Answers From LaRouche

Q: Where does the mind actually exist?
                                   - from January 24, 2023 West Coast Cadre School

Question: Good morning, Lyn. I have a question, well, I was having a discussion about this idea of the divine spark of reason. And I guess we were talking about how this actually came into being, inside a human being. Was this an evolutionary process, this attainment of cognition? And I guess, that led us to another question, which is, where does the mind actually exist? In individuals, like you have a mind, I have a mind, we each have our own minds, but how does this actually exist? What space does it actually occupy?

LaRouche: This is now getting to be fun. Okay. First of all, what do we discover when we discover universal physical principles? Think about where that comes about.

We know something about this process in a concrete way, from ancient astronomy. For example, we have, through sources, such as those of Central Asia, and some of these Vedic hymns, and things related to that, which show that mankind understood long-term cycles, like equinoctial cycles, like a quarter of a 100,000 years cycle. And there were actually people who understood, in terms of what their calendars, what we recognize as the magnetic pole cycle, that is, the magnetic pole migrates, and it has a cyclical migration, and the fact that somebody had a calendar with that cycle built into it, indicates a fairly sophisticated job way back there by some ancient peoples. And also, who would discover the magnetic pole? That would only be discovered by a seafaring people, who were using compasses for navigation. And they would have to realize that the compass point, reference point, of the North magnetic pole, was moving around a bit. And they'd have to keep track of that, and come up with a cycle on that. Otherwise they couldn't do it.

We're talking about 2,000-year range, 1,000-2,000-year cycles, and there are a lot of them floating around. There are 25,000 approximately years cycle, of the equinoctial cycle. And these things are recorded in ancient calendars, and these are the kind of things that are actually transmitted through some poetry, and things of that sort.

All right. Then you have, more concretely, in modern European history, you have a reference point in the shadows of the Great Pyramids. These pyramids in Egypt are actually great astronomical instruments, with a certain unique kind of precision which tell us what they knew about astronomy. And there are some things that go with that, which give us more knowledge, insight into astronomy by these ancient Egyptians. And we're talking about nearly 5,000 years ago, in that alone.

So, anyway, this is the source of it.

Now, our culture, that is, our European civilization, comes out of what is now called ancient Greece. They didn't call themselves Greeks then, but we call them Greeks today. Now this culture, which was a Mediterranean, largely a seagoing peoples' culture, it was called a "peoples of the sea" culture, and you had places like Cyrenaica, which is on the northern coast of Africa, now part of Libya, next to Egypt, which was an integral part of the Egyptian culture, particularly the seafaring part. The Greeks were, to a large degree, actually a seafaring people, and they settled along coastlines in ancient times. And they had their fortifications toward the inland, against wild people, or something like that sort, who were the threat to the small cities, or communities, which the seafaring people built along certain coastal port areas.

So, this Greek people, as we can call them today, the ancient Greeks, typified by the case of Thales, who was Ionian, or the case of the Pythagoreans, developed a science based on Egypt, which is called spherics. Now spherics essentially is looking up to the heavens, at night—or, they actually did it in the daytime—you'd build a deep pit, a deep well, and if the well is narrowly fixed, you can actually see stars during the daytime, and particularly in areas which are fairly arid. And that's when a lot of astronomy was done that way. They had the nighttime sky which they were able to survey this way, and also the daytime sky. Motions of the planets and so forth, they could see, in the dusk or whatnot.

So, this became known as spherics.

Now, people didn't know how far distant these things they were observing were. All they could measure was the angular motion, or the apparent angular motion, in observing these. So this became known as spherics. So, you didn't have any assumption about the nature of geometry. You assumed that all you knew about geometry was angular motion. And the sky, the universe that enclosed the Earth, was the universe.

So, spherics meant this particular approach. This is the approach of the Pythagoreans. There was no Euclidean geometry then. Fortunately. I say fortunately. Euclidean is part of the decadence of European civilization. It took us until Riemann in the 19th Century, to finally officially begin to get free of Euclidean geometry, the work of Riemann, on a generalized Riemannian geometry, in which there are no axiomatic assumptions. There are no definitions, axioms, and postulates, as such. Only universal physical principles can be used in the place of axioms.

All right. So this knowledge is there. Mankind is able thus, in astronomy and elsewhere, to look up at the heavens, not knowing exactly what they're seeing in sense perception, but by studying the angular periodicity, the periodicity of angular motions, and the aperiodicity of angular motions, observed in the domain of spherics, we come up with conceptions which we call universal physical principles.

Universal refers to universe: the ultimate domain of spherics. And therefore, we're looking for principles which exist in that universe, at all times. So, we're not talking about evolution of the universe, in that sense. We're talking about a universe, and therefore we don't start with yesterday and today. We start with discovering something which is presumably universal, and which we're able to prove is valid, as a universal idea.

Now, then, coming back to Earth, having defined this notion of universal principles, you then find that there are three different kinds of experimental areas, experimental subject areas, three different qualities which exist. One: You have processes which do not correspond to living processes, or products of living processes. They are abiotic.

Then you have processes such as fossils, the fossils of this planet. Water is a fossil. The atmosphere is a fossil. The waters of the oceans and so forth were created by living processes' actions, and they left water behind as a fossil. The atmosphere was created by living processes, which left the atmosphere as a fossil. Most of the surface of the Earth, is covered by fossils, the bodies of dead plants and animals, piled one on top of the other, and this goes down a great distance. More distant than you'd want to go. Like the depths of the ocean, for example.

Then you find a third one. That mankind is able to change the universe, or change the Earth, in particular, in a way that living processes otherwise can not do. Therefore, you have three areas, as known to the ancient Greeks: the abiotic, the non-living, universal; you have the living processes, again relatively universal; you have the powers of the human mind, which are able to change the universe, as nothing else is. Again, universal. These we call phase-spaces in modern language.

So now, therefore, what have you got? You've got a universal principle called reason, noesis, or nous, from the ancient Greek. You've got the universal principle. Did that exist at the same time that the abiotic universe existed? Did that exist at the same time that living processes existed in the universe? Did not these three principles of abiotic, living, and noetic exist at all times, at the same time, as universal principles?

Okay, then what is man? Man is a product of the impact of a universal principle, which we can call cognition or noesis, as manifested upon a form of life which we call man. That form of life called man, is appropriate for the reflection of this universal principle, which we call noesis, or creativity. So, therefore, it does not come from inside biology. It does not exist in any other living processes, but it always existed. Because the laws on which the mind operates, are universal and have always existed, in the universe. We did not create those laws of the universe—they existed. The difference is that man, by discovering these laws of the universe, and by applying them as products of the human will, is able to change the universe, not by introducing a new principle into the universe, but by introducing a new application of a previously existing principle.

And that's what the problem is for many people, when they're trying to deal with this question of evolution. They're always looking for some way in which you start with two balls bouncing against each other, and end up with living processes, number one; and then number two, you end up with a human being, who has evolved from the ape into a thinking human being. Not so.

There is something outside living processes, expressed within man, which is the creative power of man.

This is the ancient notion of the soul in ancient Greece, and in Christianity.

That sort of gets into it, and covers the other point as well.

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