He knows what you're thinking...
This ought to be answerable from personal experience, from basic and innate human knowledge - especially by reference to what we know of thinking from young childhood; and before 'socety had imposed its Models upon us, before society wrongly-described what are fundamental categories in terms of superfical, current, narrow, evanescent hypotheses...
To a child, thoughts are real - they are readable by some other people, and regardless of of location. As a child, my thinking might be being-shared with my parents, for example, while I was having those thoughts - even when my parents were out of sight and earshot.
The sharing of thinking was therefore direct, instant, with no detectable link - thinking was not a communication, but two (or more) minds thinking the same thoughts at the same time.
If I know something, everybody else knows it too - I cannot keep knowledge to myself. If I knew where something was hidden, so did other people - and they could find it; even if I had not told them.
Many things can think, maybe everything can think. You need to be careful what you think about things, because they will know of it, and might respond with hostility. Likewise if you are attracted to something or somebody - that new girl at school - she will know, everybody will know, you like them; as soon as you like them. If you have a dream about her, she will know that too.
Thinking of somebody or some-entity would tend to draw the attention of that being. If I awoke in the night and thought of the owl, the owl would know this, and start hooting. As I was aware of him, he was aware of me.
The owl knew that I heard his hooting, and directed it at me. He knew I was scared by the sound, and might come up to the window to get closer, and hoot louder... To escape, I had to stop thinking about the owl, block-out the hooting, think of something else.
Thoughts were like wishes, therefore, To fear the death of a person, or the occurrence of an event, was to invite that to happen. This is what happens in dreams - after all.
That is what thinking is, what thinking does: Thinking is causal.
These properties of thinking are spontaneously known.
If we find thinking hard to explain - then that is a limitation of our explanatory models.
4 comments:
Would you consider the development of "theory of mimd" in children to be the transition period between the cosmic "thinking ocean" of Heaven to individuated conditions on Earth?
ie. The immortal soul takes the first few years in life to learn how to be a thinking individual. That's an extraordinary idea!
@E - (Speaking as someone who used to publish in the field) Theory of mind is a narrowly defined scientific theory which implicity excludes my perspective - but it has something to do with the point I'm making. It is a part of the development of each child that he becomes aware (conscious) that he is Not passively immersed in a sea of thoughts - he separates from it; becomes is a separate and active agent. When that separation is complete we have the nadir of adolescence - or modernity in culture: feeling our freedom of thinking, but feeling cut-off from all minds - isolated, trivial, despairing. The aim is to move on, and recognise that we are active agents, true; but nonetheless that there is a *also* a universal world of thoughts. We were correct about The World as children - but our relationship to that world changes.
Further to participation mystique as a variation on thought connection to visible/collective objects/groups, what greater evidence is there of this than prayer? The majority of the human race engages in some type of thought dialogue with a personal deity that is invisible. The Prayer initiator trusts intuitively (not through science) that its thought transmission, silent or audible, is being received by the Prayer Receiver. In short, the human experiences a connection to an Invisible Object, ... God.
Thus the God, the Owl, knows the Prayer Givers thoughts.
I trust that the Prayer Receiver will not use any said confidential prayer information unlawfully and has security systems in place to ensure the users thoughts are not hacked for ransomware attacks, etc.
@wtq - Very droll comment.
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