Yes, about “straight answers”— what if at higher dimensional levels of mind there are no straight answers? so I’m putting on my blog and also will weave into my lectures: <\/p>\n
S.J. Perelman, in his book, Most of the Most of S.J. Perelman (Modern Library, NY, 2000), on page 64, wrote: \u201cYet figures, which I am making up as I go along, state that one out of every eight people owns and operates an aquarium, It hardly seems possible, does it? Yet that’s what the figures state.\u201d My comment: Gee, if \u201cthe figures\u201d \u201cstate\u201d it, it must be so. A skillful play of words offers an illusion of un-assailability, even though the author, tongue-in-cheek, baldly admits he\u2019s making the figures up! <\/p>\n
A friend sent me these bits of commentary: Here\u2019s another: Patrick Fermor, in an essay titled \u201cBetween the Woods and the Water,\u201d on pg 97 in the New York Review of Books in 2005, wrote: <\/p>\n
\u201cTheories can be evolved in a void, as it were, and the occasional fragments of hard fact\u2014 linguistic, geographical, ethnological, or religious\u2014need not fit into any jigsaw, indeed, they are unable to do so, because all the other pieces are missing; and within certain loose bounds they can be arranged in whatever pattern suits the speaker best. The interpretations are as different as the work of two palaeontologists, one of whom would reconstruct a dinosaur and the other a mastodon from the same handful of bone-fragments. ‘Let us assume’ turns in a few pages into ‘We may assume,’ which, in a few more, is ‘As we have shown’; and, after a few more pages yet, the shy initial hypothesis has hardened into a brazen established landmark, all the time with not an atom of new evidence being adduced. Advan-tageous points are coaxed into opulent bloom, awkward ones discreetly pruned into non-being. Obscurity reigns.\u201d <\/p>\n
In other words, authors may drift because they\u2019re muddy-minded or careless or, more ominously, using rhetoric to sell a political point. It\u2019s not meant to be obscure, but rather to offer a sense of \u201cwe have shown that….\u201d <\/p>\n
Meta-Meta-Cognition <\/p>\n
I\u2019m offering a lecture series next February\u2014if it is accepted\u2014on \u201cThinking about thinking about thinking\u201d\u2014aspects of what happens when we reflect on our more complex thoughts. There\u2019s also semi-thinking, though perhaps that\u2019s too kind. Daydreaming? Reverie? But on occasion a brilliant idea arises from this kind of un-directed musing. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s based on the concept of dimensionality<\/strong><\/em>\u2014a fully artificial mathematical construct aimed to help define stuff in the world\u2014the 3-D world of height as well as width and length. (Length is 1-D, Width is 2-D.) Einstein suggested that time should be viewed as a 4th dimension, and I am suggesting not only that mind\u2014which perceives all the rest\u2014should be a 5th dimension, but I go further: Just as patterns on paper draw out the potentials of line and add color as well, so should we recognize a dimension that thinks about thinking as yet another dimension\u2014a sixth dimension! <\/p>\n