MODES OF THOUGHT
The primary question then becomes - what is thought and what
does it provide us in measurable terms?
Imagine a fictitious animal that can survive but is incapable
of "thinking". A worm in Newton's famous apple can provide an
appropriate start.
When a worm moves in its environment it does so by directly
playing off of its surroundings. If you were to put this "mindless"
worm in a maze it is programmed to search all of its possible paths
and would be forced to try each one separately. At each failure it
would try another path, sometimes repeating the same mistakes, until
it finally found passage. This is not a very efficient system for the
worm and forces it to waste time.
The worm cannot contemplate all of its options beforehand and
select the best possible route nor can it "remember" or record its
failures. Put in the same maze again the worm will be required to
start from the beginning.
A human in a maze can gather and store images in its head and
can then manipulate those images in order to calculate the route which
provides the greatest probability of success.
Our brains have evolved the functionality required to imagine,
or manipulate, concepts. The worm can only do, so we say that the worm
functions in immediate mode - they are only able to operate on that
which is immediately available to them in their physical space. Humans
on the other hand work in anticipatory mode; we are able to create
situations in our minds, totally unrelated in time, to our current
physical space and manipulate that situation for a higher probability
of successful outcome. In this way we can function in the current by
manipulating any number of possible futures.
This leads to the idea of separate realities for animals that
function in these two different modes. For the immediate mode animal
reality is reality; it doesn't understand it. But for humans reality
is not reality. We use our senses to detect objects and processes in
immediate mode also, but we can manipulate a representation of reality
in our minds before we act.
Many animals exhibit anticipatory behavior, and here the
distinction between and animal and a human is not one based on
species, it is based on their capacity for anticipatory behavior.
Thus, what separates animals from humans is degrees. Even pets exhibit
human characteristics, and we often exhibit animal characteristics.
Homo-sapiens are simply the low watermark for human behavior, not
being completely human themselves. But there is much more to say on
this idea later; leave it to say that the distinctions of animal and
human have nothing to do with body, and everything to do with mind.
THOUGHTS, CONCEPTS, AND ESSENCE
Thoughts are not only visual images or ideas but to each is
applied some emotion. A thought is our individual experience of the
accumulation of images, sounds, concepts, and emotions in our mind. An
essence of a thought is the totality of electrical connections and
paths your brain takes to fire off a thought.
The essence of a thought is an electrical thing. It is
something you experience without knowing you are experiencing it. It
is a mechanical function of the brain just as filtering blood is a
mechanical function of the liver. It causes a unique dissemination of
electrical activity in the brain and therefore it can be measured on
devices such as EEG. The totality of thoughts, or of essence, is
conscience. Depending on your focus you can have thought conciseness
or essence consciousness.
When a group of people have such a degree of common experience
then their minds contain a set of well matched thoughts and the
electrical activity of the essence of those thoughts will also match
closely. This is our collective conscience. You experience this when
someone mentions some concept that fires an existing essence - you
relate to that person or have empathy, or an emotional reaction, for
that thought.
We are also born with some essence of thought and this is
called pattern essence. Hereditary pattern essences become hardwired
as we experience concepts that have been constant over evolution. The
essence of one's love for a child, or a child's love for a parent, are
in essence, for most of us from birth just as is the suckling behavior
of a newborn.
Since the essence of a thought causes electro-magnetic waves
that emanate from the brain, and since we know that electro-magnetic
waves in turn cause electrical current, the belief that the essence of
thoughts can be transmitted from one person to another is not so
far-fetched. We probably cannot transmit a concept to another person
since the storage of a concept requires stimulation directly from our
senses to the brain - but we can transmit the essence of a thought,
and if that essence exists in the receiving individual, it will be
communicated.
MEANING
When we are anticipating an action or an outcome we are
thinking - a process of manipulating thoughts. When we do so this
train of thoughts added together provide meaning. More definitively -
the accumulation of thought is meaning. One thought or many thoughts
can provide meaning.
The more thoughts an individual strings together the more
unique that meaning becomes to that person. In other words, much of
the thinking we do is as individual as a finger print since no single
person ever makes it through life by the same path. We may have
commonality in those paths but we never experience the same path. All
of us are individuals created by the accumulation of thoughts gleaned
from our unique experiences in life.
So caring is not simply an emotion. It is our bodies reaction
to something meaningful. It is a measurable reaction to an
unmeasurable event. Essence of meaning can be measured, but meaning
and thought cannot.
INEXISTANCE
It is important to point out that the assembly of thoughts and
the way each of us thinks is only coordinated with reality - but not
completely. Our reality is different than the reality of the physical
world around us since the reality of the physical world is only
reflected into our heads. It does not exist there.
In short we live in a dream-state. We create in our minds our
own reality separate and apart from the physical landscape. The
dream-state can vary in extremes between immediate mode and pure
anticipatory mode. When we dream, as during sleep, we are in a pure
anticipatory mode.
Even when we are awake and interacting with the world we are
doing things that effect reality in the way we want, then, in part at
least, also applying meaning to those actions and outcomes that nature
has no capacity to care about.
A human being can love a rock. The rock can be painted and
given a face and a persona. But in the physical world it is a rock
with chemicals on it that reflect different wavelengths of light.
Seeing your children playing ball in the clouds not only provides an
image but imparts emotions. But again the clouds are simply
accumulations of steam arranged in random patterns.
Your sense of reality is precarious without your knowing it.
You can get a clear understanding of these ideas if you are placed in
an environment so alien to you that you lose faith in your meaning of
reality. The book "Alice in Wonderland" is an example of a story that
will give you the feeling of such a state.
If you lose the coordination between your dream-state and the
surrounding world you will become temporarily or permanently insane.
The feeling of paranoia can be intense and your mind will race to find
some coordination, or equilibrium, again.
Since so much of how we react to the world is based on human
relations if the people around you, unknown to you, begin change to
their behavior dramatically you will suffer some degree of detachment.
When someone dies or you witness, or are part of, a terrible tragedy,
your dream state loses coordination with the world around you and you,
to some degree, detach.
Detachment can be experienced as a pleasant feeling of
surrealism at one extreme or an intense feeling of disorientation and
paranoia at the other.
The dependency of our dream-state on others and society in
general is the mechanism by which we are drawn into a state of
illusion. People, who have some degree of power over our lives, can
construct for us many layers of reality which can lull us into
virtually any kind of behavior.
For humans there are two worlds then - existence and
inexistance, or alternatively, the materialistic and idealistic worlds
respectively. They are completely separate from each other. Your body
lives in reality or existence. You, the thinking, feeling, meaningful
person exist only in your mind. As such you cannot be measured. You
are a figment of your own imagination. Do not be fooled by the fact
that you function well or that the outcome of your interactions with
the world are successful - you are separate and apart from it reaching
out with your senses, from your inexistant shell, to sense reality so
as to conduct your movements. Much of the world around you is
invisible to you so that your senses only allow you to interact with a
part of the existent space.
So how does this answer the original question - how can a
"theory of everything", based on all things being measurable, allow
things that defy measure? The answer is that life was required to
evolve a mechanism that allowed some beings to experiment with reality
without actually effecting reality. Since one cannot travel into the
future in the physical world a mechanism that allows contemplation of
the future cannot be connected to the physical world. Life evolved a
means of hyper-evolution since these beings, us and mnay other
animals, can experiment with future outcomes in anticipatory mode and
apply potentially successful outcomes in immediate mode. You could
refer to hyper-evolution as soft evolution since in order to change
the species the body need not change to cause advances. Only the
programming of the mind is required for evolutionary advancement.
This mental experimentation will not occur without something
to inspire it - so add emotions. Emotions effect thoughts and thoughts
effect emotion. A more sophisticated view of meaning is that it is the
feedback relationship between emotion and thought.
Interestingly the well known adage "I think therefore I am" is
by this analysis incorrect and should actually be stated "I think
therefore I am not". And, since life to us is meaning it makes no
sense to ask what its meaning is. In other words, the question is the
answer - the meaning of life is meaning itself. We live to give
meaning to our lives. Next we will see that nature has worked this out
so that the accumulation of all of our meanings results in something
predicable on a social scale; but nature cannot predict the outcome of
your individual life. Life in general has destiny; you have it only if
you make it so.
On a personal digression, the more you strive to educate
yourself and experience things the greater will be your options for a
meaningful life. Call this essence building since the more essence of
thoughts that you have the more fodder you will have for meaning. The
more you build essence the more securely attached to the existing
world you will be, and the more difficult it will be for others to
draw you into illusory behavior. The overwhelming number of people in
the world today are caught in some layer of illusory behavior - even
those who understand this to a degree and trap others in illusory
behavior are trapped in illusory behavior themselves - or they would
not do it.
The meaning we bring to our lives is by definition
self-centered since it is an activity in which we engage which
benefits us individually. This is the reason we can act with total
unselfishness yet be completely self-centered about it - it provides
meaning to us. Colloquially then, the meaning of life is whatever gets
you out of bed in the morning.
To get back on track understand that humans have been detached
from reality so to allow them to experiment with it. They have been
provided emotions which motivate them to experiment with reality so to
attach back to it and improve it - it is sort of a natural, passive,
classical conditioning. But in the process of attaching to reality
humans run into measurable, predicable, physical constructs. If we
simply experimented with reality without regard to the real world, and
some of us do, we would surely be bizarre animals.
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