Topic Tuesday #69 2013/11/12 - "Meta-cognition - Thinking About Thinking"
Between your ears rests everything you have ever known in roughly 3lbs of grayish matter known as our brain. No matter what your IQ or station in life, the amazing organ in your head does so much that you must step back and wonder how it works at some point. The ancients didn't think the brain was important, and instead went with the organs in our chest. Our heart was not a mere pump but but where your soul resided. We know more now. We don't know everything but we are getting there. Neuroscience is the field of study of the nervous system, and how it connects to the brain and how it works its voodoo.The voodoo of the brain has some really fascinating implications. The thing the brain does, beyond keeping us alive, is think. When a thinking object thinks about the way it thinks, we have the recursive meta-cognition.
As you may well know, the brain is a collection of trillions of biological switches, making connections with each other in complex patterns that interpret all the things our bodies go through. Hunger, heat, pleasure, pain, elation, excitement, fear, rage... All of it exists in the brain. All of the concepts you have learned over your years, all the thoughts about your job, all the relationships you have had and relate to every few seconds, is a product of your brain.
This, being a vast discipline, is going to be exceptionally difficult to explain in a few Tuesdays, so let this serve as a brief introduction to thinking, about thinking, and what that may imply. What might we manage to accomplish taking this ultimate introspection to its logical conclusion? How do we think? Why do we see things and think things that aren't always real? Can we have an open mind? Are we able to rely on our own memories? Do two people see the same event the same? Love the same? Feel pain the same?
Mull these thoughts over, while I try to summarize this topic for future weeks.
