behest of the environment. Touch, smell and taste receptors are all designed by evolutionary response to our surroundings. It is likely that an alien from a remote world could not respond to any of the stimuli of our earthly environment.
So the blank slate must develop receptors that are aligned to the environment if he is to receive stimuli at all. But these stimuli are of no use if they can't be processed in some way. The basic requirement for processing is that a memory store be developed. The blank slate is now becoming a complex organism with receptors and memory. But more is required before knowledge is generated. The masses of received stimuli in the memory are useless unless there is some way of processing them. The simplest form of processing would be one to one mapping - say a particular visual stimulus with a particular smell. This mapping is then put into another memory store - the basic store of knowledge. The next time that same visual stimulus is received there is a map route to an already received smell and an expectation is developed. If the expectation is satisfied then that information is stored in another memory that might be called the store of knowledge. The blank slate is developing knowledge by induction. In effect all humankind's knowledge is inductive. We receive many stimuli X and then stimuli Y and we induce that X is always associated with Y. We continue to believe it until an exception occurs. When an exception occurs we look carefully at other associated stimuli and see if there is a new association and a new inducted piece of knowledge emerges.
Philosophers have always looked sceptically at induction as a means of building up knowledge. They have linked it to strict empiricism where the link with direct observation is taken to be very strict. The empiricist tends to hold that only directly made observations are to be taken into account in developing an understanding of any phenomenon that is postulated but not observed. This may be so for simple induction but as the memory stores develop and the mapping systems become more complex, induction moves away from the empirical mode. Too much reliance was placed on Hume's scepticism about induction. He actually felt that just because we had seen day follow night thousands of times there was no reason to conclude that day will follow this coming night. If you look for strict one hundred per cent certainty that contention is true. We know that someday the sun will not shine but we know to a good certainty that that dark day will not arise in the immediate future.
It is interesting to look at how modern quantum theory sees inductive scepticism. If there is no observer present, then the state wavefunction of the world just evolves with time according to the complex partial differential equation of Schr?dinger There is no room for inductive scepticism here. There is a direct evolution in a totally deterministic fashion from one moment to the next for all eternity. Induction reigns supreme. But introduce an observer and the state wave function reduces to an eigenstate of the observable, say position. This is one of an infinity of potential eigenstates each with a particular probability amplitude but each theoretically possible. Here strict induction breaks down. Day does not of necessity follow night. But all is not lost because when we make an observation X and expect the associated eigen state Y there is a probability range for Y that, although spread out over the full range from zero to one hundred per cent, is conditioned by the environment, which in effect seeks out the expected Y. In other words if day following night depended on only one observable, our personal seeing daylight, then there is considerable room for inductive scepticism. But in reality it is conditioned by the environment where there are billions of observers each with a similar expectation that indeed day follows night. Hume's inductive scepticism was a naivet? - true only in the very extreme. It led modern philosophical attitudes to science up an irrational path.
So the blank slate has receptors, memory and induction with which to build up his knowledge base. But the blank slate existed over half a million years ago yet the evolution of man was painfully slow until perhaps the last fifteen or so thousand years. It was the development of language that had a huge impact on humankind's cultural evolution. Sophisticated communication was essential to the development of knowledge. Communication was the key that unlocked the power of inductive reasoning. This was furthered by the development of writing less than five thousand years ago. Knowledge now had a permanency outside the memories of people. The great final frontier of knowledge came with the development of the critical method - trial and error plus feedback. Science was truly borne. Knowledge was tested and if a hypothesis failed it was revised and a new and better theory applied. Knowledge becomes more and more precise. From Aristotle to Newton, from Einstein to modern theories of everything, there is a constant improvement of theory and observation.
The scientific laws developed in the last few hundred years and more specifically in the twentieth century tell us a lot about how the world works. Big Bang theory and quantum field theory covers the spectrum from the great infinite to the small infinitesimal scale. But all these elaborate mathematical models are designed to tell us how things work and not why. The increasing extent of our knowledge of how things work pushes back the horizon of ignorance of why things work the way they do. Behind the Big Bang there is a great question mark? Superstring theory of the twenty first century may bring us back to pre-Big Bang scenarios but this is still pushing back the ultimate why even further. This doesn't undermine the efforts of so many great minds as they struggle to unravel the workings of the universe. This work needs to be done and is in fact necessary to explode some of the metaphysics that philosophy, myth and religion have posited as the answer. One of the problems is that the territory becomes so difficult to understand that few people interested in the why question can travel there. This limits the number of people from non-specialist backgrounds from exploring the possible philosophical and other implications of leading edge modern scientific thought. For this reason the why question is rarely tackled in the strange multidimensional world of superstring theory.
If reality is really, say, of twenty six or even ten dimensions as may be postulated, what does that mean for induction, for knowledge, for the question why. It is important to the extent that unseen dimensions lead to unseen understandings. We struggle to come to terms with four dimensions being physically unable to wrap time into space in a cognitively meaningful way. We are satisfied with a mathematical formalism that when applied to the real world gives precisely the correct answers. What information is hidden in these extra six or twenty two dimensions? Could they hold the secret of life? When we finally, if ever disentangle them, will we see with a new up to now hidden sense. Will this sense evolve just as our eyes and ears evolved in reaction to what our environment revealed to us. The new sense may be a mathematical one. The receptor may be the brain or a special part of it that allows the person to understand the incredibly complex world of infinite dimensional manifolds, with bundle spaces like clouds hovering over each individual point out to infinity, and across these clouds will range complex infinite variable functions and hyperfunctions mapping out further membranes of reality with time. To develop this new receptor humankind must step up its education many gears so that young children are exposed these ideas from an early age, just as we teach them to write as soon as they can hold a pen, or to talk as soon as they can make sounds. Maybe in hundreds of years from now the receptor will have developed so much that the extra dimensions of reality will be visible to the mind and a whole new era in human knowledge of the world begin.
Perhaps in looking at the world as a three or four dimensional reality has been like looking at the part and not the whole. The wholeness may be the multidimensional reality currently denied to our un-evolved receptors. The gestalt nature of reality has been hidden from us by our inability to see further than three dimensions. The broader extent of nature needs to be revealed to us before we can understand why nature is or where it is going.
I feel jaded, having waded through so much only to realise that there are no answers for the why question at our present level of understanding. I can't even play a game and throw up zany reaso
ns for humanity playing out this tragi-comedy on a lone blue planet in an innocuous corner of the cosmos. I could say the reason is God. I could throw out the question and say that there is no reason for our existence or the existence of the vast space of the universe. I could say that the universe always existed and that in an infinity of time, life could just pop into existence. I could say that we don't exist and that it is all a solipsistic illusion. I could say that the ultimate laws of nature will show that the cosmos must exist and that life must evolve in it. I could say that advanced philosophical thinking will show the necessity for reason to be unfounded and that there is no reason. I could say that a holistic approach to science, art, metaphysics and religion will reveal an infinity of reasons each giving a plausible answer. I could say that future thinking will reveal that a reason cannot exist logically. I am no further on.
The sun had passed the mid point in the sky. My eyes had been closed for hours. I had shut out the world of colour and beauty to be