MnemoSlip: The Expanded Mynde
(or Thoughts about Thought...)
"We are what we think. All that we are arises With our thoughts. With our thoughts, We make our world."
-- Buddha (563BC - 483BC)
“Dubito ergo cogito; cogito ergo sum.
(I doubt, therefore I think; I think therefore I am)”
-- Zontar Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
"You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you."
-- British-born American essayist James Allen (1864-1912)
“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.”
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"THOUGHT" is generally defined as an expression of mental processes particular to an individual's subjective consciousness. It is sentience, cognition and imagination. It is the birth of or the categorization and arrangement of conceptualizations called "ideas". It is often consdiered to be the very definition of consciousness, by default requiring some measure of self-awareness. It is both an act, as in the verb "think", and a noun, as in "thought", and it is can be of physical and metaphysical and biochemical and psychological origin -- individually, non-sequentially or all at one time. It is an action and a process by which we define Reality itself relative to our own Point of View.
Thought is hard to define, we all know what it is to think and we all know when we have thoughts, but we don't really know how "thinking" actually works: how do we spawn internal mental abstractions relative to reactions to the world around us and visualize or conceptualize said abstractions into conversational topics we can easily explain to one another through translation via human speech, the written word or through mathematical concepts? How does that happen?
And more, why was it considered a necessity for such a thing to be built into the control mechanism of the central neuromechanical subsystem of the human body?
Why do we think? Is this a basic evolutionary tenet of a greater survival directive: do we need to be able to do this so we can survive in our unfriendly and often dangerous ecosphere? Is this a medium through which the input from our sensory organs interact and interpret the world through which each of our human organic machine travel? Is this ability central to the concept of the existence of a soul, thereby forever separating humans from lesser organisms?
And if we did know the Why and the Wherefore, how would this change anything for us? Would we become wiser, kinder, more accepting of things we do not understand, more tolerant of the things that present us with obstacles in the larger world around us? Would knowing why we think make us better?
And how would we define "better"? Who would set that definition for us? In short, what would we think about knowing why we think?
It is a conundrum. A puzzle. A Gordian Knot. An exercise in mathematical recursion. The concept of "self" abbreviated and defined as a Boolean Algebraic expression. It is a box within a box within a box.
It is, in the end, something to think about...
Image courtesy of Dreamstime Photographic Stock: "Torus (Donut) Wireframe Symbol" by Fixer00, dreamstime_m_19351698.jpg
Sierpinski Triangle fractal diagram courtesy of www.zeuscat.com
