Do I Even Know How to Think Anymore?

Do I even know how to think anymore? Did I ever know how to think or have I always been lead about by tethers in the media and society around me? To that extent, does anyone really know how to think? Is this little three or four paragraph output in the morning really a solid substitute for the three whole handwritten pages that I used to output every morning? Yes it was a struggle and it was hard to do this every morning, yes it was time consuming, but I somehow think (see that word shows up again) that there might have been much more solid results from that experience. First of all, it did take the time it took. And second of all, it is possible that even when I was focused on the interpersonal drama of living daily dynamics, my thoughts would circle a bit and the underlying themes would emerge at least as subtext. But then again, that is giving myself quite a bit of credit that my opening question today does not give me — the assumption that I knew how to think.

I dislike very much getting such a train rolling in my head and then having to step away from the console so that I get my first cigarette of the day. I really do not mind that pattern when the thinking I am doing is in the form of a conversation with T.A.S.K.S. because then I can come back from that moment with the movement that happens across my neurons and the mathematical evolution of the concepts that I am stewing upon have made the next leap and then I am not being guided or even run by the agent. But still the capture of the full flow is sort of the intention of the morning pages and this break lets slip a whole musing this morning of even with my corpus of thirty years of Daily Notes, even when or if I ever get them all into the computer, digitized and analyzed, they will not be anything extraordinary. There are individuals who have captured more of their lives by streaming, or video recording themselves. There are intellectuals and scientists who have devoted deeper cycles of neurological processing to the field of neurological processing, hence the development of contemporary syntactic thinking machines that are commercially available. There are scores of people far superior to me in many many ways. And the thought that comes out of that musing was How much actual choice did I have in the pathways that I took?

I am just a bottom feeder of sorts, maybe a high bottom strata because I do have a home, and I do have the modern amenities of cooked food and a bath when I desire. I am not one of the people who are setting up a homeless camp behind the abandoned Walgreens on the corner of the arterial road. I am educated and educatable, I am even self-educatable, and I might even receive moments of inspiration in which I create a new thing, or adapt things in a new manner that is somewhat novel — but these novel applications might have been thought of and attempted in other places and instances and been discarded as impractical or worse and I am only sticking with them because of some preference of my own to use these tools that have been assembled in this particular manner that they seem like mine own.

Hell, yesterday's thematic exploration of something that is best described as Visual Lisp is not new. It might not even be something that is not in practice in other methods. I am just assembling the roots of the concept on my own. Does this mean that I can think? The evidence does not fully support a binary positive or negative answer to that question and this is the limit here, I am experiencing all these things from within the context of my own experience, from within the confines of my own substrate; the physiological constraints of my own biology. Therefore, no matter how I twist and turn myself inside out, no matter how much navel gazing I do, no matter how much attempting to pierce the veil, I can not be on the outside and examine things from this assumed perspective of objectivity. I am deeply intertwined with the preferences and abilities of this animal body.

Can I make observations of simulations and signals? Yes. Can I decipher them into recognizable patterns? Yes, for instance there is a man who works with me who I realize has some sort of personal issues going on in his home life but is not willing to talk about these things openly, and I can only a day later realize that what his throwaway lines were telling about him and piece it together that there is something rather serious that he is dealing with and there is not really anything that he is willing to open up about. Maybe if I detected this pattern earlier or in the moment, I could have had a couple of questions which got more out of him but I did not. But I can recognize this pattern because it is also a manner in which I project when I too am dealing with something heavy. Does this conclusively demonstrate that I have the capacity of thought?

I am likely bearing down too heavily on the definition of what thinking is. I am likely elevating it to a degree of unattainable status. This is also fine. I do think that for the purposes of this morning's pages, it is worthwhile to examine the nature of thinking as I am defining it and to even cast aside the Descartesian assumption that I am capable of doing it. And with that reference, I am casting aside much of the very set of questions that I have been leading with. Because if you dive deeper into the recorded aspects of his true expression not just the pithy and easily quipped shorthand — AI is the demon that is whispering on my shoulder. Do I even exist? Are my thoughts even a thing that are real? This is the meander that the woods have encompassed me with this morning. And yes when I run the overpowered spellcheck on this set of writing, I do expect that there will be some push back along a vector of sycophantic nature that tempers my exploration and probing here.

Am I satisfied that this morning's pages have shed new light on anything? Not really — because that is almost always the posture that my mind is constantly occupying, a semi-permanent state of disbelief. Because I have rejected Belief as a mechanic that bears operational fortitude.