Chapter 2
For a brain to work patterns of thought and memory have to exist. We now examine what some of these look like on the planet without exploring in detail how or why they came into being. Such patterns exist where there is an interconnected group of human beings working to some common view of purpose.
Such interconnectivity has always existed locally: in a family, in a village, in a culture, in a society and in enterprise whither it part of the bureaucracy or commerce. All these work precisely because they form patterns based on shared interest and understanding of how the thoughts and actions of others mesh with those of one’s self. That is how they function. This is why humanity through speech and writing has a mechanism for constructing communal visions of the world unavailable to most other animals.
Of course we share with other animals a huge capacity for non-verbal communication and the significance of that for engagement in some forms of co-ordinated activity should not be forgotten. When an impala or a wildebeest senses danger and starts to run all follow its action.
It is also true that even with the old physical limitation to inter human communication that global thoughts did arise. They formed very slowly and imperfectly over many years if not decades or centuries of time. Their formation was restricted to the speed at which people could walk and the extent to which they could learn and understand another’s language. However, planet wide thinking did occur. Most importantly it occurred along the great data bus of medieval times the Silk Road that connected China to the West.
Over this route merchants moved goods, silk, tea, spices, gold, silver etc to be used in exchange motivated by the surplus that could be raised sufficient to justify the merchants efforts in effecting the connection. As a bi-product of this trade information, knowledge and know how would permeate from East to West slowly and imperfectly. The knowledge of how to make gunpowder passed this way.
Most of the activity our brains engage in modulate processes that enable us to exist and survive i.e. acquiring, transforming and excreting the substances we use to generate the energy that sustains us as living beings. We need to acquire and distribute oxygen around our bodies. The cardiovascular system does this breathing in air, separating out the oxygen that is then passed into the blood and pumped round our bodies by the heart. The brain keeps this process functioning throughout our lives ending by breathing out, carbon dioxide and the unused nitrogen remnant. The carbon dioxide being then inspired by plants and converted into the oxygen we breath to complete the cycle from Gaia’s perspective
Similarly our brain acts out a process that enables us to acquire food. We ingest this and the
brain helps the body to automatically convert it into materials that we can use together with
oxygen to create the energy needed for muscle to function. The unused ingested material is
excreted out into the environment where it is re-cycled as water and nitrogenous material to be
used as food for plants.
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