Building the Moral Community by Chambers David W.;

Author:Chambers, David W.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Point of View: Point-Blank Thinking

Hunting for ideas should be done at very close range.

Having thoughts is not exactly like having credit card debt or potted plants on the path leading to one’s front porch. When we die, something has to be done about our potted plants, but not about our thoughts. It is almost as though our thoughts are nothing more than patterns in a living being.

It is commonly “thought” that folks have many thoughts. But I do not see how that could possibly be true. We only have one: the one currently “in our head.” When we are finished with that one, we get a new one. Every new thought pushes the previous one aside.[16]

But we certainly have memories of thoughts—potentially uncountable multitudes of them. It turns out that is also a bit problematic because our memories are only potential and many of them are hopelessly unrecoverable. When we were four years and 58 days old we had a little journey from our bedroom to the bathroom. Last Thursday we plotted a strategy for escaping a tiresome conversation with somebody who was using up our time. We may be able to get the recollection of these things back from their neurological hiding places, but it is a safe guess that they are 100 percent useless baggage. I am surprised Franz Kafka did not write a story about a traveling salesman condemned to remember the number of every hotel room he stayed in or the number of every phone call he had made. What we call forgetting is our friend. But it is not really making memories disappear that is so valuable; it is not having to pay attention to them right now that makes us effective. PTSD and neurosis and psychosis are one-time necessary neural patterns that no longer work but must be endlessly repeated without being reshaped to current needs.

A memory we cannot recover has no more existence than an event that has not yet occurred. The tip of the tongue phenomenon is not a memory at all—it is a present thought about an unavailable memory. My capacity to respond here and now is only my total set of thoughts, memories, emotions, and opportunities here and now. A memory only exists now. When I think a little bit, I create new memories by rearranging the neurons in my brain. When I come back to reconsider that situation, I have the potential for incorporating that stored residue of my previous work into my new understanding. Daniel Dennett (1991) calls this the “working draft” theory of the brain.

In order to give this concept a handle so it can be carried around more easily, I will call it “point-blank thinking.” The term is John Dewey’s (1929), used in his 1925 Paul Carus Lectures. One brain pattern at a time, different brain patterns replacing each other in succession, perhaps incorporating bits of previous brain patterns. Think of thinking as folding a piece of paper, as in origami: same paper, different objects. All of this is done hands-on and at very close range.

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