to unblock or nudge our thinking forward. In the past, we had to find by ourselves all the hard-earned answers that nowadays we can quickly find in the vast archives of accumulated and interconnected human knowledge. So it is fair and empathetic to our ancestors to consider that they didn’t think as sustainedly about many things, and that for most the incentives to do so weren’t very clear either.

What drives our fascination for certain things and not others

Yet the very act of sustained and systematic thinking was just the initial step of the great adventure of the mind. It was, in narrative terms, a crossing of a threshold into uncharted waters and unknown destinations. Then, there is the question of what drives us to cross that threshold. My answer -which I think is one of many ways of making sense of this broader adventure of which science is but an episode- is that when something good happens, we want to reproduce it. We want to make it happen more often, rather than the bad things. And because of an awareness of the power of our innate thinking capabilities (reinforced by the proof of all that sustained thinking has produced so far), we realise that maybe we can succeed in these attempts.

Driven by this desire to reproduce and perpetuate good things (and give them more space) we endeavour to understand them. We seek to find what their essence is. That is, we seek to define what they actually are, what their causes are, what their inner mechanisms are, what their weaknesses are, how we can break them down in its constituent parts and then put them back together, and so on. By doing so, we intend to become closer and intimately familiar with them. We intend to make them last as long as possible, and multiply them as much as is desired.

And so we get technologies of various kinds. They are technologies for reproducing successful conditions such as sheltering, cultivation, domestication, communication, medicine, joy, pleasure, and the list goes on (probably almost indefinitely).

And of course, philosophy has emerged as one of the great searches driven by this desire: how do we reproduce a good life of meaning, peace, happiness, wisdom and virtue? How do we reproduce the feeling of awe that encountering something beautiful produces? How do we reproduce this elation we feel when we understand the universe just a bit more? Once broad questions like these tell us where to look towards, more specific and thorough questions emerge: how do we make sense of ethics and justice? What is truth? What is important and timeless and what is contingent and ephemerally relevant?

As we figure out the “low-hanging fruits” of knowledge, we move on to reproduce more complex things and intertwine them in increasingly denser networks of co-dependence. We develop more ambitious statecraft, sophisticated technologies, research methods, multidisciplinary theories, epistemologies, and so on. They are all attempts to reproduce good things, to hold on to them.

The perpetuation of good things – the drive that art, culture, and knowledge have in common

Even art can be seen through a similar lens. Although much of art seeks to reproduce the yet inexistent beauty that exists only in the mind (or perhaps reproduce a certain state of mind that an aesthetic experience produces; for example by the sudden, thunder-like recognition of a previously unseen beauty in things), its technical part does indeed belong entirely to the quest for reproducing good things that we witness in the world. Music is a paramount example of this: music theory -in all its cultural incarnations, its variations and stylistic ramifications- constitutes a series of accumulative efforts aimed towards pinning down exactly what it is that makes sounds move us at a spiritual level, the codification of scales and modes being a case in point.

We pin each discovery down so that we can replicate it in further creations or imitations. And perhaps, we might find new combinations of these pinned down elements (harmony, scales, rhythms, phrases, motifs, colours, styles, structures) that develop into surprising compositions that further open up hitherto unseen possibilities, effectively revealing yet another set of new composite good things that we will want to understand and reproduce.

So nowadays, when the balancing scale between spirit and rationality is undeniably tilted far in favour of the latter, I think a good question to ask is: what good things are we seeking to reproduce? And to what extent do we believe that we can succeed? Because faith is important as well, as we are still part of the great adventure of the mind, venturing in uncharted waters of unknown results. It is indeed an undertaking largely driven by faith.

The triumph of rationality in its crudest form means that what seems most valuable to us is the reproduction of our very capacity to reproduce good things, giving much less importance to learning to choose what to reproduce. It is a hypertrophied reproduction of infrastructure, tools, and maintenance at the expense of capabilities -both individual and social- to conceive and be faithful to a transcendent desire.

An intellectual example: the adventure of Jung’s mind

All this reflection on the act of thinking led me to Carl Jung’s lifelong fascination with the esoteric, especially with the idea of synchronicities. As most of us have at some point in our lives, he experienced moments of seemingly miraculous, inexplicable coincidences. Synchronicities are events that are clearly connected but do not follow the law of causality, where A causes B and B causes C. When two events are synchronic, A and B are connected in a meaningful way but neither is the cause of the other. At the same time, it seems impossible that this happened by chance alone.

Jung relates a famous case of synchronicity that took place during a session with one of his patients. She was describing a dream where she had been given a golden scarab. As she spoke, Jung heard a tapping on the window. As he was opening the window, he found that it was a scarab tapping it, trying to get inside. Even more, this event was also symbolically significant, as the scarab symbolises rebirth, a recurrent theme within the patient’s psychoanalytical journey.

Jung ventured some explanations for why synchronicities actually exist and how they obey some mechanism that empirically connects the inner world with the outer world. Given his various interests and the limited resources of his time (he worked during the first half of the 20th century), he never succeeded in producing a conclusive explanation. However, by the end of his career, as quantum physics developed further, he and physicists involved in this branch of physics noticed a strong compatibility between the bewildering, often counterintuitive laws of quantum physics and the phenomenon of synchronicity. At the quantum level, one particle is able to affect another particle without any apparent causation, not even the faintest exchange of energy taking place. The observations of quantum physics suggest that something that can be called -at the present moment, and given our ignorance- a-causal effects, is possible.

This story contains an important lesson on what enjoying the adventure of the mind means:

Jung observed something numinous, miraculous taking place at many moments in his life. To him, these events held great significance as they revealed something about the human psyche and its journey towards wholeness, the core aim of his lifelong intellectual project. And he noticed them so frequently, either in his own experience, his shared experience with patients, or the experiences of others, that he realised he couldn’t dismiss them simply as coincidence.

So, he sought ways to understand them by any means he found appropriate, delving into esotericism, alchemy, Eastern philosophy, even quantum physics as I have mentioned above. It can be said that this journey’s ultimate destination was to capture and understand synchronicity so thoroughly that it could be consistently reproduced as long as the means to do so where available.

Nowadays, quantum physics suggest that he was onto something, and as the next decades promise an explosion in new discoveries and understandings of the universe and ourselves, perhaps in many utterly strange ways that right now we are unable to conceive (even though -at least to me, and I’m sure many more- life already seems increasingly eerie by the day) he might be proven right.

The countless successes released through Jung’s failure

In my books, Jung is one of the great modern beacons of the great adventure of the mind. Even though in the end he didn’t succeed in finding ways to reproduce synchronicity, he didn’t shrink from delving deeper into what he desired to reproduce and understand, finding the path to get there through his own means and inclinations, and in the process creating a body of work that remains exceedingly evocative, intriguing, and passion-inducing to this day. Synchronicities are only a fraction of everything that he sought to understand, but they perfectly represent the importance of incorporating the notion that beyond all the means that we have developed to embark in the great adventure of the mind -science and philosophy included- we are driven by a desire to reproduce a good thing, make it last, recreate it, and perhaps perfect it and draw even more goodness out of it.

And the most thrilling part of it is that many can seek to reproduce the same thing while finding very different paths to do so, creating many new possibilities and ramifications as they forge them, while leaving other fascinating fruits in their wake. Jung’s pursuit of the essence of synchronicity revealed new things that he found important to understand and reproduce, and perhaps some of them could prove to be key stepping stones towards a conjectural ability to thoroughly understand and multiply synchronic experiences in the distant future.

This is the power of transcendent desires beyond utility, performance, profit, or narrow problems that only make sense within the stages of particular social systems. How great can the things we seek to reproduce be? Will it eventually become a desire as encompassing as reproducing the perfect life, allowing it multiply endlessly? Who knows, it is a vertiginous notion to consider. Nonetheless, perhaps it is not a matter of ambition such as aiming for synchronicities or perfect life; it could very well consist of much smaller yet fascinating things that we love and wish were more recurrent in the world. Yet somehow, right now there are no ways to do them. These smaller things are infinite in their variations, and it’s up to us to find them by truly listening to our desires.

Too many tools, not enough temples?

It is indeed hard to find them in a world geared towards consumption and selection instead of creation and discovery. Perhaps we have built too many tools but not enough temples. Before we had traversed enough in the great adventure of the mind, we would use temples to offer sacrifices to the gods, in hopes of reproducing good things and preventing bad things from happening. Today we still need to converse with the gods, and when it comes to faith in what we believe to be transcendental (that is, sacred or, in secular words, intrinsically valuable and worthy of devotion despite lingering uncertainties), sacrifices are always necessary. They might not come in the form of animal blood, or offered crops, yet everything has its opportunity cost, and the freer we are -and the more options we have- the more we are sacrificing with each choice. Temples materialise these fundamental acts that assert our prolonged devotion and sacrifice (or renunciation).

A literary example: Italo Calvino’s fanciful speculations in Invisible Cities

In his fantastic book Invisible Cities (1972), Italo Calvino illustrates the infinity of possibilities that our desires to perpetuate and reproduce good things -and our effectivity in doing so, thanks to our minds and our capacity for devotion- can produce. The book is composed of a large collection of cities that Marco Polo describes to his master Kublai Khan. These are all cities that in the book Marco Polo, ever the great fable-maker, claims to have encountered in his travels within the Khan’s incomprehensibly vast Yuan empire. Each city is built and organised around very peculiar ways of life, all plausible yet highly unlikely. In a sense, each of these invisible cities embodies a series of concepts, or better said, the physical implications of an entire population devoting themselves to perpetuating certain good things above others in a disproportionate scale of priorities.

In addition to exploring the idea of reproducing good things, this singular book emphasises another fundamental aspect of the great adventure of the mind, which at this point might also be called the great adventure of the human spirit: we make them endure, and we also give them space –physical space– in the world.

“MARCO POLO: the inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

These invisible cities also embody the inherent messiness of these pursuits, as more often than not they leave behind endless streams of byproducts, some “good”, and some “bad”, some orderly, and some chaotic, further generating new paths and possibilities towards the pursuit of the greater good things which, in ideal circumstances, where temples (literal, or metaphorical) reassert their existence, remain in place against all contingency, like distant North Stars meant to orientate us.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

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