I’m not a great storyteller, which is a shame as I have a long story to tell. Most of it has been already written, a couple of years ago when I was trying to find out more about everything, but I always say to people that if you have written something you like then you should tell people about it.

Some of what I am going to say might sound pretentious – it’s not meant to – and some of it may sound complete nonsense, but maybe someone reading it will get something out of it. I hope so.

This is part one; I don’t know how many parts there will be, I’ll tell you when I’m finished, honest.

Sometime in 2002 I decided to take a Mensa test; Mensa is an organisation for people who score high marks in Mensa tests. I’m not sure why, I think I just wanted to see if I was “clever” in any sort of way, having never been fantastic at school, or having an aptitude for languages, or anything particularly brilliant. Anyway, I took a test and it turned out that I had an IQ of 156, which came as a bit of a shock. “What now?”, I thought.

Having not much time on my hands I didn’t fancy joining so that I could talk to other Mensa people about big numbers, but did get the idea that if I was supposed to be clever then I could think of the answers to things – maybe. I had started seriously thinking about our future, doing things for Greenpeace and Friends Of The Earth, writing letters to politicians and companies, that sort of thing; so,obviously the thing to do was to discover the meaning of life.

Well, it’s got to be out there somewhere, so why not?

Over the next 10 months I read LOTS of philosophy, and bought lots more that I haven’t even got round to reading (and probably never will – more of that later). As I read, I started to write…and it really came out, things I had never imagined I would think about. Sometimes it scares me to read the kind of things I wrote, and I don’t think I want to be in that place again for a while (not the train to work – that’s where I did most of my thinking – I mean my head).

If you would excuse me, I’m going to paste lots of things that I wrote in these posts. They may not make much sense, out of context, but as I said, maybe someone will get something out of them. This is the first thing I wrote, on 21 May 2003:

Do the thoughts of philosophers, or indeed anyone with original ideas, derive from innate knowledge? This is highly improbable, given the nature of inheritance. Our genetic makeup seems to rule out the inheritance of ideas – although that does assume separation of mind and body. In fact, if we take the monist approach, much if not not all of our knowledge could be inherited, and just awakened as we are stimulated throughout life.

Could there be such a thing that gives the impression of innateness, but is not inherited? Well, some things, such as the ability to learn language are, in all probability, part of our physical makeup. Knowledge itself seems to exist in a complex array of memories, be it physically contained in books, or present in the minds of people. This corpus is growing at present, but may only be growing due to the memories that exist. Historically, knowledge has peaked wherever there has been some major stimulus, such as freedom of expression, the need to create societies, technological discoveries and so on. Conversely, troughs in knowledge, and apparently troughs in the development of thought seem to occur at times of intellectual repression (though, not physical repression – this would act as a stimulus for thought) or where the need for survival as a society overrides the possibility for complex thought.

Overall, this forms a powerful image of the knowledge corpus as an energy blanket, which grows when it is stimulated, and can potentially be fed off by those who require that knowledge and have the ability to retain and utilise it. The thought of humanity as a single organism inevitibly comes about, but could it be something more mundane than this; perhaps that we are equipped with the ability to absorb information at a far greater rate than we are conscious of. Maybe, by a very early age, we already have a remarkable amount of knowledge, but are not yet intellectually mature enough to utilise it, and turn it into original ideas. It may be that intelligence is not the ability to absorb knowledge but the ability to utilise it.

Sorry about that.

I’ll write some more in a little while – if you want me to – and I will show you something like the meaning of life eventually, honest.

Keith
www.theearthblog.org
www.reduce3.com
And Proud Member Of The Sietch