Pre-Socratic Philosophy: A quest for understanding origins (WIP)

A branch of philosophy that mainly deals with an interest in the Natural world, mathematics, form, etc., and a quest to understand origins, mechanics, and to formulate hypotheses about the world. I will be diving more into my personal takes and suggesting several thought experiments to delve deeper into the core of the said subject and possibly discover more about the subject after writing this blog

Let us begin with one of the most important questions that come to mind when we set out on a quest to understand the origins of the material world

My incorporeal beliefs lean me towards an idea that our reality consists of mainly two realms, the material, and the conscious realm, the material realm consists of everything that can occupy space and has place in a human being’s visibility spectrum. The conscious realm, however, is a totally different topic, for starters, it is pretty next to an impossible task to even talk about its existence without being challenged by academic scholars from all around the globe — I believe human beings, just like animals have an inherent capacity for infinite evolution and the brain has a huge role to play in that process. As is rightly quoted on the NCBI website

The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.

A reality perceived by you might be a completely different reality for me, but we can never truly know — since we are not one.

The modern definition of reality in vague terms is something that is real, and the modern definition of real is “existing or occurring as fact; actual rather than imaginary, ideal, or fictitious”.

In the definition above, we’re very clear about what is real, it is something that is not imaginary, however, your perception of reality might a totally different one from mine. The implication is that because each of us perceives the world through our own eyes, reality itself changes from person to person. While it’s true that everyone perceives reality differently, reality could care less about our perceptions.

“The world as we experience it, including ourselves, is at all times characterized by change and transmutation, and by apparent accident. This impermanence and unpredictability was a central theme in the whole religious mythology of the Ancient Greeks. Animals and plants are created and grow, and then die and disappear. The weather changes unpredictably. Only astronomical phenomena display any regularity — the seasons, the motion of the planets, the ”fixed stars”. But is there some underlying and unchanging ”reality”, or at least a set of simpler ”principles” that are not changing? If so what is the underlying reality, and what are the principles?”

• > Perhaps the most important underlying idea running through this — one central to modern science — is the recognition that if one wants to explain the world, then the basic elements of the explanation must be different from the world. The early philosophers firmly understood that a theory of the world of appearances and particular phenomena had to be constructed from building blocks, or an underlying reality, that was not like the world of appearances — and not like us. For them, the attempt to personify Nature was to explain nothing, since it left things in the same state as before.
• “The problem with an exclusive concentration on the natural world is that it is impermanent, in a state of constant flux- if one is seeking an explanation for all things, it cannot, therefore, be found in the world of everyday phenomena. This was of course recognized by the Milesians, but they did not attempt to get to grips with the structure and form of the ineffable underlying ’stuff’, treating it as undifferentiated. In what may be one of the most important intellectual steps ever taken by mankind, such studies were initiated by the Pythagorean school, in a move that led to the creation of crucial parts of ancient mathematics. The later ideas of Heraclitus were in part a reaction to both Pythagorean and Milesian work.”

This is merely part 1 in the next few writeups of mine regarding the subject, for more content, do follow me up.