COTHOUGHT

Communication, communion, and cooperation are species in a genus we might as well name cothought Characteristics of cothought must include some provision for sharing aspects of thought which coordinate action among different people. We cannot know in direct personal subjective knowledge that we think the same thoughts as each other and if we do have access to such knowledge by psychic or other means then that enters the realm of interpersonal experience.

It is soon clear that this whole section on cothought requires either interpersonal consciousness or some forms of coordination between different personal subjectivities. It would seem to me that this is a crucial alternative, although we may find upon further examination that the distinction so presented does perhaps fade. As I find such raw dichotomies painful in their contradictory sense, my personal predilection would be to find either a synthesis or dissolution of the conflict.

Direct interpersonal experience requires cosubjectivity: that which is my self and that which is your self are joined in so far as we share an identical subset of experience; we become sets with finite intersection; that is not too difficult to accept, either morally or intellectually; it does not require us to be the same set nor, if a center can be defined for each of our personal centers, does it require us to share or even overlap our centers; it is just a matter of being part of a society of thought experienced; personal thought remains mostly and centrally, although not entirely, private.

I am personally pleased with this analysis; it resolves a problem previously held forth by my Evaluator; I had seen evidences of interpersonal direct communication, something which we could call telepathy for present simplicity, but was uncomfortable with exposing my own psychic fallibility to external inspection; since I have enough trouble acting right it does seem rather constricting that I should also need to think right to avoid the arrows of either assumed guilt or external persecution. This paranoia is considerably relieved if thought forms are shared up to the degree of mutual comprehension and not in such a way that one imperfect being can read, as it were, the secret thoughts of another imperfect being; what I share with god I do not necessarily want to share with my neighbor and my neighbor, being as the case is a friend, would with all human sympathy share that understanding. We live together in this society in such a manner that we do share much physical and social congruency but allow each of us to hold our interior logos with neither compulsive examination nor prescription.

We have been discussing cothought and communication but we have so far eluded a direct examination of just who is thinking and who is communicating with whom: the question of self, although we have certainly implicated something similar with multiple references to Watcher and to consciousness. Nevertheless there is some metaphysics more or less hidden in the word self which bothers me. The situation is somehow like our discussion of time where, although the flux and flow of change is admitted, the more general and abstract entity named by time is held in abeyance. The word self does, as it is most generally used, seem to me to imply an absolute centrality of identity, some mystical being, me, there, but just where? Is it in my body or deep inside my consciousness? Because I cannot locate it does not mean that it is not there but I do seem to perceive that such a concept of self, so metaphysically loaded, is not really necessary for our much more phenomenologically oriented approach to thought. Having said this, if we use the word self as a convenient name for the subjective Experiencer, well and good, or we might wish to use self as a reference to the location, otherwise unnamed, where thoughts are thought, which is not quite the same meaning because thought is not just an experience but also an action. Should we then identify the agent of active thought with the mind and call that combined entity self? I am not at all clear that that identification is either certain or necessary. We could name two agents, Projector and Experiencer, here to add to our group. Then we can extend the question: are all of the agents connected, tied or rooted together in some sort of bundle which we might call self? They were in fact derived from a common source which is our analysis of thought. In order to avoid the metaphysical difficulties which we mentioned above as seeming to be implied by the concept of self, let us call a localized association of thoughts, thoughts referred to a single subjective Experiencer, a conscious entity. In broad usage, consciousness carries almost as much metaphysical baggage as self but we intend to use it just for localizing thought and subjective experience.

We now can at least describe communication as a relationship between some of the thoughts belonging to different consciousnesses. Let us try to explicate a simple example. Consciousness A, which we will presently call just A, has a thought involving the theme of a memory of eating three apples the previous day, A has other thoughts which include at least a recognition of the nearby presence of consciousness B, presently called B, as well as an acceptance of the factuality of the memory of eating the apples and a desire to communicate that factuality to B. A in its body then acts out the physical motions of its body to speak the words: "I ate three apples yesterday." B hears those words and has thoughts which include the assumed factuality of A having eaten three apples the previous day. Is this process transparent, have I made it entirely clear? Well, not entirely, because there are so many nuances of thought, action and logic unmentioned. But leaving those subtleties aside, is this a correct explanation of a (relatively) simple communication between A and B? Does this at least outline a skeleton of that communication?

At various places in this writing we have criticized some commonly accepted concepts, including time, mind and self. My problem with these concepts is that they stretch too far away from direct experience; they project a fossilized entity, a Platonic form, a being out there which has self subsistence beyond our experience. Time can hardly be rescued from its conceptual gridlock; there is much too much apparatus attached to time: past, present, future, duration, clocks and measurement and social concepts such as interest, appointments, schedules, etc. Even restricting time to an ongoing flux of the present is freighted by the ghosts of these other associations. But perhaps mind and self are different than time, are better candidates for resurrection. Why I might want to resurrect them would be to express the concept of communication between separate minds and consciousnesses, different selves, in case that is a more appropriate model than direct sharing of consciousness in cothought. I seem to experience thought as my own, as something I own in a natural and unavoidable sense. Is such a disposition correct, is it true or a reasonable assent? Or am I primarily predispositioned to such a viewpoint by social pressures and assumptions during development? I do not know the answer(s); personal feeling leads toward individuality; rationality, at least as linguistically developed, seems to point towards at least the possibility of cothought. Consider the following argument: Enter into the biophysical explanation: Thoughts are something somehow projected through our bodies which are, it appears, separate; thoughts are communicated by language among other gestures such as art, music, pointing and touching; language may be either written or spoken but we can assign at least some cases of communication to spoken language; speaking involves acts of controlled breathing also associated with muscular tensions along the throat; hearing is also necessary, which involves transduction of physical pressure waveforms, induced by the speech of the other, into patterns of electrochemical stimulation, except that all this is a highly oversimplified skeletal model which should properly contain many more resonances, subtleties and phenomena. This makes a beautiful picture but...I wonder...do you recall Occam and his razor? or consider that in Euclidean geometry the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Does this intricate scientific image best describe communication or is the possibility of cothought more direct?

It may be thought that there might be a third phase, something else not imagined in either the cothought pattern or the scientific view, but what would that be? Every time we formulate or speak or write of formulae, models, or ideas, we open the possibility of ascribing essentially novel concepts to those forms by just a slight expansion of their linguistic domain. This is both a strength and a weakness of language compared with mathematics which implies a fine line of discrimination between true and false, between proven and unproven, between non contradiction and contradiction. Even mathematics, however, loses its exclusiveness under the realm of thought, from where my writings on neomathemtics go forth. But what could this third phase be? Can we find it? Should we?

We will search for it; it will be in the arena of thought. We will no longer have such simple tasks as either the phenomenology of thought or the metaphysics of awareness but rather we will need to delve deeper into that which we have accepted as named by the word mind.

Frederick Joseph Staley