THE ENTIATIVE BRAIN: THINKING WITHOUT THOUGHT Jud Evans

Jud Evans lives in Lancashire England and is married and has eight children. He is the author of many articles, primarily on the subjects of ontology and linguistic philosophy.

The Entiative Brain:  Thinking without Thought.

Jud Evans

Let's talk about what happens to your brain when you conjure the concept of an apple. What is going on? What's happening in general when you conjure any concept? Can you give an explanation in theoretical terms? This is the question we discuss here.

The question is as old as the hills and has bedevilled philosophy for millennia. It hinges on our phenomenological perception of activity and whether activity exists,  or what  exists is that which is active, i. e., the acting entity. The active (thinking) entity in the case of thinking about an apple is a human and a thinking human certainly exists. The apple which is thought about may be or may not  be an actual apple. If it is an actual apple (the nominatum of the symbol apple) that is being thought about then  it is quite possible that the fact that it exists can be verified deictically simply by being indicated or pointed at, or checked out as being situated in a different location in accordance with the context in which its ubiety - (its state of existing and being localized in space) can be demonstrated. Such existential clarifications are called deictics or demonstratives and are dependent upon the type of communication, the knowledge and the  interpretation of the context in which the communication occurs.

Nowadays the dualistic Cartesian concept (see the cogito) of an inmaterial soul as being incorporeal and without material form or substance is laughed at by most modern philosophers. To a large extent the words  dualism or dualists have become a term of abuse. But are we not all equally guilty of dualistic imaginings in that we attribute to action a form of existential actuality which does not in fact exist?

Consider this representation of a woman dancing. Imagine for a moment that she is a real flesh and blood woman. We will call her Annabelle. Ask yourself... "Is it the dancing lady (the dancer or the picture of the dancer) that exists - or  the dancing?...or both?   Is it the being called Annabelle that exists, or the being of the human being called Annabelle? 

  If you come to the conclusion that either (a) the dancing exists, or (b) that both the dancer and her dancing exist then you are a dualist and believe that the world consists of, or is explicable as, two fundamental, though perhaps different entities, such as mind (thought)  and matter (in the case of Annabelle  - her moving matter and movement.)  

If you decide that only the dancing Annabelle exists, then you are probably a materialist - a monist who believes as I do, that the dancing Annabelle consists only of material substances and that there is no ontological difference between active humans and their so-called activity. In other words that the various names we attribute to the various activities of humans such as Annabelle were coined historically in order to classify the way they exist when they think, dance, collect postage stamps or swim or smile and does not mean that thinking, dancing, swimming and smiling actually exist..

There are some non-lateral thinkers  who insist that there is an active ghost in the machinery, or the transistors, or the neuronal networks. I say NO! and I passionately believe that it is a ridiculous concept, for like everything else that some people ask one to believe exists, such as God or the soul or spirits, etc., they never produce tany evidence for these fictions they claim exist  for us to examine and decide for ourselves. We are always urged to: Take my word for it or relax and have faith.. If I asked such a believer to show me an   activity  (such as dancing he  or she could only show me Annabelle or some other human who was temporalily existing in an existential modality  we characterise as  dancing.

The fact that change and action, [and all  synonymic correlatives such as motion, activity, events, propagation and all the other convenient fictions don't exist, doesn't mean that the entity involved is incapable itself of existing in active or changing states and modalities. In fact if it it did not exist  as a changing, dynamic,active - it wouldn't exist in the first place. I include ostensibly inert entities too, for rocks and metals and grains of salt consist of active quantum forcefields and active, moving particles just like any other entity in the cosmos.

So back  to the human brain.

When I think of the word dog or apple the meaty-bits that I/we identify as my nerve-cells [neurons, synapses, etc.] change the way they exist. But only the changing and altered fleshy neurology exists. the neurological change or alteration does not exist, nor is it dualistically separate from the thinking brain-meat. What actually changed was the brain-meat's reticular electro-chemical configuration from that as it existed before I thought of the symbols dog or the apple to that whilst or after I thought of the symbols dog or the apple.

So how do we explain the reason for this ontological confusion and the Cartesian-like duality of which most of us are guilty? It is due to thousands of years of continual misinformation which goes right back to man's primitive beliefs in spirits and souls and energy and the inexplicable dynamic forces of action and movement and change, which they believed was governed by spirits and Gods. Man needed such abstract nouns, gerunds and reificative adjectives in order to classify, describe and communicate and describe the changing nature of themselves and the entities which surrounded them.

Notice the grammatical difference between the present continuous conjugation of changing, and the abstract noun [verbal noun] change. here we can see that the process of changing has been reified [reify = considering an abstract concept to be real] into a real thing. The irony of the situation is that in order to draw your attention to this fact I have to reify the useful fiction processing into the verbal noun process in order to make my point in an articulate manner. We can see now that thought does not exist and that only the thinking thinker can be found in the world.

Now to go back to the original question:

                What is going on? What's happening in general when we conjure an idea or a concept?

Firstly we can ask:

At base, it is an evolutionary  survival mechanism. Those earlier human individuals who did not respond to internal or external stimuli were wiped out of the gene-pool and never had the chance to pass on their DNA.

Socially we are exposed to our fellow human beings and participate in  the interplay that goes on between them and us with our own brain as the interface.  We have an inbuilt  natural proclivity to respond to the stimuli to which we are exposed by conceptualising about it in an effort to understand with it and deal with it. This response is as natural as a spider feeling the vibrating web and making its way to an appropriate position in order to secure its prey. Conceptualising is an automatic response by humans, even to conceptualise that it is not worth conceptualising is a form of conceptualising, and those traumatised humans who do not conceptualise at all do not last long, and can only do so with the assistance of other caring humans.

What goes on when we think?  The  brain is the meaty hub of our holistic nervous system. It is made up of 100 million million nerve cells - about the same as the number of trees in the Amazon rainforest. Compared with the brain of a fruit-fly which has about 100,000 neurons, humans have about 100 billion neurons with about 1,000 synapses, so a fruit fly brain has about 0.0001% the amount of neurons as that of a human brain.   Each cell is connected to around 10,000 others. So the total number of connections in your brain is the same as the number of leaves in the rainforest - about 1000 trillion. Stimulated by electro/chemical activity the entiatic configuration changes - it exists [is present in the form of a fleshy electro-chemical  brain which exists differently from nanosecond to nanosecond.

Old fashioned traditionalist attitudes [still very much alive and kicking in society] insist that we have minds that enable us to learn from our experiences, plan ahead, solve problems and make decisions. They are terribly and dramatically wrong: What we have are BRAINS that enable us to learn from our experiences, plan ahead, solve problems and make decisions. There is no activity existing in the brain, nor, psyche, mind, spirit, soul, energy, dynamic nor any other spirituous fictional product of our imaginations - just the fleshy, electrified, chemicalised,  thinking,  brainmeat.

What exists is an active, changing, energetic, dynamic bundle of human energised flesh and chemicals called an embrained  body (or embodied brain if you prefer)  and it changes the way it exists from moment to moment.

To paraphrase Henry Ford: