Well, I forgot to bring the lapcom back from the office yet again yesterday evening.  And again, there was no actual reason for leaving it; I simply forgot.

Some might call that a “reason”, and they would certainly not be foolish, but I prefer to differentiate between “causes” and “reasons”.  Reasons involve‒as the term might suggest‒an actual thought process, whether clear or logical or rational or even unconscious, whereas a cause is simply an antecedent event or process operating according to the laws of physics, that leads to something happening.

The laws of physics are basically the root of everything (even though we don’t know them all) and so all things that happen have causes in this general sense.  But not everything happens for a reason (not as far as anyone can see, despite popular trite platitudes).  In fact, most things that happen do not happen for a reason.

I was going to say that reasons and causes are like squares and rectangles, but I don’t think that’s a stark enough simile.  Rather, reasons and causes are like squares and the general class of polygons (regular and irregular).  Every square is a polygon, but squares are a tiny, vanishingly small, miniscule, wee subset of the polygons (although both sets are infinite, one is a very small fraction of the other*).  So saying not every cause is a reason is an almost misleadingly understated claim.

I started reading a book called The Enigma of Reason which posits that reason‒the capacity to articulate why we do something or what we think should be done or to explain certain things‒was not born solely out of our capacity to make models of the world in our minds in order better to navigate*** it.  It was a social trait, evolved or developed after language developed, or perhaps as language developed, in order for us to be able to persuade our fellow Homo sapiens.

I haven’t finished the book, but it is an interesting and provocative thesis.  It certainly seems plausible, and it provides a potential reason (not just a cause) for reasoning itself.  How very “meta”.

Anyway, my point is that I had no reason to leave my lapcom at the office, I merely forgot it.  I need to try harder to remember and bring it, because my thumbs are not happy with me for all this phone typing, and they are being scrupulous about making sure I know how far they are from gruntlement.

Is that a word?  Google Docs seems to consider it one, because they have not underlined it, neither in blue nor in red.  Of course, one would expect that it would recognize it, since to be gruntled must be a thing that happens if one can be disgruntled.

Interestingly enough, one doesn’t encounter the words “nongruntled” or “ungruntled” or “agruntled”.  That’s the vicissitudes of linguistic evolution for you!

Likewise, of course, we do not use the word “nocent” anymore‒at least I’ve never heard anyone use it other than to explain this fact‒but we use the word “innocent” all the time.  From context, I’m sure you’ve recognized that “nocent” means, basically, “guilty”.  Why the root word went the way of the great white whale while the derivative word is alive and well and living in our heads rent free is just one of those more or less random things.  It has causes, without a doubt, but I suspect it does not have any true reasons.  I could be wrong, though.

It’s a bit like how there are oodles of Homo sapiens in the world today, but Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and other members of the genus Homo are all gone.  Humans do tend to carry a variable smattering of genes from Homo neanderthalensis, so one could say they are not fully extinct.  But the very fact that Neanderthals and “modern” humans could interbreed and produce fertile offspring should lead one to consider them members of the same species, according to the usual definitions thereof.

I believe many biologists have proposed a subtle renaming of Neanderthals, as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, indicating that they are a subspecies of humans.  I think this is the right thing to do for logical consistency within the naming systems and the “definitions” of species.

That reminds me:  I think I want to find a good freshman (university) Biology textbook (geared toward Biology majors) to read, just to bone up on my basic Bio.  My knowledge of the subject is very advanced in the realm that applies to humans, of course‒that’s part of being a medical doctor‒but it’s been a while since I reviewed the more general science in other than popular works by such worthies as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins.

I want to get more of the latest and deepest on the subject.  And good Biology textbooks are always a joy to read.  Also, they tend to have the loveliest photos and diagrams.

On that weird little tangent, I will come to a close.  I hope you all have a very good remainder of your weekend, and I will be back with another post on Monday…as always, exclusis improvisis.

*If this sounds odd, it’s because we’re talking about infinities, and they can feel quite strange.  But consider a simple infinite set:  the counting numbers, i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4…  There are a (countably**) infinite number of them, as is probably obvious.  Then consider the multiples of a million, i.e., 1 million,  2million, 3 million…  There are also an infinite number of these.  And yet each one is only one out of a million of the counting numbers.  They have the same cardinality, and yet the one is a “small” subset of the other.

**This is to differentiate them from the uncountably infinite sets of numbers, like the Real numbers and the Complex numbers.  You can’t finish counting the counting numbers in a finite time, but if you had an infinite amount of time, you could “finish”.  Whereas you can’t even really start counting the Real numbers, because from any point, there is no next real number, even if you have them in ascending numerical order, such as on a number line.  Between where you are starting and any arbitrarily close number you choose as your next number, there exists another uncountable infinity of Real numbers, every bit as “large” as the whole Real numbers themselves.  Mind boggled?  If not, I suspect you haven’t really thought about it carefully.

***Or geogate or astrogate it.  Most of us probably spend way more time geogating than actually navigating, since we’re on land much more than on the water.  And we spend very little, if any, time charting our way through space among the stars (astrogating), though we are always moving through space.