Thinking Is Feeling. Activeness Is an Illusion.

SELF-ORGANIZED INTELLIGENCE

 

One thought just came across my brain. Viewing through a global view, the universe is just a sequence of perturbations of energy through time. An ultimate cause, which we'd like to call it 'Big Bang', triggered all of the interactions between adjacent particles which lead to complicated energy perturbation of the whole universe. Ivestigating on the great perturbations, some of them can be expressed in a self-organizing way. In Chaos Theory, self-organizing is a meaning that even there are so many interactions between so many particles which looks so complicated that it seems we can never track or simplify them, there may be some common rules in a hierarchical way which may lead to incremental pattern construction (e.g. fractal). If we see the universe as a big one pattern generator, recursively dividing it into more microscopic area, we may arrive at one mid-level: interactions between living things.

 

RETHINKING ABOUT THINKING: AS A PASSIVE FEELING MECHANISM

 

On the aforementioned view of our universe, I can now start to say about what was just came across my brain. The topic is started from one simple but heavy question: 'what is think?'. How can thinking occur? In my view, thinking is just one of the higher-level phenomena induced by some lower-level physical interactions highly related to evolution. In other words, thinking is emerged from the everlasting history of animal evolution which can be accounted for in the mid-level self-organizing physical phenomenon. Simple, but this view may give rise to serious philosophical problems about our 'activeness'.

 

What do you feel if someone says to you, "All your thinking running in your head now is not from your free-will."? People would not agree with the suggestion and say like "No, I decide my own thinking.", or "I'm thinking about something, because I wanted to." Then, what if we change the question a little bit differently like this: "All your feeling sensed in your body now is not from your free-will."? This time people would pretty much more agree with this suggestion of feeling than the former suggestion about thinking. This is because feeling is widely considered as a passive mechanism caused by a set of sensors attached to our bodies, while thinking is considered as an active mechanism induced by our free-will.

 

Thinking is commonly regarded as what we 'do' which is an output came out from us. In contrast, feeling is commonly regarded as what we 'sense' about surrounding environmental information which is an input come into us. However, you could also agree with the idea that feeling is not confined to sensing surrounding information, but rather also sensing your inner status of your own bodies. In this regard, I'm going to give you a suggestion that thinking is actually a kind of feeling, and because feeling is a passive mechanism caused by some interactions between you and surrounding environment like in the aforementioned self-organizing way, 'thinking' as a kind of 'feeling' is also a passive mechanism occurring in your inner bodies, more specifically, in your inner brains, to sense the status of your running brain activities. 

 

WE ARE ALL FEELING MACHINES

 

No matter how complicated the mechanism of your inner brain is, as a self-organized physical form, low-level inner interactions and interactions between you and your surroundings made some high-level (or mid-level) phenomenon called information process to live well. And some of them can flow into our conscious sensing system called feeling, in the form of 'thinking'. In this respect, the 'activeness' of 'thinking' loses its power because we defined the 'thinking' here as a kind of 'feeling' which is not active but passive. Then what we prefer to call 'free-will' becomes an illusion in the low-level microscopic physical view, only applicable to the mid-level human-biased view. If thinking is a passive mechanism, actions also become a passive outcome, then all of the living thing's activities become a big complicated passive current recursively chained in a self-organazing way.

 

This view is actually not a new, and is typical perspective of Determinism. But seeing 'thinking' as a kind of 'feeling' is a novel perspective in here. With this view, this kind of explanation is possble. "Our bodies are actually autonomously generating the logical process taking into account combining of several information sources such as desires, activities of hormones, and inner and outer sensings. And when we 'feel' these processes, they finally become a 'thinking'." This view might redefine any living things which have a form of brain as 'the feeling machine'. (And I was astonished that how this kind of view is lined with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's perspective on emotion. Check out this link: We Are Not Thinking Machines. We Are Feeling Machines That Think.)

 

ABANDON THE CONCEPT OF FREE-WILL, AT LEAST IN AI RESEARCH

 

Most of all, I think this kind of view may be pretty impressive to AI researchers. Because, in theoretical study, even a single elimination of assumption may give researchers a substantial opportunity to make a big consensus regarding from many sub-researches, this view may help the researchers by eliminating the assumption of the concept of 'activeness' which has been ambiguous in AI research area. By thinking 'thinking' as a 'feeling', researchers can build a AI machine without bustling concept of 'active thinking', mainly focusing on the problems that really matters. If thinking is just a secondary phenomenon of what is really operating in our body and brain system, why not we dispose the concept of thinking to focus on more important problems to build the artificial mechanisms imitating those of intellectual beings?

 

CONCLUSION

 

In summary, I suggested that we have a passive mechanism named 'feeling' enabling us to sense our inner status as well as our surroundings, and some of the inner status is the current of information processing caused by several interactions. And I'm suggesting that they are actually the things what we call 'thinking'. Consequently, I am expecting that AI researches with this view can focus on the problems that matters and not being lured by some kinds of truly red herring in AI: 'activeness'.