Deluded

I think it’s about time that we all realise something very important, there is no such thing as pure thought. How ever much the philosophers of old might have praised it to the heavens as the only true tool of finding out how the world around us works, it doesn’t really exist, as such.

Pure thought is an impossibility for us, as we exist right now. The reason is quite simple, though we might think things can actually be separated in our brain, they can’t. Our emotions, desires, passions and thoughts are all interwoven into a tapestry that is us. Though we can sometimes rely more on one region, than another, it is impossible to rely upon one area alone.

You can see this back in the problems brain scanning teams have in defining the boundaries between one zone and another. The reason, in my opinion, is that there aren’t any. Yes, some areas seem to be more dedicated to one thing than another, but they meld into each other, just like almost everywhere else in nature.

Our desire to zone and create borders is just a tool that we use to define the world around us. With it we can react quickly enough to our changing surroundings to survive, without it we would constantly be stuck in a state of indecision, until finally we get eaten by one of those four legged things with fur, claws and big teeth that is generally carnivorous but sometimes does eat plants if there is no other choice.

Since the world was created through an unintelligent process called evolution, nobody ever sat down to categorise different things that were slowly coming about till after we came about.

In the same way our brain has evolved, with different zones being hijacked by different processes and then being taken over by something else, without anything ever being taken away. The flying spaghetti monster lives in our head (read the God Delusion if you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about).

We have to get past this notion that there are clearly defined zones in our head. It’s a former tool that has turned into a modern crutch. As long as we keep thinking that there is such a thing as pure emotion, pure thought and pure instinct we do not truly understand ourselves, or each other. Once we’ve accepted that they’re different dimensions of the same shape, then we can adapt our sciences and our philosophies to take this into account and we get tools better suited to what we are, rather than what we want to be.