Mind is the most difficult of these texts to write. The other texts have been relatively simple, being based upon clear thought and observation of the basic facts. Mind is more problematic because it is more complex. Mind is our chosen name for the more highly organized forms and functions of consciousness; it is from awareness that the perception of a light enters consciousness; thought recognizes the light and mind organizes thoughts to model the light, at least in its exterior formulation, as an electromagnetic phenomenon, with all of the mathematical and experimental resonances pertaining thereto. The intent to formulate general understandings of subjective experience, thought and awareness, was a natural emanation from many years of thoughtful searching, to describe mind with similar proficiency is much too much, although perhaps we can understand some useful aspects of mind.
Writing these texts requires an activity of mind, something which includes thought and awareness of subjective experience but also a bit more. It includes a continued focus of intent across a wide division of change, commonly called time. It includes sequences of deduction, induction and metaphorical description, hopefully pertaining to the subject at hand. It includes lapses, lacunae and mistakes which are sometimes corrected. It also includes some overarching vision, progressively revealed, unveiled, thought and written.
The proposition of ontological mind chills my comfort; it is so easily swayed away to metaphysical incongruities and yet the concept of mind does seem necessary; it saves the phenomena, wherein we do think our way to more structured powers and perceptions. Can we find some resolution of these difficulties? We do have an advantage. Starkly we may now envisage. Truth shall be our forefalling before the sweetness of reason.
The challenge of thinking is not to do it but to guide it. In order to guide thought one must have both a direction and a resistance to distraction. We can begin to examine mind guidance through a geometric metaphor. Cuspoidal guidance occurs where you find that your thinking has wandered entirely away from your intent, or teleos, and you abruptly recall that teleos and redirect your thought by turnabout. Tangential guidance occurs when your thoughts are still on the road towards your teleos but need their direction shifted, as in turning the wheel of an automobile to follow the curving road.
Thought and mind are not the same thing; thought as I describe it in these writings is a phenomenon of consciousness, a not exactly bounded but fairly discernable part of the contents of awareness, of being. Mind seems to me to refer to some rather more abstract form or force; I am not quite sure what to make of the concept of mind, for one thing, judgmental value seems to be loaded rather heavily on top of a somewhat suspect ontology; mind must be rational, logical or perhaps more exactly, some sort of approximation to a Platonic absolute of coherence. I am bothered by this. We, us human thinkers in this civilization, have almost no explicit agreement as to what rationality means or even if it is good or bad; in origin rationality refers to the comparison of numerical magnitude and, even prior to that, to a comparison of geometric magnitudes; its extension to a general procedure of thought does seem rather transcendentally Pythagorean. Logic is to be in much the same situation as reason, it can be defined narrowly and clearly or broadly and diffusely. Higher levels of coherence, as we know them today, might refer to, for example, pure mathematics or to the physical mathematics of unification theory; however, we humans have not yet advanced far enough for many of us to use such structures in our normal thought processes. The ontology of mind also seems questionable: whose mind? My mind? But where is that? It would seem as if my mind refers to an abstraction from consciousness, from my thought plus some higher Platonic model which, ideally, influences my thought but which is above or beyond my personal level of experience. Because we cannot know, in the sense of philosophic knowledge, what is beyond our experience, then this mind seems to be also beyond philosophic writing, something more for faith, which is just fine in itself, but not the direct intent here. For another thing, as stated above, mind, at least as the word or concept is normally used, would seem to be set over against emotion, not quite compatible, even as if emotion were a deterrent, or at best an external driving force, to mind. Thought, however, as we naturally experience it includes emotion as well as those real subjectively experienced phenomena which might be associated with consciousness. Another writer could define these things differently, calling mind what I call thought and vice versa Consider how narrowly mind is used as a verb: "Jenny, mind the store!"
Although the word mind floats through public language with the various hermeneutic and metaphysical associations we have been describing, we can choose to narrow the description of mind to what we need in our explication of thought, and we now do so: Mind is the superstructure that connects thoughts to each other. In the limited field of thoughts which have to date occurred in an individual's subjective experience, mind could be defined as a subset of the set of sets of thoughts. There is not an absolute boundary distinguishing mind sets from non mind sets; mind could be defined so broadly as to be the set of all sets of thoughts or so narrowly as to be only one set of thoughts, perhaps the set of all thoughts, or even the empty set, void mind. It seems more reasonable, however, to let mind occupy some intermediate extension, mind is properly only those sets of thoughts which have some meaningful connection. Although neither thoughts themselves nor sets of thoughts have exact edgewise boundaries there is an implicit concept of thematic centrality which provides a reasonable criterion of connection to distinguish meaningful assemblages of thoughts.
Having defined the exterior or perimeter envelope of mind as sets of thoughts, the next and more substantial question is to ask which sets of thoughts should be included in mind and by what criteria.
As a simple example to begin with we could choose a tautology, which might be examined as a set of three thoughts: major premise, minor premise and conclusion. For example: listening to Vivaldi pleases me, I am listening to Vivaldi, therefore I am pleased. The above tautology occurred to me, as the circumstance was, while looking about my thoughts for a suitable example tautology and thus is also part of a larger mind set. It would not seem entirely unreasonable to extend the above case by generalization, saying that any set of thoughts which includes a mind subset would also thereby be a mind set. This extension could be made a little awkward by giving silly examples yet could be useful if treated with good will. We may also extend our set of minds sets by generalizing from tautologies to include all sets of thoughts associated by logical connectives, at least provided those connectives are used logically; i.e., correctly. Also sets of thoughts about logic would seem plausible candidates for mind sets.
Now we have reached a level of valuation of potential mind sets as validly belonging to mind. If we require mind sets to be 'correct', then we run into grave difficulties; first of all we will need a model, rule, or pattern of 'correctness' to measure mind sets against; this immediately raises us out of our phenomenological grounding into the world of abstract, even Platonic, truths, which occurs in an atmosphere too thin for this author to breathe in. On the other hand, to have no limitation upon which sets of thoughts should be called mind opens the gates to a flood of errant nonsense. We will need to find some path out of this confusion.
We may begin our extraction with some linguistic experiments. We could say that a set of thoughts is a mind set when the thoughts have some sort of fibrosity of connection, some relationship to each other. That relation might be that they relate either directly or indirectly to the same theme, say thoughts about prime numbers for example or thoughts about the void for another example. Herein begins to glimmer a further possibility of coordination, something based upon thematic narrowing of focus; from thoughts about prime numbers in general we could intensify the focus to, say, thoughts about proof of the infinite ordinality of ascending primes; doing thus lessens the size of the set of sets of thoughts which fit the chosen criteria but also appears to more brightly illuminate the mindfulness of what we accept as a mind set of that category. To recapitulate, we have introduced a tool for refining mind to greater intensity, the tool of focus, sometimes narrower, but more specifically clearer.
As mind is brought into tighter focus it sometimes expands, partly as if there were some light squeezed out of mind so that the more tightly mind is held the more light is squeezed out, the more brightly to illuminate. Narrowly focused, intense mind radiates illumination outward into surrounding consciousness.
Besides sets of thoughts derived from logical connectives there are other tools for elucidating mind. One of these is language. At the minimum we can say that a thought or set of thoughts which contains words arranged in a sentence, or in sentences, implies the presence of mind.
There are different orders of mind but they are most certainly nonlinearly arranged. Can we, however, find some linear measure according to which degrees of mind might be measured and compared? A very simple possibility might be to consider the cardinality of the set of sets of thoughts distinguished by some aspect or concept of mind. This might seem rather crude; a dull long book of many sentences might be counted as to how many sentences the book contains, whereas Newton's second law: F = MA, might count only as the equivalent of one set containing one thought. However, in these extreme examples a more appropriate measure could be seen to count not just the raw statements explicitly given but also the implicit connections those statements induce; from this point of view the Newtonian equation would be far more mindful than the long book. Implicitness transcends the crude determination of mindfulness but it also unfortunately subverts the operational simplicity of our measure. Still, although we can not actually count by it, our cardinal overview gives a not unreal perspective upon comparative mindfulness.
Can we make some closer approach to climbing the mountain of nonlinearity? Let us cast forth a net into the middle of mind. Somewhere, not yet distinguished but perhaps potentially available in the vast set of sets of thoughts are sets of high mindfulness. If we could consider the set of sets of thoughts given, then we might try to focus in on high mindfulness by a process of narrowing elimination of mindless and simple minded sets of thoughts, shedding layers of dull mind, low mind, boundary mind (I almost said practical mind), intermediate mind...and to call it further than this would be to invite trouble... If we were to follow such a procedure would we not eventually arrive at an island, perhaps one in an archipelago, of very mindfulness? Yes we would, if our premise of the given set of sets of thoughts were valid, and, perhaps, it is partly so; yet we do not, in full truth, have such an easy elevator to the crown; in order to more fully give mind its rightful presence we shall have to follow other routes, some more direct and perhaps shorter, some more constructive and perhaps slower.
Thoughts are figures in the dance of thought. Around each figure are multiplicities of variations of each of the media represented in that thought. Although each figure can be distinct, the transformations between them are as nearly continuous as may be, sometimes smooth and sometimes abrupt. Mind consists of sequences of the dance and sometimes of multiple sequences separated by intervals.
The essential distinction between mind and pure thought seems to be that mind provides some connecting thread by which thoughts and sets of thoughts are strung together. In order to examine mind we could search out the separate threads, although they appear to be a multitude. We might, however, make another order of progress if we seek out what it is to be such a thread. Whether we write of a thread connecting thoughts or themes of thought we seem to be writing about something which is not a thing, like a thought, for example, or a perception, but rather more in the nature of a metathing, some concept we appear to need, itself not in direct experience, in order to explain occurrences that have direct experience. In some cases the thread or theme occurs in direct experience when itself is the theme of a thought, but often sequences of thoughts are thought, which, if we are to examine them, we might suppose to be connected by a thread of meaning, but which in fact occur without such examination; in fact, this is what we normally do: when I think a series of thoughts in order to analyze why a particular noise is occurring in my automobile I usually do not have another thought of observing myself thinking through that series of thoughts. In these common cases of a sequence of thoughts not reflectively observed, the thread or theme does not exist, there is no metathing; when, on the other hand, we do observe such a thread or theme then that thread or theme does exist.
There is nothing mysterious about the statement: there is no metathing. We had just previously described a metathing as something which, although we might be able to give, or perhaps I should say, pretend, a name for it, it itself (a double misnomer: it is neither an it nor an itself) is not part of subjective experience and thus it is not, it does not exist. These recent comments are analogous to the nonexistence of the void. These statements may also clarify the converse; threads and themes of thoughts are brought into existence when they are thought, becoming thereby part of subjective experience. Thus we have the freedom to explicate thought threads and themes as needed or found without hypothesizing some Platonic metareality.
Frederick Joseph Staley