Are You Just An Idea?
It might be the result of watching too much TV or reading too much fantasy, but I’ve always been a firm believer in the existence of a supra-normal aspect of reality. You’ll never hear me say ghosts exist or whatnot, but you won’t get a denial from me either. I enjoy the ambiguity, and adventure, that refusing to take sides brings; it frees your mind from certainty, and freedom from certainty creates the urge to explore; to find your own answers. This exploration, in my case, has mostly been intellectual, and courtesy of all the recent reading I’ve done, an idea has been brewing in my head.
So that common sense doesn’t cause you to zone out in the course of reading this piece, I implore you to treat it as a thought experiment; an exercise in imagination. So, here it is:
What if ideas are the actual inhabitants of the world, and human beings, and living organisms in general, are just mediums ideas use to live their own lives?
It sounds weird, but it’s a hypothesis that has been explored by other people in different ways, a prominent example being Richard Dawkins’ belief that genes rule us, and all our actions are indirect efforts to prolong the survival of our genetic material. And I, after going down an intellectual rabbit hole, feel like there’s some merit to the sentiment. To see what I mean, let’s look at how the people who first conceived this hypothesis thought about it.
The following excerpt, is a paraphrase of an idea shared in Mark Booth’s “Secret History of the World:”
“The Ancients (citizens of ancient civilizations) believed that thoughts were independent and people, were avenues for thoughts to express themselves. It’s not that people thought, but that thoughts ‘peopled.’ The human mind, thus served as a meeting place for various thoughts emanating from the various centers of consciousness located in the human body (e.g. heart, kidney etc.). Therefore, the material world, in this way of viewing things, was nothing more than an amplifier of thought, and the human body was a portal by which thought entered into the physical world and became manifest.”
This sounds laughable, but think about it, think about how you actually process existence.
It happens in two stages. The first is the sensory stage. Everything you know, feel, or experience, comes to you via your sense organs. There is nothing that exists outside the world your sense organs create, in fact, the world, to you, is basically the input your sense organs receive. Sound, sight, smell, sensation (both internal and external) are the blocks from which your entire experience of the world, and by extension, your world, is built. There is nothing else apart from these mediums.
The next stage, which isn’t actually the next stage because it happens simultaneously alongside the former, is the meaning making stage.
Basic sensory data is usually meaningless, and has to be filtered, or crafted, by our minds into mental models, each with its own narrative. These narratives in turn create ideas, which then result in thoughts, or actions. These thoughts and actions, then fuel the agendas the ideas push. Case in point: you’re walking down the road, and you see a member of the opposite sex smile at you. Your sensory organs perceive the person and the smile, and at the same time, your mind jumps to a conclusion, based on whatever mental model you’re working with. You can never know the real reason for the smile, it could be anything, the person might actually be interested in you, or they might be smiling for another reason and just happened to be looking in your direction, or they might be toying with you. But all you have on your end, is the perception of a smile, the idea your mind conjures from its dominant mental model, and the narrative you unconsciously accept.
So, if we consider that the end products of your humanity in all its glorious complexity and intricate design, are thoughts and actions fueled by ideas, do the Ancients’ claims, as put forward by Mark Booth, still seem laughable? Do you see more clearly how the world as we experience it, is really just a mixture of sensory perceptions and the meanings derived from these percepts? A mental world? A world of information and ideas?
If so, think about the question again. What if people are actually just a bunch of ideas in the form of flesh, and there’s actually no individual behind any person? What if we’re all just walking around, possessed by memes? (A meme is a term coined by Richard Dawkins to describe an idea that is rapidly transmitted among people within a culture, with the sole aim of spreading a particular meaning or narrative).
What if ideas are the original owners of the universe but like viruses, can only survive via hosts? Because when you do the research, you’ll find that viruses and ideas share similar traits. They both need hosts to express, they can be spread from one person to another, they grow with time, they can evolve or mutate if the conditions are right, they need specific environments to thrive, they can die, and they compete with other viruses/ideas for hosts.
I mean look at religions, they’re ideas shared by billions of people around the world, and many people are slaves to the dictates of their religious movement, right? Or look at culture, a bunch of ideas which are created by a small number of people, but end up running thousands of lives for generations, until other ideas take over in the form of a revolution. Or even societal trends, how everyone jumps on them, and how it’s quite possible for you to be stigmatized if you don’t follow suit. Don’t these entities strike you as having lives of their own? As being alive in some fashion, and low-key pulling the strings?
Are we really people? Or are we just receptacles and breeding grounds for ideas? Is there really a person running the show behind your life? Or you’re just a puppet yanked around by different ideas about what life (aka the totality of your sensory experience) is? Because if you think in this fashion i.e. that everything you know, is only a mental model of a sensory experience, you’ll also find that what you think of as “I” is really a bundle of ideas your mind has acquired about the sensory experience of your body and its interactions with the rest of the universe, and your attachment to these percepts.
Thoughts like “I’m a boy, because I have a penis, and hair on my chest and face. You’re a girl because you have breasts and wide hips. I’m smart because I’m doing well at all the games our ancestors created for us to play, that we call life. You’re dumb because you aren’t, and so on.” are examples of such ideas.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making any claims here; I’m not saying anything is wrong or right. I’m just observing my experience of life from a different angle, and asking the questions that result from this switch in perspective.
Do we know for sure, that we own ideas, or do they own us? Are we actually living our lives? Or are we just carriers of intangible viruses with their own agendas?
