The History Of Your Thought
How embodied-thought affects who you are
Here we are two days after a historic election in the United States. So much has happened in the 240-year history of the country, yet little has changed. From a historical perspective, the new president-elect is but one new data point for us, one that many did not expect.
As I have worked on the Web Of Thought (WOT) project, I have become even more intensely aware of how important it is to understand thought. Specifically, How We Share Thought, and how thought becomes a part of us. How we become that thought, and the decisions we make because of it. As important as it is to learn from history, I think it’s more important to understand thought.
If you were educated in the U.S., as I was, you learned American history. There were a lot of facts (thought, therefore data). Think about how you learned it. It got to you through a long and complex route.
None of the writers of your textbooks were present at the founding of the country. Your teacher was not at the Ford Theater the night Lincoln was assassinated. You learned through materials that were created and recreated over the centuries. Those materials were designed to distribute thought.
As history was transmitted from one item to another, it was decoded and re-encoded. It is the coding that I would like to delve into. Encoding is a way of converting data into a code form. All our means of communication encode thought into some medium. Your history textbook had thought encoded onto the paper.
Books are good examples of encoding. It’s easy to see how thought is explicitly encoded onto the paper. Thought which has been encoded into the body is called embodied-thought. The term and concept are adapted from what George Lakoff calls the embodied mind.
The history documentaries the substitute teachers had you watch are another form of explicit encoding. But, unlike the books, you can’t directly understand the thought encoded on the documentary without a special decoder. That decoder, a film projector, VHS or DVD player, depending on your age, once again, decoded and re-encoded into the light you saw. Which is yet another form of decoding and encoding.
There’s another form of embodied-thought. The butt-numbing chair in your history class is an example of implicit encoding. Imagine if when you stepped foot in that history class you saw a chair for the first time. You didn’t even know the word ‘chair’. That is to say, all the concepts you have which describe a chair did not exist in you. You wouldn’t know what it was, much less what to do with it.
Luckily, before entering school, you had seen chairs. You learned the word ‘chair’, and how to use one. Over the years, you sat in hundreds of chairs of all shapes and sizes. Each one of those experiences were examples of thought being transmitted to you, and becoming embodied-thought in you. Right about now you’re probably thinking, ‘hold on a second, just by seeing a chair thought was being transmitted?’
That’s right, like the creators of the book and documentary, the designer of the chair transmitted thought into the materials that became the chair. The designer’s thought about the function of the chair became implicitly encoded — built right into it. You recognize it as a chair thanks to those functional aspects ‘thoughtfully’ designed into the chair.
As with history, most of the thought which is transmitted to us on a daily basis doesn’t come directly from another person. It actually, comes from the man-made objects (artifacts) around us. Objects that were previously embodied with thought by others. We rarely perceive the transmission or see it as thought. It feels like it’s just things, but it’s in those artifacts that much of the thought that makes up who we are comes from.
From the macrothought perspective, the chair, books, documentaries, you and I are entities in this endless network we call the universe. We are integrally linked in the Web Of Thought. We receive and transmit thoughts between artifacts and one another. How we and the artifacts embody thought is different, but in all cases, thought becomes embodied (encoded) in every artifact.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana
We too easily forget what we learned in our history classes. I suspect it’s because the context changes just enough for us not to make the connection with our present situations.
It’s one thing to know history and not learn from it, it’s another not to know the history of our thought. How did it get there? Where did it come from? It’s the thought in us that provides us with our self-view and world-view. If we’re unaware of the sources, then we are likely to be pawns in the game we call society.
I welcome your comments or contributions to this effort. If you know someone who you think would be interested in this project, please pass it along.
