Tag Archives: thoughts

Bubbles

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I’m sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon, my feet hanging over the rim. I’m facing the setting sun and the light is painting the canyon walls. Somewhere far below, out of site, someone or some thing is blowing soap bubbles and I’m watching them drift slowly up and out of sight. Sometimes the bubbles are few and far between, other times a continuous stream, too many to count. But they never seem to stop completely.

From a distance, they’re just empty soap bubbles but if I bring my attention to particular bubble, I see it is filled with people, places and things. A tiny world that I recognize. My world.

If I look closely enough and long enough, I’m drawn into the bubble. I’m no long sitting on the canyon rim but part of the story unfolding in the bubble. Unlike most of the bubbles I’ve observed, this one doesn’t pop or float away. The canyon and the other bubbles no longer exist or, perhaps, I am just unaware of them.

Eventually, this bubble bumps into another bubble and the two merge, as bubbles often do. Sometimes these new bubbles are filled with a future world, sometimes the past. The worlds can be wonderful or awful but they’re always completely “real.”

I can spend hours moving from bubble to bubble, having completely forgotten about the view from the canyon rim. Every bubble is small and fragile and can be popped with the slightest touch but, from within, it’s difficult to remember this. Or the Me sitting on the canyon rim.

Ah! There I am. I’m back, watching the bubbles. How long, I wonder, was I trapped inside these shiny little things, drifting up and out of the canyon? How much of the spectacular sunset did I miss?

6,200 thoughts per day

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“A new study from psychologists at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario Canada reports observations of the transition from one thought to another in fMRI brain scans. Though the researchers don’t detect the content of our thoughts, their method allows them to count each one, and they say we have about 6,200 thoughts per day. The researchers refer to them as “thought worms.”

“We had our breakthrough by giving up on trying to understand what a person is thinking about, and instead focusing on when they have moved on. Our methods help us detect when a person is thinking something new, without regard to what the new thought is.”

Thoughts think themselves

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For those of us who subscribe to the theory there is no self — that me “I” thought is just a persistent illusion — a frequent question is where do thoughts come from if there is no “me” to think them?

They come from the subconscious whose name happens to be Jeff. Jeff sits in the refrigerator that is your consciousness. He has one of those horseshoe magnets he uses to arrange tiny word magnets on the outside of the refrigerator. Jeff is working backward and in the dark (trust me on that point) so the ideas he strings together are often random and arbitrary. He can sense when there is an awareness on the other side of the door and this makes him uncomfortable so he slows down the magnet work. When he feels the awareness depart he gets busy again.

Thought Switch

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I’m imagining a technology that doesn’t exist. Yet. A lightweight set of electrodes that monitors my brainwaves and transcribes (transmitted via Bluetooth to my mobile device, let’s say) my thoughts. An advanced version of today’s voice-to-text apps. We get to read that “stream of consciousness” at long last.

I imagine printing out a hour’s worth of this mind noise and using a red pencil to circle anything interesting or profound. Alas, there is almost nothing worth noting. Hour after hour after hour. I’ll program an intelligent algorithm to scan a week’s worth of my thoughts. What the hell, let’s to a month! Scanning for something worth saving. Not much, it seems. All that miraculous brain power wasted on “monkey chatter.”

Since I’m imagining yet-to-be-invented tech, how about a drug (or an implant, perhaps?) that will quiet that mind noise, leaving only the input from my senses. (I’m thinking we’ll need a timer switch to re-engage the thought process.)

Click.

I feel the morning sun coming through the hundred foot oak trees that shade my deck. I hear birds — near and far — singing to whomever birds sing to. There’s the sound of the water feature gurgling in the middle of the flower bed. A cool breeze gets a sigh from the Golden Retriever at my feet (say ‘hello’ Hattie). I take a sip of coffee and experience the slightly bitter taste on my tongue. Somehow I know this is a good thing without an accompanying thought. I still have 10 minutes before the noise returns.

The Nature of Consciousness

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“In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Thomas Metzinger about the scientific and experiential understanding of consciousness. They also talk about the significance of WWII for the history of ideas, the role of intuition in science, the ethics of building conscious AI, the self as an hallucination, how we identify with our thoughts, attention as the root of the feeling of self, the place of Eastern philosophy in Western science, and the limitations of secular humanism.”

“Thomas K. Metzinger is full professor and director of the theoretical philosophy group and the research group on neuroethics/neurophilosophy at the department of philosophy, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. He is the founder and director of the MIND group and Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies, Germany. His research centers on analytic philosophy of mind, applied ethics, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. He is the editor of Neural Correlates of Consciousness and the author of Being No One and The Ego Tunnel.”