Have you ever tried to stop your thoughts? I have heard that the practice of zazen in Zen temples involves closing one’s eyes and stopping thoughts to eliminate distractions. Indeed, I have tried to stop my thoughts and realized it is very difficult.
Once the functions necessary for maintaining life in a living being stop, they cannot be restarted. Similarly, it is challenging to intentionally stop brain activity. This suggests that both life and thought have properties that compel them to continue moving. Notably, once life ceases, it cannot be restarted.
While this may seem obvious, it’s fascinating to ponder why such properties exist. It seems unnecessary for organisms, which have evolved to incredible complexities for survival and reproduction, to possess a trait that renders them incapable of restarting once stopped, especially considering the inefficiency in energy use.
This article delves into the mysterious nature of life and thought.
Heart and Brain
Typically, creatures with hearts will eventually die if their hearts stop. Likewise, creatures with brains will die if their brain activity ceases.
We can freely move our limbs and control actions like breathing, which normally occur without conscious thought, by choosing to stop or restart them.
Thus, we might assume we control all our bodily functions through our will.
However, the heart operates independently of our will, unable to be consciously stopped or started.
While we can freely choose what to think about and how to think about it, controlling our thoughts as we do our bodies feels natural.
Yet, like the heart, stopping brain activity through will is nearly impossible. Despite efforts to cease thought, the brain autonomously resumes thinking.
This suggests that our brains are equipped with a mechanism that continues to function independently of our will, similar to the heart in physical activity.
This might be due to specific brain regions or a feature integrated throughout the brain.
The Riddles of Life and Thought
Even in organisms without hearts, continuous bodily activity is necessary for life. This is true even for the simplest organisms, like unicellular ones.
If all bodily functions ceased, the organism would die. Although only living beings that eventually die exist, this fact remains mysterious upon reflection.
Organisms have evolved to survive and adapt to their environments, enhancing life-sustaining functions, hiding from predators, and adopting energy-efficient mechanisms.
Thus, evolution has favored bodies that are both survivable and energy-efficient.
One might expect organisms to evolve mechanisms that allow bodily functions to pause when unnecessary and to resume upon external triggers, which would seem more logical.
However, the absence of such mechanisms, even in simple organisms, remains a mystery, raising the question of why mechanisms that could restart after stopping have not emerged over those that cannot.
I refer to this mystery as the riddle of life.
Similarly, the reason why thought cannot be stopped remains a mystery. Despite the brain’s small size relative to the body, it consumes a significant amount of energy.
Ideally, to conserve energy necessary for survival, thought would cease when not needed and resume upon external stimuli.
This mystery could be termed the riddle of thought.
Designing Robots
Consider a thought experiment involving robot design.
Imagine we have the technology to develop robots with self-repair, self-manufacturing, self-improvement, and self-evolution mechanisms, along with established artificial intelligence that can think autonomously or upon external stimuli.
Would we design these robots to be unable to restart once stopped and to consume energy through autonomous thought even when not faced with immediate danger?
Such a design contradicts intuition.
Without deep consideration, one would likely design robots that could resume function upon energy resupply rather than incorporating a feature that leads to their cessation.
Regarding thought, designs would typically initiate upon external stimuli.
Unsolvable problems would be stored for later reflection when time and energy allow, ceasing once all interpretations are exhausted or a deadlock is reached.
Creative thinking could lead to innovation, making autonomous thought without stimuli effective. However, this would use more energy and should ideally occur under favorable conditions.
Thus, there seems no necessity for a design that does not allow thought to cease.
A Mystery with a Reason
The thought experiment suggests that the non-ceasing nature of bodily and thought activities is unlikely a result of evolutionary coincidence.
The characteristics of death and unstoppable thought are likely intentionally incorporated functions in our bodies and brains.
There must be a reason behind the riddles of life and thought, suggesting these are not random evolutionary paths but necessary for the advanced evolution of organisms and intelligence.
If we, in the future, decide to develop self-evolving robots and deploy them on a planet, they would likely acquire the capability of death over time, and those with this capability would become dominantly prevalent.
Similarly, the ability to think continuously without stopping would be acquired, and robots with this ability would dominate.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, I currently lack a clear and satisfactory answer to the riddles of life and thought.
Regarding the riddle of life, one thought is that mechanisms capable of resuming after stopping cannot incorporate a function of death due to inherent constraints. Evolution favors those more adapted to their environment from a diversity of forms.
A mechanism that can incorporate parts without the function of death is overwhelmingly advantageous from a diversity standpoint, which may explain why organisms with the capability of death have become dominant through evolution.
Regardless, these riddles highlight the importance of understanding life and intelligence through the aspects of the functionality of death and non-stop activity.
