Some Thoughts Regarding Salience

Not every thought that pops into our head is worthy of our attention. It’s probably safe to say that most of them aren’t. If you spend any time meditating one of the first things you notice is how much your mind jumps from thought to thought in a frantic and non sequitur kind of way.

Part of me feels desperate to follow each haphazard idea in the hopes that it will germinate into some deep insight. The kernels are rarely fruitful though and the process is exhausting. I didn’t realize how tiresome it was until I tried being still. I can’t help but think that letting all the insignificant blips fade away will save me energy. But how does one only dismiss the thoughts that are noisy dead ends?

Making meaning is hard. Further, making meaning that gives insight into reality is even more difficult and is usually referred to as wisdom. One doesn’t need to be intelligent to be wise either, because wisdom depends on making the proper information salient.

A world view makes information salient, because it interprets data in a unique way. Religions, whether supernatural or civil, give its followers a filter to process everything through. The benefit is that it offers large groups the ability to to act as a superorganism. The downside is that the superorganism will still reproduce itself even if it’s wrong. It’s inevitable that they will be too since they’re made up of humans. Adopting a world view that doesn’t have dogmas seems critical then.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this other than to say that most of our thoughts suck our energy and are probably not ours to begin with. Knowing how to recognize worthy thoughts is difficult, but necessary for wisdom. The inclination to rely on ideology is natural, but turns our minds into a meme. Something that’s unable to generate new knowledge. I wonder what we should expect from humanity as a whole if all of this is the case?