Incarceration versus Liberty of the Mind:
A Case For A Changing of Mind / Change the Way “YOU” Look and Think About Things and The Things YOU Think and See Will Change. - compiled & compilated by GCM 02/01/05
Few of us give much attention to the manner in which we possess and process thoughts. Or even the transition of how we perceive in order to conceive ideas and ideologies. The miniscule role we as individuals play to our own degree of perception are quite frightening. In our journey toward enlightenment, awareness of self and the composition of self rings fundamental.
The acknowledgement of how little we know of the pre-packaged development of our own mind would seem the beginning of our understanding. The Biblical quotation, “the absence of knowledge is the beginning of understanding.”
Socrates claimed to have been told by an oracle that he was the wisest person in all of Athens. Incredulously, he decided to begin wandering the streets and questioning the people who were reputed to be the wisest people in Athens, just to prove the oracle wrong. What he found out was that all of the most respected people thought that they had knowledge of things that they were really ignorant of and indeed of all the people he met he was the wisest, simply because he acknowledged his ignorance.
The primary purpose of this research into components that influence our thoughts, ideas, relationships, aspirations, mores, and values, should alarm each of us to the importance of Awareness of Self as an exercise into our methodology of idea formation and its subsequent image of that idea.
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What is an ism?
The English suffix -ism was first used to form a noun of action from a verb, as in baptism, from baptein, a Greek word meaning "to dip". Its usage was later extended to signify systems of belief.
The first recorded usage of the suffix ism as a separate word in its own right was in 1680. By the nineteenth century it was being used by Thomas Carlyle to signify a pre-packaged ideology. It was later used in this sense by such writers as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw.
In the present day, it appears in the title of a standard survey of political thought, Today's ISMS by William Ebenstein, first published in the 1950s, and now in its 11th edition.
The -ism suffix can be used to express the following concepts:
Thought or thinking is a mental process which allows beings to model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans, ends and desires. Concepts akin to thought are sentience, consciousness, idea and imagination.
Thinking involves manipulation of information, as when we form concepts, engage in problem solving, reason and make decisions. Thinking is a higher cognitive function and the analysis of thinking processes is part of cognitive psychology.
In the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, thinking means you tend to put a higher priority on impersonal factors than personal factors.
IDEA
An idea (Greek: ιδέα) is the result of thinking. (Thought, Concept)
Idea is the term used in both popular and philosophical terminology with the general sense of "mental picture" or "understanding".
Today many people believe that ideas are a new sort of intellectual property like a copyright or patent. There are some who believe that there is a realm in which ideas exist and that we only discover these ideas in much the same way that we discover the Wikiwiki world.
To "have no idea how a thing happened" is to be without a mental picture of an occurrence. In this general sense it is synonymous with the idea of concept in popular usage
CONCEPT
A concept is an abstract, universal psychical entity that serves to designate a category or class of entities, events or relations.
A concept is the element of a proposition rather in the way that a word is the element of a sentence. Concepts are abstract in that they omit the differences of the things in their extension, treating them as if they were identical. Concepts are universal in that they apply equally to every thing in their extension.
Concepts are bearers of meaning as opposed to agents of meaning. A single concept can be expressed by any number of languages. The concept 'dog' can be expressed as 'Hund' in German, 'chien' in French, 'perro' in Spanish. The fact that concepts are in some sense language independent makes translation possible; words in various languages "mean the same" because they express one and the same concept.
The above usage of the word is quite modern, however. The definition below, (from Random House Unabridged Dictionary) is how the word was used up until not too many years ago:
1. a general notion or idea; conception. 2. an idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct. 3. a directly conceived or intuited object of thought.
IDEOLOGY
An ideology is a collection of ideas. The word ideology was coined by Count Destutt de Tracy in the late 18th century to define a "science of ideas." An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare Weltanschauung), as in common sense (see Ideology in everyday society) and several philosophical tendencies (see Political ideologies), or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society (the Marxist definition of ideology - see Ideology as an instrument of social reproduction).
Every society has an ideology that forms the basis of the "public opinion" or common sense, a basis that usually remains invisible to most people within the society. This dominant ideology appears as "neutral", while all others that differ from the norm are often seen as radical, no matter what the actual vision may be. The philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about this concept of apparent ideological neutrality.
Organizations that strive for power influence the ideology of a society to become what they want it to be. Political organizations (governments included) and other groups (e.g. lobbyists) try to influence people by broadcasting their opinions, which is the reason why so often many people in a society seem to "think alike".
When most people in a society think alike about certain matters, or even forget that there are alternatives to the current state of affairs, we arrive at the concept of Hegemony, about which the philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. The much smaller scale concept of groupthink also owes something to his work.
Modern linguists study the mechanism of conceptual metaphor, by which this 'thinking alike' is thought to be transmitted.
Karl Marx proposed a base/superstructure model of society. The base refers to the means of production of society. The superstructure is formed on top of the base, and comprises that society's ideology, as well as its legal system, political system, and religions. Marx proposed that the base determines the superstructure. It is the ruling class that controls the society's means of production - and thus the superstructure of society, including its ideology, will be determined according to what is in the ruling class' best interests. On the other hand, critics of the Marxist approach feel that it attributes too much importance to economic factors in influencing society.
The ideologies of the dominant class of a society are proposed to all members of that society in order to make the ruling class' interests appear to be the interests of all, and thereby achieve hegemony. To reach this goal, ideology makes use of a special type of discourse: the lacunar discourse, as discussed by Althusser. A number of propositions, which are never untrue, suggest a number of other propositions, which are. In this way, the essence of the lacunar discourse is what is not told (but is suggested).
For example, the statement 'All are equal before the law', which is a theory behind current legal systems, suggests that all people may be of equal worth or have equal 'opportunities'. This is not true, because the concept of private property over the means of production results in some people being able to own more (much more) than others, and their property brings power and influence (the rich can afford better lawyers, among other things, and this puts in question the principle of equality before the law).
The dominant forms of ideology in capitalism are (in chronological order):
and they correspond to the stages of development of capitalism:
IDEA
In philosophy, the term “idea” is common to all languages and periods, but there is scarcely any term which has been used with so many different shades of meaning.
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It should be observed that an idea, in the narrower and generally accepted sense of a mental reproduction, is frequently composite. That is, as in the example given above of the idea of chair, a great many objects, differing materially in detail, all call a single idea. When a man, for example, has obtained an idea of chairs in general by comparison with which he can say “This is a chair, that is a stool,” he has what is known as an “abstract idea” distinct from the reproduction in his mind of any particular chair (see abstraction). Furthermore a complex idea may not have any corresponding physical object, though its particular constituent elements may severally be the reproductions of actual perceptions. Thus the idea of a centaur is a complex mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse, that of a mermaid of a woman and a fish.
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Throughout the twentieth century the expression and fixation of ideas has become more commercialized as reproductive technologies have proliferated driving the cost of reproduction down. Capitalists views these ideas as business commodities, and actively pursues legal action to prevent what they consider the theft of their property. What started with Victor Hugo and the Berne Convention as a means of protecting the economic livelihood of authors and artists has (in the view of some) turned into a largely profiteering foray, with an endless stream of product that is recycled to create more profits for corporate shareholders -- the individual artists and writers have lost the protection that was supposed to be guaranteed. On the other hand, many consider stricter intellectual property rights legislation necessary to protect small to medium-sized business interests from being overwhelmed by the greater manufacturing capacity of larger businesses.
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Patents are a scheme to protect a new idea that has a functional manifestation as invention or know-how. Copyright law is a scheme to protect the expression of ideas like books, videodiscs, and datastreams. There are other schemes to protect designs and even laws to protect integrated circuit patterns. Those types of law are aimed to protect the value of expression for a limited period of time so that the creators, authors, or their designated assignee can exploit those ideas -- a form of monopoly. This area of law is quite complex and the bucket of entitlements that refer to these types of incorporeal property have come to be referred to as intellectual property. With the development of digital reproduction the legal concept of fixation has become more an more ephemeral and it has become more difficult to control the reproduction of information that can exist in the digital domain. Some would say that this is the underpinning idea behind the open source and GNU movements. Software patents, which monopolize the pure idea, not the expression of it, are becoming a huge threat for these movements.
Group Psyche
An Experiment: See Mirror Neurons in Monkeys
A recently discovered system in the brain may help explain why we humans can get so worked up watching other people. A monkey was reaching for peanuts while his brain waves were being measured. A certain area of his brain fired signal when he would reach for them. Later a scientist came in and reached for a peanut while the monkey observed him. The same area of the brain fired in the monkey. The suggestion is that a motor neuron fires whether one is see one doing something or they do it themselves.
Note: www.pbs.org/wbgh/nova
This brings new meaning to the term, “Armchair Quarterbacking”. Mirror Neurons ties us not only to what people are doing but also what they are feeling. Mirror neurons send messages to the emotion area of our brain. That’s why we’re able to enjoy sporting events or movies. This experiment suggests that we are meant to be together socially with others. Otherwise, there would be no need for a mirror neuron.