Friday, August 14

Radial Thinking

Humans have evolved to think in straight lines. Our eyes, nose and mouth face forward, and the limit of our gaze at any one time is about 108 degrees, good enough to discover danger as we trundle along.

It's as if we take a funnel and attach it to our face, and filter out the majority of our immediate surroundings. This is even worse when we focus, and that funnel becomes a garden hose. Then we become one dimensional beings, traveling along a line from point A to B to C.

Even in my thoughts, I can't make the picture a panorama, or worse, a sphere. In the virtual space of my brain, my neurons seem limited by the physical boundaries of my eyes. I can't have all around picture-thoughts, any more than I can attach new eyes to the back of my head.

I wonder what an intelligent radial creature with all around vision would be able to think about. I'm curious what sort of philosophies they would have, and how they would be able to think in ways that we can only haphazard a guess. Just as humans tend to think in one, two, and many, with our monisms, dualisms, and our universalisms, these creatures might have skipped over the idea of one and two, and began their search for truth with infinity.

Do trees and jellyfish sense in this manner? Do they "think" in a way unique to themselves, in which the universe comes to them, from every direction, without having to chase meanings on endless and futile paths?

Is there an alien race with these characteristics, that sees our thoughts and giggles when humans have the nerve to talk about the universal truths derived from causal logic? They may chuckle and speed away in their space ships, and mock us, because after all, how can we be so blind as to not understand the truths in circular logic?

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