thinking about thought

There was an inkling to gather thoughts about thinking: so I set up the laptop in the warm kitchen.

'Metacognition’ was quick to appear and I followed it up in the MSWord ‘smart lookup’ tool which put a link to Wikipedia –

‘Metacognition is "cognition about cognition", "thinking about thinking", "knowing about knowing", becoming "aware of one's awareness" and higher-order thinking skills'.

The higher-order thinking skills are dealt with in the pre-frontal cortex where they are labelled as executive functions. They parallel the stages of the project planning cycle - situation analysis, policy formation, planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating.

Khaneman recognises two types of thinking -fast and emotional and slow and rational. The fast type is useful in situations of clear and present danger - escape from predators. The slow type is useful for being creative and thinking new thoughts.

Neither type of thinking presents an abiding truth and reality. Ideas and words are memes that evolve. Languages are forever developing with some ideas passing their sell-bye date and others catching on.

Babies learn their local language with great ease. Guidance comes from family, community, school, the workplace and the media.

Most of the young ones come to embody their parochial natal language.This is good so long as it 'keeps the peasants in ignorance' and prepared to die for king and country. Absorb the propaganda and demonise the enemy.Them and Us - and we are the precious ones.

"I like tomatoes and I don't like potatoes."
"Who is the -i- who likes and dislikes and why?"

Meditators can be good TFM watchers in that they detach from the cognitive churn which has no abiding reality.

It is never too late to change your mind but it can be difficult to remember to do so. Difficult but not impossible. It is like training a lively dog.Patience.

SO - be still and know.Let the churn of TFM settle such that there is peace in every step

monbiot on junk

monbiot points to how we glorify non-sense junk
HERE

cognitive memes

My mantra is ‘changing minds’ aka training, education, enlightenment - with or without overtones of brainwashing, enculturation and propaganda. 

Each human being is influenced by nature (genes), nurture (memes) and stupendent levels of serendipity (chance).

daniel dennett

I have just finished Daniel Dennett (2017) From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (476 pp). Fascinating stuff. He operates at several cutting edges.

He has a sense of humour. My research topic for my Zoology degree was to do with the nervous system in adult sea squirts. He makes mention of them: “The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting tenure.”

“We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.”
― Daniel C. Dennett

BUT

“There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.”
― Daniel Dennett

Back in the 1970s I reckoned that I had “a sermon that never would bear preaching”. Evolution. I taught it in school. But there was little reward from trying to tell the story to the hypocrits with sabbath hats.

It might be the case that, these days, a greater percentage of the population may be more receptive to the scientific way of  looking at things.

bluesy mood

There has been something of a bluesy mood recently. “I am a hopeless chancer” with an expanding inability to handle simple technical things like changing a lightbulb.

Aha – it is a ‘waste of time’ to write about the negative nitty gritties – the petty stuff. However, in some schools of thought there is need (a) to take heed of what TFMs (thoughts, feelings, moods) are capturing attention, (b) to name them, and (c) to hold them or let them go. “Accentuate the positive.”

Peace of mind is easier said than done. One secret is to practice ‘just sitting’(ref Dogen Zenji) and to become familiar with the egoic v non-egoic mental states.

There are egoic mental states that cloud the mind and manifest in unwholesome actions. In Buddhism these are called Kleshas and they include such states of mind as anxiety, fear, anger, jealousy, desire, depression, etc. Contemporary translators use a variety of English words to translate the term kleshas, such as: afflictions, defilements, destructive emotions, disturbing emotions, negative emotions, mind poisons.

There are non-egoic mental states that clear the mind of the kleshas and enable sustainable focus. These mental states are gradually being recognised as ‘flow’ and are associated with the wholesome action of creative people such as poets when inspired by their ‘muse’, athletes when in their ‘zone’, improvising musicians when in the ‘groove’, and housekeepers when washing the dishes

These days I am in non-egoic flow most of the time; but the kleshas are continuously churning incoming sensory signals (sights, sounds, tastes, smells) with similar stuff in memory. The linkages serve to keep my understanding of ‘reality’ up to date in the present moment.

The angst and ennui (blues) that are associated with the kleshas are the price that most people must endure. My mindbrain was shaped by nature, nurture and by serendipity. I have put a lot of time and effort into training my mindbrain.

Activities include:

Reading (non-fiction), attending to media, writing (blog), doodling, making music, shopping, cooking, meditating, being mindful, dropping off body and mind, “just sitting” (Dogen Zenji).

dreadful waste

My head goes in different places from other people. I sat in company the other day and noted what was being said. We are all shaped by nature, nurture and serendipity.  To some extent we are the same, and to some extent we are different.

Vocabulary sets limits on what can be thought, spoken and written. Pictures and tools also help to enrich how we relate to each other and the world.

Some people will have restricted vocabularies while others will have extended ones. Your natal language is likely to be more elaborate than foreign ones. And there will be variations during work, rest and play.

As there is junk food so is there junk conversation. It features in the process of more or less formal schooling (aka brainwashing). Different social situations call out different curricula with their own vocabularies: for example I was schooled in Zoology and I thus can chat about vertebrates and invertebrates and their breakdown into phyla, classes, orders, families, genuses and species. In a similar way we have ‘expertise’ in specialisms such as gardening, cooking, DIY, hairdressing, ICT and many more.

It is said that the human mindbrain is a sports car that few people get out of first gear. By the time they are in their late 20s they have become parents and have settled into a limited set of world views.

My brain-washing views this as a dreadful waste. 

There are too many people on the planet – especially the first gear types. There is thus an imperative to have people change their minds so as to do away with myths and magic and to think and act in a user-friendly way.