eThoughts : The Mind and the Evolution of Evaluation

(For another look at the structure of the mind, go to: Chapter 26: It’s Not So Easy Feeling Good of Renewal.)

What’s the mind for?

Let’s start with the brain. Generally speaking (we’ll leave viruses and bacteria out of this rendition), it appears that entities that do not have to move, do not have a brain (there’s some good jokes about humans here all right, but let’s let it go for now). For instance, rooted beings, such as plants and trees, have neurological activity, but no centralized brain (perhaps they are just all one, unrecognizable, centralized brain). A further example is a little thing called a sea squirt that has a primitive brain until it finds a place to implant itself. Then it digests its brain, because, since it no longer moves, it presumably no longer needs its brain.

So, it would appear that the brain developed to handle movement. After all, a winged, legged, slithering, or finned one needs to move towards, away, or against other things in the environment. So, it needs to calculate position and identify objects.

Let’s say that the human mind at least, arose from the brain’s calculating feature–that might account for the propensity of the mind/brain to have a running dialogue (that internal dialogue is one of the most common human behaviors). After all, a calculating brain also needs an evaluation feature.

This evaluation feature would account for the mind saying “good job” or “bad job” relative to the brain’s calculations. This evaluation could well lead to the creation of the egoic function of the mind.

Furthermore, the evaluation feature would not likely be exclusive to the abilities of the individual, but would likely include the individual’s position relative to other individuals.

Now the alpha-leader situation has moved from pretty much just size and strength to include calculating and evaluative features. Then we have the birth of a different kind of hierarchy–one that includes much finer calculations than just assessing size, strength, and emotional communication. And it opens up the position of alpha leader to those possessing these much finer functions (and so David smote Goliath).

All right, there is likely more to this evolution than this formulation. But one gets the idea–the mind took over and has been directing the planning, evaluative, and experiential loops ever since. And, as Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice in Wonderland, “it’s a poor memory that only works backward.”

I think that we have not much explored the features of the mind that includes a space in all of these calculations and evaluations (that’s one reason why we sleep I suspect–to get a break from our ego). Without such a space, the mind cannot initiate one of its most important functions–the refresh mode, the place where we can clean the afflictions from our window upon creation (not a forgetting, but rather an unobstructed seeing). (Remember that the brain, unlike the mind, cannot just shut down for any length of time without the body dying–so the brain’s spaces are, by necessity, highly transitory.)

Whether we’ve not utilized the quiet mind because we’re intimidated by space more than we are by things or whether we just don’t recognize space because we’re so focused on where and what things are, doesn’t really matter.

I guess it’s a good thing the universe is infinitely patient, even while it throws us curve balls. Perhaps, like a cat that cannot get comfortable, our position in the scheme of things is its own kind of feedback. For beings possessing the ability to move, maybe we ought to consider another position, one that allows the mind to shut-up every once in a while. Without that ability, we’re more than likely to get so barnacled up by our constant doings that we’ll become rooted to the experience of things, and really become incompetent. That certainly seems like a tough way to be free.

Okay, that was an evaluation. I’ll shut-up now…