Re: virus: Re: Open Thinking

Corey A. Cook (cookcore@esuvm.emporia.edu)
Thu, 03 Apr 1997 21:40:51 -0800


D. H. Rosdeitcher wrote:
>The language that the mind uses to conceive ideas
>does not consist of spoken words, but pictures.
I objected that:
>... it seems to me that the language of the mind
>(or as I call it, mindspeak) isn't a picture, but
>rather a concept.

David responded:
> I think that sometimes concepts are put in abstract
> pictures instead of concrete pictures. For instance
> when I got the idea to write this post, I imagined 6
> sections from introduction to conclusion, which
> seemed to resemble a symmetrical "bell curve" in a bar
> graph of 3 bars rising, 3 bars falling.

Hmm. Eeenteresting. Your theory seems to hold up to that
data. Let's see how far it goes without stretching too
much. A common relaxation technique that I use is to
contemplate the color spectrum, one color at a time.
(Starting with red and ending with purple.) Now, I find
myself unable to bring up the next color unless I
internally vocalize the name of that color. Am I just
letting my speech pattern to rule my thought? The problem
persists, even when I switch to Spanish.

I further rambled:
> It really is amazing that we both had the relatively same
> idea at relatively the same time. What were you thinking
> about when you wrote this post? Let's see if we can track
> this little meme down. It should be interesting.

David responded with:
> Over the past 2 weeks I've been studying pancritical
> rationalism--mainly the philosophy of Karl Popper. Popper
> wrote an essay about a flawed form of thinking called
> 'essentialism', which is the idea that definitions of words
> contain the true "essence" of the word and that to find the
> truth about reality you must look to the "true meaning" of
> the words in question. By coincidence, essentialism was
> demonstrated by Robin, who criticized my unorthodox use of a
> word. How about you?

The reason I said that the seed-meme was based in something
that someone on the list said last week was that I had been
disconected for Spring Break. But now that I think about it,
I read Saturday's and Sunday's digests Thursday afternoon, and
I had my illumination on Thursday night. Lately I've been
thinking about E-Prime, watching the news, looking at the comet, reading
_Winnie the Pooh_ and _The House at Pooh Corner_ and indulging in an
incredible number of Alternative Thought Patterns. It is possible that
something you said on Saturday or Sunday caused me to come up with mindspeak,
and you followed you're own train of thought until you discovered
thought-as-pictures. I wonder what it was...

Corey A. Cook
cookcore@esuvm.emporia.edu

Zen parables don't count.