It's a bit lamentable that consciousness should cause so much controversy in philosophy.

I mean, sure, it has many aspects and you may want to highlight one aspect or another. But I don't see many people arguing about the existence of brains, for example, it's taken as a fact.

But returning to the thread, I suppose that for something to be called a "thought" properly, it should have a beginning and an end point. Otherwise we'll have to consider everything that goes on in our minds thoughts. I don't know if that's helpful...

I am sorry if I appear to be referring to specific ideas of particular writers and this is just because they seem to have thought so much about the subconscious or systems. I see your point about a database and how we could be like databases. However, while the model of information may have some usefulness for considering our processing, but it is a picture based on our particular perspective, whereas people who lived in different historical eras may have thought in an animistic way, or in connection with the planets and stars as a basic construct for viewing and explaining the content of thoughts. — Jack Cummins

Animism is wonderful. The trouble is, this is unprovable. I'm talking about the "souls" of people, animals and different "things".
Although they (these people) are united by the fact that they had their own database based on their own collected data. Which has been going all my life and sorted into a kind of conviction.
If we call a "microorganism" an "evil spirit", this will not fundamentally change anything. And the replacement of the "demon" with the "green UFO man" too.

What if it gets interrupted in the middle? will that also be a thought?

To be clear, I'm totally making it up here. But I think this "dirty work" has to be cleared up a bit somehow, maybe using a totally different framework or something, but if we don't clear up what "thoughts" may be, we'll not get far.

Having said all this, if it gets interrupted, then it wouldn't be a thought. It would be mental activity. Something like that

What I'm trying to get at is that an awful lot of stuff happens when we are thinking, if we consider them all to be thoughts, then I don't see how we'd make any distinctions.

"Thoughts" is the name we give to our inner experience when we have to put it into words to communicate with another person. — T Clark

My sentiments as well. Has there ever been an occassion, in the everyday course of your private rational machinations generally, you ever said to and for yourself alone, “I think.....”?

I’m guessing.....never.

hmmmm , we understand what thoughts are, but it is ... the language that gets in the way.

Yes. I think that's right on point.

It's all very confusing if you think about it. :lol:

I can see the relevance of the idea of a mirror as a way of seeing the whole process of thinking. It is also easy to see the danger of thinking in a narcissistic way, or of just in ways which enable us to buffer up our own egos. I would imagine that the one way we have of preventing this from happening is that we share our thoughts through conversing with others, and this exchange of thoughts probably stops us from living in our own little thought bubbles.

It is questionable at what point experience becomes thought. We are facing sense impressions and coping with the stream of thought at the same time. In some ways, perhaps we could say that the dialogue may be like a war with the possible competing demands for attention going on.

Your point about non verbal aspects of communication is important because in the processing of thought we are mostly taking more in than we can process consciously. Of course, that doesn't mean that it is forgotten. We may be asked to recall aspects of experience which we had not really thought about, such as the colour of the eyes of the person we are speaking to, and we may or may not be able to remember the correct detail. But, it does seem important to see how our thinking process involves aspects of which we are aware as well as subliminal aspects of perception. The question is whether such parts of perception are thoughts until we try to think about them?

I can see the relevance of the idea of a mirror as a way of seeing the whole process of thinking. It is also easy to see the danger of thinking in a narcissistic way, or of just in ways which enable us to buffer up our own egos. I would imagine that the one way we have of preventing this from happening is that we share our thoughts through conversing with others, and this exchange of thoughts probably stops us from living in our own little thought bubbles. — Jack Cummins

We, in a sense, hold an image, understood in the broadest sense possible, of the entire universe, including ourselves and this image is made up of every thought you've ever had, you're having, and will ever have. Writing and speaking are media that capture these images for posterity if they're given the nod of approval by the quality police.

we understand what thoughts are, but it is ... the language that gets in the way. — No One

Hey. No fair. You didn't like that answer when I gave it for the question "what is our true nature."

I feel that my thoughts seem like they are from some underlying source, such as that of a soul. — Jack Cummins

How would it feel if they weren't from some underlying source such as a "soul"? This was a serious question Jack. If you want to talk about "thoughts" then you need to get your own thinking straight. You don't want to be throwing out wild ideas about underlying sources like souls, unless there's some justification. So what it is about your thoughts that makes it seem like they are from some underlying source?

Holding a mirror up of the universe and all our own previous thoughts does in some ways sound a bit like the cross between the day of judgement and an acid trip. However, I do think that in a way we do hold up such a mirror, because no matter what model of the mind we adopt we do have a certain impression of the universe and the history of our own thoughts somewhere in our consciousness....

However, the question is how accurate our mirror is and, if we carry the mirror analogy further, we have to remember that the mirror image which we see of ourselves is round the wrong way and not really accurate because most of us are not really completely symmetrical.

I was not ignoring your comment, but simply had not got the chance to reply to the comments. I don't necessarily believe in a soul. I think that it is a term, like most others which we are accustomed to using, which is dubious. I was certainly believe in souls, but that was in the context of my Catholic upbringing. I do use the term on occasions like that of the self, or even the mind, but they are all abstract approximations. So, when I say that the thoughts come from some source, it is a statement which implies that there is something beyond the physical brain, but this could be more like Jung's collective unconscious. Or, it could be like Bergson's idea of 'mind at large'. I am just not convinced that consciousness and the brain are identical.

I suppose that it is useful in thinking about particular thoughts to consider them as having a beginning and an end, but as for the process of thought itself, this is open to question because in some ways it is hard to know when thoughts stop, and the closest may be in dreamless sleep. Certainly, when we are awake it is extremely hard to stop thinking. It is sought in various forms of meditation but to completely still one's own thoughts completely is probably an art achieved only by yogis, and probably still involves certain awareness, rather than complete emptiness.

I do wonder if the reason why most scientists are not wishing to challenge the attempt to go beyond reductionist materialism is related to fear of ostracism from the scientific community. On the other hand, I think it is partly because we have made such progress in connecting the mind to the body that many see the body and the brain as primary. It is all about which is emphasised. In my thread on dualism I definitely got to the point where nonduality seemed to be the way forward. I have began reading thinkers such as Plotinus and Huxley's perennial philosophy, but it does still seem that it is hard to place some degree of emphasis on mind or matter as being more real.

but as for the process of thought itself, this is open to question because in some ways it is hard to know when thoughts stop — Jack Cummins

You're right. We can't stop thinking outside very rare circumstances and even here it's questionable.

But now you've introduced, correctly I think, the distinction between particular thoughts and the process of thought.

Which one is it that you want to clear up on? These are different, albeit obviously related, aspects of thought.

I am not sure that we can distinguish particular thoughts from the process of thought in any absolute way because while there are breaks in consciousness and, themes within our thoughts, it is an organic structure, with many interconnected overlaps.

I have began reading thinkers such as Plotinus and Huxley's perennial philosophy, but it does still seem that it is hard to place some degree of emphasis on mind or matter as being more real. — Jack Cummins

As one of my teachers used to say, science says that the earth goes around the sun, while everyday experience says that the sun goes around the earth. The first view may be useful to science but the second is what matters in daily life.

So, it depends what you want to achieve. Personally, I believe that science knows quite a lot about matter so perhaps it ought to try and look at spirit for a change, all the more so as it seems that the scientific view of matter consisting of energy particles or fields or whatever actually comes very close to the spiritual view that matter ultimately consists of immaterial spirit.

In fact, science is unable to explain what matter ultimately consists of while criticising the idealists for being unable to explain spirit.

If it's spiritual and psychological matters you're interested in, then obviously you place less emphasis on matter. But that's something everybody has to decide for themselves.

I think that we are in the position of making decisions about how we place the emphasis on the material or the spiritual because we are coming with the vantage point of seeing the panorama of historical views, rather than just adopting one worldview necessarily.

What is interesting is how some of the Eastern thinkers really did see the physical world as illusion, or maya. I remember when I did study the module of Hinduism, I was at the time attending Christian Union and felt that the Hindu idea of Atman, man, merging with Brahman, God, made more sense to me than the idea of eternal paradise after the resurrection.

However, even within Christianity there have been different degrees of emphasis on the physical and the immaterial. In some ways, it does seem that esoteric traditions have generally given more attention to the nonmaterial. Some esoteric thinkers, especially within the esoteric tradition even interpret the idea of the fall of the angels and of mankind into a more gross physical reality.I find this approach to be interesting, but my thinking shifts between this kind of thinking, and of viewing esoteric ideas as symbolic depictions. In other words, my own thinking shifts a fair amount over the emphasis, and I keep a certain amount of flexibility but do dwell on it.

There's a whole lot there to be unpacked. First of all, it's not going to help you or us get clear about thoughts and consciousness and the brain, if you use words for things you don't necessarily believe in, like soul. So let's have no more of that.

Then there's this "abstract approximation" stuff, the soul, the self and the mind are all abstract approximations. Well what does that mean? Is it possible to say what you mean without using abstract approximations?

Your ideas about thoughts coming from a source, which you think implies something beyond the physical brain...I'm still completely in the dark about why you think any of that. And why are you not convinced that consciousness and the brain are identical?

I think that a lot of terms which we use are ambiguous. It was interesting a couple of weeks ago that there was a thread on defining the term consciousness, and it became apparent that while we use the word so often on this forum we all probably come from different understanding and usage of the term. This ranged from the perspective of the medical model to that of philosophies about states of awareness. I think that the term soul is equally ambiguous, ranging from certain religious philosophies which maintain the existence of souls as entities which can be separated from the body to ideas about soul as being about meaningful heartfelt experiences, hence, soul music.

When we engage in philosophy discussion part of it is about the analysis of terms and partly about understanding and explaining the reality behind the terms. The two are separate but closely linked, because the way we use terms is partly related to how we see reality and, alternatively, our ideas are based on our use of language.

I am not saying for sure that the mind and brain are not identical because I am not sure that it is possible to be certain in any absolute way. I grew up adopting a dualistic picture of reality, and I have certainly questioned this. However, when you look outside the perspective of thinking of science, especially the behaviourist model developed by BF Skinner, which has been so influential, it becomes apparent that the particular approach of reductionism is only one way of seeing and not the only one. Even the picture of reality in quantum physics makes a mechanical picture of reality less solid, especially the division between mind and matter. Reality, including our thoughts, may be of an energetic nature.

What is interesting is how some of the Eastern thinkers really did see the physical world as illusion, or maya. I remember when I did study the module of Hinduism, I was at the time attending Christian Union and felt that the Hindu idea of Atman, man, merging with Brahman, God, made more sense to me than the idea of eternal paradise after the resurrection. — Jack Cummins

Some Hindus, such as the followers of monistic Advaita Vedanta, yes, though the majority are dualists. These different traditions in fact correspond to different levels of teachings regarding metaphysical realities and are not necessarily incompatible in all cases.

Besides, Platonism, for example, which sees the physical world as the realm of "appearances", comes very close to the Hindu idea of the world as "illusion". On the other hand, the Hindu concept of Maya is interpreted in many different ways. For example, the world may be an "illusion" in the sense that it is projected or manifested by the Universal Consciousness or God in the same way as a feat of magic is produced by a magician, hence God is referred to as Mayin or Magician. But, for man, especially the unenlightened, the world is and remains very real. Westerners and sometimes even Indians often misunderstand these fine distinctions and may come to the wrong conclusions.

:up:

I do wonder if the reason why most scientists are not wishing to challenge the attempt to go beyond reductionist materialism is related to fear of ostracism from the scientific community. — Jack Cummins

Apparently, you're still fairly unacquainted with the history of cognitive science and the "schools" of contemporary nonreductive (supervenient, emergent) physicalism in both the philosophy of mind and neuroscience, Jack. Besides, it's much easier to derive experimentally reliable results using a reductionist approach than not – but that only gets us so far in explaining any complex phenomenon – which accounts for much of the bias rather than "fear of ostricism". Scientists tend to ostricize only other scientists who peddle "fringe", demonstrably pseudo-scientific, woo-woo (e.g. Capra, Wilbur, Leary, Jung, Chopra, Peterson, Bebe, Tipler et al). :roll:

Or maybe thoughts are just the result of one subroutine being read by another subroutine? We call these procedures "consciousness" and "subconsciousness". — SimpleUser

:up: Okay, I'll drink from that bottle ... Btw, welcome to TPF.

I am asking what does thought tell us about the nature of personal identity and about the underlying source of consciousness? — Jack Cummins

Perhaps only that "personal identity" consists in the continuity of affective memory-bodily states rather than inheres in a discrete, or concrete, "substance" independent of transient body-states (re: Buddha's anatta, Epicurus' atoms & void, Hume's bundle theory, ... Metzinger's phenomenal self modeling).

Do thoughts help to explain the nature of consciousness?

I don't think so, or not much if it all. "Thoughts" "help to explain the nature of consciousness" no more than the sight of migratory flocks of birds high overhead "help to explain" the nature of the sky.

I wonder to what extent the "I' is able to reflect upon it itself? — Jack Cummins

It's a 'strange loop', or self-referential tangled hierarchical system (vide Douglas Hofstadter ... or Thomas Metzinger); the extent of self-reflection, I suspect, corresponds to the limits of the semiotic or symbolic systems available to cognition.

What are thoughts comprised of, or composed from, and can they be reduced to matter'?

Basically, thinking is autonomic processing of environmental and bodily sensory inputs reflexively looped through memory correlations. "Thoughts", thereby, are referential (intentional?) narrative-like abstractions from – interpretive confabulations of – thinking; in other words, they are reflexive sub-vocalizations of which we are more often than not completely unaware (like e.g. breaths or stools) that tend to facilitate adaptively coordinating behaviors with perceptions.

So to the point: "thoughts" seem to be series / traces of irreducible electrochemical events occurring in network-like clusters (akin to static discharge bursts) frequently throughout structural pathways of the mammalian cortex (affective bottom-up, fast system 1) and by comparison only occasionally throughout structural pathways of the human neocortex (semiotic top-down, slow system 2).

So what it is about your thoughts that makes it seem like they are from some underlying source? — Daemon

Good question!

My educated guess – Like the eye that is necessarily absent from its own visual field, the brain, lacking internal sensory organs, is functionally brain-blind, and therefore cannot immediately perceive any source – mechanisms – of its own thoughts even as it is thinking so that the cognitive illusion of an "I-self" floating free and "essentially" disembodied persists and variations of a "soul"-of-the-gaps (or more sophisticated gap-of-the-gaps aka "nonduality") are psychologically (& culturally) confabulated to (transcendentally) tether down our "thoughts".

an acid trip — Jack Cummins

Yes, My description of thoughts was metaphorical but it isn't completely wrong to look at it that way. Nevertheless, it probably isn't a definition a scientific, formal study of thinking would use. :grin:

However, the question is how accurate our mirror — Jack Cummins

My hunch is that just as mirrors come in all shapes and sizes, our minds too exhibit an immense variety, this being the result of thoughts themselves which, in a way, determines the qualities of the reflecting surface of the mind-mirror. Since each person's mind-mirror is unique to that person, the reflections/images of reality too will display commensurate variability - this is at once our greatest strength (variety is the spice of life) and our greatest weakness (which is the correct image?). In other words, thoughts, though the aim seems to be to form a faithful image of reality, modulate other thoughts in a continuous and complex web of interactions that ultimately become worldviews.

Okay, I'll drink from that bottle ... Btw, welcome to TPF. — 180 Proof

TPF is "Transaction Processing Facility" or "Terrestrial Planet Finder"? :)

The Philosophy Forum :smirk:

Your discussion of mirrors has lead me to think of my own trip on acid, which I took twice. It was my second one, at a dance music event, with crowds of strangers and I was tripping. I went up to a mirror and I expected to see a grotesque monster staring at me. But, instead, I could see the walls and the radiator behind me, but I was not there at all. I began thinking how I must be out of my body and worried about whether I would be able to get back into it again, ever. So, I went and lay down for many hours before the trip began to end.

The reason why I am recalling this here is it could be described as the ultimate dualist trip. I am aware that it was drug induced but it did really seem as if I had lost my body. I don't know why I had this experience on acid and I don't know if other people have experienced similar ones, because none of my friends have taken acid. At the time, I I think it felt like confirmation of dualism, but as it was a number of years ago I probably don't view it in that way any longer.

I admit that I have not read much on cognitive science, and, strangely, even though I have done a fair amount of modules on psychology on various courses, it has never come into these. I do think that it is an area I probably need to read a lot more about, and I can see that it is relevant to the topic of thinking.

Some of the writers you mentioned are ones I have read, and I am not surprised that you think Jung is 'woo woo' because I realise that many people on this site take that view. But, I am a bit surprised that you view Capra in that way. What is your criticism of him? It was his book, 'The Turning Point' which I found so helpful for demystifying the new physics, and for seeing how the ideas of Descartes, especially dualism, were problematic.

Even though I realise that I need to read up on cognitive science, and probably phenomenology too, I still have some difficulty viewing thinking as some kind of electrochemical reaction. It does not seem to explain the content of thoughts, and, surely, even the cognitive theories are constructed as thought, whether expressed verbally, diagramatically, or in some other conceptual way.

Also true. But you are asking what thoughts are. So we'd at least need to be able to speak about one thought, otherwise we are just left speaking of what goes on in my head that I'm more or less aware of.

Or else, someone can say, whatever thoughts are, are part of what my brain does. But that says very little. Sure, thoughts come from the brain, not my finger.

One thing I can think of, though this may deviate from your question, is to look at some of Oliver Sack's works. He talks about people who have unique experiences, different types of thinking that ordinary people and so on.