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.
