The most elemental question. What is a thought? Very infrequently it is asked - the word is tossed around left and right-, but the answer it seems would have far reaching consequences. For those dualists out there, the immediate, common-sense approach would at first seem to be on your side, yet if one prods just a bit below that easy picture-window surface, the concept may prove as difficult to dualists, as to monists. What is a thought?
Neurologist Antonio Damaiso makes an interesting definition, not of a thought, but of feeling:
“Feeling, in the pure and narrow sense of the word, was the idea of the body in a certain way.â€
Perhaps this might get us somewhere on the question of ‘what is a thought’?
How about this as a venture:
A thought is associative feelings (patterned body states) and images that often – and perhaps always in such cases – precede interpretable behavior (such as speaking, writing, and generally acting with intention). In this sense, “thoughts†are often confused with the nature of what can follow them, imagined to be bodily words unsaid, or speaking to oneself. Further, the attribution of “thoughts†is a (perhaps indispensable) aid to interpreting such behavior of others (and also of ourselves).
Any thoughts on what a ‘thought’ is? Dualists and monists alike…
One can categorize a feeling one does not sense? Explain.
Also, who or what is doing the categorization, how is it categorized?
And what exactly woud you say a “feeling” is?
A thought is an ABACUS of electrons. The strength of the electronic field is read like the beads of an abacus, and like an abacus you get a result from this count.
The counting is calculated from the shape of the allignment, like a key in a keyhole. You don’t need an observer, you need a keyhole that fits the shape. Imagine an allignment of molecules that form the shape of your door key. The molecules are built inside the keyhole, so do not have to be pushed into the hole. The keyhole is not triggered by a twist of the key, but is triggered by a filling of each orifice.
Each keyhole if slightly different for each person, so the results can be different.
The molecules are built inside the keyhole, so do not have to be pushed into the hole.
You were once at electrons, now you are are molecules. How many hops in scale do you propose? Somehow I don’t think you are answering the question, what is “thought”.
You should not be concerned about scale. Lego is a brick, it can be any size, it will always work the same way so long as you scale all of the bricks at the same time.
Isn’t what comes out the other side of the sieve behavior?
Is not thought the sieve? Or how are you seeing this?
I think the meat of ourselves is the sieve, through which whatever you’d like to describe as raw sensory data** from the world external seeps, and gets sorted through the various loops and reflexive curves of, for want of a better word, the ‘older’ brain** for things that just can’t wait for ‘thought’ to process.
After all the automatics/autonomics have had their way with this data, then thought comes into it’s element, a kind of interpretable and shareable consensus of a whole bunch of chemistry, imagine badly translated subtitles scrolling just slightly behind a incomprehensible blur of fluent chinese, catching only the most basic of its actual content. An organic ‘basic’ to make sense of all the 1’s and 0’s.
Thought is the body’s way of applying ongoing narrative to a life lived in the instant.
**Sorry Big D. - I’m feeling the poverty of my vocabulary more and more of late.
A thought is a result. Invisible actions take place in the backstage of the mind. Then the finished thought comes onto the visible performance area. It “appears” out of “nowhere” as it were. Then the planning functions of the brain can assemble the thoughts into more complex configurations.
