George Soros, Left vs Right Brain Perspective, Crypto-Currencies, the True Nature of the Physical World
What is common in those seemingly separate, irrelated things and ideas that are written in the title? I believe they all represent a fundamental and inherent roadblock in our thinking: we mostly think in entities. Even worse the case with our language: we are only (!) able to communicate in terms of discrete, separated, well-defined entities.
What do you mean by that? I mean that we always need a separate body to hold it responsible for something, we are unable (or at least hard) to imagine that it comes from the dynamics of a network. Many people cannot imagine that the recent refugee crisis arose from a series and network of events and not necessarily an old wealthy evil person planned it out. Most people cannot comprehend that everything that is related to the brain comes from the delicate and chaotic interaction of billions of neurons, situated all over the brain, that is why they need simple and misleading interpretations as: "your creativity comes from your left brain" (or the right, I don't care, it's false and wrong on many levels anyway). I am not a fan of cryptocurrencies and neither a skeptic, I am rather just curious about it, but I think many people have a problem with it because there is no well-defined separate entity which stands behind it, like your bank is literally standing behind the cash-machine when you withdraw money, and the national bank is standing behind the given country's currency (this might be a real potential danger though). Our seemingly neverending quest to understand the physical world contains the wish to find the ultimate elementary particle (particle technically means small, building entity...) and by definition, we may never assume that we have finished, because the only way we can imagine stuff, is that it's made of other stuff.
But all this happens not because we are lazy or purposefully ignorant. It happens, because of millions of years of evolution. Our thinking and later language evolved to help us navigate in this mid-level sized world (much bigger than subatomic particle but much smaller than galaxies). In this range of the physical world, the things which we had to deal with: falling rocks, lions, deers, other humans, fruits are all easily separable entities with easily spottable "borders". Water and big bodies of water is kind of an exception but we ignorantly just handle it with a single name: sea (or river, or lake, or ocean, etc).
Those big separate entities (lions, rocks, deers), do not show "strange phenomena" like quantum entanglement, continuous fading around the edges, fluctuating around a quasi-stbale state (as a network could), and so on. These entities behave "nicely", or in other terms, we got used to their behaviour and that's why they are "nice". Based on our common sense, we can easily agree where the body of the lion ends. You could go into arguments about that, there are atoms diffusing from it, so are they part of its body or not, but in case of danger, no sane person would argue. And this is the key here, this was the reason for our language to develop, to inform each other about these entities, so we can survive and flourish. Our language did not evolve to express the properties of dynamics of large networks of groups of humans, or networks of neurons, or the series of events in a biochemical cell-signalling pathway. We try to use our language for this, but I always have the feeling that implicitly the broken piece, the roadblock is there: we need entities think.
In my interpretation, indirectly this yields Gödel's incompleteness theorems as well, which kind of shows a limit for our understanding even for something we created: mathematics. If you think about it, even when we talk about continuous functions in math, or continuous sets, deep down, they consist of separated entities, separated points, and we have a very crude, binary operation defined on them: whether they are IN the set or OUT of the set. We are unable to go real continuous. This hinders our quest to find all proofs in math, to find the ultimate particle/or network which makes up physical matter, to understand intuitively how our brain works, etc.
At the beginning, I wrote that language is "even worse". I think language is really about entities (math along), but our thinking is a bit "better". I think emotions, and the thoughts that we cannot express in language, they represent the more "continuous" part of our thinking. But when we try to put them into words, we hurt and torture them, like you hurt a torture an animal that you try to squeeze into a rectangular box smaller than it's body (disclaimer: I have no experience with that of course).
Or am I just dramatic and it is not a true limitation? I would be happy actually. I am curious about your opinion.