Especially Relative

This article will continue my past writings but may be understood, although to a lesser degree, without referring back to them.

It was previously supposed that the true “I” observes both external and internal events as happenings removed from itself. Thoughts and sensory experiences are both forms of observance and have no real difference. Both come from the puzzling relation of the variations of sense with the electrical patterns of the brain. Specifically, thoughts occur when a pattern of the brain usually caused by the delivery of a stimulus from the ears is caused from other electrical activity subsequently preceding it. The fact that others cannot hear a thought is irrelevant since others can neither hear your perception of external sounds; two people do not hear the same external sound, but rather experience two different sets of variations coinciding with each other because of the common source. In thoughts, it is simply that the source is more intimately related to the observer (part of his brain anatomy) and thus not common.

From the existence of variations, we form the concept of the “It” or “I” that because of definition must exist to view the variations; for color to exist, something must be there to view it, although this something has no necessary attributes.

However, I would like to establish that the relationship between “It” and the variations observed must have some degree of interaction. The fundamental self cannot be treated as an isolated watcher from afar, having no relation to the variations themselves, for it so happens that the thoughts we experience, as they are now, can contemplate the “It” that observes them. They themselves are therefore aware of “It”.

One might say that in a world absent the “It”, thoughts could continue as they have now, and, in other words, the “It” constitutes no necessity in explaining the course reality has taken. But, from our certainty that this “It”-less substitute is not the case - a conviction born from an awareness of our awareness, actualized through thought - we must infer some interaction between thought and the “It”.

Furthermore, the superior vivacity of external experience that becomes apparent when contrasted with thought - clearly designed by the needs of evolution - marks an additional difference between internal and external experience, although not debasing my argument at whole.