Think

Big Bang

Why wouldn't I write a book?

That was the question that I used to ask myself for years. No great idea, was the answer.

Yes, I had thoughts, some of them interesting, yet none of them convincing enough to become the "seed" to make me cross the bridge from "I wanna be" to "I really am" a writer.

And ... out of nowhere , I should say,  there it was!

Spontaneously, without a connection to anything before with any previously thought, an idea "exploded" in my mind.

I remember clearly the thought that crossed my consciousness and which contained simultaneously the title and the whole idea of the story.

Suddenly, the universe of my book burst into existence!

And I started to write.

Page by page, chapter after chapter, I "met" the many possibilities opened to me as the story went on. And so I became the witness of a strange phenomenon.

With that initial idea of the book came also the full synopsis of of the story. And it was so coherent  that it convinced me that there could have been nothing to change it .

But then came the actual writing and I realized that my book was ultimately a sequence of countless choices and changes caused by new ideas that popped in my mind with every paragraph. The reality of the story which was gradually asserting itself, stimulated new associations that ended in ideas, some entirely new and others that either completed or removed the old ones.

And my book was no longer the same! Not in terms of the general plot, but in the manner in which it came to "reality".

As my initial idea was changing, questions about the mere existence of the book kept bugging me:

Could this "form" of my book be the only possible "materialization" of my initial thought? Why my book came to be in this form and not else?

What happened to the many other sequences of thoughts that could have been embodied in books following an alternative narrative?

While I looked for answers for this question, spontaneously, another new idea exploded in my mind.

I saw a similarity.

A strange, improbable, disproportionate, unlikely resemblance between how a thought, a stream o thoughts or a book come to reality and the very birth of a universe.

The greatest, the most mysterious inception of all time:

THE BIG BANG!

I saw how a thought might be a universe. Or a universe might be just a thought.

And in my mind, this theory made sense. Leaving aside all the related preconceptions and mainstream theories, my mind made a connection. And then my logical thinking considered it as valid to be explored.

What initiated this connection? ... this thought? Our thoughts in general. What is the mechanism that triggers a new idea to appear all of a sudden in our mind out of nowhere?

Nowhere? Or its source could be somewhere in the outside our awareness that we call unconsciousness?

Could our unconsciousness be in fact the initiator of our conscious thinking?

Could a long lasting unanswered question provoke an "obsession" of our unconsciousness mind which then tries to find an answer by any means?

Intuitively, we associate the rational thinking to the state of consciousness.

Recent studies, however, have shown that this perception may not be entirely true.

In 2002, Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a Nobel Prize for earlier research, which indicated that people rarely make rational decisions.

Their study conclusion was that,

"For a Rational Decision, Let Your Subconscious Do the Thinking".

Presented in 2006 by Ap Dijksterhuis and Loran Nordgren, Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) is one of the new theories of neuroscience running counter mainstream theories and research of the past decades.

UTT states that our unconscious mind can and does perform complex thinking processes and is capable of performing tasks outside of one's awareness, and that unconscious thought (UT) is better at solving complex tasks, where many variables are considered, than conscious thought (CT), but is outperformed by conscious thought in tasks with fewer variables.

Could our sudden thoughts be just the tip of an extensive thinking process happening in our unconscious mind?

Why wouldn't our mind employ, in the process of unconscious rational thinking, the same remarkable resources used, for example, for "miraculous" solving of human body malfunctions?

Daniel Kish is a man from California who lost sight when he was 13 months, but has developed a system of echolocation like bats and he by now "sees" objects around.

This ability can be interpreted as the adaptation or evolution, but essentially, Daniel Kish's nervous system synthesized the purpose of the visual perception. His brain realized that the purpose of our sight is not to be sensible to light but to perceive space. The light perception is just a mean to an end.

Consequently, Daniel Kish's brain unconsciously explored other senses to configure them in a way that they would be able to project in the brain the same perception that sight provides.

Said otherwise, Daniel Kish's unconscious brain solved the problem, providing the ability to perceive the space.

We could say that in fact, Daniel Kish's brain had no preconceptions; it did not "think" that because the human hearing apparatus does not resemble in any way the visual apparatus they could not have similar functions?

Daniel Kish's unconscious just "focused" in finding a solution without excluding any possibility.

Preconceptions are forerunners in forming a concept. Although theoretically they may be associated with the experience, in our general understanding they have a negative connotation. Preconceptions are associated with conservatism, opacity in thinking negatively.

One could say that our default understanding of the preconceptions is, well, a ... preconception.

Nevertheless experience cannot be eliminated from the process of scientific analysis. The problem is that the experience, which includes also the preconceptions, may limit or impose barriers and erroneous limits to our logical thinking.

And frequently, the preconceptions become widely accepted undisputed "truths", not because they have been demonstrated incontestably, but because they have been so much circulated that have become axiomatic.

Returning my my association of a thought, a book with a universe or vice-versa, there is one undisputed truth which says that our world is real whereas a thought, a book or an idea are abstract, therefore unreal.

So, viewed through the perspective of the mainstream science my claim sounds as absurd as comparing an apple with a screwdriver.

And I would accept that if science had an answer to a full understanding not only of the universe, but what is behind it.

Yet, although we, humans, have been trying to understand the universe ever since we raised to self-awareness, we are now farther than ever to a complete explanation.

Scientists, physicists, astrophysicists, astronomers, chemists, mathematicians untangle mystery after mystery and so, they give the impression that the answers to the big riddles of the universe are just around the corner.

Philosophers on the other hand...

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End of Big Bang