playing the same kind of game and starting with universe as defined, i found that the universe definition included metaphysics because metaphysics deals with thoughts, which are weightless... the physicist defining the physical universe (Einstein's famous definition) had deliberately excluded metaphysics because they are imponderable... so, i found it interesting that i had a definition that also included the metaphysical universe - of mathematics, thoughts, and dreams as realistic experiences... and because all of my experiences had beginnings and endings, they were finite... i said, therefore, that the aggregate of finites must also be finite... therefore, the universe, including both physics and mathematics, is finite...

in playing that kind of game i now had the advantage of being able to start not only with total finiteness but logically - as men, lacking a definition of the whole universe, had not been able to start logically before... this gave me many advantages, for the whole system was finite... i thus came logically to some mathematical discoveries regarding the thought processes... i would like to give you a simple way of looking at things, which i found appropriate once one starts with a definition of the finite whole...

i also found the this process of working with finite logic from the whole to the particular to be a very effective kind of strategy in trying, for instance, to think our way through to understanding what our human function in the universe might be... i found that, when i was confronted with a vast question and an enormous amount of material and experience, one of the first things i always tried to do was to make a basic division of the universe and thereafter subdivide the relevant parts into progressively smaller halves, always, successively, selecting the half most clearly containing - and therefore relevant to - the problem until i reached an understandable and very local level in universe... in developing the solution to complex problems in modern information theory, which governs the design of computers, this same principle of progressive subdivision and selection of the relevant half is used and each progressive subdivision is called a "bit" and the number of subdivisions totally required are known as "so many bits"...

i found it is quite possible to subdivide the universe instantly by developing the concept of a "system"... a system is a local phenomenon in the universe that is geometrically definable because it returns or closes upon itself in all directions... systems may be symmetrical or asymmetrical... i found that systems are the first subdivision of universe for they subdivide the universe into all the universe that is inside and all the universe that is outside the system... this divided the universe into the macrocosm and the microcosm... then came the extraordinarily surprising and sudden discovery that this system concept led to an important understanding of - what we do when we think...

i am quite certain that thoughts are not bright ideas mysteriously inserted into a vacuum chamber in the head... i'm quite confident that what we do when we think is to behave as follows:

we dismiss irrelevancies... i find that our brain is filled with constant reports and notices in which we're being told about various events around us... all of us have experiences saying to one another, "what's that friend's name? you know, the man we both know. we were with him for three years." and neither of us can remember his name right away... but we all experience suddenly recalling the name possibly five minutes later, possibly the next morning...

the main point is that there is a definite lag in the search to memory storage and its feedback and that there is a great variety in the rates of lag between some recalls and others that we have stored deeply... because we do get such feedbacks, we are always receiving a great deal of feedback from questions we had even forgotten that we had even asked... on my way here today i looked at a tree and i said, "what kind of a tree is that?" and i asked many other questions as i went along... i am asking myself questions all the time; and because the lags are very different for the different kinds of memories, i find that when i am lying down in my bed and trying to go to sleep, i get report after report coming back telling me about things that i had asked questions about and forgotten that i asked them... at all times we are in almost chaotic focus of brain-dispatched messengers trying to come into our conscious thought pattern to give us the answer to questions we or others in our presence have asked... therefore, i have discovered that what i do when thinking is to say, keep those messengers outside for a moment... that's very interesting... i'm glad they're there, but please keep them outside because all i want to think about right now is this glass of water...

i discover, then, that thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies... that decision immediately gives you one of those enormous opportunities further to divide the residual definition into two... this is possible because irrelevancies fall into two main classes: all the events taht are irrelevant because they are too big to have any possible kind of bearing on the particular focus of our thought, and all the irrelevancies that are too small possibly to build up any significant relationships to alter the focal subject of our thinking... you find that what you have been trying to think about has a definite experience and frequency magnitude... thus we find that all the irrelevancies that are too small are dismissed inwardly of the thought about local system and, therefore, dismissed into the microcosm because they can't catch up to the magnitude zoen fo the wave length and magnitude that we are working on; and the irrelevancies that are irrelevant because they are too big to have any effect on our considered focal system of consideration, are dismissed outside the system, that is into the macrocosm...

i find that there are also a number of temptingly almost relevants, which i might bring into our consideration, which might persuade you to be interested in what i am trying to communicate to you... thus i learn that there is a Twilight Zone of Tantalizingly Almost Relevants... there are two such twilight zones - the macro and the micro - tantalizingly almost relevants... between them there is always a set of extraordinarily lucid items of relevance... and when i pay attention to those lucid relevances i find that the minimum set that may form a system to divide universe into micro and macro cosms is a set of four items of consideration... i see next that between four stars that form the vertexes of the tetrahedron, which is the simplest system in universe, there are six edges that consitute all the possible relationships between those four stars... when we have found all the relationships between the number of items of our consideration we have what we speak of as "understanding." the word consider derives from the Latin words for "together" and "stars." when we understand, we have all the fundamental connections between the star events of our consideration... when n stands for the number of stars or items of consideration, the number of connections necessary to understanding is always