Multi-Dimensional Cognition

The Germans have it in their lexicon. A word for a comprehensive, holistic, multi-dimensional world view and philosophy of life - "Weltanschauung".

Cognition together with different disciplines of knowledge, metacognitive thinking, experience, training and phenomenalism (visual, visceral, auditory, olfactory, tactile, kinaethestic, intuition) go hand-in-hand to assist us in laying into a problem or issue.

This is almost uncannily analagous to the multitudinous , individual, self-contained lenses of the compound eyes of an insect which in the end assimilate them all onto a focal point - the next stage of the information processing conveyor belt - initiation and acting upon the information so obtained.

Thus we have sensors and receptors working together bi- and multi-directionally this way.

Think watching a view from above the tree-top and below. Or visiting the reserve at various times of the day and at night. And that multi-faceted sparkling panorama strikes you at once!

Just so you can grasp what I mean, I am going to explain with several illustrations.

The facts of the what and how of the Cambrian explosion are well known. However, why it happened, was never fully understood.

The study of the Cambrian explosion lies surely within the ambits of biology, archaeology and palaeontology. But Professor Andrew Parker, with the aid of optical physics, was able to lay in on the issue with his Light Switch Theory, hence providing another viable scientific explanation for this phenomenon.

Who would , in his rightful and politically correct mind, think Optics has a role to play in of all things, an essentially biological complexity?

George Bernard Shaw was so right when he observes that no one can be a specialist without being an idiot of sorts and further on espouses : "All great truths begin as blasphemies."

We only have to think of poor Copernicus and Galileo to understand this pithy epigram . But just so we have a fair judgement of this papal bungle, the Reformist of that era also did not lend any credence to Galileo's theory. I just want to be really objective here so you can see from all angles.

We can conclude from the above that no science stands alone. But if the late Professor Stephen Jay Gould had his way in his book "Rocks of Ages", the magisteria of Science and Religion cannot intertwine.

But now in the age of the genome, reproductive and stem cell cloning experiments with chimera , many moral , religious and ethical implications beckon and inevitably this sees some crossing over of the two.

In fact, in his other much later book on "Crossing Over - Art and Science", Professor Stephen Jay Gould acknowledges how these two divergent disciplines converge.

Thus even Science has bio-ethical considerations with legalesse thrown in as well and that makes for multi-dimensional thinking through problems.

A science student of today similarly when he learns of lenticel should immediately be able to interconnect this to a uni-cellular nuclear membrane and the corneal membrane. Or the concept of mutualism to a prophage, lichen and Nemo in his marine coral habitat.

By the way all three concepts are neatly categorized into the Prostita, Plant and Animal kingdoms.

When we think Linnaeus, we think taxonomy. But there is another side to him. He was also the founder of the racial classification system we inherited - whites, yellows and blacks as he calls them. So too Montessori. She was an educationalist but an elitist one at that - a firm supporter of the eugenics movement sweeping modern Europe.

Chairmao Mao of the CCP certainly earned kudos with the peasants of his day when he lived among them in the rural villages and tried garnering their support. He realised this could be a potent way of besieging the city from the fringes and thus overpowering the Kuomintang.

However his congenial rapport with the proletariat only serve to mask the hideous crimes he was to commit later in his cultural revolutionary trials and agricultural reforms.

If we thought that with the now discredited science of phrenology that nothing good came out of it, we are absolutely wrong. It sparked the study of the brain with our present ever-growing database of how it works.

The eugenics movement with its argument for differentiating between born and occasional criminals led to enlightened determinate sentencing later on. So with just as many debacles so too we had as much enlightenment and amelioration.

But we must always remember how all writings or academia expresses only a unilateral view, usually that of the author. He may pick on one aspect of the subject to discuss or his own personal preferences or prejudices. Thus to round up our world-view, we may have to read several texts on the same subject.

Don't forget subsequent revisions or reprints and new developments in that particular field and we can appreciate the dynamic versus static nature of cognition. Change is the only constant with exceptions if I may add.

Francis Crick, a bio-physicist and James Watson, a bio-ornithologist, both from very different fields of science , built the helical structure of the DNA from scratch. But was it any surprise that Crick with his engineering insights and Watson, his attuned observational acuity, should eventually solve this bio-morphological mystery?

If you think linguistics has no place in the scheme of all the sciences here, think again. Many of the older scientific literature were written in the vernacular languages of their times.

That means Latin ,Greek and a host of other ancient languages - Sanscript, Hebrew , Medieval and even Anglo Saxon English.

To clue in on the medical and scientific writings, maybe sometimes even in hieroglyphics, a linguist and polyglot of sorts must be on hand to decipher the as good as encrypted scripts.

Leonardo Da Vinci strikes me as one fine example of a multi-disciplinarian. Artist, engineer and inventor. Sir Issac Newton and his Principia Motion was at once a scientist and cosmologist. Sir Thomas More and his "Utopia" was a statesman, humanist and philosopher.

The Bible has a final word on multi-dimensionality with this observation : That an adult studying the Bible will take on matured thought and serious reflection compared to the childish notions learned long ago in bygone catechism lessons.

This then sums up how experience is a great leveller and eye-opener. The young may not see as far or deep.

"Nothing is real until it is experienced".

It should just be a matter of time when our own scientific and linguistics boffins start combining their knowledge bases in the Sciences (which include the social sciences) , Mathematics and Languages (plus the humanities) to unravel the many scientific, medical , cosmic , linguistic , social, political , historical and archaeological mysteries and puzzles of the world.