Next
Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 14 Mar 2021

Taken: 14 Mar 2021

0 favorites     1 comment    31 visits

See also...

Keywords

Excerpt •
The Meme Machine •
Author •
Simon Blackburn •

Authorizations, license

Visible by: Everyone
Attribution + non Commercial
31 visits

Can you stop thinking

Can you stop thinking
Comments
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Can you stop thinking?

Perhaps you have practised meditation or some othe rmethod of calming the mind. If so you will know that the task is not trivial. If you have not, I suggest you try now to empty your mind for a minute or so. When any thought comes along, as if certainly will, just acknowledge it and let it go. Do not get tangled up in the thoughts or follow them up. See whether you can find any space between them. The simplest forms of meditation are no more than this kind of practice. It is fiendishly difficult.

Why? You will doubtless notice that thoughts just seem to pop up of nowhere and grab your attention. You may also notice what kinds of thought they are. Typically, they are imagined conversations or arguments, reruns of events with new endings, self-justifications, complicatd plans for the future, or difficult decisions that have to be made. They are rarely simple images, perceptions or feelings (which can come and go without causing trouble); rather, they use words, arguments, and ideas you have acquired from other peoples. In other words, these incessant thoughts are memes. ‘You cannot command them to cease. You cannot even command them to go slower nor tell yourself not to get sucked into them. They seem to have a life and power of their own. Why?

From the biological point of view this constant thinking does not appear to be justified. I say this cautiously, in the recognition that many things that at first did not appear to be the interests of the genes subsequently have turned out to be. Nevertheless it may be helpful to think this through.

Thinking requires energy. One of the many benefits of techniques like PET scan is that we can observe graphically what goes on in the brain when someone is thinking. Scans although still severely limited in resolution, can show the relative amounts opf blood flowing in different areas of the brain. For Example, when someone is doing a visual task there is more activity in the visual cortex, when listening to music more in the auditory cortex, and so on. And had long been suspected, imagining something uses similar parts of brain is actually seeing or hearing the same thing. So imagining conversations activates speech areas, and so on. Experiments comparing simple visual tasks with more difficult ones show higher levels of activity with the more difficult task.

The amounts of energy used are small compared with say, running up a hill, but they are not entirely negligible. Blood flow means that oxygen and stored energy are being burned up, and these have to be worked for. If an organism could get by without thinking all the time it would use less energy and hence ought to have a survival advantage. ` Page 39

Presumably, then, all this thinking has some function. But what? Perhaps we are practising useful skill, or solving problems, or thinking through social exchanges so as to make better deals, or planning future activities. I have to say this does not seem to be plausible for the sorts of activities. I have to say this does seem to be plausible for the sorts of daft and pointless thoughts I tend to think about. However, applying evolutionary thinking to today’s situation may not be appropriate. We did not evolve along with books, telephones and cities. ` Page 39

Now imagine a brain capable of imitation -- a brain with memes. A brain with memes not only has much more information to store, but the memes themselves are tools for thinking with (Dennett 1991). Far more kinds of thinking are possible when you have learned words, stories, the structure of arguments or new ways of thinking about love, logic or science. There are now far more thoughts competing for the same limited processing capacity of the brain. Now only that, but memes can also get copied from one brain to another. ` Page 40
3 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.

Sign-in to write a comment.