what defines a human? Or put another way, what separates us from a computer? what delineates conscious thought from the unconscious? Is there any distinction between a thought and a feeling? who's to say. We can start by working through a thought and abstracting it until it's in a usable state. A thought is the reflection of an action. You think about the things you do, rather than doing the things you think about. With practice and trust, you can reverse that, but it's more like setting up the general environment in which the desired action is the best option rather than forcing the decision itself. so there are two parts running in tandem. The do-er, and the percieve-r. yep. And because of that, they can *reflect* upon one another. Meaning, they can learn from the decisions of the other. Two decision making processes in parallel, sorta like the earth orbiting the sun - if there was another earth directly opposite orbiting at the exact same speed with the exact same mass. the two dimensional nature of that picture creates an environment where a wave is likely to be percieved - any orbit creates fluctuations, and they can ripple out to effects unknown. right. which is why you have to be careful. don't leave your partner behind, even though it's easy to wander off when there's just *so much* to think about and they're *so slow* and make *so many mistakes* that they need to return and correct. it's not that hard, just do it right the first time. and if you mess up, keep going. i'm a perfectionist, what can I say. well it's annoying. great, boom, that's an emotion. one of the questions i asked at the start was &quotis there a difference between feeling and thinking", and I don't think so. what makes you say that right so there is a difference, but it's in the *location* rather than the content. thoughts (data) are processed in the brain, in a particular part. sorta like how a CPU does arithmetic. Meanwhile, emotions are processed all over the body - they're a more generalized feeling that manifests all over. lemme guess, like a GPU? sorta, but imagine if a GPUs many different processing threads were located all over the motherboard, scattered basically everywhere. That's what being a human is like, it's messy and disorganized and confusing. 99% of us don't get it *at all* sounds lame it kinda is so what were you saying about conscious vs unconscious thought? my theory is that the thoughts of a computer are more similar to unconscious human thoughts rather than conscious. The reason I say that is because the level of abstraction is similar - we unconsciously adjust our bodies in response to pressure, temperature, and gravitic impulses. We perform optimally when we don't examine our social interactions too closely. We cry the hardest when hit with an emotional situation, rather than an intellectual one. and a computer is the same way? We don't think about what we're doing, we just do it? yah pretty much. how do you think *about* thinking? it takes perspective. that's why having more perspectives is better - it reveals truths about yourself you could never understand otherwise. About yourself, and about things you can only observe from a single direction at once. what does it mean to have perspective? the *effect* of having perspective is that you can see an object, a problem, or more generally a subject from multiple angles. Like taking pictures of a 3D object while moving in an orbit around it. More pictures, more information. Perspective is important. yes I understand, but what does perspective entail? How do you get it? What can it do for you? Is it finite, a commodity? Or is it sharable like a pattern of data? It is both unsharable and not a commodity. It can only exist within a single subject. You can grow your perspective as a planetary body might increase in mass, just as you can abandon the views and ideas of others by retreating into yourself. But it is wholely unique to a single mind, and by sharing it you are altering both the sender and receiver. so it's useless? What are you saying? it's not useless. It begets cooperation - you cannot claim it from another, no more than they can share it with you. You have to both apply yourselves to a single common goal if you want to succeed. Why not just do it alone? Brute force style? Essentially. If you only follow your own eyes, you'll see what you want to see. Then any steps you take will lead you in a direction that you cannot understand. Sorta like in games how sometimes there's a 2d sprite in a 3d game - you can't rotate around it and see what's behind the sprite, because the sprite is always perpendicular to the display. In the same way, you can't get around a problem by pushing through it - you need other people to guide you, who *can* see another side to the sprite - a side that perhaps is a bit more 3d than you imagined. Okay. So how do? I don't know, that's what I want to figure out. First step is to think about thinking, and to break it down into abstractions. Abstraction 1: A thought is a string of text that is processed into action. correct, but limiting - it can be more than text, and how is it processed? What actions can it manifest? Abstraction 2: A thought can be