Since concepts
of 'Creation' and ' A Creator' are impreceptible to the senses,
religious communities have always relied on icons as a stimulus or focus for prayer
and meditation. Some have argued that aesthetic experience through contact with
heritage landmarks, no matter how small, can border on the religious or mystical. It
is maintained that that the experience of wild things involves "awe in the face of large,
unmodified natural forces and places – such as storms, waterfalls, mountains and
deserts." Landmarks of this kind may be taken as cosmic icons for mediation on
the meaning of life and the universe.
There is no doubt that
life is carried forward because molecules of DNA, which
constitute the genes, embody a coded history of life's genealogical past. In this
respect we are part of nature in everything we do, from stepping on a bus to painting
a house. Like all other living things our behaviour is governed by a chemical coding of
our genes, which is a record of successful long-term interactions with the
environments of our ancestors, near and in the distant past. It is a biochemical
memory that remembers the body's responses of growth reproduction and behaviour
that have been responsible for survival.
In this respect, the
body of a plant, animal or microbe represents a kind of prediction
that its future environmental experiences will, to a general extent, resemble those of
its ancestors. Animals, especially those with brains, are particularly good survivors
because the nervous system also has a remarkable picturing ability for remembering
what is the most useful way of responding to short-term variations in the
environment. As a computer model, the brain (hardware) and its networks of
memory cells (the software) have evolved to continuously scan the environment, and
use memories of good and bad responses to keep short-term survival strategies up
to date.
The genes model the
basic aspects of the environment that change very slowly over
generations. The brain produces models of survival as day-to-day interactions
between perception via the senses and a mental representation of environment that
triggers the correct response. This interplay between changes in the environment
and their representation as virtual images in the central nervous system allows us to
move through a mental world of our brain's making, and produce neuromuscular
responses that aid survival. Since brains are also products of natural selection,
ancestors, near and in the distant past, also carried virtual worlds of their
contemporary environments in their heads. Brains are a particular expression of DNA
tasked with the role of recording lifespan- events as pictures to help predict the
immediate future.
Landmarks
as maps
We describe these virtual
worlds as 'patterns of thought' and the process of
perception that generates them as 'reading the environment'. This faculty of
'graphicity' is a vital process of comprehension. We become interested in shapes
and colours that do not fit into the known. In this we prefer intriguing suggestions to
actual representation. For example, a trail of footprints occurring together with
disturbed vegetation and dung deposits is read intently by a hunter as the pattern of
his prey. It is comprehended as a detailed mental map of events over a wide area
that points to the course of action necessary if the hunt is to be successful.
According to Steven
Dawkins it seems plausible that the ability to perceive the signs
and generate such pictures might have arisen in our ancestors before the origin of
speech in words. If the thought-picture could be represented as an arrangement of
shapes and signs, constructing an environmental model 'in the head' is a helpful way
to communicate, and coordinate what has to be done in a social group. Such mental
imagery could be an educational resource to help group cohesion and promote
social evolution. This seems the likely origin of art, which depends on noticing that
something can be made to stand for something else in order to assist
comprehension and communication. Dawkins suggests that it could have been the
drawing of mind-maps in the sand that drove the expansion of human evolution
beyond the critical threshold of communication that other apes just failed to cross.
It may be pertinent
that ceremonial sand- pictures of native Australians function as
maps. They are patterns created by an individual 'dreamer' through the two-
dimensional spacing of symbols standing for people and local topographical detail.
The fact that these patterns are closely associated with 'dreaming' is significant.
Dreams are set up by our simulation software using the same modelling techniques
used by the brain when it presents its updated editions of reality. These aboriginal
maps of the dreamtime were community properties. Their role was to codify the
neighbourhood and its use by the community in the form of a locally accepted non-
representational pattern of relationships. The collection of pictographs reinforced the
existence of a tribal territory and its natural resources by incorporating stories about
its occupation by the group's ancestors. The pictures, now being made permanent
works of art on cloth and hardboard, had a social function to maintain a subculture of
understanding by reinforcing comprehension of group identity and space.
