Putting a pseudo- in front of words: Oft confused with quasi-, but with more of a negative connotation anyway. As the world becomes more complex, whether in actuality or merely through my constantly-revising perception of it, it becomes necessary to define concepts which deviate from the norm, yet remain related in some way. One convenient way is to attach prefixes, among which pseudo- is one of the most useful, in spite of, or perhaps precisely because of, its ambiguity. Is verisimilitude the best criterion for deciding between pseudo- and quasi-? The two are very similar.
Coming up with abbreviations that have already entered common use, e.g. HFS (holy fucking shit) and FTS (fuck this shit): In the case of the latter, it could mean fuck that shit as well. The version you choose is nontrivial; it reveals profound things about your outlook in life, since fucking this shit means you consider the shit to be in your immediate vicinity, and to constitute your milieu or domain, perhaps inescapably so, whereas fucking that shit shows actual indifference and a sense of non-identification/responsibility and allows you to actually chuck it to one side. In such subtle ways our word choices hint at the person inside. Ah well, FTS.
Not thinking in complete sentences: I think my thoughts in perfectly grammatical sentences. Does this mental conditioning (possibly imposed by education) actually slow me down though? Semantic nodes in my mind for a full sentence are activated before I even think that thought. Semantic nodes of course link to phonological nodes, which sound out the words in my mind (and also more weakly to orthographic nodes). Thus the process of sounding out the full sentence is redundant as the meaning has already been thought by the mind (see also, experiments which show consciousness comes after the thought, hence suggesting free will is an illusion). Would thinking using only semantic nodes speed up my thought? That (subverbal thought) is after all presumably how people used to think before languages were developed (think pre-Proto-Nostratic [or Atlantean, if you are so inclined]). (This is not an argument against language; language probably unlocks and sculpts these nodes.)
Thinking in complete sentences allows me to hear how the sentence sounds, which is presumably useful in speaking and writing (because readers do actually sound out what they read via activation of these phonological nodes). However, the subconscious, being as powerful as it is, could possibly be trained to aesthetically filter sentences without having to actually think out the full sentences, i.e. a trained mind could think nice-sounding sentences without having to worry about it.
There are many other (hypothesised) merits to thinking in full sentences. The sound of the sentence probably reinforces the semantic nodes via feedback (or forward) from phonological nodes, so the meaning is reinforced in the mind. It is easier to remember these thoughts as they can be encoded and recalled by sound. It probably facilitates thinking through listened sentences and breaking them into their elements. The inner soliloquy probably substitutes for actual conversation by activating the reward centres in the brain. It probably trains the brain to listen during actual conversation as well. Lastly, it helps the mind focus by giving the consciousness something to attend to.
Not sounding out thoughts is temporally and calorically efficient (for the latter presumably so, or at least in the long run when inhibitory signals are no longer needed to suppress phonation). However, the adverse effects of such a drastic change in cognition are uncertain. Anyhow, it is probably useful to develop an alternate mode of cognition. Perhaps I will self-experiment in the future.
Weltanschauung shuffling: My worldview is way too protean, yet I still feel like the core of my person has not changed since ten years ago, merely matured. It's like a sculpture being chiselled from a piece of marble, or a rock being weathered by time. Or perhaps in reverse – a collage to which more and more has been added, with the older parts yellowing already (which segues into the classic mock(pseudo)-philosophical question: if you add new parts to a collage, then excise the old parts, is it still the same collage?).
Although I've not always been able to express my worldviews at different stages in my life, I can now define them retrospectively, from my childhood belief in possibilities and intelligence and my teenage beliefs in efficiency and rationality to my more recent beliefs in human interactions and beauty. Along the way, idées fixes have been challenged, abandoned, gained and reinforced. If possible I have become both more pragmatic and more idealistic.
Whatever the case, my essence is defined by my desires, which may not be that different from those of other humans, and my intelligence(s). How I act upon that depends on my beliefs, which are shaped by quasi(pseudo)-Bayesian learning from my experiences. The past year has provided lots of experiences, especially, somewhat surprisingly, the past few months (possibly the reading and reflecting). Thus I am much wiser this year than last, and by extrapolation will be even more so next year. Hence, I should not bother writing things down, since I will have moved on by then, and these thoughts will merely seem foolish to FutureMe. Or perhaps it is because I am not an expert in thinking and writing yet, having not racked up my 10,000 hours. Then again, deliberate practice has been shown to improve the performance of even very experienced experts. So, check out this space again for my Weltanschauung after I clock 10,000 hours of viewing the world.
brilliant!
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