"...might not be matter at all, as humans defined the term, but instead a thought in the mind of her Goddess embodied in the world of human kind without being wholly of it."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Two, p. 37.
I commented on this idea in The Sword but there is always more to be said:
minds and their thoughts originate in brains;
brains are material;
gods and goddesses are conceived as embodied, therefore as beings with brains;
thoughts are embodied in material artifacts.
Thus, a thought that is immaterial in origin and that remains immaterial even when "embodied" sounds right but may not be right. I think that disembodied minds are logically possible but no more than that. The idea of embodied but immaterial thoughts requires further elucidation.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
You beat me to mentioning that THOUGHTS are immaterial! (Smiles)
Sean
A thought is a pattern of information; the information exists apart from the medium in which it's "running", rather in the way that information in digital form remains the same throughout a transmission -- from a hard-disk, say, over fiber-optic cables, through electrical wires, and then as phosphors on a screen, where our eyes perceive it, our brains interpret the letters into words, and the meaning is transferred to the matrix of our brains.
Any artifact is an embodied idea in a way, since it must being as a concept -- information -- in a mind.
Hi,
A thought is also conscious. A sentence written in a closed book is information without consciousness. My thinking of that sentence involves my being conscious of it. So there is something different there.
Paul.
Gentlemen,
A thought is not a thought unless the being or entity thinking that thought is AWARE it is a thought?
Sean
Sean,
There are unconscious mental processes but they occur only in beings capable of consciousness. When I think about something, then I am conscious of it.
Paul.
Late night blogging is bad for me so I will try not to post again until tomorrow morning. It is now 6:12 PM.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree with the first of your most recent comments here.
As for the second, that gives more time for catching up with this PROLIFIC blog of yours!
Sean
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