Thursday, August 27, 2009

The perception and assignment of meaning to randomness

Somewhere on the Aegean coast of Turkey, two miniscule particles of sand lies together on the beach. Infact millions of them lie together there… Is it a coincidence or contingency that they lie together? It is not even a coincidence. There is not any meaning to it. If you name it as coincidence it is because you percieve things a intentional or coincidence etc… it is how you percieve things nothing else… Also the words ‘sand particle’, ‘beach’, ‘coast’ would not exist and we would not name those ‘things’ as as such if we did not have a vacation there, if we did not come to meet these things… There were not any coasts, sand dooms etc on the Mars or any planet till we, the human beings come and ‘discover’ them and gave them names…

Perceptions lie at the bottom of every mental activity – including cognition in general. Nature builds intelligence based on perception. Once we meet the sand particles, and many of them, we simple see or feel the warmth of them. We do not assign any meaning to them at this phase. The necessity to tell them or to remember them easily causes us to desribe them. Finally it is easier to give them a name. How we name things depend on how we relate to them rather than to their internal attributes.

The naming process causes us to use deeper levels of meaning as we get to learn more about things and the interaction between things develop. While there is a minimum common ground of the meanings of words, there still are different views to things which bring different meanings to their names.

Different levels of meanings create abstraction and the abstract names and concepts. This creates the possibility to use basic names with different meanings in different contexts.

The way we name sand particles on the beach displays our tendencies to name randomness. Some times we name random things as if they are absolute entities (accompanied with a strong sense of belief). Sometimes we do not care whether it is random or not and name the whole thing or process – as beach. Sometimes we get so high in abstraction that we name it as if from somewhere high in the atmosphere – as coast…

The perception and assignment of meaning to ramdomness is a critical mental process which displays the strength and weaknesses of the individual human mind. It is no coincidence that the initial signs of many behavioral or clinic mental problems are related to the deficiencies in this area.