Where do ideas come from? Is it from a misfiring neuron in your frontal lobe or spoon fed from god? Is it born from two or more parent concepts or is it born immaculate? Is it really new – even if it has not manifested yet? Is it relevant?
I do not know. But I can create a hypothetical system that might glean some insight. Ideally, I can accelerate the flow of ideas, even if I don’t know exactly where they come from.
The Subconscious City Within and Entities That Might Work There
So I looked closely at how ideas might flow within me. It has become an internal game. Can I create a model that honors the question, “how do ideas manifest?” The first challenge was sheer magnitude. For every sentence I utter, write, listen to or ponder, there are thousands of calculations to determine just the words that best map to sentences that build on the story of now in a cohesive way. By the time we add in purpose, intention, ambiguity, dependencies, distraction and imagination, the system would need to accommodate billions of possibilities per minute – perhaps per second.
Power in Speed and Capacity
So we need an insane amount of processing power to make this work. Current estimates predict that more than 95 percent of our mental capacity is happening in the subconscious. Even so, we still have an issue of time. To bring forth the right data at the right time in order for me to type this sentence requires millions of calculations. How is it happening so fast?
Time and The Conductor
Time might be vastly different at the subconscious level. In order to have relevant information fed in time, it seems reasonable that the subconscious experience is working at 1000X the speed of the conscious. If so, I imagine a vast city of entities, living in the subconscious, whose job it is to bring relevance to what I would call my Conductor. The Conductor is in the seat of power. He decides what is sent to the conscious self and he modulates the speed of what is shared. He is positioned in front of the portal to the conscious self and oversees a massive workforce of what I call “Finders” and “Expeditors.”
Finders
Finders search for relevant data in the form of words, symbols, pictures, visions, concepts and questions. They are entities that live within the subconscious for the purpose of identifying relevance in data – and assessing how relevant information is for the body or mind. Once they find a potentially relevant bit of information, an importance is assigned to the data in the form of what we will call “glow.” The more important the item, the more glow is assigned.
Streams, Pools, and Oceans of Data
Finders look in streams, pools, and oceans for relevance. For example, a stream can be a metaphor for our conscious experience (streaming…) into our subconscious. A Finder can take experiences from the now and store them in short term memory for reuse when needed.
A pool can represent our stored past experiences (long term memory.)
An ocean might represent the enormity mankind’s collective consciousness or even that which is shared directly from a higher power.
There may well be a second ocean at the subatomic level. The vastness of the infinitely small. What can be gained by listening to the quantum levels of our body? Again, I don’t know. But it feels like it is possible that information can be shared from the ultra-small to the ultra-big… and vice-versa.
Expeditors
These entities do exactly as the name suggests. They expedite data that is relevant to the body or to the conscious present self. Think of Finders wading into streams, pools and oceans and pulling out relevant data to put into carts. There are cart trains (of thought) are on two tracks. One track is headed into another part of the subconscious called “Internal Operations.” This vast division of your subconscious self is not directly visible to your consciousness and is managed by a different part of your (reptilian) brain. It regulates how your body balances, breaths, beats etc. The second track leads to the portal of the conscious self. Concepts (ideas) move on these tracks in what we will call Stack Carts.Think of these carts as similar to mining carts. Each idea has its own cart and these carts can be quickly moved in front of one another by Expeditors. As they cue up for consideration by the Conductor, they can be arranged and re-arranged as the needs of the conscious self-changes moment to moment. Expeditors look at the glow and compare with what is needed in the now – and prioritize accordingly.
Shipping To the Conscious
Conductors look at the flow of Stack Carts holding data with glow and decide what is sent through the portal. Alternately, a Conductor can hold carts, or send them back. The result is that I see/hear words appear through the portal and decide whether or not to right them down here – in the now.
~ Erik Knutson