Philosophical and logical aside

 

The history of the living beings and the capacities of the human species presented in this way can lead us to rethink certain philosophical references that we have inherited from our history.

For example, one relatively central in our Western culture in 2020, "the separation of body and mind": the fact that the mind would be a superior realization of nature that would take us out of the "animal" world, which can almost go so far as to make us forget that we are above all by nature living beings, included in the living and similar to all living beings.

We can for example easily retain from our philosophy courses:

 

"I think, therefore I am"

 

(Principes de la philosophie, René Descartes, 1644 - translated into Latin "Cogito, ergo sum")

 

which taught to young humans early enough can give them a reference, by the powerful simplicity of the formula which looks like a theorem, that "thinking" would be a kind of primary and ultimate nature of human beings, which could then become a form of implicit over-requirement in our lives.

This sentence is actually a logical error. "I think" is not a sufficient condition for "being", it is not a sufficient condition for our existence.

 

One should know that in 1644 the human species had only a very partial idea of ​​what matter was, or what living beings are made of and how they function - knowledge of the world below the cellular scale could only be truly accessible from 1900, so very recently - these old legacies must therefore be considered with a critical eye.

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Moreover, the spontaneity of the mind to seek simplicity can often lead to simplifying the necessary conditions and the sufficient conditions into simple equivalence relations: "I think therefore I am" => there must be many of us to hear it in high school as "I think = I am", thus opening the door to the belief in the omnipotence of the mind over the body, and at the same time opens the door to "our exit" from the living world because we cannot explicitly exchange our thoughts with other living beings (...they do not think, therefore they are not).

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Conversely, many cultural heritages place certain realities of our living being nature under the weight of very negative representations (to cite just few of them: sin, vice and virtue, etc...), or even propose in a “sacred” way (by religions) that the human species would not be an "animal"... while the human being is indeed a living being whose existence is linked to those of all the other species cohabiting the Earth biosphere.

This type of representation can “nip in the bud” a certain reality of our nature as a living being, with the danger of seeing certain intensities of the living intensify and, like a dam that breaks under pressure, generate important trauma.

It would therefore be necessary to maintain a critical look at our cultural heritage which can sometimes ignore, or even contradict, certain realities of nature, and on a large scale could perhaps endanger the balance of our finite biosphere.

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Another irony of fate, our “exit” from the living world would be facilitated by one of our spontaneous inspirations placed at the rank of first value in many of our cultures, up to the point of becoming a belief in its "absolute reality", "without limits", which can go so far as to give more space, or even value, to nonsense and to noise rather than to relevance: LIBERTY... which can then disempower us as living beings existing in a finite biosphere.

“We always have the choice” we can hear/say… is that really the case? If I am "absolutely free", I can "freely" choose to be homosexual or a priest during different phases of my life?

 

• ​From the point of view of direct relationships between people:

“my freedom ends where that of others begins”: no one can impose their own will on me, just as I cannot impose my own will on anyone.
It is perhaps this freedom that was really claimed by the slaves in the face of their executioners: the categorical refusal of any domination and abuse of power, respect for their dignity, respect for their private life, respect for their rights equal to all other human beings, respect for their existence: RESPECT.
This freedom is therefore the opposite of the belief in absolute freedom of choice, because it speaks of understanding and accepting that in our lives there are LIMITS that we cannot exceed without igniting this rage for living which can lead us to war.

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• From the point of view of the functioning of a society:

we inherit an entire functioning (culture, institutions, tools, “rules of the game”, etc.) of which we mainly reproduce the models that we have learned (which may go from “good to bad”), and whose transformations pose major issues, even when necessary, are realized on a large scale over the generations.

Our representation of the world would then be shaped by the scales of values of a given society (its levels of importance), transmitted by the elders to the younger ones during their first years of their lives, and thus modulating the "priorities", even the requirements to be met... LIMITING therefore our inspiration of absolute freedom.

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• From the point of view of our personal and inner life:

who we are physically, what we like and don't like, our gender character, who we fall in love with, the pain we may experience when a loved one disappears forever, the desire to destroy the person who would leave with a person we love... all of this we do not choose, these are natural realities that we experience.

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• From the point of view of our action :

if the school environment allows us to cover many disciplines during the first 23 years of our lives, in a relatively diversified daily life, with relatively significant freedom of orientation, once we arrive in the world of the "market", in the "systemic node " of the economic exercise which are companies, companies obliged to always produce to generate at least constant wages, our freedom and our relevance to ACT can then find itself extremely LIMITED. Indeed, while we are all capable of doing many different things, companies can place us in a “job” box, as if we were becoming a single capacity, in which we can find ourselves paralyzed for years, with very little diversity in daily action.

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• From the point of view of thought itself, the “freedom of thought”:

it seems indeed that there is an infinite dimension, without limits, to the activity of the mind, capable of assemble all the information and ideas of the world in any configuration, curious to always seek the "edges of the world", abundant in constructing the most fertile trajectory possible... but whose stability and serenity would come from its effective knowledge of the "concrete edges of the world", the LIMITS guaranteeing its sustainability as a living being.

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• Finally from the point of view of expression:

“Freedom of expression allows any citizen to express their opinions without the risk of being disturbed by a public authority.»
This freedom is therefore the potential place of expression of the LIMITS OF THE ESTABLISHED ORDER, and would therefore be a mean of moving a society forward, to the extent that the population and its coordinators remain capable of listening and digesting the proposals.
If this freedom is acquired in a given society, the fact remains that proposals that are too far from the established order (“radical” proposals) can require too much effort from everyone, and be origin of tensions.
Freedom of expression must therefore also find its right LIMITS.

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We are therefore very far from "always having the choice": behind this word LIBERTY would therefore hide the words RESPECT, LIMITS for the co-existence of the living beings, and knowing how to listen to ourselves to be able to build a BALANCE that respects our own nature in the reality of the times that we live in and that we do not choose... that is to say in some way the opposite of a transcendental extrapolation of a belief in absolute freedom.

 

Anyway, we can rejoice in living in a time at the beginning of the 21st century where a very large part of the human population has inherited this RESPECT from its history, where in concrete terms billions of human beings live without having to endure daily physical violence nor the sole vision and will of a dictator.

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Concerning the"equivalence relations", "sufficient" and "necessary conditions", it should be noted that their subtleties of are often taught with precision in the 1st year of mathematics courses at the university, hence the fact that this quote can misslead more than one.

 

By the way, the use of the terms “sufficient condition” and “necessary condition” in mathematical logic could be revisited, because the word “condition” means in itself “prior hypothesis”. This word therefore generates a confusion of meaning in the statement "necessary condition" since this expresses that it is a "consequence of another hypothesis" and not a "prior hypothesis", a "condition". To be clearer, we could therefore replace “necessary condition” by “necessary consequence” (or even use only the word “consequence”); keep "sufficient condition" (even simplify by using the word "condition" only); and replace "necessary and sufficient condition" by "necessary and sufficient proposition" in the case of an equivalence (the simplified terms would therefore lead to formulating the equivalence between a proposition A and a proposition B as follows: "a proposition A is a condition and a consequence of a proposition B", perhaps bringing more clarity?).

 

The use of the sentences "it is necessary" and "it is sufficient" in logic for these two "conditions" respectively "necessary" and "sufficient", would also need to be reworked because they can thus lead to errors of meaning for the realities of our daily life, this “must” for necessary conditions giving rise to requirements where there should really be a question of consequences.

A mathematical example: if a function reaches an extremum (minimum or maximum), then its derivative is zero. The zero derivative is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having an extremum (the zero derivative does not imply being at an extremum); it is a necessary consequence of the behavior of the function at this stage (and not a requirement in terms of need: the derivative “must” vanish at this point).

An example accessible to all in marketing/"customer relations": smiling, laughing, being happy, kindness,... are the consequences of an environment which guarantees the development of a perennial life for all. Consequences, therefore "necessary conditions" from a logical point of view, therefore using the logical terms "it is necessary to" smile, be happy... the transition to a "requirement" can quickly be done: number of companies adopting a model of happiness at work where we should be "just one" among colleagues, where “living together” becomes a requirement (happiness ambassadors, #ONE, #ALLTOGETHER,... while with whom “we are one”, friendship, is completely personal); with marketing diving into it while wearing this "façade of a smile" to satisfy the "king customer" who does not accept to be served in an mood that would not be at the top; ... thus responding to this ultimate requirement of "happiness" in the "economic exercise", while this exercise is itself the crux of the problem by totally delegating authority and value to our exchange tool (money), the heart of our abdication to this unique counter that we ourselves print, giving rise to rules of the game where humanism and life clearly no longer have first place.

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To come back to “I think, therefore I am”, the true implication would thus be the reverse:

 

"I am, therefore I can think"
 

​To be understood: "I am a human living being, so I have the capacity to think", so I can use my intellectual capacities for sorting out information, analysis, conception, invention, imagination... but I can also not do it.

 

I can sometimes not think and do lots of other things that will not directly be an action of thinking: I can sleep, eat, defecate, dance, have sex, defend myself against an aggressor, practice a sport,... all participating in my reality of nature of living being.
 

Thinking would therefore be neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for being,
but would be a capacity of the living.

It seems that Descartes had pursued his development more broadly in a different form (ego sum, ego existo: "I am, I exist"), which we learn less often at school, and which would better reflect this starting point,which is a mystery (cf. 1-Living / 1-Origin / 9), of the existence by nature of the living beings.

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We can also sometimes hear "the world is mathematical". In the same way this proposition is said in reverse and should rather be formulated: “mathematics can describe the world”;  or in other words, "the world is, and the human species has a capacity to describe the world, its forms, its dimensions, its movements, its interactions,... which can be formalized in a common unambiguous syntax to the human species called mathematics".

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Quite popular confusions of logics between "causes" and "consequences", which sometimes can also be "consistent" because we really do not know "which chicken or egg was there first" (?), duality or real feedback loops of certain realities.