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The Limits of the Mind

The mind has no limit, but the brain has real limits at its current level of development.

Software has no limits the only limits are that which the hardware provides. The mind is the software while the brain is the hardware for running the mind. 

Right now our brains are practically limited by the language that we use. A language is system our minds use to arrange data in our brains. Without a language we will just receive the external chaos and store it as is without the capacity to organize, think about it, create with it and eventually communicate with it. 

The major language that we have evolved to use is symbolic language, it is the foundation of our human civilization. Without it we will be like animals in the forest because we will not be able to communicate our experiences. Natural language is a form of symbolic language that is used for common communications, but there are other specialized languages that we have developed to enable tackle problems of communication and expression in specific domains. The language of mathematics has been the most dominant language in the specialized fields of science. 

Recently programming has emerged as a more general form for expressing ideas and will increasingly become the primary means of communication in many specialized fields and in any other general field were clear and explicit codification is required.

The title of this post is the limits of our minds, well it should have been named the limits of our brains because all we can really talk about is our brain, the mind is a little more abstract. 

The brain is the only limitation we can think about; the mind has no practical limits. 

The language we primarily think in can limit or expand our minds. Using natural language will not allow us to think properly about scientific, in fact things that could be expressed in a single line of mathematics would take endless pages to be expressed in natural language. So when we cannot do scientific thinking, it may not really be about a limitation in our minds, it’s really a limitation in our brains, we have not taken the time to teach our brains the proper language to enable us engage properly in scientific thoughts.

We should expand our brains by learning multiple natural languages, mathematics and several programming languages, these languages remove some limitations from the brain allowing us to be more productive, smarter and more efficient in our life.


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