Language and Consciousness:

Much of what we feel as consciousness is the perception of the structure of our thoughts, which is possible because of language.

Think of the mind's eye as a train on a round track. Ideas like "food", "sex", "what am I supposed to be doing?" are major junctions which press the "turn off here" button every so many minutes.

Only a narrow bridge connects the right and left sides of the brain. On the "creative" side the dendrites are longer than on the "analytical", verbal, "scientific" side. Having them short keeps you in a smaller portion of the brain so you can keep the subject and the possibilities in narrow focus. This is good for deduction. The wider "creative" focus of the other side allows connections to be seen which are more tenuous and abstract. This is induction.

Turing small talk into significance with out wasting time can seem okward. This is what I call the superficial barrier. Metaphors and analogies introduce significance because they take a wider focus. They abstract the essence of the idea, which is possible because ideas have common roots. Every trivial idea is an example of something more profound. Even if something is totally dumb, its flawed reasoning can shine light on large parts of sociology and psychology.

Language evolves through slang. Sense language is a symbolic association rather than an association between two actual things, any sound or symbol can stand for anything. Like fashion, its form is arbitrary and changes by following those who refuse to follow it.

The degree of similarity of the languages used on Polaneasion islands corresponds to their physical distance apart because the language has traveled on canoe.

Seeing something worthy that does not have a word is a cool thing. When I started saying, "boggle" I meant, "think of the weirdness of this situation in the way I that I do". For my friends, the meaning of the word is partly defined in me. Many words were originally people’s names.

Without language thoughts still have structure. The area of the brain which is a symbol for "lion" is more connected to the "fear" area than to others. Imagine billions of brain cells (switches) with thousands of dendrites (wires) connecting it with its neighbors. If dendrites die out if not used, then the amount of connection between areas will correspond to the amount of connection in reality between what the areas represent. This way, when your instinks light up the word "food" the lights go off at "acorns", "berries", "sea slugs" etc. with brightness to match their importance. Water moving quickly cuts into the ground making a trench, which attracts even more water (a re-enforced pathway). Moving slowly, it drops slit and erases. The brain developed a system similar to these phenomena to carve pathways and forget them.

Thoughts are not as amorphous as they seem. There are only so many basic ideas that contain the essence of all the others. There are only so many paths an impulse can take. Each word and each sentence is an idea. All the words and ideas could be graphed out to show their relationship.

No idea is "bigger" than another. A sentence is an idea that is not common enough to merit its own word. Only a few words are irreducible. Most are shorthand. Although all our words are needed for our level of convenience, fewer than 500 could describe everything.

Make a list of the things you think of every 15 minutes some day. Trivial things are easily separated out. Getting your thoughts written down helps you to organize them and frees your mind for new thoughts. Only un-developed ideas are hard to write down. Most ideas will remain un-developed until you try to write them down.

Conversation is over rated as a tool for learning. The monologues of which it is composed may be great but synthesis usually requires time to think about the stuff said.

A brain is a library; people are curators who try to stock the best books, conversation is like a computerized card catalog.

Plagiarism is a type of replication. Even a book of recycled ideas, like a quote book, is valuable. Everything has been said before, the hard part is to find the good stuff. Knowledge is like LA; its all just sitting there but you have to know the right people and the lay out to get the most of it.

Besides, are any ideas truly original? Most ideas are rearrangements and new comparisons of things you’ve heard. Some thoughts are your own creation, but others have created it too. It is written out in some dusty volume. Once you grasp a new idea its funny how quickly you run into someone else expressing the same thing. They were all along but you couldn’t notice or look in the right place until your brain was ready.

It is good to over do it when talking. If you say it was "so, so, so great", they know it was 1/3 better than if it was "so, so great". Without repetition it is hard to convey enough detail. To describe something, you must often describe it incorrectly and incompletely, but in a number of different ways. By changing your tone you imply which parts of each dicription apply, and to what degree they apply.

Concentrations of about 20 neuro-chemicals control the moods of the brain. Moods are systems that monitor the brain looking for certain patterns. Typically they stabilize brain activity, just as glands stabilize metabolic functions. They release their neurotransmitters to make your brain run faster, more right-brained, lustful, angry, hungry etc. Emotions seem to have opposites because they reflect the levels of the neuro transmitters, which change over a continuum. Love becomes hate as the level drops, sad to happy, confident to fearful, pain to comfort, hope to defeat, envy to pride, greatness to meekness, energy to slothfulness, playful to serious etc.

Combinations of the base emotions form the many shades. Envy is lust mixed with anger and meekness, or whatever.

Your perception of anger etc. is very similar to other people’s perception of it. You may have unique thoughts and experiences, but your feeling match other peoples as well as you match them physically. People look different but it is only skin deep. People all have the same basic bone structure, brain structure etc. Size, strength, effectiveness may vary, but essence varies little. Our perception is skewed to maximize the differences. To an alien, we would seem as homogenous as lab mice. People of unusual races look similar because you have not had time to zero in on the small differences.

A videotape could be made to teach kids to talk, which would introduce words at the best rate and show examples when possible. An advanced lesson might show a person walking thur a door saying "I am walking thur this doorway, this is me (point to self), this is the door, this is me walking, this is me not walking, now I am sitting". Kids must get very confused listening to adult talk because it is so abstract and has so many words they don’t know.

A dolphin or primate could be shown a similar tape in which "door" would be said using a sound they could make. Actual recorded dolphin squeaks could be spliced together to make sentences. Which sounds you pick for witch things does not matter- the sound "door" does not mean door to a kid until you tell him that is what it means. The initially random association has meaning because it is uniformly and consistently associated with the same thing (the basics of symbolism). After the dolphin learned your system of associations between real things and squeaks, you could understand him by looking up the squeaks he makes on your chart of associations. "Fish" might be 440hz and "faster" could be 450hz. Once you got a bi-lingual dolphin you could hear all their "Iliad" type stories.

Imagine a dolphin with an electric wheel chair he could steer with his nose. He could have a soggy wetsuit to protect his skin. You could make him glasses to help his vision in air.

Thought is a type of feedback loop. When you think, you are monitoring the amount of connections between the subject idea and all your other ideas. Because unused brain cells and their dendrites die if they are not used, the remaining connections can be said to be tuned by the environment. Your thick pathways are in fact a symbolic model of reality, which turns input into output by copying previous experiences that were good

I once suggested people will some day have houses as big as the world trade center- only to be laughed at. However, such things can be built by automation. A cell is far more complex. People’s appetites are limitless. Imagine a 100-mile meteor injected with bubbles. Swing it near the sun to get it soft and the bubbles will form rooms. Imagine a planet converted to a building by self-replicating robots. People’s lack of understanding of the complexity of what has already been done grounds their imagination.