"...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.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteYou 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.
ReplyDeleteAny artifact is an embodied idea in a way, since it must being as a concept -- information -- in a mind.
Hi,
DeleteA 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,
DeleteA thought is not a thought unless the being or entity thinking that thought is AWARE it is a thought?
Sean
Sean,
DeleteThere 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.
DeleteKaor, Paul!
DeleteI 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