default thinking

I do think my mind is my central nervous system, yes. And I also think that there's nothing of my conscious being that falls outside of what I have just referred to as mind.

But these are default positions. I hold them only because they are the appropriate starting point and I have neither evidence nor argument by which to advance from square one.

The usual complaint is that I am somehow low-rating mind by treating it, by default, as material. I'm sure this has no merit: wherever did anyone find the limit of material capacity? No such limit is known. I start with the material mind in part because material is, so far as I know, limitless.

Pendant implications hang thick, but I peruse them lightly - it really is only a default view. The first is that animals may well think and feel in the same manner as do we, but with only the tiniest fraction of human mental complexity and extent. That said, the possibility that an approximation might exist - or nearly exist - between a prodigiously thoughtful simian and a very feeble minded person, would not shock me if demonstrated.

And if it were I would be able to take further a guess of mine: that emotion, soul and higher-order aspects of human consciousness are actually vast sheets of ordinary thought folded into the small packets that we experience, in time and situation, as something quite other than thought, logic or recognition. That a feeling of lost love, for example, is really a compact scroll, or, better, folded sheet of thoughts written in tight columns on both sides. A whole book of narrative felt in less than a sentence, expressible in a single sigh. Like having the whole scriptures etched onto a grain of rice, only immediately and simultaneously available to perception. That emotions are, as it were, thoughts, but printed tightly and overlapping into suggestive shape, as if a densely folded origami made from microfiche.