The Cacophony of Life
- The first realization was that our mind is shaped by the sounds we hear. The mind of a person living in the Roman empire and hearing sounds of horses and artisans was not the same as the mind of a medieval person hearing church bells and market noise, a mind which, in turn, was not the same as the mind of a contemporary person hearing the sounds of cars, ringers and radios
- The second realization was that there is always sound. Silence does not exist. There is always some vibration which a strong enough auditory organ can hear.
- The third realization was that light is not everywhere, but sound is: there is no light in the dark, and therefore we are "blind", but we are never "deaf" (unless you are born without that auditory organ, of course). We can hear in the dark, we cannot see in the dark. With darkness, objects and animals disappear but their sounds keep existing.
- Therefore sound must have driven evolution: the animals with the strongest auditory system greatly increased their chances of survival; and animals capable of producing sounds contributed to the richness of information contained in the environment, and therefore increased their group's chances of survival.
- As multiple animals made multiple sounds in addition to the sounds of inanimate matter (rain, wind, water, and so on), life became a cacophony.
- Humans don't have strong hearing, but they are capable of building sound-making tools and then sound-detecting tools. Humans make musical instruments, church bells, alarms, records/discs, etc. And, thanks to sound-amplifying tools, humans can listen to sounds that their hearing cannot hear.
- No surprise that human society has developed a cacophony of sounds. That cacophony keeps shaping the human mind, and, in particular, it shapes it to produce ever more sophisticated cacophonies.
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