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<h1>Thoughts on Thoughts</h1>
<br>
<h3>Pritam Sarkar</h3>
<br>
<p>
Surprising is the fact that whatever apprehension and inference a mind simply makes at each instance, is a perception; which doesn't at all have
any simple phenomenology. It is to acknowledge with most priority that - thoughts are all there is in mind, and mind is natural; no whimsical
wizardry makes a blob of matter thoughtful and self-aware. For a subject 1 the world as it is immersed within, seems to have constrained its rigid
physical existence, although attributes regarding mind provide additional degrees of freedom for each state of the subject. the immediate
freeness of an individual's choice of thought, or the structure of it, if any as it appears instantaneously, allows the independence of choice of
action from a number of possibilities. How does that even manifest spontaneously in an I? We're so accustomed to the availability of thoughts
and mind that its absurdities and non-trivialities have become opaque to us. Looking at a sky full of constellations, and pointing towards a moving
satellite; it's profoundly epiphanic to realise, within these very sparsely distributed matter in emptiness, consciousness exists. The question of
how, would reveal what possible phenomena persists it after its primitive emergence; and the question, why, would address the inevitability of the
emergence of thought, and mind; out of the interactive evolution that might constitute brand new properties from the subparts it's built upon [1].
By mentioning the rudiment, simply that - It's the subject, the self-conscious entities that can make some sense of the word I, who can think and
thinks always.
</p>
<p>
What is simple and spontaneous must require a finite description length (probably simple) to describe the phenomena; which is indeed true for
events in mind. A perception is real for a individual just like other stuffs around us; the difference is due to the range of the description length of
such processes, due to complexity, that changes the perception on an I-basis 2 . The reality of a schizophrenic clearly differs from me, but it's the
totality of reality that character has. For a body to think, it doesn't require external fine control, rather the structuralisation of statements like -
'what would've happened if - '' although doesn't have anything to do with the natural reality outside, carries characteristic signatures of a thought.
Further surprise strikes in the contemplation that a negligibly tiny fraction of the universe can think, and even anticipate about the whole universe;
which is of huge orders of magnitude different in spatiotemporal scale. Also recognition of a naturally formed system as self and spontaneously
doubting the existence of self-ness reflects the utter extent of complexity in cognition. Think of each state of comprehension you make, the
perception is biassed due to the object under consideration, and the preconceived structure you had in mind until that instance. Although subject,
environment and object completes nature, and interactions of environment-object are pretty understood; the position of subject in natural
science, especially as an observer [2] in physics is universal, but very ill-posed.
</p>
<p>There were instances in the universe when there was no subject, consciousness, or mind; but these seem to be highly abundant over a certain
spatial domain at some instance later. Imagine how it would've felt for the subject at the first instance of self-awareness in the solar system. Such
a question, although seems valid, wouldn't lead to anything significantly insightful but only philosophical wonders to ponder over. The Emergence
of Consciousness in an inert universe, and its characterisations are what this article concerns.
It's quite natural to consider, processes in brain manifests as mind, and one can then ask about the brain, its detailed structures and
functionalities, but it is not that much relevant in structure and function in mind Consciousness is to be treated as a critical phenomena; a new
state of matter [3] where the details of its constituents (synapses and neuronal avalanches) wash away under neighbouring coarse-graining. The
system is close to the point of a phase transition, and its criticality is universally reflected in many of the empirical and analytical results, verifying
very much the brain at criticality hypothesis. Scalefreeness of dynamical variables is the signature of critical phenomenon; where I wish to
incorporate thought, as informally speaking, a temporally long-range correlated association of states in mind.</p>
<p>The succinct distinction still pervades between what we empirically know to be real, and what we can logically construct due to human's higher
cognitive faculty; as Noam Chomsky advocated throughout; not to mention the species capable of constructing language, apprehending
abstractions, anticipating future via theoretical development and containing magnanimous range of internal expressions (feelings) is only a
human subject. But to ask what an expression is for a particular subject at an instance, is fundamentally different from what originated it in his
brain. Thoughts surprise one in all steps, some opacity hinders me to completely think what you are thinking, no replication, no cloning, or any
unambiguous representation of that mental state, possible. What happens via an underlying phenomena must not vary between similar natural
structures, since they are tied together from their phylogenetic origin, and ontogeny recapitulates it. But what happens in mind, is not capturable
in totality from external observation. Thought never being a static object but a dynamic association, slips out instantaneously, giving rise to
another one. It is present in the motion, may persist, may not, but is simple and spontaneous.</p>
<p>
But where does a subject, a body that can think; differ from an inert substance? It is the doubt, and the apparent independence of choice which
we have regularised in calling the free will. Doesn't it seem we feel independent of the environment, the choice of what to think and the
consequential sequence of thought, popping in the head? Indeed the appearance of freeness is real but the freeness is not, as Daniel Dennett
prefers pointing the analogy that the role of money played in societal decision-making indicates how free-will is inexistant in the universe but in
the form of an instantial appearance to a perceptual universe of the subject [2]. The cognizability of the brain characterises the subject or the
mind, as a separate entity from the environment. Wonderous it is that, not a cat, not a dog or a chimpanzee, but us humans can narcissistically
recognize ourselves when we visually notice our physical appearance reflexively. What drives the acknowledgement of existence to be so vital
within this planetary periodicity of cosmic particle blobs? There are countless contemplative philosophy dealing with morality, free will, mind and
subjectivity with endless introspections and fountains of neologistic jargons, which not only exaggerate the natural possibilities of mind as
originated from matter, but also irrevocably eradicates the simplistic and ubiquitous generic features of consciousness, encapsulated within a
complex adaptive biological system. The ideas of self-recognition, self-awareness and all such reflexive capabilities of mind thus can be
commemorated through the lens of apparent free will, since what can a blob of particles do except follow the least action trajectory? Freeness is
physically too ad-hoc to be real and substantially disposable in the irrelevant categories of consciousness. Although the contemplation that my deliberate tendency to convey this statement is my personal will, the negligence of which would thus account for no credible judgement of what I
try to convey. This is more of a physical and neurological issue than philosophical.
</p>
<p>
Nevertheless, the generic properties the mind and the consciousness innately carry and reflect through the thoughts, can be interestingly
approached when instantiated the whole discourse in terms of Information and sense, to establish thoroughly that we tend to make sense in the
sequence of a thought rather than a nonsense; whereas a nonsensical sequence of events, when strikes as a thought, carries in its realisation
being a nonsense, the sense. The requirement is that we need to make sense out of the worldly gobblygook; so it’s not that in one fine shining
morning an Australopithecus started introspecting about platonism and be the founder of wonders to ponder; rather such bodies needed to make
sense in playing a movie in the head of ideas and notions, to anticipate the next and comprehend the past, at the present instance. The
necessity of thought has been inevitable in such unsimilar diversification of human cognition. Thoughts and Mind being the enhanced extension
of the body are necessary in order to survive the competition of assortatively similar forms of biological blobs. Recent works in explaining
occurrences in the brain as Bayesian Inferencing, a crucial idea from information theory; shed light on many relevant yet unrevealed aspects of
human thought processes and brain phenomenology.
</p>
<p>
Let us look at something of a more counterintuitive but irrefutable aspect of the human mind. Its comprehension and appreciation of melodic
sequences, i.e. music. The classification that there are consonant and dissonant intervals reveals something intricate about how the mind
perceives the distribution of frequencies. An octave being the trivial consonant interval given a root node, the perfect fifth is the most consonant
nontrivial interval we happened to have listened to in popular music all around the planet. The consecutives are perfect fourth, major third and
minor third. The intervals that are perceived to be more consonant are composed of frequencies of small integer ratios, and listing the interval
with corresponding ratios are as follows: Octave [1:1], Perfect Fifth [3:2], Perfect Fourth [4:3], Major Third [5:4] and Minor Third [6:5].
Interestingly, note that for any consonant interval, say the minor third, the composition of two frequencies of ration 6:5 exhibit constructive
interference at each 30th maxima of the count; thus brain would more correlate the instances of each constructive interference, the less the gap
would be, which is 1 for an Octave and 6 for a Perfect Fifth. This is what fundamentally forms a sense. A sense is simply a correlated sequence
of identifiable quantifiers. An astoundingly mellifluous phrase makes sense to the human brain and certainly crosses the threshold of minimal
appreciation due to the very correlated arrangement of frequencies. It sounds beautiful not because it has beauty, but because the human brain
is designed to consider those configurations of intervals more sensible than others. Although music and language are not conceived by similar
mechanisms in mind, the conveyance of information in natural and formal language is again the concern of compactifying senses.
</p>
<p>
An expression and inference extrapolated via a thought in terms of words in a language captures the senses in the thought under the constraints
of the corresponding vocabulary and grammar. A nonsensical statement as exemplified by N.Chomsky as: colourless green ideas sleep furiously
is clearly an uncorrelated notion when matched with the additional properties of the constituents; i.e. the causal correlation indicates how sleep
and furiousness do not go along usually. One can further hypothesise with reason, that, the more the correlation the more the sense; which
strictly separates the categories of conscious thoughts and a dream, which is more of a free association of pathological responses.
</p>
<p>
But what's the point of all this? Why did some systems evolve spontaneously over a planet and start to think, write poetry, compose pieces and
construct verbal to formal languages in the course of time? Is it just a consequence or is the emergence of thoughtful and doubtful moist robots
an inevitable phenomenon? The way biology defies standard closed and equilibrium thermodynamic setup, due to being open, dissipative and
way out of equilibrium; endowed with tremendous complexity with hinges of simplicity lurking precisely at necessary points; instructs something
fundamental is driving you and me, at every single instance of our existence. It has been anticipated how emergence of life, evolution, language
conceivence, states of perception are all the part of the big brat; the critical phenomena of complex systems [1], [2], [3], [4]; where the lack of
characteristic spatiotemporal scale allows divergence of correlation lengths. Huge range of empirical and phenomenological works indicate - the
brain at criticality - hypothesis to be true [4], whereas state of mind, or an instance of a thought can be regarded another state of matter [3]
affirms possibility of phase transition in complex dynamics of neurons and other microscopic detailings, whereas the instances of falling in love,
falling apart or falling asleep has been identified to have caused due to phase transition in neuronal networks. But one interesting key feature
waits to be revealed.
</p>
<p>
Whistles, distant signs and horns were the primitive methods of communications which further evolved into symbolic representations of
expressions and further shaped into more and more unambiguous forms of language, in fact humans now have formal systems where no
unambiguous statements are possible. Why this direction? One plausible case to investigate is to consider the loss of information due to
ambiguity of language, which decreased in the course of evolution of formalisms. From thought to lingual forms of expressions, the continuous
replication of pattern of mental state to sequences of vibrations of air-column, upto arbitrary range characterises the least loss of information or
least dissipation and scalefree information propagation throughout the system; which are signatures of criticality; are universal and inevitable
near the point of phase transition [1].</p>
<p>
All of these contemplations and anticipations, about how and why contemplation and anticipations are even possible at the first place shines the
marble of the emergence of the subject and a thought in the universe.
</p>
<h3>
References:
</h3>
</div>
<ol>
<li>More is different - Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science - P.W. Anderson</li>
<li>It from bit - Information, Physics, and Quantum - in search for links : J.A. Wheeler</li>
<li>Consciousness as a state of matter : Max Tegmark</li>
<li>Emergent complex neural dynamics - The brain at the edge : Dante R. Chialvo</li>
</ol>
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