The talents and skills of accurate perception and memory formation are very much higher-level properties of the human being, giving the appearance in past ages that ‘soul-stuff’ or ‘mind-stuff’ is necessary for such acts tied so tightly even to what we would label as virtues, such as honesty. In more recent years, dualists with the tint of reductionistic materialism have proposed software-stuff and purer dualists have proposed processes of consciousness.
Oddly enough, human abstract thought — including those realms of thought necessary for even basic exploration of empirical reality — seems to have bootstrapped itself by conjecturing these abstract or immaterial entities which exist alongside of the physical stuff of this world. As the story goes:
Souls animated all creatures with man having a special sort of soul, sometimes in addition to a more ‘ordinary’ human animal soul. Mind has access to truths only partly reflected in the physical stuff of mere things and organisms, that is, truths are somehow apart from, transcendental to, created being and yet accessible by a creature with a created brain and — according to some — a created mind as well. Of course, you can assume mind is not created, or at least some sort of transcendental Mind which belongs to some sort of transcendental Man. It becomes reasonable that the Realities of man and mind would be fully as transcendental as the truths that the flesh-and-blood creatures can somehow know.
How very disturbing it must be to some, how very interesting it is to me, to learn from this article, Keeping Track of Reality: Why Some People Are Better at It, that our ability to form accurate memories of the world around us seems to be related to the existence of a particular fold in our brains. There is even reason to believe that those without this fold in a region “at the front of the brain called the paracingulate sulcus” might live in a dream-world of sorts which they believe to be the real world outside of them. That itself is reason to believe there might be some connection between a lack of this fold and schizophrenia.
We know that some of us are better at leadership, some at nurturing, some at making useful and beautiful things, some at various types of thinking, and so forth. Now we know that some of us are also better at remembering what really happened. This isn’t so surprising, at least to a Christian who has been told that we each have a role in the Body of Christ, but it does raise some difficult questions about recognizing and properly utilizing those with different abilities.
How will this process happen? I don’t know. If I did, I could apply for a position in the top-levels of a hierarchy, arguing I could plan a community by way of slotting individuals in their proper role. If I, or anyone else, could describe this process, we’d be able to plan for the best for all who are under our power. Modern history has shown us, is showing us now, that this is a fool’s game to try to predict and control the future of human societies or any of their substantial parts.
What we have to do is to try our best to pay attention to reality and to learn from reality. We do our best by going with the flow, not in a fatalistic way, but in the way of a talented and experienced surfer who certainly knows he doesn’t have the strength or agility to do as he will, rather does he have the strength and agility to use the wave’s movement to his own advantage.
Still, it’s somewhat surprising that some of us, probably many of us, are congenitally incapable of remembering with accuracy the things and events of our own immediate regions of spacetime. Is that simply a factual result of an ongoing evolutionary process? Is it a factual result of a stable aspect of human beings?
Is it maybe even a good thing? Are there advantages to having some, or even many, in a human community somewhat detached from reality in all its strict details? It’s a question worth contemplating.