Cognition – Integration – Reason

Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 8:00 am.
by pre.

Our lucid dream to improve cognition was aimed at improving reason. You dreamed that you saw and understood the information flow between the various spiral skills and the world outside your nervous system. The people in your family, the wider society, even the tools you use (such as pen and paper) to direct and improve that information flow.

Understanding that information flow is the very essence of our topic this lap: integration. The way one spiral skill feeds upon the others and then uses it’s power to enhance all the others. A whole family of brain functions, each supporting the others, sitting on each other’s lap in a circle without need of support outside that loop.

Your powers of reason are just one of the family of skills in the spiral, but they do much to support the others. You may see your reasoning powers as a system for finding hierarchy. Your way of chopping up the world in your mind into manageable bits. These flashes of neural input represent a line, which compared to other data indicates an edge, which compared to other data represents a solid 3D object, which compared with other data represents a book, which compared with past experience will likely have words you can read inside it.

Each of these steps represents an inference, an act of reasoning, the exercising of whatever neural functions eventually get exaggerated by the other skills to the cognitive systems we use the word “reason” for.

It’s obvious how these steps culminate in the raw data for your awareness, in order for there to be something for you to be aware of, there must be these internal reasoning processes in your brain.

Your memory is certainly a skill which helps your reasoning systems. In the example above it supplies much of the data required to produce this awareness, to provide access to past experience to enable you to search for patterns to reason with at all.

Could you learn to move your body without the skills to learn, to reason about the interaction you observe from experimenting with stretching and moving as a baby? How could you learn to walk as a child without these basic underlying skills?

These functions are responsible for you even realizing there are other beings like you out there in the world, let alone learning the social and bio-programming skills needed to get along with them, to help and be supported by them. Certainly no sensible ethics system could evolve without a brain able to reason about the world to determine the best course of action.

The Meditation

Next week we’ll present a guided walking meditation to improve your reasoning skills by imagining other worlds, words where something was different, and search for the implications of that change, try to find something which proves it can’t be so. In this way we hope to improve both your imaginative skills and the reasoning abilities which are so important to transcendence.