Alpha Mind Blog

To talk about the will of the idea is not merely fanciful. It is helpful to us in two ways. First, it allows us to think of ideas as entities with lives, and thus to analyze what conditions most conduce to an idea’s realization. Second, and more importantly, when we set about to apply the principles of thoughtcraft, personifying the idea gives us several advantages. Most of these derive from our separating the thought from the thinker, the idea from its originator or champion. The thinker is usually far better off to think of the idea as something owned by or entrusted to him, like a dog that has followed him home, than to think of the idea as intrinsically part of the self. Among the advantages are these:

• It separates the idea from that defensiveness which necessarily surrounds the self. If the idea seems to be one’s self, there is far greater risk in communicating it, far more pain if it is rejected.
• Similarly, even in the most emotionally robust persons, there is a certain rigidity to one’s self-identity. Major changes in one’s understanding of who one is are like earthquakes, shaking up areas of one’s life and thought that aren’t even close to the epicenter. None of us can go through many of these. But if we believe our ideas are us, we take the risk of a self-identity shift each time we entrust an idea to others. Nearly all ideas undergo modifications, some of them radical, on the way to realization. Ego-involvement with the idea will bring about a fear of such modifications, while ego-separation decreases the fear.
• This in turn permits more flexible negotiations among all the parties necessary to the idea’s realization.
• For an organization, it may permit the realization of more ideas. An individual’s or group’s self-identification with an idea may create a jealous attitude toward other ideas, and leads to the stifling of some ideas which may have been of great benefit. Since creative individuals tend to be fickle, most in love with their latest idea, self-identification is a far greater problem for organizations and for adopters of an idea than for individual originators. An organization which learns to view ideas as quasi-autonomous entities will be less jealous, and more inclined to give every idea, even if it competes with another adopted idea, its best opportunity.

We want some ideas to take physical shape. We want others to take over minds. In either case, the idea’s path to realization is a quest for territory.

For many people, their very job is to originate or assist ideas whose bent is to change the physical environment. For others, modifying physical space is an important form of self-expression. Yet very few ideas can be effectively moved from vision into physical reality without making space in their social environments, since few individual thinkers have total control over much physical space. Ideas not requiring physical realization vie only for mental space.

This is true even for some thoughts that are kept private; the mnemonic jingle or acronym rehearsed in order to memorize a list is employed precisely for its ability to claim space in the mind and occupy it. Even where the mental space to be claimed is in a single mind, I find it most helpful to think of this as social space, for two reasons: first, those constraints on thinking which we will analyze in the realm of the group have their counterparts in the individual mind; second (and this partly explains the first), many of these constraints arise from the individual’s group affiliations and memberships, so that even if we were not employing a “society of mind” model (which I do), we would still have to deal with the individual thinker as the social being he or she is.

The concern of the rest of this book is the quest of an idea for territory, its journey from conception to realization. In studying the matter, I am taking an idea-centric point of view. If the ideas themselves were the readers of this book, it would constitute their manual for conducting a successful quest. In taking this approach, I fully realize that ideas are not this book’s readers. I understand that in talking about an idea’s will I am guilty of pathetic fallacy, and while it may seem otherwise, I never forget that my goal is actually to serve the human beings who originate, adopt, adapt, and find their lives shaped by ideas.

Today I begin to post chapter 2 of Thoughtcraft. Here I begin to take an idea-centric view of the thinking process, assuming that every idea has, inherently or as accompaniment, an impetus to change something, somewhere. I call this the idea’s “quest for territory.”

Membership in any community affects individual thinking in two ways: it teaches one what to think, and it teaches one how to think.

We are taught what to think by all the ways in which the community signals to us which ideas are in favor and which are not. Signaling may be very overt (”How dare you say that!?”) or less so, as when one’s statements are based on assumptions the group doesn’t share, and are consistently met with non-understanding. In many persons, these signals result in various thoughts being either “thinkable” or “unthinkable” in the context of the group.

We are taught how to think when we are taught explicit paradigms for thinking (”Here is a model for thinking; find ways to apply it.”), or rules, which are even more explicit and which normally come packaged with statements of the conditions under which they apply (”When both A and B occur, do C.”) All formal rules of logic are obviously teachings as to how to think.

These two teachings, what to think and how, interact with each other and are interdependent. Some of what we may or can think is actually decided by what we learn about how to think. When we have been taught rules for thinking, they inform what we are able to think in that, using a given set of rules, certain thoughts can be thought and others cannot.

This is true and obvious in language: in English, which makes no distinction between polite/formal and familiar/informal forms of address, there is no way precisely to translate the insult conveyed when a Frenchman addresses a social peer or superior as tu on their first meeting. Similarly, when a framework for how to think has been put in place, it makes certain thoughts truly and literally unthinkable, while other thoughts will come rather naturally, proceeding almost inevitably from the framework of rules.

Conversely, we infer part of the how from the what. Even when rules are not taught us explicitly, we learn them by inference, based on what we observe to be permissible. Again, this is true and obvious in our learning of language: most of us have no conscious knowledge of syntax or grammar, never having heard their rules stated explicitly. Yet we know these things quite well, learning them by example and by inference. Those individuals who are able to make explicit what is implicit may originate an explication of the rules they obey in speaking and writing, and we might say these people are self-taught in grammar.

This would be wrong, however. Rather, they are only expressing in words what they have certainly been taught in another way, the same way all others are taught.

There is also a kind of middle ground between what we learn about what and how to think. This is the case when we are taught rubrics for judging thoughts based on outcomes. Some groups are quite explicit, for example, in applying a pleasure principle: only think “positive” thoughts, or those which make you feel good. This may lead to highly stilted and unrealistic thinking. But closely related rubrics may be very healthy, such as when alcoholics in recovery learn to eschew thoughts that would lead them to drink.

Since some thoughts are made easy or hard, near-inevitable or near-impossible, by one’s group membership, any group which must think must be aware that its very existence as a group will tend to advance certain kinds of thinking and thwart others. Groups as groups will never be aware of these group-engendered influences on their thinking, but depend on their constituent members to recognize them. The individual thinker within a community that must think should be aware of the effects of group membership on individual and corporate thought processes. I will explain some of these effects in the next chapters.

All complex thought processes, and all efforts to achieve ends, involve multiple thought processes, in multiple modes, in master-servant relationships.

Visioning frequently brings the other modes of thought into its service. When a visionary idea begins to move from reverie toward purpose, an essential step is to bring new thought processes into the service of the idea. Thus when a visionary thought begins to harness the work of explanation, a step has been taken toward realization; an effort to work out how to present the vision to others has been started. At some point puzzle-solving thought will be brought into the service of the vision, as the thinker begins to work out how to resolve challenges to the idea’s realization.

Visioning is not the only mode that presses other modes into its service. Any mode of thought may be master over other modes.  The likeliest master processes are visioning and maintenance, visioning because it so often leads to an effort toward realization, maintenance because it is essential for survival and because many maintenance activities require other modes of thought in order to be carried out.

For example, many physical maintenance tasks are of such complexity that conscious schemata are necessary in order to perform them. Even as simple an activity as brushing one’s teeth is done by many persons in a ritual manner, with a conscious inward recitation of the steps involved, the number of strokes in each area, and other details. In some (probably not all) persons, these recitations involve explanations: “we do this because…” Maintenance tasks frequently cross the line from simple remembering to puzzle-solving. For example, while eating is a simple activity, obtaining food is less so; when hunting and gathering are required, then puzzle-solving has become the servant of maintenance.

Frequently, visioning is also called upon as a servant even before puzzle-solving; the hunter who must puzzle-solve in order to find the prey may need to image the successful outcome in order to motivate and focus the puzzle-solving effort, and sometimes to recall the conditions under which success was achieved in the past.

Of most interest to us are those processes which are either ruled by visioning or which employ visioning as one of the “first servants hired,” so that visioning becomes a master over other processes. These are the processes whose over-motive is expansion rather than maintenance, which in a sense vie for territory.

Yet even when the over-motive is maintenance, once visioning has been employed and assumes a master role over other processes, the overall process is in a sense expansive. It aims at an alteration of outcome, which is another way of saying a claiming of territory.

When the route to food is simply remembered, although there will no doubt be a change in the world when the food is claimed and eaten, the eater has little or no sense of mastering or prevailing over the food such as inheres in actually puzzle-solving to obtain the food.  This is clear in the case of hunting prey in the wild. But even in the simpler case of maze-running, the first learning of the maze is a puzzle-solving activity, and is expansive in that success results in a kind of ownership of the maze.

Nearly all animals have skills which must be exercised for the survival of the individual and the species. The purposive exercise of a skill is its use to achieve a direct, concrete end, the end achieved by the action carried to its fullest extent, such as a cat catching a mouse. But most skills or basic activities will also be carried out non-purposively, as when a cat pounces at a shadow or at nothing at all. It is probably safe to say that the activity is being done “just for practice.” Humans seem to engage in forms of thought unique to their species, and there is a strong tendency to think “just for practice.”

Yet mental maintenance is not “just for practice,” and the thought activities whose aim is mental maintenance may be done obsessively, as if the thinker is addicted. One reason for this kind of thinking is a recurring or constant need to self-image. When there is continual assault on the self-image, work must be done to reestablish it. The habitual daydreamer is one who is in one way or another not at home in the world. Perhaps there is a need or desire which can simply not be met (such as the never-fulfilled need for a mother’s love).

An adjustment will be made, such that the person will compromise, perhaps by compensating for the unmet need through other pleasures, or by creating a persona which does not have the need, or in other ways. Whether the adjustment is compensatory or denying, it must be integrated into the personality, that is, the sense of self must be constructed so that there is none or minimal dissonance between the adjustment and all other facets of personality. Where this is achieved, there may still be dissonance between the resulting self-sense and the requirements of high functioning in the social world. The result will be a continual need to maintain the self-sense, to repair it after instances of insult to it. (Insult may be entirely mental, as when a desire to fit into the social world creates a dissonance within the self, or may rise to the level of the practical, such as when someone whose self-sense is very attached to truth-telling, but whose job requires deception.)

There is a dual motivation for maintenance thought in this scheme. Walter Mitty daydreams first because he has a continually unmet need. Daydreamer becomes part of his self-sense, but since daydreaming is not regarded as useful in the social world, there is continual dissonance. To resolve it, Mitty must somehow, even if unconsciously, determine that the daydreams are important, not just to him but to the world. Each time a daydream involves heroism on Mitty’s part, it works on both levels: it gives Mitty a sense of mastery that he cannot achieve in the real, social world, but it also repairs his self-image, in that, unconsciously, Mitty believes (correctly?) that the mental exercise of heroism is required to keep alive within him the capacity for practical heroism, and that therefore even his daydreams may benefit the world some day, in some way. Thus he can resolve the dissonance between his sense of self, which includes daydreaming, and the requirements of social interaction.

Here is the difference between casual “practice” and addiction. When thought occurs “just for practice,” it is easily abandoned. The cat chasing a shadow and the dog chasing his tail can be drawn away from these activities far more easily than either of them in pursuit of actual prey. But Walter Mitty does not abandon his dreams easily. Fetched to earth from one of them, he will be haunted by it and will want to return to it as soon as he can.

Then there is that element of addiction that is simple escape. There may be an element within the mind which one chooses not to integrate into the self-sense (perhaps because sensing that it will never fit into the world—think of homosexuals before 1970.) Mental activity may take place precisely to escape from the necessity of admitting the unwelcome element.

We are accustomed to thinking of addiction only in terms of overt actions taken—drugs ingested, co-dependencies acted out, compulsive behaviors such as overeating, gambling, or overspending. For this reason, when we face the challenge of thinking clearly, flexibly, and effectively, alone or in groups, it is important to be aware that addiction which may not result in any such overt action may still direct, and mar, our thought processes.

While understanding our motives will contribute to self-control in thought, and thus to a better-controlled thought process, this does not imply that control is entirely a virtue. Those thoughts which we might call random, and those thought processes which have no discernable aim or goal, which I call reverie, are both important.

Random thought I define by two characteristics: it has no discernible aim or goal, and it is not bounded by the constraints we normally place on our goal-oriented thought. These constraints include those of formal logic, in which most people are trained in at least some rudiments. But the constraints are limited neither to formal logic nor to any logic of which we are aware. For example, when we are awake, those thoughts which are formulated in words will mostly be formulated according to the rules of syntax which we learned in early childhood, and which most of us aren’t even aware of knowing. But many of us have the experience of being awakened in the middle of dreaming, or of coming back to consciousness when we have been halfway to sleep, and knowing that we had been thinking a sentence that “didn’t make sense,” meaning that it violated our accepted rules of syntax. Similarly, in our sleep-dreams (more, usually, than in our day-dreams), scenes are played out that violate every good playwright’s sense of decent drama. Shifts of scene are sudden and nonsensical. Persons change their identities instantly, and there is often little of “plot,” that is, a sequence of actions which build from each other and hang together to tell a single story. Most often, the compete non-sequitur rules, and all that is sustained for any time is simply mood.

Reverie overlaps with random thought, but includes a great deal of thought that is bounded, sometimes quite firmly, by the rules we use to construct meaning. Thus it has in common with all random thought only the absence of aim or goal.

Random thought plays an irreplaceable role in creativity. All innovation-in art, science, social life, and business-is based on the mind’s ability to put together things that previously had been separate, frequently kept so by conscious or unconscious rules.

Reverie is often without aim or goal simply because there is no discernable means of connecting it with a goal. Young children have many dreams of what they will do when they grow up, and even those dreams which happen to coincide with what one will actually do are strictly reverie at those times in life when one is too young to conceive of what must actually take place in order for one to become a fireman, zookeeper, or President. Later, some of these dreams will actually direct the thinker towards action; that is, they will come to possess aim and goal, and the child will find a path toward a practiced identity and a career. This is not restricted to children. In these days of increased life expectancy, more and more people have fascinating second careers which could only be undertaken after completing the first. As with the child, during the times when there is no course of action that can move one directly toward the goal, the thinking effectively has no goal. But when the freedom and opportunity arrive, and the dreamed-of path is actually taken, then all thought of taking it possesses aim and goal. Also as with the child, there is a transition period, during which the opportunity of actualizing the dream is seen to approach, and the thinking will become, often gradually, more purposeful, and lead more toward action. The achievements of late life have been fed and formed by reverie.

Both childhood and late life are extreme examples. Nearly all achievement is the result of thinking that begins as reverie and then, quickly or slowly, becomes purposeful.

All human effort is aimed toward destruction, maintenance, or expansion of the self. The ultimate motivation for every effort, including thought, will be one of these aims. For purposes of this discussion, self-destructive urges, and the thoughts they motivate, are regarded as diseased, and will be dealt with only when discussing the impediments to effective thinking. For as long as our discussion is concerned with healthy thought processes, this leaves us only two over-motives to deal with: maintenance and expansion.

These are only over-motives. Each of these motives leads us to choose subordinate goals, and in an important sense, these subordinate goals may be said to be the motive for a particular action. However, it is often important to distinguish which of these over-motives is at work, that is, whether one’s own or another’s thought or overt action is motivated by maintenance or expansion.

The motivations for a thought may be hidden or clear, to the thinker or to others. However, there is no clear separation between the hidden and the clear, because there is very seldom a single motivation for anything we do. Thus, an action or thought may have some motives that are clear to the thinker, and others that are not, and because of this mixture, the motivation in sum is neither perfectly hidden nor perfectly clear.

We are better able to exercise self-control, both in outward actions and in thoughts, the better we understand our motivations. The more our motivations are hidden from ourselves but clear to others, the more we are subject to outside influences. These influences may range from those of which no one is conscious, such as the tacit assumptions underlying social mores, to those that are deliberately wielded, such as the motivating tactics of the best teachers and the worst charlatans.

When thought of any of our modes is undertaken for its own sake, its aim is usually given. This is another way of saying that our modes of thought are to a degree defined by their aims. Again, to use the example of a formal puzzle such as a game: regardless of its motivation, the aim of the thought process is simply the solving of the puzzle. But it is not entirely so simple, and we may benefit from looking a bit more closely at the aims of thought processes of each mode.

Random thought seems to have no aim. This may only mean there is no aim that we can discern; there may be “hidden work” going on. A part of what our minds do in sleep may be very analogous to the re-indexing of a computer database, a process which, in all but the most sophisticated databases, requires a temporary shutdown of normal operations. If this is so, then our saying so is another way of saying that some random thought is actually maintenance thought, but without the thinker’s awareness.

When maintenance activity is conscious, there is very often conscious choice of the aims. To use our example of rote rehearsal: this is usually undertaken when a conscious decision has been made that a particular subset of knowledge is valuable, and worth the effort to make its recall easy and swift. But just as the recall of simple facts or statements may be made easy by practice and hard by neglect, so a more complex process may be facilitated by rehearsal, such as chess playing or algebra. But such rehearsals will only be undertaken as a result of a conscious value decision.

Another aim of maintenance thinking is to establish or re-establish relationships between entities (very broadly defined) in the mind. This is a necessary aspect of maintaining one’s sense of self. Just as in the interpersonal realm, ritualization occurs to establish or reestablish relations between persons or classes of persons, so also intrapersonally, relations between “microselves” are maintained. For example, interpersonally, the bowing of Japanese or other cultures, or forms of address in language groups employing “formal” or “familiar” second-person forms, establish and maintain power relations. Just as power relations are part of a community’s sense of identity, power relations occur within the individual mind, and when they are not consistently maintained, self-identification problems can occur ranging from simple aimlessness and impulsiveness to more complex character and personality disorders.

For the other modes of thought, the aim of a particular mode is often dictated by another mode. In the example already given, explanatory thought often takes place to achieve a basis for puzzle-solving. Puzzle-solving in turn often serves the purposes of visioning, being aimed at helping a vision “find its place in the world.”

It is possible for any mode of thought to serve the aims of another mode. Puzzle-solving, for example, may be employed to learn new processes which will be used for maintenance, as when one works out a new mnemonic device by which to remember elements of history or anatomy.

The aim of a thinking process is not its motivation. If the puzzle to be solved is a crossword, the motive for solving it may be mental escape (to forget something else), mental maintenance (some people solve crosswords to maintain their recall of words), or high-stakes competition, in a formal contest. Whatever the motive, the thought process is still that of puzzle-solving, and its aim is to arrive at a correct answer to the puzzle. It is important to keep in mind the distinction between aim and motivation.

Aims themselves may be defined in various ways, but always, the aim of a thought is nearer in than its motivation, and in most thought processes, the thinker is more likely to be aware of the aim than of the motivation.

The aim of a thought process is frequently the service of another thought process. When a formal puzzle (that is, a game) requires logic, to solve it frequently calls on conscious explanatory processes. Many players of Sudoku, for example, may be heard muttering “therefore” aloud; they are explaining to themselves the applications of logical rules. This is an example of the explanatory mode called into the service of the puzzle-solving mode, and the best way to name the aim of the explanation is “the service of puzzle-solving.”