MEANING

Even as we have continued to examine the exterior form structures of thought we have been drawn again and again toward an awareness of the depths of meaning looming beneath us, much like a skater across clear ice can see the life proceeding in the winter waters below. When you first bend down to peer through the thicky glass ice you see a still life of brown weeds, looking longer you can discern their subtle waving in the slow winter currents, after a time you begin to notice the small bright beetles carrying out their business among the leaves, then the guppies playing across the sandy bottom; you begin to notice that a whole community is alive and well below the ice.

Consider a thought with a simple theme, such as the thought of a carrot. Suppose also it is the thought of an individual carrot which the thinker has seen in the recent past. Therein the thought has, we presume, a visual image, an orangish elongated image of something which the thinker identifies, at least implicitly, as that carrot. Perhaps the word 'carrot' also accompanies the image in the thought and there may well be other images of taste or association, perhaps a popout picture of Bugs Bunny. We have roughly described the form of the thought, of a possible thought, but what of its meaning? In this case of a thought about a carrot we do not expect a strong or immediate connection to a high plane of abstractions or recondite values, Bugs Bunny aside. This thought would appear to point at something perceived, unless remembered is more accurate, as an external object, but whatever can that mean? (Here the Department of Odd Correlations should interpose an explanation for English reading and non English reading readers...In English the word 'mean' has two very dichotomous projections: one is as a synonym for 'intend' or perhaps 'point towards' or 'bring into representation' and that is the usage I have last intended; another usage is as a word approximately synonymous with 'cruel', 'harsh', 'critical' or, more anciently, with 'cheap', 'limiting' or very 'narrow'. Perhaps this explanation was not necessary but although I find the word tempting to use in its intentional sense, I am thereby often bothered by its other meanings.)

One aspect of thought meaning would be intrinsic, thoughts whose meaning is the occurrence of the thoughts themselves, perhaps an aesthetic perception or religious experience, a sense of truth or completion. Another aspect of thought meaning would be thoughts whose intent pointed beyond the thought, perhaps to another thought or a bodily action.

Thoughts flow on in consciousness, one thought giving way to another, or to put it another way, one temporary crystallization of focus dissolves and another one forms. The intensity of focus also varies, sometimes sharp and definite, sometimes running along like small waves forming from and dissolving into one another. How can we truthfully write that some specific crystallization of attention, some distinguishable thought, connects in a specifiable manner with another distinct thought? We might be tempted to specify the connection by writing a word or a phrase, such as writing that the concluding thought of a tautology follows logically from the thoughts which we name the major and minor premises. We could do that in the common way of writing but it might be more interesting to hew closer to the quick of what happens.

What is the meaning of thought? Consider some possibilities.

Perhaps there is no thought. Perhaps there is no consciousness, no awareness; that whole business is just a myth made up by old white guys in order to justify western imperialism and the oppression of everybody else. This is sometimes called the postmodern position. I doubt that they really mean that there is no subjective experience, although perhaps some do mean just that, but rather that there is no such coherence which can be correctly named thought or consciousness or anything of the sort. Perhaps.

Perhaps thought has no meaning. Perhaps thought is an epiphenomenon, an efflorescence of the body like sweat or carbon dioxide, an electromagnetic perspiration of the brain. This view seems to be predominant in the public media today so let us examine it more closely. Humans are mere animals (and so are animals) whose desire for effortless comfort is only outmatched by their lust for sex and blood. Thought is something never thought of. Perhaps I am being too harsh but it does not much matter because the purer products of this reality will not read this.

A somewhat more intelligent view agrees that the above paragraph describes the essence of human being but also accepts thought as a useful tool to achieve such ends. However the use of the mechanical aspect of thought as a guide to technique is not necessarily limited to those who live entirely by primitive desires and we shall examine it elsewhere in some detail. It is mentioned here because thought can be used as a tool by those who otherwise dismiss it.

There is also a more refined perspective in which thought is still a shadow of reality. The universe is composed of a primordial design which may at root be mathematical but which we usually perceive as substance, as matter enlivened by and sometimes transformed into energy. Somehow through the depths of time this substance organized itself into self replicating forms. In order to continue the sequence of replication in the context of a sometimes nutritious and sometimes destructive background these forms transformed through their generations into greater complexity and one aspect of that complexity became awareness and eventually thought.

Religious concepts are so various and multiple and so closely held that it is difficult to comment justly on them here. In so far as I understand, religious views are not much concerned with the natural history of thought but much more with its meanings and ends, which ends or goal may be very generally characterized bringing the thinker closer to God. But in most religions this central aim is masked in doctrine which here can be characterized as a set of thoughts one is supposed to think.

Thought can result in bodily motion. The only direct power one has in the physical world is to change the arrangement of one's body parts. If I want to walk I bend one knee while simultaneously leaning forward from the other foot, then I straighten the bent knee and repeat on the other side of my body; gravity and friction do the rest. The actual physical motions involved in walking are more complicated than the outline above but what is important to note here is that what one can control, and all that one can control directly, as regards the outer world, is the flexure of one's own body.

Thought can result in other thought. As thought follows thought in the flux of consciousness it is not unreasonable to suppose a linkage or connection, perhaps something which can even be called causal, between thoughts having some similarity of substance or meaning, some similarity of topic. Where we have to look deeper is, in the first place to reveal the actualities of such connections, but still more essentially to investigate what we mean or can mean by the topic, substance or meaning of thoughts.

Thought can result in action. A while ago I thought of my wife. I thought of her kindness and sweet temper and the desire arose to do her some benefit. I finished the paragraph I was then writing and then went in the kitchen to make her a fresh vegetable juice. It is pleasant to love someone who can be so easily pleased.

Thoughts can sometimes be identified by a theme. A few minutes ago I thought of the word 'bicycle' and that word served as a theme for a complex of associated images such as pictorial remembrances of some of the places I had ridden on my bicycle, a path near the river, the sensations of sun and air, then again of a tree set in the sunlight against a far winter horizon; during the same moments of that thought there were also images of the material object, my bicycle, of the feel of its metal frame and again, while thought was arranged around that theme there were words, fragments of feeling, and other thought forms too slight to be described or already forgotten. Underlying the theme of that thought of bicycle was the situation that I had been exploring thought forms and picked the word 'bicycle' as much as I could at random for a theme to look at the thought it would instigate.

While the bicycle thought seems reasonably typical for a simple class of thoughts which can be named by a theme word or phrase, that class of thoughts is still near the beginning of our search for the meaning of thought.

To go forth now we need to introduce intent. Begin with a distinction between will and intent. Call will the metaphysical substance, if it can be called substance, or call will the essence, if it can be called essence, which could be said to underlie intent, if such a lower or more primal stratum is desired. In any case will is what we do not look into here; instead we introduce intent. What is called intent here is a form of thought itself, rather than some metaphysical substance; it is just that aspect or form of thought, of some thoughts, which points or focuses the intent thought toward some more or less specific, or specifically themed, thought or set of thoughts, a personal and often locally applied teleos.

We have broached the wide question of the ends of thought, of what thought is for, of what purposes it serves. I find two classes of ends available for thought; thought can be directed toward external action, towards moving the body such that desired changes are effected in the external world, that is one class; the other is where thought is directed towards thought, where the goal of thought is thought. These classes have been here formulated for thought directed out of itself, either toward action or other thought but we also have another case where thought is thought for its own sake.

We will return to the two classes of directed thought but I would like to pause a moment to further consider thought whose value is itself. A simple example of this would be perceptions whose content is beauty, the pleasure or illumination of the beauty being integral to the perception itself. Another possibility involves thoughts whose intrinsic harmony is such that the very thinking of those thoughts, their occupation of the consciousness, is of sufficient value unto themselves; these would include some states of meditation or grace. There is also a related situation involving more extended thoughts or sets of thoughts wherein value lies in the consecutive sequence or congruent pattern as a whole rather than necessarily restricted to the end or final thought of the sequence; what occurs to me are mathematical demonstrations where both the theorem and the proof of the theorem form an integrated whole and wherein the pleasurable understanding evolves from thinking the whole pattern through. This example has already overlapped the case of thought directed towards other thought and is perhaps sufficiently explanatory of that class.

Sometimes thought is directed outside of thought towards bodily motion and action in the external world. There are cases where a complex association of thoughts is focused toward a simple end, as in making a decision from a binary choice, such as whether to sell a certain equity in the near present or not to. I have spent semisleepless nights looking up charts, reading fundamentals and opinions, searching the Internet for possibly useful information and spending hours watching the dark or the curling flames in the fireplace trying to think out the most relevant sequences just to make such a formally simple decision. Long before we can investigate such complex cases, at least in the reductionist mode that the thought focus of this essay induces, we would need to reach some understanding about simple sequences of thought.

Thought can be directed when a thought form intends its succession. Suppose I intend to think of a sequence of initial primes and then I think thoughts which might be described by the themes: '1', '2', '3', '5', '7', '11', '13', '17', '19', '23', '29', '31'. The thought of intention to think of the initial primes has directed the succession of the following twelve thematic thoughts.

Thoughts can be ordered by intent and by design. Design is a good word, in ordinary English usage it's use as a verb implies the intentional creation of form, a pattern or picture both functional and aesthetic; it's use as a noun implies the form but does not require the intentionality. One can imagine designing one's own thoughts by thinking a thought which included both the pattern or form of the designated thought as well as the intent to think it. Can you imagine how creative this procedure can be for the evolution of the psyche? It reminds me of the potentials current for recreating genetic forms, although the design of one's own successive thoughts seems, by comparison, eminently benign as well as personally available, even now, to each of us, at least to each of us who reads or hears this or in any way conceives of the possibility.

Thoughts can be created. Every thought is a creation, not necessarily in the sense of being the result of a creative energy or agency but in the sense of a coming into being, as a thought is thought it is in being; it is also that which to a large extent can be called being, especially in accord with the definition of being as the content of awareness. In this writing we can accept thought itself, in and of itself; we do not need to ground thought upon other strata, except awareness, which is more of a place or receptacle for thought than a causal or generative agent. Sometimes, however, thoughts are generated, at least in part, by other thoughts.

Thoughts can be caused. Consider an indirect causation; last night I intended to arise at first light to awaken my son for school; as time progressed it proved delicious to stay under the warm blankets and let the outside world work it's ways; I did, however, arise at 7:00 AM as duty called, withdrawing the curtain I saw in the Northern sky such a lovely, deep and resonant color, unnameable in its beauty, some great ancestor of magenta, which transfigured my experience this day. Can it be written that the perception thought of the color was, at least in part, caused by the previous intent to arise, was thereby called into being, for a purpose?...and would such purpose include illumination of the day?

Frederick Joseph Staley