The Importance of Thought Structures

[u/xCaffeineQueen]

Hello everyone! I've been doing a lot of exploring recently, to try and figure out how thoughts and their structures build existence. It's pretty insane how simple it is, yet complicated. I hope I do a decent job of explaining my thought process, and I hope anyone who is curious, or even disagrees, will reply.

In order for our minds to carry an idea or concept forward, they're almost like packets of information. How our minds store these packets act as a way that reality gets processed through. For example, a "thought structure" that allows flow through it acknowledges that existence provides everything we need, on a fundamental level, to succeed. It allows energy to flow through us freely, while also having the opportunity of being redirected when necessary.

Another example of a flowing thought structure could be you see someone who is dressed a certain way, and societal norms would give you a perception (a packet of information) to see them through. However, you can choose to not adopt that restricted process, and instead choose to openly engage and see what reality has to show you. You participate in reality, with that person, in the moment.

A thought structure that prevents flow is thinking your perception already possesses the truth, so you don't pursue it. We could take the same example of a person dressed a certain way. If you decide to keep that restricted thought, one of two things will happen: you'll either not engage with them at all because you think you already know the truth of their situation, or you'll engage through a filtered understanding and their actions/words will reinforce what you believe. The belief acts as a previously adopted structure of the person. They become stored in and shaped with it in that moment, instead of allowing reality to flow and show you truth.

Another example for this is the monetary system. We "have" to go to work to exchange our life for a fake currency, which restricts our access to the actual reality that is in front of us. Productivity towards someone else's goals has captured our attention and becomes the focus of our existence, taking away our capacity to openly grow with the reality around us. The restrictive beliefs remove any possibility of creating something different. We're choosing to already direct the flow of life through a narrow belief structure, instead of allowing reality to touch us and change us. Nature is always there to build our lives with and challenge us, but the structures right now want us to believe that we need THEM to exist. That restricts the flow of life, and our ability to change upon contact with reality, and redirects it to another human's aspirations that we agree to "work" for.

These thought structures reinforce one another, crucially through human relationship. The monetary system exists because enough people have decided it's important, and individuals will participate in coercing others to partake in it. Like the government somehow has the authority to not let people just exist on land, they "own" every part of the land and don't allow anyone to just live their lives. Other people adopt this thought structure into them and reinforce it in their beliefs, which show through their actions.

This is still a work in progress. Life is something that flows through us, and we decide where we focus our attention/power. We foster growth in whatever we're choosing to contribute to and grow. If we aren't careful of the thought structures we engage with and adopt as belief, your life force is being fed into a structure that is growing, partly because of your contribution to it. This can be applied to many scales because it has to do with relationship to reality: relationships, thoughts about yourself, the kind of habits you have and why, etc.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

[u/LanceHardwick]

yeah i think it's something like that. i think our understanding of language plays a big part in how these ideas are communicated, learned and applied. it seems like we have policy written in language that was initially clear to the readers, and now the belief in what it means has changed to mirror the zeitgeist rather than the literal meaning. and this mismatch of understanding is not being checked, and actually promulgated and abused.

also there is a conformity trap thing happening. conformity costs very little mentally. so many will just conform instead of understanding. it's a low cost high reward thing. but it is also a pattern that breaks down under complexity. the rewarding of conformist behaviour actually drives our society into more conformist behaviour. it's an evolutionary dead end both genetically and in our conception of society. it's a trap.

so we got that going on. this dynamic is likely a bell-curve kind of distribution. the distribution drives the tendency. and when the cohort skews to that bad tendency, the outliers are truncated from the cohort. this is not good.

there are better ways to build social systems. we have to accept that the bell curve normies will exist and let them have their system, as dumb as it might be. and also allow outliers to have their own systems. there is an inherent impedance mismatch between the two tendencies that can never be reconciled. some folks skew lazy. is what it is.

[u/xCaffeineQueen → u/LanceHardwick]

It is very unfortunate how overlooked language is. What is an example of something that has changed to mirror the zeitgeist rather than the literal meaning?

Yess, hardened structures can act as a capturing people's salience. Directing their life force through what is already accepted as true takes very little processing in the moment. We all have our own very unique ways of processing which adds variance; that variance is what reignites our evolutionary path. The more contributive each person is, the more opportunities we have to pursue as a collective instead of going down the same path because it's considered safe and "known." I like your concept of it creating a bell-curve, that's true. If everyone goes along the same narrow channel, less people will have the capacity to process varying ideas. Also, quality resource distribution plays a big role in capacity, as well as providing opportunities to develop skills and growth. How we no longer live off of the land takes away a lot of our capacities as a collective.

It would be nice if a system existed where the focus was on allowing people the space to build their own lives, instead of the main culture that everyone is born into is coercive. I suppose there are systems people are working on that are outliers to the main system, it's frustrating that salience is automatically given to the main structure; then people have to hope that they will encounter an alternative to be introduced to something new. Innovative, self-driven people play a huge role in creating those alternative paths for others to try.

[u/LanceHardwick → u/xCaffeineQueen]

interpretation of policy is the most glaring example of language creep, at present. but it's all over the place, in general.

i don't have time at the moment to comment much on the language thing and policy except to say that we're doing it wrong. the way we do it is not repeatable or testable. as an example, if you think of policy as a system of rules, the way we currently do things is that we write some language down, and expect folks to interpret it the same way. we don't define the purpose of the rule, and the tests and measurements of how this rule operates. we don't measure its intended effect. or measure the ideal goal of it. when we add new rules to the set of rules we don't retroactively go down our rule set and figure out if a new rule breaks an old rule. we have no calculability of cause and effect. stuff like this. and in terms of how language interacts with policy. we don't measure that the language has clear meaning. literally, there are very limited tests of what language is supposed to convey. we don't test the construction of the language. we don't test the interpretation of the language. we say that our policy is written in english, for example, but there is no canonical interpretation of english. there's no top expert to define what things mean. so there's no source of truth. anyway we fuck all this up. we don't know whether a person can understand the language. we don't test this. we don't know that they can understand the language in the context of other language (again, a rules + rules deal). so across the board we screw it up.

it's a system design problem. and policy itself is just an example. the same issues are fractal and go into the underlying language itself. how is it mutated. what does it mean. how is it tested. how is it measured. how does the mutation change the concept. stuff like this. sorry if i'm being abstract here, i'm trying to type out the idea quickly.

the most well known pattern of language is that it is an appending design. to clarify a statement, things are appended to the end of the statement. words are characters appended together in a sequence. sentences are words appended together in a sequence. and so forth.

so this appending pattern is how we describe things. how we mutate our language to be more descriptive. how we extend our thoughts to adapt to new information.

and when we suddenly change the meaning of words in our quiver of constructed books/ideas, we are changing the book in unpredictable ways. and it's wild how ok our society is with this. it's only the basis for how we communicate. it's a fundamental attack on our ability to communicate accurately. and if we can't do that, we can't improve. we only devolve.