Commonsense definitions

A small point - 
Consider this sentence - The lawyer is talking. 
Immediately this conjures up an image in the mind of a lawyer in a courtroom wearing a lawyer's dress and arguing.

But this could also mean that a man is talking in his sleep, and is a lawyer by profession. Things would still mean - "The lawyer is talking". But we dont visualise that. Why?

Because : have a look at the very definitions of words in a dictionary. How does a dictionary describe definitions of words - we have phrases like "when someone...", "when something...", "when one.....", "(word) relating to...", "(word) used to indicate....", "used to mean...." etc. But what's hidden behind this 'relating to' and 'used to indicate' and 'used to mean'? What's hidden is 'USUALLY'! 'In typical/normal scenarios!' Even the phrases "when someone", "when something is so and so way it is called....." have the implicit connotation of "usually", "in typical scenarios", "in regular cases" etc. And what does all that - the hidden stuff and the implicit connotations indicate - Commonsense! Meaning commonly, usually, typically, in normal scenarios....etc.

So, if the very definitions of the words in the dictionary are "commonsense definitions", the visuals of the sentences too have to be commonsensical and typical. 

Speaking the other way, even my phone can be named as 'lawyer'! If such possibilities are to be accommodated, the whole dictionary would turn wild !

Emotional Thinking

There is nothing like 'thinking versus emotion'. There is thinking and there is emotional thinking. Thinking, rawly, is connectionism. You connect 2 pieces of data in a certain way to arrive at a thought - a product of intellect. But so do you connect 2 "emotional elements" in certain ways reminiscent of connectionism (as is present in thinking) to arrive at an emotional thought. Suppose you love your 2 sisters - Mary and Jane. You think - when's my love Mary going to come to meet me here? I haven't seen Jane for a long long time. How I wish I could talk to Jane! Then there can be a 'THOUGHT' - an emotional thought - like what if both of them came here? And you feel immense happiness at that imagination. Here you have connected 2 emotional elements - your attachment to Mary and your attachment to Jane, with a connectionist element of "COMBINATION". You have combined / added the 2. This is thinking in the emotional realm. Lets see this in more detail.

All emotions are associated with a want, a desire. Take say feeling emotional about seeing your favourite batsman walk off the ground in his last match. Here there is a want of seeing him bat. Or something like - oh, what a cute puppy! Here you want to hold the puppy close to you. Emotions are thus networks of such wants. Suppose someone narrates to you the sacrifices of the freedom fighters of your country and you get emotional. There is firstly a want of those fighters for freedom for the freedom; there is your want of not seeing such good people not suffer; there is a realisation of their want for the fulfillment of your want of freedom. This is an example of a set of connected wants in the emotionality of the whole issue. 

Now, lets see what these wants are connected by; what the connectionist elements are. Emotions are said to not support high-level thinking and allow only for "dumb", low-level elementary thinking. Lets not get into that debate. (Higher level intellectual feats are achieved consciously by "controlling oneself" and "maintaining calm". Even if you are intensely charged up and motivated, you cannot let all that spill over into the actual process of the execution of the intellectual act or the mental skill). This feature of emotions allowing for only shallow thinking is seen in the nature of the connectionism in their case of thinking - these are essentially simple conceptual antonym pairs (and in the obvious sense of amount of distinction i.e. high and low) like - distant/close, get/not get, create/destroy, more/less, add/subtract, present/absent, win/lose etc. In the case of the 3rd want of the freedom fighters' example, the connectionist element is a comparison of the amounts of 'distant' and 'close' - "they (freedom fighters) were so disconnected and thus "far" from me/us (present generation) and yet they have a want for fulfilling my wants (something like closeness)!" Or suppose your son goes to school and you get the thought owing to your love and care for him - what if other students eat up his tiffin? Here the 2 emotions are - your love for your son and son's want of tiffin. The connectionst element involved - the speculation of someone eating up his tiffin - is a simple case of 'CREATE/DESTROY' (others finishing his food) or 'GET/NOT GET' (he getting the food or not)!

Take another example. Suppose your beloved batsman is playing his last match. Also, you have a huge passion for making your son a cricketer. You take him to the match. The batsman gets out and is walking off for the last time. You are obviously in tears for that one particular emotion. But then there can be an emotional thought - why don't I lift my son (whom I badly want to become a cricketer) in my arms and show him this great cricketer which his growing generation will never see again. The 2 emotions (beloved batsman + want of making your son a cricketer) have been connected by the elementary connectionist concept of 'ADD' (see the listed examples above). You have added one to the other. 

'Wants' bound by 'simple connectionism of elementary concepts' is the 'network' of 'emotional thinking'. (Each of the terms in quotes have been talked about above). 

Variedness of the mind

Why don't we sit on the chair (for typing on the computer on the desk), in exactly the same fashion everyday? Why don't we wear our same-sized T-shirt in exactly the same fashion every morning? Why dont 2 soccer matches between 2 teams with each having the same players on the 2 occasions, and played on identical grounds yield the same result? 

Suppose your friend is sitting besides you. You poke his shoulder with your finger. He will say “ouch! What?” You do this again. He will be irritated again, but react differently - not exactly alike. But when I click on my File tab in Microsoft Word, everytime, the same menu will drop down; everything's the same every time. (Here also, it is not certain that even if you do this 100 times, the 101st time, the menu will pop down. But induction takes care of that.)

Why this difference? What is the reason for this “variedness” and “diversity” every time in the case of humans? What is the reason for this fixedness in case of the ‘File tab, Microsoft Word, screen, mouse, cursor'-system and there not being so in case of your ‘friend’s mind, his body, your poking hand’-system? Both have “codes” in them. Our brain is an organised entity which reacts in certain ways to certain stimuli. A poke is like a physical force acting from the side; the reactions should be the same on both the occasions if the speed and intensity of the poke is the same and at the same place on the shoulder, on the 2 occasions. 

Two reasons : 

One difference is MEMORY / “BAGGAGE” / CONTEXT. The first poke goes in memory, influencing the way the second poke is received by the system. There is a “baggage” of the first poke. There is a context generated by the first poke, contributing to the state of your system before the reception of the second poke, making the second reaction different. There is no such memory in the File tab for the clicks.^*

Also, in real life, no two situations (at 2 different instances in time) are exactly alike. So the state of the mind on any 2 occasions cannot be exactly alike since the input signals from these surroundings that are coming are different, at least slightly, everytime. So my reactions to the same thing are going to be different on different occasions.

^*Now, one might say that this can be done if the machine maintains a log of the activity (btw is the maintenance of a kind of a “log” of ‘what's happening’, consciousness?) of the clicks and “randomly” generates a slightly varied response everytime there is a click on the File tab. This would be like the friend’s different reactions on exactly similar pokes every time. But such machine randomness isn't really randomness because, due to the code you have created for enabling that process in the machine, the machine, in concept and principle has pre-occupations on what “random” change to generate every time; it's just that you the programmer aren't aware of those preoccupations and have this illusion of randomness.  

There is nothing random and varied and diverse in the mind. It's all a response based on the very initial state from which it started. Very complex to map and write down; but exists in principle definitely. 

Extending this, there is nothing random in the universe as a whole. The initial state of things has decided everything. It's just that we cannot put down all those variables and predict things. But the predictive answer exists. Just like the initial velocity and angle of shooting decides everything for a projectile motion - the range, time of flight, maximum height etc. 

The combination of machine, mind and the world (surroundings) in the universe is behaving in this predictable fashion every second. It's just that it is out of our human bounds to know of all of those predictions. 

Is this what they call destiny (which I hate!)? Lets see if the creation of smart machines is there in this “script”!

Physical Relativity v/s Mental Relativity

Consider 2 cars - A and B - travelling in parallel along a straight line along a straight road. A is travelling at say, 40 km/h and B at say, 20 km/h. The velocity of B relative to A is -20 km/h i.e. receding at a speed of 20 km/h parallelly along the straight line. If B was travelling at some angle with the straight line, along  a straight line, the motion of B from the reference frame of A would be some straight line at some angle with our original straight line (the road). Now, the speed of B changes with respect to A in both the cases when you step into the reference frame of A. The magnitude and direction of velocity changes but the qualitative nature of the motion remains the same - motion along a straight line. It is not say, that in the earth's reference frame, B is travelling in a straight line and in the reference frame of A, the motion of B becomes along a curve or something - (as long as the 2 entities - A and B - are undergoing the same nature of motion).

Consider another example - Suppose there are 2 people A and B. And A gives a ball to B. From the earth-frame, A is losing possession of the ball and B is gaining possession of the ball. In the ball's reference frame, A is going away from the ball and B is coming to take the ball. Now, the first observation in both the cases, i.e. A losing possession of the ball and A going away from the ball are qualitatively the same. And the second observations, i.e. B gaining possession of the ball and B coming to take the ball are again qualitatively the same. So, in both the above examples, the truth is preserved. The qualitative nature of the phenomenon remains the same, irrespective of changing your reference frame from one to some other, in case of a system of 2 "equivalent"-entities (2 cars travelling along a straight line (or both along a curve) or 2 human beings, with a transfer of a thing from one to another).
But now consider 2 minds - A and B. A hits B and derives pleasure from that (say, he is a boxer who enjoys punching people). From the reference frame of the MIND of A, the event is a pleasurable event, whereas say, from the reference frame of the MIND of a third person like you or me observing this, this is an annoying or a surprising event. Now the same phenomenon is enjoyable from one mental reference frame and annoying or surprising from another. These 2 observations/experiences are qualitatively different from each other. The basic nature of the phenomenon experienced changes with change of reference frame. Hence the essential qualitative truth is not preserved across mental reference frames.
This shows that physical reference frames and mental reference frames are fundamentally different. In this case, physical relativity is quantitative whereas mental relativity could be qualitative as well. Hence the very concept of a mind seems fundamentally altered from that of physicality (a physical body).