Patterns in the mind

I just listened some lectures on philosophy of the mind by John Searle and he supports most of the views I already had which is quite nice and interesting. While my latest post is still a bit messy and not fully substantiated by facts, Searle conveys.

I recently read a short story by Franz Kafka that really captured my mind, it's called The Tradesman. When I further searched upon it I figured it's a story about Sisyphean life. In Greek Mythology Sisyphus was a king punished into Tartarus by being cursed to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, and repeat this through eternity. A myth about life that's full of pointless or interminable activities. I'm going to translate it into the feeling that there must be something beyond mundane daily life, mundane daily life being the boring eternity. Tired of carrying the weight of the world and trying to escape it would be another interpretation of the myth. Where the world could as well translate into the mind. Because ultimately, your world is your mind. Then I began seeing related stories, examples being the main characters of Into the Wild or Taxi Driver. So that lead me to think a very unmotivated state of mind, a personal crises, the thought of life being meaningless can lead into a very motivated idealistic - bringing and giving meaning to life - state of mind.

In the lectures Searle talks about functionalism, a philosophy of the mind based on causality. Its core idea is that mental states (beliefs, desires, being in pain, etc.) are constituted solely by their functional role - that is, they are causal relations to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs. So the input of let's say the archetypical Sisyphean life can lead to the following behavior: the desire or will to escape Sisyphean life. Although if we take the myth as unconditional and it would be impossible to escape, it would probably be better to accept the conditions. Still, these are speculations as it's impossible to see from Sisyphus's perspective, I use the myth merely as a metaphor of meaningless life to point out that people always seek meaning when there is none. When there is no meaning people's behavior is to create meaning out nothing, out of chaos, the original dark void from which everything else appeared. This form of causality may seem very black on white, but it covers the whole spectrum on the mind and communication. Meaning manifests itself in signs, in language, symbolism, objects, every representation of what is created in the mind. One's state of mind is much stronger than any representations of it, until today it's impossible to communicate one's state of mind 1 on 1, that would be telepathy. However, to give meaning is what I believe the core of any behavior.