Mindless rumblings on the mind!

Who understands the mind? The poets, the writers, or the artificial intelligence program? What do they understand? Well, I cannot compile their findings, but it is clear that nobody understands the mind in a complete way. We just know it in figments. A poet can talk about the intricacies behind pain or workings of love. A writer can describe its effects on society. An artificial intelligence program can work out an algorithm. But none of them can tell you what your mind will do, let’s say three days from now. They probably can’t even tell you how your mind comes up with what it comes up with. What a puzzle to be solved, the one who gets it first will be the next Zuckerberg, or probably his baap, in terms of fame and money!

If you are a loner like me, the things that will most intrigue you are your thoughts. When you are with people in social surroundings, you are not in touch with yourself. Your attention is pulled with all the things happening around. When you are with yourself, the mind is alone and all the mental attention is garnered by your thoughts. You don’t have an avenue to get lost into, except your own mind.

It is strange how people make opinions of other people. What people think of other people unless it comes out of a standard test, comes from their experience in their previous encounters of similar kind of people or what they would think of themselves had they been in the shoes of another person. Which means that if you meet a new person, then based on the characteristics you notice, you would either map that person to the closest similar person you have met and if that is not possible you would form an opinion of the person based on the opinion of yourself had you been that person.

Now the above paragraph is speculation, which I nowadays believe in. But imagine why we have so much drama in our lives. If all of us got the other person right, there would be no drama at all. There would be a perfect understanding. Just because what we think of the other person does not come from our true experience of the other person, but from our own experiences leaves so much room for error. And this is what gives writers their true raw material.

Now if we could know the mind, it looks like these kinds of issues would be solved. We would know exactly how the other person thinks and so we will at least make an informed choice. But I postulate that the mind is such a tricky beast that it could go recursive. That is if you know the present state of mind, it would go a state further and change itself. But this is again speculation.

Experiments in behavioural economics have shown that is generally good to have clear objective tests to judge a person than subjective tests. A popular book also talks about making simple checklists to perform your activities than make them complicated. The idea is to reduce subjectivity. Greater the subjectivity, greater the room for the mind to play its tricks.

     Recently quantum physics is being used to understand the decision process of the mind. Good progress has been made and the experiments yield some interesting results. It is clear that classical theories are incomplete and further advancements are needed. If decision making follows quantum laws, I would be very happy to know what to do when I am alone. You see, in that case, I may be able to tweak this beast to things I really wish to think about than to just wander around aimlessly and judge the past with new lenses!