I don't really know what you had in mind with the word "isolation". But, unless we say we have only one thought per day, spanning the entirety of the time we're awake and thinking, then, whatever it means, we isolate thoughts all the time. I just ate a salad. You don't need, and surely don't want, to hear all the thoughts surrounding it. My wife gave it to me. She got it last night at a late meeting for her job. Her boss had these meeting every month. He always gets food. but my wife only eats one meal a day, and it is keto, so she never eats at these meetings. For some reason, that bothers her boss. He always wants her to eat, and actually you could say he pressures her to eat. don't know why he feels so strongly about it. Anyway, it's usually pizza or something, and she's not gonna eat it under any circumstances. But last night he got her this nice chef salad, and asked her how that was. She said she would eat it today. She gave it to me instead. My father absolutely loves chef salads. He always says, "That was good! It had everything!" it cracks all of us up. we can go to any restaurant, with the most amazing food in it, and he's darned likely to ask if they have a chef salad.:rofl:

I just ate a salad. — Patterner

You were the one that used the word, "isolation" and I was simply trying to get at your meaning of your use of it.

I don't know - that whole block of text might be considered one thought and you only divide it up depending on what your present goal is. If I were more interested to know where you got the salad then that would be the part that would be relevant to me, and it is my goal that isolates a cause from its effects - as if the world is an analog signal and our brain converts it to a digital signal that allows goal-directed behavior (in QM this would be like picking out the particle from the probability wave distribution).

That wasn't well-phrased by me. If "a thought" causes another "thought" (countable: one thought, two thoughts...) and it's all "thought" an ongoing process, then we need to divvy up the stream of thought into distinct pieces each of which is "a thought".

Since I came into this thread saying that "sentences" aren't clear expressions of thoughts and thus "I wonder how Ann is doing," isn't a 1:1 expression of thought, it's up to me to say what a thought is and how it's related to its sentence. I tried in this thread, but... it's hard. — Dawnstorm

Look a little deeper and you might find that the boundaries of any thought or process are determined by the present goal in the mind. The boundaries are what make some thought relevant and all the rest irrelevant to the goal, but that does not mean that those other thoughts or processes would not be relevant to some other goal if you had it.

Why do I think this? Am I right? How would I tell the difference? (I actually second-guess myself like that all the time.) — Dawnstorm

The point is that you have a reason to second-guess yourself, and I'd be willing to bet its the same reason I do the same, that we have been wrong in the past. Don't worry. This is healthy behavior, unlike many others on this forum that think they know everything and that it is their feelings, or some authority, that determines truth rather than logic.

You have to already have learned what the relationship is. Your recognition that 5+7 and 12 mean the same thing is an effect of your prior experiences. If you had never seen those scribbles before your thoughts about them would be different.
— Harry Hindu

Obviously. I'm not sure what to make of this whole paragraph. We're talking past each other. — Dawnstorm

Then maybe you should lay out how you came to know what the following scribbles mean: "5+7=" Why would you every return the scribble, "12" when there is nothing inherent in the scribbles themselves as to what they mean or why there is even a relationship between 5+7 and 12.

Think of an alien arriving on Earth after humans have gone extinct and they see a marble tablet with the scribbles, 5+7 = 12. What about the scribbles would allow the alien to know what they mean? Wouldn't they need to get more information (something like a Rosetta Stone) to determine its meaning? In other words, you had to have learned what the relationship of the scribbles 5+7 were to be able to consistently return 12 as an answer. You must be following some rule. Where and how did you obtain this rule?

You were the one that used the word, "isolation" and I was simply trying to get at your meaning of your use of it. — Harry Hindu

I lost track. Dawnstar first used it. I just don't see the difficulty. We can break things up however we want. My father ordering a chef salad in a restaurant is obvious a different thought than my wife's boss's desire to get her to eat at their monthly meetings. We can focus on, as you said, whatever interests us.

My father ordering a chef salad in a restaurant is obvious a different thought than my wife's boss's desire to get her to eat at their monthly meetings. We can focus on, as you said, whatever interests us. — Patterner

Well, now you're talking about different minds, not thoughts in the same mind. So yes, I would consider thoughts in different heads different thoughts, but this could just be an outcome of my goal to treat each person as an individual. Are we all separate individuals, or are we only individuals and part of a group when it suits some goal?

I'm not following. In whose mind are my father ordering a chef salad in a restaurant and my wife's boss's desire to get her to eat at their monthly meetings not easily identifiable as different thoughts?

I'm not following. In whose mind are my father ordering a chef salad in a restaurant and my wife's boss's desire to get her to eat at their monthly meetings not easily identifiable as different thoughts? — Patterner

That is my point - that it is only in some mind that they are identifiable as different thoughts. The world independent of thoughts does not make any distinctions. It is just a wave of probability, according to some interpretations of QM. Think about our minds as stretching all causal relations into what we refer to as the medium of space-time.

I’m not suggesting that thoughts obey quantum mechanics necessarily, but that there’s an analogous structure: just as a quantum wavefunction represents a range of possible outcomes until measured, our experiential field contains a continuous flow of potential meanings or thoughts. It’s our focus, intention, or interpretive stance that ‘collapses’ that field into discrete thoughts or objects. The divisions are in the act of observation, not in the underlying reality.

That is my point - that it is only in some mind that they are identifiable as different thoughts. — Harry Hindu

Certainly. It is only in minds that thoughts exist at all. There is no other place they can be differentiated or isolated.