On the Mind

I was watching a documentary about psychedelics when I had a peculiar thought. The man in the video was describing his experience on DMT and he was talking about seeing entities which apparently is a common experience whilst on DMT. This got me thinking about the concept of self reference from GEB the book by Hofstader that I was reading. Basically for those who haven't read it, this idea of referring to oneself, "self reference", comes up repeatedly in complex ideas such as the cases where mathematics breaks down! In a nutshell, what that statements means is that with our current system of mathematics, mathematicians (namely godel) have formalized a proof which demonstrates that we cannot prove everything. There will always be contradictions so long as we accept the current number theory taught in school everyday. Another idea in this book that the DMT video had me thinking about was the notion of cognitive symbols. Without going into much detail, Hofstader explains that the next intuitive abstraction beyond neurons in the brain is the idea of symbols. I came to interpret this as the bottom-level resemblance of a real world "thing" in our brain. Sort of like memory in a computer except we have no concrete way of explaining the symbol precisely with words and language. It is simply what we know to be true. The book takes this idea deeper by trying to explain what the symbols are and where they come from (the nature of isomorphism) but what I am proposing is that humans have a symbol in their brains which is in fact the "entity"/"entities" which cross visual experience of someone on DMT.

This remark might not jump out immediately to whoever is reading this, but I want you to imagine your life and your thoughts if the above were true. In fact make your own interpretation of the statement. Do you believe there is a little person in your brain? Many little people in your brain? It might sound extremely silly but I think it is entirely possible that the human mind has developed an advanced network of symbols specifically for the production the "entity". Furthermore I think this raises a bigger conclusion: that the human race is distinguished purely through the internal entity it has evolved to contain and that the inexpressable qualities of life, consciousness, ego, personality, desires, love, god, and soul are embedded in the inner human. And I believe that the incongruity of our farmost intellectual befuddlement in mathematics, the lack of total consistent axioms, is proof the importance of self reference and the "entity" in our world view and possibly the necessetation of the entity.

As far as arguments for its necessetation, I think immediately to the idea of evolution. Now I do not think evolution is predictable. The world in 2026 is still at a place where the exact biological process that construct a organism have not been detailed to perfection. We do know, that evolution acts under environmental pressures and thus evolution must in fact reflect the environment in some way. So where does the mind come from? Where does consciousness come from? If we are creatures that interact with a "world" then how on earth have we evolved to produce something that is not on this earth but is instead in our mind? I think the truth is it was always on earth. It was simply the ape standing next to the other ape that taught the other ape what an ape should be. But what! This doesn't make any sense. Dogs know what other dogs are. Squirrels know what other squirrels are right? That doesn't make humans unique. And yet humans have all these things like language and agendas and phones. Humans have science and religion and epistomology: a literal study that asks you how you know you know what you know. And that isn't a typo. So at some point the human figured out that the symbol for a human, the symbol for the like-species entity (similar to dog squirrel etc.) also knew about the human. And that is a remarkable thing because one can develop the "mind" simply through actions of the human (I purport). It is like a bond is formed. An invisible trust. Now that I know this creature is a creature like me, but also that he is thinking the same thing as me, we both do the same things. We are the same. We are the isomorphism of each other. The symbols in our brain develop symbols in the other brain and when the other brain does like-wise we enter a loop. Because if one brain learns enough about another brain then its symbols knows that there are symbols in the other brain that correspond to symbols in the first brain. And this cylce probably continued to develop in parallel with communication. Every moment of synchronization in this early period of human history was a form of very basic but crucial communication by which the symbols for the human grew more and more abundant. This would have a been a catalyst of the intelligence we came to know today but an important sidekick would have been memory a biological property transcendental of time but I would say that was an earlier evolutionary attribute given to most of the animal kingdom. The two in conjunction would allow humans to continually evolve their entities into more and more complex forms until a man would emerge very similar to you or I in terms of the symbols that make up their mental schema.

I have made many suppositions in this writing that I want to state are purely from my learned notions and are most definitely filled with haphazard lies and falsities. I could go on to make claims that god is simply a form the entity, that benevolent religious figures are role models for the entity, that your parents are also part of your entity which is entirely up to you to determine. I keep mentioning the entity in singular form because I am not sure about the multiplicity of it. This might seem destructive of my own argument, but Hofstader in his book explains symbols in a way which treats the complexity of overlapping symbols in the constitution of our thoughts. The entity is a whole and that is certainly what I wish to propose. I believe that people form identities and feel a strong sense of uniformity due to the fact that the entity provides a single schema by which you can mirror a single identity. What I am addressing here is that the amount of information that makes up the entity might be so vast that it will not feel like an entity in the maybe traditional sense, but it will also be tightly human because as I mentioned before, it was born of the human.

A concerning derivation of my theory is that "the self" is an illusion. Or maybe it is not concerning depending on what you think you are. The more weight you place on your individualness, the more this will feel concerning for sure. In general I think the claim "the self is the other" is what sums this up and I think it is free of any immediate paradox. My answer to the epistomological question "how do you know you know what you know" is that you know what you know because there are others that know what you know and the presence of the other is truly the only thing that is known because we live in a world of otherness established by physical existance. There are many notions that this theory does not explain like what is the nature of the isomorphism (similarity) and of course the big question of "how did we get here". But I think it is still an important thing to answer because I don't think humans consider what limits their knowledge they just try to rattle off as much as they can in order to establish themselves because why would you delve into what you don't know? What does the absence of information tell us? Not to be prophetic of "ying yang" nature but there is an odd discreteness to the ideas of what we do and do not know, what is in our entities and what didn't make the cut. The next question I wish to answer is what fundamental attributes of humanness are stopping us from reaching the conclusive whole explanation of our reality.