Shifting Your Conceptions

One of these days, when you have a brilliant thought while doing the dishes, you'll be able to prompt your home computer vocally and record the thought for posterity. Or as soon as you dry off your hands and make yourself a cup of tea, you may choose to sit down on your couch and really explore the idea thoroughly. It's hard to imagine this technology not making its way into our lives at some point. With voice activation and recognition technology, data storage, search engines like Google, and a myriad of other lifestyle related technologies already developed, it's just a matter of time before we're speaking to our computers and our computers are speaking back. It'll be just like Star Trek the Next Generation, except for the whole flying through outer space thing. Oh, and somehow I doubt we'll abandon our Levis for futuristic onesies.

What if you asked, "Computer, what is showing at the Shakespeare Festival tonight?" and the computer immediately answered back? What if, while riding my bike, I could record a thought like, "If it weren't for men being influenced and changed by women-by women's feminine instincts-humanity would have never risen above its original barbaric state"? What if someone told you the title of a book they just read and you simply recorded it on the spot?

If these things were possible, essentially what you'd have is an advanced, turbo-charged mind. Furthermore, your mind would be less constrained by your body and more interwoven with the collective mind of humanity. This concept, the collective mind, has become more and more useful and appropriate over the past few centuries as books, libraries, the phone, high-speed travel, and the internet have freed our will and our minds of so many natural constraints.

There is no doubt that we live very unnatural lives thanks to technology. With that said, we have yet to know, appreciate, and, most importantly, accept, what it is about us that is in fact natural. We are still largely defined and controlled by our innate programming. Collectively, our genes have been geared towards one thing-keeping generation upon generation of our ancestors alive in the face of the most immediate threats, the storms and tides of life, as well as all gradual global adjustments.

We are the way we are because it is the only way we could be. If our ancestors had been any other way they would have joined the countless life forms which returned to the soil before successfully reproducing. Life on this planet is a billion different stories of how just a few variations of one replicating organism ducked and weaved their way past threat after threat until a billion years later we see them both as they are and as our minds interpret them to be.

We conceptualize everything, even ourselves. Creatures are cute, beautiful, majestic, and scary because conceptualizing them as such helps us in some way. Our advanced mind-our genes- have used this advanced method of conceptualization to secure our survival; and in the process, grant us personality.

There's more to personality than the aggregate responses to concepts which we hold. How we think of something we experience directly affects how we feel towards that thing, but each of our feelings do not travel through the same exact filtering process on their way towards action. We all use knowledge and reason differently and to different degrees. Why? Because we have different capacities in this regard as well as different temperaments. Temperaments are likely that part of our personality which develop soon before and after our births. To a large extent, our life's happiness is likely predetermined in those early phases of development.

Still, I am excited about the power of conceptualization. Being able to change permanently or manipulate momentarily how we think of things both big and small is an act that holds much promise for our present and future happiness. Do you remember how things seemed so marvelous when you were a child? Yes, much of your excitement came from first experiences and mystery. But not being able to undo all that has been done is no excuse for not feeling those feelings still. There are always more things waiting to be experienced than those things which have already been experienced. And there will always be more mystery than there is knowledge.

More to my point, vibrant conceptualization which children are known for should not be something exclusive to them. It may not be natural for adults to willfully conceptualize themselves and all that is in their lives in any other way than what is expected of an adult, but this does not mean it would not be good to do so.