Two Thoughts On Thinking

The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.
—    Dr. C. D. Broad
…Each one of us is potentially Mind at large.  But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.  To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.  What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.  To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages.  Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born — the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experiences, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
—    Aldous Huxley
From his book:  “The Doors of Perception“
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On This Day In:
2014	From The Top, Please…
2013	You Are The Stars
2012	Just One??
2011	Anything But

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