Thoughts Of A Predicate Thinker [Vol I: Chapter I: Subsection A]

There comes a time when events in life cover an immeasurable circumference, one so large to see and mark. The test to holding on at such times appears fruity and desolate, albeit preponderant and tasking. Life gets better at every tide, and the human struggles in the face of so many hostilities suffer an excruciating torment that leaves a lot to be desired. Life is ignoble to say the least. And much of man’s accomplishments speak little volume of what is potentials actually are. Man is simply insurmountable!

In the time of the earliest men, much of what people had to do was fend for themselves and their immediate environment.  Several institutions in man’s filial digest were yet to see the light of day at the time. In that time, Man had but one task; survive. He was faced with challenges that beclouded his thoughts, hopes and aspirations. He had very little to count on, and so had little cause to worry about the next day. He lives each day as they come. Surviving the problematic associated with nature was the next order in line. The earliest man was awed by the wonders of nature; the phases of geographical order and the polemics of ecological constraints. He simply had to seek a way out. There then came the first moment of cognition.

At the first level of awareness, man acknowledged there were differences in time, space and knowledge. He discovered a change in time as day gradually gives way for the night, and the position he occupies at certain points or moments of the day/night was ever changing and things don’t appear to be the same even though they are still what they are and were in some times past. The obviousness in this led to him first accepting that he knows something and can be sure he does know what he thinks he knows. That is knowledge! But then, knowledge as he would later discover, is limited in time and space. There is a limit to what he can know at a certain time and position. And of course, he is aware that, in laying claim to a certain knowledge about the marvels of his world, he encounters a constant factor; change. Everything seems to change. Even what he seems to have known at a certain point falls victim to change. The knowledge he acquired at certain points become a matter of the past and a possibility for the future, and even though the knowledge still has some level of validity to it, the fact that, the time difference to which/when the said knowledge came upon his grasp remains a subject of reference and mere conjecture. What he knows in about an hour ago has changed in time; he has had other thoughts and activities that are capable of altering what he has held as “known” in that time. This is a philosophical problem!

The human person is a product of design and quasi-purpose. His existence was designed by an intelligent cause. He functions as a single unit forged to a common course with other units that share a common and exclusively distinct feature. The human person is pronged by design to act curiously. His mind is a prototype of markedly fine-tuned modules which have socially amicable structures that act not strictly to a design, but uniquely of a design. Man is not mechanical and does not live to fulfil any special goal. He lives for himself in union with the other units he shares same features with. He and other units have a common course and each goes about his own course based on subjective cognition and recognition. Each person lives for himself in view of pursuing a common course with others who live for themselves as well. Man is not determined to an action. He acts upon his own judgement and cognition.

Every single man acts on his own accord. He is the maker of what he thinks and sees. He sees the world by his own eyes, and make meaning of everything he wants according to how he wants them. He is the architect of his own path. His mind is a single component that informs his actions and movement. He thinks alone because he is alone. He acts because he thinks, and he lives because he is aware of the fact that he has a thinking ability that revolves around him and him alone. His world is uniquely single and objectively evolving. The human person is a thinking thing according to Rene Descartes. That he thinks is a reason why an individual can only read his own mind and know what he alone is thinking at a particular time. No one can know what goes on in the mind of another.

Upon conception at birth, the human mind is blank like a clean sheet of paper. This is what the earliest Greek thinkers called the “Nous tabula rasa”- blank sheet. The mind is plain and is only written upon as the human person starts to engage in his own self-activities. The mind thus records the activities from previous time and space into cognitive awareness for rumination on a later time and space. This is the thinking faculty of man; his person and his world.