the building blocks of thought:
now what we have in our minds or our brains perhaps is a network, a web of connected ideas and concepts or what we might call items of thought. these relate mostly to real things but also those abstract. by real things, i mean images, actions past, sounds, and so on. yes we all have imagination and a surprising capacity to think about things that do not exist in actuality and also we can think about abstract subjects like mathematics.
now i digress. can a fiction, a made up story, ever allow us to wander far enough away from reality to ever be truly believable? a word always connects to something real. we cannot turn off thoughts about real things that we have experienced and seen and heard. a writer creates a work, but the audience has its own individual interpretation of it. of course, if we were less strict, yes it could be admitted that we all share a general sense of this work, but each individual brain whilst reading it works in its own way. i might mention the word "drink", but whilst i think of the coffee i've just had, a reader elsewhere in space at another time might think of whatever he or she just had, orange juice perhaps. the word triggers something in our own experience. what i am saying is that we cannot truly have a "clean" reading of any work, fiction or non fiction, for everything is coloured by individual experience. to deconstruct any work is to work out what is connected to what in the world of real things, to undermine imagination really, and in so doing perhaps we discover more of the impossible and the possible.
it is clear that the conscious mind is little in relation to the unconscious and memory. it is a slim "holder" of thoughts, like a tiny screen lit up on the side of a mainframe computer. it can only hold so much at any one time. it is volatile like a multicoloured flame of a candle or lighter blowing in the wind. i would say it is incorrect to attach all of our identity to our consciousness, for we are more than what we are thinking of at any given moment. i think, therefore i am, but i am not only what i think.
let's say an intelligent person's consciousness, or mental "holder", could have 50 discrete items of thought at once. of course, let us consider that this could be a variable number. perhaps in concentrated thought, even a 100 in one go, like the flame were adjustable. now the items of thought are like building blocks which a person might play with, each represents something real or abstract. in writing this work, i've thought of a computer, a flame, building block toys, etc. i have ghostly images of these things in my mind's eye now. i have a little collection of building blocks of thought. now what lateral thinking is, briefly, is the manipulation of these building blocks, creating a new collection or arrangement of thoughts, by adding a new, different block to what we had before, something seemingly unrelated usually. what do we have now in our conscious mind? what has the addition forced us to think of?
there is an argument that the consciousness is not the leader of the total mind, rather it is the larger unconscious that is so, even that calculation is led by the unconscious. then the concept that the unconscious is the supercomputer seems more apt. the conscious mind is more like a passenger viewing the scenery of thoughts.
CLEARCHARGE
