Architecture and Morality

Apologies for the further OMD related title. It's all I can think of at the moment. Maybe it will change when I edit out the inevitable spelling mistakes. Everything should be pictures. How do animals think? Come to think of it, how do we think. I am sure that not all my thoughts contain words. Actually I am not sure that more than a few of my thoughts contain words. The problem is that every time I try to think of how I think, the whole system collapses back to some default state and you have to rebuild the whole train of ideas. Sometimes I will get to a point in a train of thought and wonder how I got there. If I think of something happening in the world and I cannot trace back to why I might have thought of it, it worries me that the final thought has arisen fully formed in my head without any cause and that it is premonition. I will then spend ages tracing back to the start of the sequence - the current transaction as it were - to make sure that there is a reason for the final earth shattering thing. I know that on the point of sleep, the brain can throw up random images - so disconnected from anything else that they can't be said to be bizarre or otherwise, they just "are".

I don't believe in premonition by the way. The world has 6 billion people in it and each has thousands of thoughts a day along with a number of dreams each consisting of many additional concepts and other quite concrete components. It would be bizarre if NONE of them actually happened to the person thinking them within a day of the actual thought. I begin to wonder if the supposedly learned people who think of these things (and you know who I am talking about don't you) actually spend any time carrying out a simple, rational analysis of what they are saying. (Hypnagogic dreams).

I used to have a theory about strangeness. If I was away from home for a short time (a week or two), when I returned there was an element of strangeness to everything and everyone (Have you ever decided that it is weird that your parents are your parents?) I surmised that it was down to some sort of Quantum effect along the lines of the people involved changing because they were not being observed by me; keeping an eye on someone keeps them the same whereas if they are left to their own devices, they change. Try reading the third Policeman which I have just thought has some of the elements of these ideas - The policemen are becoming one with their own bicycles. Anyway, some extreme versions of cosmology go further than saying that the reason that the universe is like it is, is because if it wasn't, life would not have arisen and be able to observe it. These extreme visions, seem to suggest that our actual observation of the Universe ( and this includes our observation of the Universe as it was just after it was created) defines the way the Universe is. If the universe is cyclic (Time IS only an illusion) then the Universe just exists. It has start and end points in time but time is just a dimension and although it is uni-directional for us, it is bi-directional for the Universe itself. Therefore we can see ALL of the Universe in time and space at from one point in time and space (within the limits of Relativity and Quantum theory of course. It is not too strange to think that by observing something we change it.

I suspect that one or two of my "Therefore" statements may not be as intellectually rigourous as they could be. The spirit is there.