Mind | This World and Others

From cave walls to the cosmos: how humans built the One out of questions they couldn’t stop asking

Philosophy | May 2026

Intelligence is based in memory, without why they are useless. The moment you can ask why, you will, and you’ll keep asking until you hit a wall the evidence can’t get you past. That wall is where religion lives.

This isn’t a weakness. The why-drive is the engine behind every model humans build of the world. It starts with fire and weather and then, inevitably, it turns to the question behind all questions: what started this?

Vocabulary

Most discussions of God get tangled before they start because people use the same word to mean very different things. Here’s the map I work with:

The Origin — the start of everything, defined as an event. No feeling of intention behind it.
The Final Cause — which is to say, first cause, a step between the Origin and the Absolute. Still largely intentionless, but there’s a tint of something.
The Absolute — Less an event than an impersonal creative condition.
The One — the Absolute plus intent. This is a matter of faith, not evidence. It cannot be known from what we observe.
God — the personification of the origin of all we perceive. The One given a face and a relationship with humanity.
god (lower case) — a referent to one of many deities in a system where there is no single final origin.

On gender: rendering God as he or she assumes things that aren’t in evidence and are arguably contra-indicated by the concept itself. A creator might seem more female if you think in terms of procreation, more male or neuter from a philosophical standpoint. Neither is satisfying unless you set out from an assumed initial condition, personification is a human need.

Beginning

Animism came first — scratching the why-itch into a set of beliefs that could be shared across a tribe. It works at small scale. As culture complexifies, you get gods: local, specific, squabbling. Then philosophy pushes further back, past the gods, toward a single origin, and you start to get God.

The Hellenistic world shows this arc clearly. It started with gods, evolved philosophy that defined the absolute origin, and from there derived a concept of God. That Hellenistic concept of the One then wrapped around evolved Judaism — with its apocalyptic messianic tradition — and produced Christianity. Islam followed, melding tribal Arabian religion with Judaism and Christianity into something that collapsed individual conscience into a tribal collective. That’s the source of its strength but a reason that it’s historically been a threat to neighboring structures.

Egypt started a similar philosophical evolution and then, probably due to the shaping effect of Nile Valley culture on its social structure, devolved back to gods. The environment bends the theology.

Consciousness

Even extremely simple worms react to stimulation in idiosyncratic ways, suggesting some differentiation in even minimal nervous systems. Single-cell organisms show behavioral differentiation that might indicate some level of something. Ants recognize themselves in a mirror and try to remove marks that would get them attacked at the nest entrance.

Does only self-consciousness constitute mind? Does consciousness without self-consciousness exist? These are thoughts we struggle with as we look at the evidence in the world we live in and apply it to the question of origin. What is the relationship of Mind and Consciousness to the Absolute?

The evidence says there’s an origin. Whether that beginning had intent is the question the evidence cannot answer.

Origin

The origin of our universe produced complex organization that chained up through cosmology to chemistry, to life, intelligence, ecology, and society. That’s not random noise out of an infinite field of interactions. It’s structured emergence across effectively infinite time and space.

This argues, at minimum, for an Absolute that set the conditions for what is. It also suggests that ethics, philosophy, and meaning were intrinsic from the start not invented by humans but discovered, the same way mathematics and physics are discovered. Invention from nothing is not real, we find what was already there (in my opinion a categorically more difficult problem given the complexity of our reality.)

Whether you take the next step, from Absolute to One, from impersonal origin to intent, is where evidence runs out and faith begins. Not faith as credulity, but faith as a position you hold in the absence of proof in either direction.

From the One to God is personification: a human need, driven by the desire for relationship with the absolute rather than mere acknowledgment of it.

That’s not irrational. It’s the oldest human need there is.

More on engineering, technology, and science fiction on YouTube. Fiction and commentary on the bigger questions at Substack.

International Space Station's Expedition 29 crew on September 17, 2011, while cruising over the Indian Ocean near Australia and south of Madagascar

Is it only after certain brute needs are met that we can look up and see the wonder, the beauty of the world around us? And if you are trapped in the mental, social, and light smeared deserts where too many of us live in, does it takes a special imagination to see beyond the here and now?

SNC Dream Chaser Docked with ISS

Sierra Nevada Corporation dreams big with the Dream Chaser, a crewed spaceplane based on the NASA/AF experimental lifting body designs from the ’70s (It was the crash of one of these that was a lead in to the Six Million Dollar Man TV show by the way, not to put you off.)

They have a composite fuselage built and have experimented / developed (like Virgin Galactic) a hybrid rocket motor. A hybrid rocket motor has a solid fuel but liquid / gaseous oxidizer. You don’t have to deal with the complex plumbing of a pure liquid motor or the uncontrolability of a solid. They are talking to Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic about catching a ride into the stratosphere on a White Knight II. I’d even guess a sub orbital launch from a WKII is likely. I then hope they talk to SpaceX about a ride to orbit on a Falcon. There is no reason these various guys shouldn’t be looking at cooperation as their technologies mature, or not. Its possible the SpaceX dragon will be a wonderful cargo hauler but not a real solution for crew return or maybe won’t really be reusable….

There seem to be a lot of people dreaming about a lot of options, far and away above what NASA has been able to do for most of my life. I can only hope this continues.

And by the way, the guys who are supporting this stuff, they’re all in the 1% the OWS crowd are against. When OWS talk about bankers, they almost have my sympathy, but when I look to eSpace and Steve Jobs, even Gates, then that faint flicker, flickers out.

You have to have big assets to make big dreams real, and as long as they are spending it on this sort of thing, I’m all for them keeping every last cent of what they make in the money world.

What happens when your memory is so faulty you don’t even know your memory is faulty?

I was reading an article in an actual paper magazine Brain Power that was discussing the problems of a patient with a particular type of brain damage. The patient had a form of amnesia that let him remember old information, from before the brain damage, but not since, the person can do all the normal things, dress and take care of themselves, but they are living in an eternal now. And because all they have is a fixed past and an utterly confusing now their mind basically fills in the gaps, without ongoing memories the persons brain/mind cannot do the sort of ‘running average’ comparison of the now with the near, recent, etc past that keeps us (most of us, relatively) grounded in the hear an now. So this person asked a simple question about where they are and why, would come up with various stories, from the nearly right to the utterly fantastical and apparently believe them and operate as if they were true.

So maybe writing Sci Fi requires a certain amount of amnesia?

: Beating the Decline..

There is a very interesting article at Baen the premier outlet for Sci Fi these days particularly Mil Sci Fi. Mr. Dunn has done an excellent job of outlining the current trajectory of the mil world from the threat to the budget and the current reaction of the Tech Services, the Navy and Air Force, I eagerly await the second part which will deal with the ground forces.

The situation in grunt land has always been more complex than that in the technical services, not to say that the sea or the air are simple, just simpler, on land you have the interaction of so many things that it is hard to readily predict what will work and what won’t.

I can hear a lot of cat calls regarding the fact that Navies and Air Forces have made huge missteps. And I agree but in general those mistakes while suboptimal where still better than what came before. In the mud its not clear that this is always the case. Now I’m not talking about weapons like nukes or even heavy artillery, these are technical services, but as we have found out in Iraq and Af’stan its boots on the ground that matter and a thousand little actions that eventually spell success or failure.

In the J.S.Zaloga book Panther vs. Sherman focusing on the battle of the bulge the author re-examines the face off between these two tanks. And while in most pure technical terms of armor, gun, ground pressure, engine power, the Sherman comes off the worse, in fact tactically it often won. For many reasons, reliability, more vehicles, fighting from ambush, generally more agile, better visibility.

While better equipment is often an amplifier, training, logistics and morale are generally more important once you have reached reasonable parity. You are not going to beat even a PzKfWgn II with straight up lancer charge. But there is no reason that an armored force couldn’t be fought to a standstill by folks on horses given horse portable anti tank weapons, equivalent logistics and lack of air superiority (Russia in Af’stan anyone?)

Precision weapons and ubiquitous day/night recon and observation are having profound effects on open field warfare. And the emergence of extended urban/sub-urban campaigns are making things even more difficult. Then there is the emergence of powerfully armed subnational or non-national forces whose operations are distributed temporally and geographically, to such an extent that they look like policing problems, but are really outside of the scope of traditional police force, since they are often heavily armed and operate largely within the law except for occasional egregious exceptions…..

So I’ll be interested to see what Mr. Dunn has to say in his second article.