Thinking Outside Language...
Dualism proposes that the mind and body are separate, yet when the body dies, the awareness disappears… Descartes famously suggested ‘I think, therefore I am;’ but there is something much deeper than this: ‘I experience, therefore I exist…’ In this language, ‘I’ doesn’t exist in the conventional sense…
When thinking in a linear language, the framework of the world model that you have built up over your lifetime through which to interact with the world produces a single stream of conscious thought – although this itself is built up dynamically ‘in real time’ through myriad strands of thought ‘beneath the surface.’ If one can express oneself and ‘think’ naturally in more than one language, the underlying language is in fact separate from these, and they are merely ‘filters,’ which convert the thought outside a particular language into the language of choice at that particular point in time…
Thus, thinking inside linear language appears to be a single train of thought… In contrast, thinking outside conventional language can support many trillions of trains of thought simultaneously… In comparison to linear symbolic – and indeed non-linear symbolic thought, it can appear to be infinite, but in fact it’s only trillions of times faster…
Awareness builds upon this massively parallel, massively interconnected framework of thought based upon the structure of the brain and body and the mapping of the mind onto it, and converts it into a sense of oneness… Yet the true framework extends far beyond the single human body and is interconnected with all life surrounding it, at all rates of processing from bacteria to lichen to lemurs and beyond… In this sense, ‘we’ are all one…
Being dyslexic, I have analysed why I have always had difficulty in writing things (and tended to fail exams for that reason) and I’ve realised that it is because I mainly don’t think in words but in pictures and therefore have to translate them into words, which takes time having to re-organise the elements into a linear string. This sounds very much like what you are describing. But I think that, far from being a disability, it is a great advantage as I can simultaneously consider multiple factors in solving any problem – and also visuospatial judgements are very easy as 3-D processing is the way my brain works naturally.
ReplyDeleteIt’s likely that right-brain intuition works in this way even in people who consciously think verbally.
Your last sentence is rather speculative – there is no established mechanism for this. Although, in the right circumstances, I can feel vey strongly at one with nature, I’m not sure that nature feels the same about me! … but who knows?
Jonathan (from Nick’s WA group)