Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 27

days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 27 The Evaluator

On a drizzly afternoon I sat under an umbrella, my tent pitched a few yards away, a bag of food hung up in a tree safely out of reach of hungry bears. The plan was to camp for four days and three nights. (As if I hadn’t been isolated enough for weeks.) I knew from experience that I probably wouldn’t cross many tracks of Homo sapiens in the vicinity of this oxbow bend of the Middle Fork.

So many decisions in life, some with momentous influence that spreads for years. Camping allows one to focus on small decisions that loom large only in their immediacy: Where to put the tent? How about right here, in roughly the same place that worked last year. That decision engendered numerous, smaller sub-decisions: Which rocks to clear from the tent site, which plants to uproot and toss aside? I also decided on medium-sized rocks arranged to shelter a small cooking fire and support a pot. I decided on where to gather a variety of burnable biomass, also known as twigs and sticks. These decisions were not as taxing as they would have been had I been camping at a completely new site. I could relax by my repetition of context, which kept decisions relatively minor and able to be dispatched quickly.

As in many scales of decisions in life, the case of my campsite shows repetition providing a base of mental comfort. The same happened several days ago (Day 23), with an umbrella carried as context during an evening walk. With stable, safe context, the mind can be free to create, to concentrate on building the next stage of interests and aspirations, either for personal plans or for those involving other people. Of course repetition can also dull, if the stimuli that come from exercising one’s exploratory urges are stifled. The trick is to have it all.

In many decisions we take, the sensory and motor consequences pass through consciousness at some point. So do the goals of the decisions, in inner words or images. This is not to say that consciousness made the decisions. That’s probably not true in many cases. But it’s not to discredit consciousness either. It’s obvious that in any introspection of consciousness, that it at least perceives the choices and often the choice-making process.

The decision-making power of the unconscious might tempt us to look to it for answers about who we are. Those who praise the faculty of intuition are doing just that. “Trust your gut” is one guiding slogan along these lines. The implication might be that the unconscious is a truer self, a more reliable lantern for the way ahead than the brain-wringing involved in figuring something out, step by tortured conscious step. But simplistic slogans about the unconscious can be dangerous mental viruses that infect and lull us. We must be wary. Consciousness is also crucial to binding the world of sensory perception and action. And I do “perceive” that psychological growth gradually refines consciousness, by strengthening our memory and ability to use language. This starts when we were children, perhaps in exchanging joy with a caregiver, and then, as adults, during ongoing expansion of our capacities to communicate to others and, importantly, to communicate to ourselves who we are and what we experience, as we think about thinking and interweave the streams of mind.

Today, in the drizzle, I had a hint of an answer to my cry two days ago for help (Day 25). The answer just popped into my head. It had palpable clout. Delight spewed forth like a unseen stream emerging from under rock visible and free.

“I need to set up an evaluator.” This idea came as an internally-verbalized thought along with faint, abstract imagery of creating a meta-level for my thoughts. Well, at least the answer didn’t recommend faith in a higher power of the unconscious. I liked that the idea pointed directly to consciousness. That seemed like a right direction.

I’m not entirely happy with the term. It sounds a bit like a Schwarzenegger movie: “Bring on the Evaluator!” Thought-shaper? Thinking-filter? Appraiser? Assessor? Weigher? Decider. “Evaluator” it will be for now.

Finally, I thought, here’s a potential reason to think about thinking: to help set up an evaluator. This goes beyond my start to think about thinking and just see what happens. An evaluator would be a mental function that can discern types of thoughts and, well, evaluate them. For example, a simple binary evaluator would separate good from bad thoughts. But be careful, this is sounding like a return to my Catholic upbringing. I don’t want a priest in my head. I’ll want to avoid the dangers of over-simplification.

Surely, though, many of my thoughts are, for the most part, useless. Many involve rehearsals for situations in which prior mental rehearsal adds nothing, except to increase anxiety or to waste mental efforts in repetition. Much useless repetition could be another example of how we unconsciously seek comfort: Repeat inner rehearsals so new thoughts don’t have to be struggled with. Other often useless thoughts include replays of memories, replays that change the past into what-ifs and should-have-dones, and walks along life’s paths that were in fact not walked.

Some of the sum total of relatively useless mental activity is related to who we are and is certainly invaluable to some extent for preparing our repertoire of reactions to situations. But like the way that our biologically-evolved hankering for once-rare sugar and fat lands us in health problems because those foods are now abundant in excess, so our mind’s patterns, faced with the complexity of things to think about today, often go into overdrive, and the beneficial aspects of rehearsal and replay can become a serious hindrance. Thus the need for an evaluator.

© 2024 by Tyler Volk

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