Observering and Understanding Thought

[Sy Borg]

How do you mean "bailout from nature"?

I may have phrased that too colloquially. I meant something to the effect of mysterious dynamics interfering with what would have been a grim/grizzly fate. Some people get pulled out in the nick of time, other people are left to become human black holes. Aside from fighting to be my best maybe, or saying no to some of the most toxic narratives/stories that were offered me, I can't think of much else that would make me distinctly more 'worthy' of help than the next person.

I have often wondered why I've had luck in life when others seem more worthy, but I am not complaining. Serendipity? Dumb luck? It can't be discounted.

If any of us were raised by wild pack animals for long enough we would not develop a human mind. Much of what and who we are is effectively programmed in by experience. So much so that that we take it for granted and attribute much of our mind's contents to our individual selves. Yes, we are all individual :) Regular web use reveals our parrot-like nature, with web commentators operating almost like neurons passing the latest messages around - terrorists blah blah, political correctness blah blah, climate change blah blah, Trump blah blah, religion blah blah, ad infinitum.

When I look for things in my head that are truly original, well, there doesn't seem to be much. My mind is like one tiny visible cranny of a huge consciousness iceberg that consists of the shared knowledge and ideals developed by people (and others beforehand) over countless prior generations of survivors.

That's where I think the fight for claiming ownership to a novel idea is somewhat wasted, rather more importantly we should just aim to line ourselves up with the highest quality ideas we can manage. A bit like how Jordan Peterson constantly brings up the centrality of the question 'how should I act in the world'. Those are personal quests, personal journeys, and for as much as you might end up indirectly taking a near identical path to millions of people or being a cookie-cutter INTJ, ESFP, or whatever other MBTI block you go with, its almost irrelevant because on thing holds true regardless - no one can be you for you regardless of how traveled your personal trajectory through life is.

Yes, but it often takes a lot of work to dig up novel ideas and the one who does the work is rewarded.

I don't doubt our individual qualities, though it seems to me that they are subtler than they seem and feel to us.

[Burning ghost]

Thought is the dialogue that takes place in your head. When you are quiet, free of distractions, and focus your attention on thought, you will become aware of something observing thought. This simple exercise allows you to experience consciousness, which is capable of understanding thought. I would like to hear from those who have experienced it and what they discovered.

Language is telepathy. That is all there is to it. No mystery, no mumbo jumbo. I say words and know you know what they mean.

Be careful when saying things like "experience consciousness". The verbal attachment and repreentation of this or that is a representation. I do not experience consciousness anymore than I experience an experience (meaning from some "distance".)

What you are referring to is meditation. Transcendental meditation is interesting, meditation takes a lot of patience though. I once did 6 days intensive meditation. Was very interesting.

[Sy Borg]

Or, under the right conditions, that person whose set to have their mind eat itself starts having visions of exalted/radiant beings aiding and supporting them - after which their life seems like it breaks free of the fatal rut it was in. I don't know what the identity of mine was but she very much passed herself off in the Mary-Isis-Sophia type motif.

I had another thought on this. This morning my dog was lying in front of the heater, watching me. I looked back at her. We observed each other for a while and then each turned away, as is normal. This struck me as a similar situation to the one we've been talking about. That is, the observed entity, in this case me, provided the dog with less useful and compelling feedback when I watched her in return. Someone looking at you quickly loses interest (not much is going on!), and this apparently applies whether dealing with a dog or one's own mind.

This suggests to me that "I think, therefore I am" is not accurate. There is a feeling, emotional self within and underpinning the mental construct of self - our emotional animal self, our total body self; the infant and baby we once were never went away, it was just covered by layers of experience. So we are not yet brains in jars but full body systems that also incorporate large portions of the natural, cultural and technical environments - to a fair extent our bodies and minds are porous. The brain and the sentience that it facilitates are just parts of being but not the whole sensation of being.

However:

A psychologist in Italy has figured out how to induce a drug-free altered state of consciousness by asking 20 volunteers to sit and stare into each other’s eyes for 10 minutes straight. Not only did the deceptively simple task bring on strange ‘out of body’ experiences for the volunteers, it also caused them to see hallucinations of monsters, their relatives, and themselves in their partner’s face.

Perhaps staring into our own eyes, so to speak, for ten minutes straight would also induce that altered state of consciousness? If so, why? How?

The wannabe sci fi author in me thinks of minds as informational black holes - a concentration of information so dense that it opens up new informational dimensions (in the case of humans, that would be the capacity for pattern abstractions). The self then acts as the event horizon separating our mind from the stuff outside. It relentlessly sucks in all surrounding stimuli and groups the complex particulars into simpler abstractions that allow for an overview to develop. So diving down into the inner horizon of an informational black hole would perhaps lead you to another informational dimension where the abstractions themselves are lumped together, resulting in broader attributes. Or something like that :)

[Papus79]

I don't doubt our individual qualities, though it seems to me that they are subtler than they seem and feel to us.

I'd agree, the point I was making was pragmatic though - ie. no matter how many or how few people have walked almost identical paths or how many people could be considered cookie-cutter clones of a given person, it doesn't make it any less effortful for them to get up in the morning, brush their teeth, go to work, deal with a tragedy in their own life or in their family, handle existential crisis, etc.. In the bigger third-person picture our individual suffering might be interchangeable with the next person's suffering but in the first person it couldn't be farther from the truth.

-- Updated June 20th, 2017, 7:50 pm to add the following --

However:

A psychologist in Italy has figured out how to induce a drug-free altered state of consciousness by asking 20 volunteers to sit and stare into each other’s eyes for 10 minutes straight. Not only did the deceptively simple task bring on strange ‘out of body’ experiences for the volunteers, it also caused them to see hallucinations of monsters, their relatives, and themselves in their partner’s face.

Perhaps staring into our own eyes, so to speak, for ten minutes straight would also induce that altered state of consciousness? If so, why? How?

You might want to check out neutral monism. The way that line of inquiry is headed sounds like a Mack/James/Russell type of phenomena.

[Sy Borg]

My mind is like one tiny visible cranny of a huge consciousness iceberg that consists of the shared knowledge and ideals developed by people (and others beforehand) over countless prior generations of survivors.

Very nicely put.

The only thing I would say is that just because original thought is tricky (to say the least) that doesn't mean it isn't original for you. Or that your experience therefore doesn't matter, again if only to you. Funnily enough South Park cover this whole concept quite well in 'Simpsons Already Did It'. Well worth a watch in my opinion.

It's true that the nuances of our ideas will vary a little from those of others. I saw that episode :)

I don't doubt our individual qualities, though it seems to me that they are subtler than they seem and feel to us.

I'd agree, the point I was making was pragmatic though - ie. no matter how many or how few people have walked almost identical paths or how many people could be considered cookie-cutter clones of a given person, it doesn't make it any less effortful for them to get up in the morning, brush their teeth, go to work, deal with a tragedy in their own life or in their family, handle existential crisis, etc.. In the bigger third-person picture our individual suffering might be interchangeable with the next person's suffering but in the first person it couldn't be farther from the truth.

Agreed Papus. Every entity, human or otherwise, is obviously unique. As per the iceberg analogy, that "tiny, visible cranny" on the iceberg's tip is still a real entity, just that it's only a small part of a greater whole (which is not much impacted by small parts "breaking off"). If you are that particular small part then you have countless unthought impulses driving you to retain your form, drives inherited from all the survivors before you. In fight or flight we literally lose control of our minds as nature's autopilot kicks in. So, whether we are important or not, we will always matter, at least to ourselves and some others.

As a child I was fascinated by that loss of mind during fight-or-flight - how I would in a sense not be present in stress situations. I didn't like it. I wanted control, to be present, to witness what was happening with full mind. I was determined to catch myself next time something unexpected happened. Sometime later, on holidays, I fell a few metres from the side of a docked daytrip boat into the water. One moment I was walking in the sun with lunch in hand, the nest moment I was in the "icy depths" (so it felt). Now I could catch that thought! As my head broke the surface I verbalised my thought - "I don't believe it!", which greatly amused my previously-concerned father :)

So, once again, the observation of one's mind in the short term yields nothing. It seems that you need to retain that inwards focus for some time before interesting things happen.

Re: monism. I reject (and accept) both monism and dualism because they are assumptions, each is possible but not yet known.

[Atreyu]

Thought is the dialogue that takes place in your head. When you are quiet, free of distractions, and focus your attention on thought, you will become aware of something observing thought. This simple exercise allows you to experience consciousness, which is capable of understanding thought. I would like to hear from those who have experienced it and what they discovered.

As a student of meditation, my main discovery was that I am not in control of my thoughts, that they run automatically. That 'my' mind really wasn't 'mine' at all, but that it existed almost as something else besides 'me'.

So the main discovery was basically the uselessness of the mind, and its ability to deceive us. Our 'minds' make us think they are 'us', but in reality they are not 'us' at all. The mind always says 'I', as if it was what we are, but in reality our true 'I's, our true selves, are something else. The true 'I' is that which observes, and eventually learns to control, the mind, i.e. we are not our thoughts....

[Sy Borg]

Thought is the dialogue that takes place in your head. When you are quiet, free of distractions, and focus your attention on thought, you will become aware of something observing thought. This simple exercise allows you to experience consciousness, which is capable of understanding thought. I would like to hear from those who have experienced it and what they discovered.

As a student of meditation, my main discovery was that I am not in control of my thoughts, that they run automatically. That 'my' mind really wasn't 'mine' at all, but that it existed almost as something else besides 'me'.

So the main discovery was basically the uselessness of the mind, and its ability to deceive us. Our 'minds' make us think they are 'us', but in reality they are not 'us' at all. The mind always says 'I', as if it was what we are, but in reality our true 'I's, our true selves, are something else. The true 'I' is that which observes, and eventually learns to control, the mind, i.e. we are not our thoughts....

Freud would have called that the superego.

[Tamminen]

As a student of meditation, my main discovery was that I am not in control of my thoughts, that they run automatically. That 'my' mind really wasn't 'mine' at all, but that it existed almost as something else besides 'me'.

So the main discovery was basically the uselessness of the mind, and its ability to deceive us. Our 'minds' make us think they are 'us', but in reality they are not 'us' at all. The mind always says 'I', as if it was what we are, but in reality our true 'I's, our true selves, are something else. The true 'I' is that which observes, and eventually learns to control, the mind, i.e. we are not our thoughts....

My thoughts are part of my individual consciousness or empirical subject, because I can describe them. But the I who describes them can also observe, accept, criticize or reject them, and take many other attitudes at them. This I is something that cannot be described, because it has no properties, and it does not characterize me as an individual. On the contrary, I can even reject myself as an individual subject by committing suicide. I transcend myself, and in this role I can call myself the transcendental I. My view is that it is universal and connects all of us to a common flow of existence.

[3uGH7D4MLj]

I think we often confuse or conflate "thought" with language. Anyone who observes corvids solving multi-step puzzles, honey badgers plotting their escapes from enclosures and pack animals encircling their prey would be hard put to say "thought" is not involved in these activities. All available as youtube videos for the interested.
Even humans solve problems while sleeping, using their subconscious. Who has not woken up in the morning with an answer or idea to a problem troubling the day before, or who has not suddenly had an answer pop into "consciousness" after being unable to recall something, forgetting about the question, and then having the answer appear. We confuse conscious attention and language with thought and mental processing. Most mental processing is unconscious and below the level of focused attention. Language is a derivative of thought not the source. And attention is the tip of the iceburg for mental processing and "thought" not its sole content.

This is a good point. Pinker is good on the question of thinking in language. Chomsky too. We don't. So if the statement, "Thought is the dialogue that takes place in your head," means language, that's pretty limiting.

Can't say that I've ever watched myself think. I know I'm thinking all the time, but I have no idea about the actual process.