Modes of Thought

I want to try writing in a different way.

I sometimes feel limited and trapped, a 10 foot person in a 6 foot body. There's an outward pressure on my skin, threatening to explode and throw everything out. This body is a Matroshka doll, a second self inside the first self and all the way down. If we strip away everything that makes me me, all that would happen is that we would find a Me again.

It's an outcropping of intense restlessness, but forming an energy that can't be physically used. I'm trying to channel it mentally now and see if I can let some of it out, push that illusory self into bits of words and see myself from another place of myself.

Often I'm struck by a surreality about myself. I interact with the world in strange ways. I mean, I walk around campus handing out homemade candy. Why? Because. The thing is I cannot imagine anybody else doing this. If somebody walked up to me and said "here, have a caramel", I would honestly not know what to do. Which is odd, because that person is an aspect of me. I am not capable of seeing myself when that self is in another.

And that extends the other way, too. I cannot see another person seeing me. I can self-reflect but not throw that reflection into a mirror. Maybe it's another consequence of a malfunctioning brain. An unpleasant consequence is it is very hard to anticipate how people will react to me. So I just go with the flow.

This limitation of my self-awareness fascinates me. I cannot completely understand myself. I need someone else to tell me who I am. I once asked people what I could do better, and some of the answers were things I could not anticipate. In my head I see it as a hall of mirrors, seeing myself reflected in a thousand different ways and a thousand different colors. Did you know that if you juggle that kind of place, you can see what it looks like from behind you?

I've tried to think like other people. Not just "ask myself how would XYZ think", but try to think those same thoughts as if they were my own. It's hard. It's really damn hard. And even with people I am very close to, I can barely do it. Even then, it will be completely wrong. I am lightning in the shape of a human, casting the world in blue. Can I say that this is how I think, but everybody else is a Chinese Box?

Hell no.

Our individuality cuts us off from entire modes of thoughts, our minds collapse knowledge into three dimensions. Even when we try to act with perfect rationality we still are limited by our ignorance. And worse, we are limited by the unknown irrationalities, the things we don't know we don't know. Then again, maybe rationality itself is just another way of dealing with the world, one that easily gets us what we want. Or what we think we want. But not the only valid way. I've occasionally wondered if you could use irrationality as a epistemic superweapon. Rationality is so slow.

This is yet another reason why Rand is an idiot. We cannot be Objectivist unless we are also completely objective, and objectivity is impossible. You cannot exist without a mode of thought. It may constrain you, but it also gives you the power to act and think. I guess it's less collapsing potential and more as creating a tiny bubble in potential.

Even so, it's still a bubble, and bubbles have walls. We are used to thinking in certain ways and may not see clear ideas from other ways. The easiest way to think outside of the box is to think in another box. This is why it helps to know multiple academic fields. If you can move between the each field's mode, you can more easily solve individual problems in those fields.

More importantly, it means that we're always dependent on others for their own modes. Two mathematicians may be able to see the world mathematically, but they will see it in slightly different ways. And they will see in radically different ways. Of course this is tautological, only an idiot would say that teamwork was useless. Two people can come up with ideas that just one person would not. I wonder if it's in part because their sets of modes combine to produce entirely new modes of thought.

I've always wondered where the restlessness comes from, the restlessness that makes me want to explode. I think it might in part be from limitations in how I can think. I am human, so I am limited. If I want to make the restlessness bearable, I have to interact more with others, and interact in ways that would expand my own self. I also need to explore other ways of thinking.

And there are the unknown unknowns, always out there, affecting us in ways we can't comprehend. Maybe that's what we should care about. That's the scariest thing of all. It's not that we don't know what's most important. It's that we haven't yet considered it as a thing we could know.


The restlessness is back. Or maybe it never left. I feel like I'm on the verge of catching fire, burning without heat, pain, or harm. There are ways of thinking out there that not only would benefit me, but would completely change me. What are they? Where are they?