I think therefore I get very confused

Do you ever think about thought and what it is and why it's bothering you all the time. Some of my other posts will reveal that I think about it, sometimes way too much. But then it is fascinating. Not just fascinating but kinda the very purpose of being human beings altogether. Unless you think that there are other living beings that also think.

And thought needs to be separated from being. We exist as a body which is not greatly different from other bodies in nature, even when you look at the body genetically there is a large amount of DNA that is common across species but DNA tells us nothing about thought. At least I don't think it does, maybe one day we will find out that the ability to think is contained as code within DNA. Who knows, then maybe we will be able to understand that other sentient beings also have the power of thought, of being self aware and who knows, after that, maybe we might find some surprising way of communicating with them on a whole new level.

But then, that is all thought.

If you come to understand that the ability to think and contemplate ones existence and that this is different from the human body which is simply a vehicle with which to transport the thinking bit around then you can start wandering all sorts of other paths. There is also that differentiation between thinking about something and an automated action/reaction. Such as catching a ball. We don't think about it, it is a mechanical process that takes information and processes it. Don't we? If we throw the ball and think about where we want t to go and why then I think those are two different processes. There is the automated process of throwing the ball to a given point and the thought process surrounding it which has no connection with the automated process. But expanding on the though.

For instance it would be a simple logical step to imagine that if the human body is simply an autonomous biological transport system that carries the mind, for want of a better word although there are better words it is just I am not using them, then why would it not be possible to copy that thought generator and its collective memory and write them on a suitable medium.

It might also lead you to conclude that when the part of the body that contains this thinking system, say a part of the brain, starts to fail and that thinking system fails, even if some portions of the memory system that works with it continues to work to some degree, then the person within the body has already died! Or maybe it is when the both the ability to think and also retain and recall memory has failed then the person is dead even though the vehicle that carries these elements continues to work without them.

This would differ from the aspects of the brain that regulate breathing and heart function and senses. They continue to work, possibly, but the sole purpose of their function is no longer there and so, to all intents and purposes the bio-mechanical aspect might as well switch off as its purpose has passed. Even though the container still has aspects that appear to indicate the person is still contained inside such as looking the same, continuing to breath, process food, give indications that the senses all still function. The person is gone and the continuation of the biological container is pointless and yet very few people are willing, without considerable persuasion to allow life support to be switched off and it is illegal, for good reason to bring about the shutdown of a biological container on the basis that we do not fully understand what constitutes a person and therefore what constitutes death.

If death is the end of the thought process and people accepted that and the law accepted that and it was then permissible to turn off the container, then that might be the right thing to do. Unfortunately, any discussion on the subject tends to quickly be shut down when words like euthanasia and murder start getting hurled at those that dare put into words the thoughts that many have.

When you think about how far our understanding has come on so many subjects in the past hundred years then the next hundred should be utterly fascinating and pretty much everything that any science fiction write can come up with might well be seen as prescient. Unfortunately I will not be around to see this but any child born recently should see some amazing things and will no doubt accept them with a shrug pretty much we do the ability to fly, or drive, or understand DNA or see black holes etc.

Then again I also fear that history has an awful lot to tell us about the future. If you think about the ancient civilisations such as Mayan, Aztec, Indus, Incan, Egyptian etc etc then you can understand that there is the possibility that instead of taking further huge leaps forward in the next hundred years it could take a pause or even step back.

It could even be that in several hundred years or a millennia or two, there will be a culture of human beings that uncover ancient cities of London or Paris as they are today and have no understanding of what they were or how they cam about or what happened to them, and then some books will be written by some very clever, for their day, people who will extrapolate and contemplate and speculate. And they might well have less information than we do about the Mayan civilisation as everything we use today as a mechanism to record information will not exist in their period and books will have long disintegrated without humans to care for them.

For all we know, the ancient civilisations were even more intelligent than we understand its just we cannot see and understand how clever they were. If you get my train of thought. If you don't then there are not just loads of books on the subject but a whole life time of films that have covered each and every one of these plot lines.