Solving For eXistence: Part 1

A Case of False Assumptions

We humans have a blind spot when it comes to reality. We’re convinced objective reality is the only true ‘real’, and anything subjective is just something we do in our minds. We believe this because we’re spectacularly bad at interpreting things at their base level. It’s so natural for us to make meaning that we aren’t able to accurately observe the things we experience. We interpret them meaningfully before we even have a chance to fully understand what we’ve encountered.

Just as an example, when we hear about someone accused of hurting somebody else, it’s natural for us to be outraged and reflexively condemn the accused. It takes quite a bit of self-discipline for us to step back and realize we weren’t there, we didn’t see it and we don’t know the facts. It’s so easy to jump to a conclusion before we really understand the situation. We do it because we’re meaning making agents. We automatically interpret the whatever we encounter well before we know the facts or understand the context. Very few of us make the effort to get forensic about life. We’re understandably casual about everyday life, but we’re like this with reality itself, as well. We forget to look at it as deeply as it deserves. Or maybe, we don’t know to.

Thinking what to see
Right now, scientists are trying to figure out how the brain generates thoughts. They’re working on something called ‘the hard problem of consciousness’, and it’s giving them heartburn. They’ve discovered that our bodies ready themselves to act upon decisions several seconds before the brain actually makes the decision. This is a problem. If the body responds to thoughts before the brain processes those thoughts, are the thoughts being processed somewhere outside the brain and then filtering in after the fact? Is the brain the last one to know what’s going on?
If so, then how can the brain be the one generating the thought?

Faced with a situation like this, it’s worth asking if we’re working from a flawed set of assumptions instead of facts.

For starters, we haven’t figured out thought itself. Scientists and laypeople alike tend to consider thoughts and thinking as an activity. And as with any activity, we’re under the impression that thoughts are verbs. They strike us as something like the act of bending over. We bend over, then straighten up again, and the only lingering artifact of that action is our memory of doing it. It leaves no trace of itself in observable reality. There’s no echo of having bent over. There’s no visible presence of the bending. Nothing about us having bent over remains in the physical world, and yet, it did happen. This is what makes it a verb. It’s a transitory action that can’t be said to have ‘durable’ existence.

We look at thoughts the same way. We consider them things we do that leave no trace afterward, even though they happened. But we’re seeing them wrong. They actually do leave a trace. No matter where you are right this very moment, there’s something man-made in your presence. Even if you’re reading this in the emptiest stretch of the Gobi desert, you’re still reading it. It’s either on a device or printed out on manufactured paper. There’s no other way for you to do the reading, so you’re undeniably in the presence of an artifact of thinking. Every man-made thing was a thought before it was made real. Thoughts are responsible for absolutely everything the human race has ever done. Thoughts are what created the modern world.

So there are clear artifacts of our thoughts. Even Idle thoughts leave artifacts. Can you identify something you thought about recently and then simply dropped? Are you able to retrieve a thought that you didn’t do anything with?

If you’re like most people, of course you can. This is because, unlike bending over, thoughts are durable. You don’t have to act on a thought to make it a thing. You can think about it, put it away and think about something else, then come back to it later. We all do this every day. Moreover, we can have a thought and get distracted, then days later get reminded of it again and pull it right back off the shelf to work with it some more.

Thoughts are durable and persistent. They don’t vanish like bending over does.

"Thoughts are durable and persistent, just like physical objects."

In other words, thoughts aren’t activities or verbs; they’re nouns. They are things. They have existence, presence and durability. They can be put away, taken out again, put away again and taken out later. They can be forgotten and then remembered just as readily as that wheat penny you dropped in a drawer years ago and just found again. And we understand that thoughts are responsible for absolutely everything the human race ever does, both for good and for bad.

Thoughts show all the signs of being real things. And yet, science can’t detect them.

Now I can already hear someone shouting, “we can measure brain waves just fine, thank you very much!”

Yes we can. But brain waves aren’t the same thing as thoughts. Brain waves are products of an active brain. They tell us what level of activity it’s in. A useful analogy is that brain waves are to the brain as breathing is to the body. When we run, we breathe harder than when we rest. When a brain is droning on idle, it gives off alpha waves. When it’s busy it gives off beta waves, and so on. A brain will give off the very same beta waves whether it’s thinking about a class assignment or how to log into a website. Brain waves are not thoughts; they are the activity level of the brain. No brain wave can tell us what another person is thinking about; only that their brain is operating at a certain intensity.

Thoughts are something different. Thoughts don’t give off measurable traces of themselves. When researchers hook up the brain to an MRI and present the brain’s owner with a picture, the MRI maps the active neurons and generates a semblance of the image. But that’s us mapping neurons, not reading thoughts. It’s rudimentary and basic. In fact, it requires a lot of preliminary neuron mapping in order to get a sense of how that individual brain does its thing. That same map won’t necessarily work for a different person. In other words, this isn’t mind-reading; this is using braille to represent the Mona Lisa.

Can it be done? To a degree.
Is it what we’re really after? No.

Our assumption is that the brain thinks, and thoughts are verbs; much the same way an elbow bends and bending is a verb. But when we re-categorize thoughts as nouns, something shifts. Specifically, thoughts take on an existence of their own. Thought itself becomes a thing in its own right; not merely an instance of activity.

Realizing thoughts are nouns tells us that they may be made of something. And whatever it is would be a substance not currently recognized by science.

This doesn’t need to surprise us. Rethinking things is an ordinary part of physics. Physicists are now rethinking Einstein’s space-time and giving serious consideration to the universal aether theory that existed before it. Science has been presented with non-quantifiable things before. Thought is simply another one added to the list.

Considering how science categorizes consciousness as a hard problem, perhaps it’s only hard because we consider consciousness and thought in the wrong way with the wrong assumptions. We keep looking for a thought-generating mechanism buried within the biological brain, but there might not be one.

If thoughts are things and have a substance of their own, the brain probably wouldn’t be responsible for generating them. It might merely work with them. After all, this is what all the body’s other organs do. They don’t create stuff from nothing; they convert one thing to another. The organs take whatever we eat, drink, breathe or bask in and use it as building blocks, transforming it into new chemistry that the body can make use of. If the brain holds true to this methodology regarding its own actions, then it doesn’t create thoughts at all, it just work with them to make something new.

But how can this take place right under our noses while we watch?

Seeing what to think
Remember that science can’t quantify whatever it is thoughts are made of. That substance lies outside what scientific instruments can detect. For now, we have to categorize thought as pre-physical. This places it outside science’s materialism domain. That may change in the future, but it’s how things are right now with our current methods and technology.

So if we drop our biases and assumptions and work with this idea that thought is pre-physical, it follows that consciousness would also be pre-physical. Thought is the active form of consciousness. Thought is consciousness doing the thing it does, so they’re fundamentally the same thing.

If consciousness is pre-physical, it wouldn’t necessarily conform to localism. It could be anywhere. It wouldn’t have to be restricted to the brain. In fact, not even restricted to the individual. Consciousness may have its own presence outside physicality. This could explain the time delay between the body readying itself for movement seconds before the brain has ‘decided’ to move. Thought itself wouldn’t have a time delay in transit, but the brain might take a certain amount of time to process the thought it’s working with.

Of course, reframing consciousness like this has implications. We’ll tackle those in the next entry.