Let’s assume the left hand image to be of one’s own mother, the word mother exists nowhere physically, but is a representation of the human whom one refers as mother.
The right hand image is what one saw in a dream. The face of the woman is not visible, yet one ‘knows’ that the said woman is one’s mother without any physical resemblance.
Word ‘mother’ is a representation of a woman in one’s mind, while the right hand image is an imagination.
Flashing of word ‘mother’ is an effect of one watching a woman with the left side image, while concurrently being a representation. But the right hand image has no umbilical cord connecting it to one’s mother. But is ‘marked’ mother arbitrarily. In my book Awareness & Consciousness, I have underlined that the most important attribute of imagination is absence of cause. It happens not as an effect of an external stimuli, but is a ‘re-arrangement’ or pop-up of a new infonomy, which is completely free off any connection to the past and hence is not burdened by causality.
Thematically, both the world ‘mother’ and the right hand image ‘represent’ one’s mother, but the vital difference between the two is following:
First animals invented the thought of image of mother, thereafter the auditory sound was invented and subsequently the written symbol was invented. Both thinking and speaking (referring) are capabilities that are available in other animals too. It was the invention of ‘written’ symbol that completed changed the homo sapien community. Because written symbol could be conserved. Thoughts and auditory references, die immediately after being used. But it was the written notation that generated social memory (memory outside one’s mind) & generated that most important feature that distinguished human intellect – objectivity. Because humans learnt to represent through symbols, outside of their mind, they could share their information with others, thereby converting a huge chunk of information to be objective instead of all of it being subjective. This in turn dramatically expanded human capabilities to forecast, as they started to factor in besides inferences of personal experiences & observations; those informed by others. This created the network effect, that changed human history for all times to come.
Therefore, written word ‘mother’ became an objective representation, while the imagined image on right remains a personal subjective, imagined respresentation.
