The difference between thought and speech

[Empiricist-Bruno]

Hello fellow thinkers and speakers,

Here, I won't go into the common definition where 'thought' is an unheard mental process but still 'reportable' out loud. Isn't it a contradiction if you are going to say out loud, 'The following are my thoughts on ...' If you open your mouth to say it, then it's no longer 'thought' right? Isn't it impossible to let others know what you are thinking without speaking about it? You may be able to deduce/ guess what others are thinking by their behavior but if you are a fool, that won't work.

If I ask you, "Don't you think it is stupid to present 'speech' as 'thought?'" Well you may answer yes, but your answer 'speaks' of your worldly concept; it doesn't 'think' about it. So that makes sense: your answers to others 'speak', they don't 'think'.

Rather, here I wish to go into a conviction that has gradually grown with me for a few decades: and that is that setting your thoughts in a solid medium (as opposed to speaking in the moment only either in voice or signs) isn't speech: it is thought.

I mean, if some machine record your signs or voice, that doesn't mean you are setting your thoughts in a solid medium; it only means that another does that, and that's not the subject of this thread. However, whether when memorizing what another is saying you are actually setting thought into speech would be a side question of interest here..

So, when we get our red light signal at an interesection, it doesn't speak to us, it is just a thought. And it's a thought that has a legal power over you. I am concluding that this is wrong because thinking should always remain free. When you are compelled to obey thoughts you are, as a matter of fact, being treated in a derogatory manner, as if you were a computer that when the X signal is entered into it, it will respond automatically with reaction Y. If not then the computer is bad and must be fixed (by fines?).

So, my point here is that if what I am saying is right, going through a red light should never be penalized other than by the evil natural consequences that can occur when you do this.

There are evil consequences to forcing people to treat thought as speech: you force people into robotic behavior and you appear to be encouraging and approving of such demeanor. I would argue that this approach is potentially injurious to the healthy development of a person. It's not helping to make others smarter, but then again, we live in a world where a lot of people don't want you smart; they want you obedient. I would argue that this isn't helping society reach its highest potential. The time has come to fix this problem?

If, as I claim, thought can be set in solid form in addition to existing in individual minds, then the question of knowing who possesses certain 'thoughts' would come up when the 'thoughts' in question appear to be located outside a living entity's body.

Through copyright, some people are believed to own what I consider to be 'thought'. That's obviously wrong as well. Thought must remain free. If some of us are greater at producing valuable thoughts, providing them with possession rights over the 'thought' isn't right; it is simply trying to adapt the capitalist system to all things, even including instances where that makes no natural sense.

[Vita]

Hello!
Your idea about thought and speech is certainly very interesting. I wonder how much of what we say we really think. Am I even thinking right now or just speaking?
I find it much easier for many things to bypass the repetitive thinking about trivialities like whether to stop at a red light. But it is scary how much people automatically pay attention to a speaker on stage and just clap without thinking about it.
I agree that copyright rules are very limiting. Our society would be farther advanced if we could improve others' designs without starting afresh each time. However, the reverse would happen without copyright. Say a new author writes a book. A renowned author, jealous of the book, might write the exact same book but sell more copies and ruin the other author. So it would be perfect to have a copyright law that allows copying after a certain amount of improvement or change.

[The Beast]

It is fine to conceptualize and add tiers of understanding. Is there a process as to how stupid becomes smart? Maybe a late gene activation or a philosophy class. In this post of so many levels, this which is thought proposes a boundary. This boundary was proposed by Kant as well. It becomes evident in a two-year-old human that has many thoughts and no speech. How do we condition thought? Is it possible to unconditioned the speech the same as a stoned dude becomes smarty pants? IMO. If the hardware is there, anything is possible even freeing the genie from the bottle.

[3017Metaphysician]

Hello fellow thinkers and speakers,

Here, I won't go into the common definition where 'thought' is an unheard mental process but still 'reportable' out loud. Isn't it a contradiction if you are going to say out loud, 'The following are my thoughts on ...' If you open your mouth to say it, then it's no longer 'thought' right? Isn't it impossible to let others know what you are thinking without speaking about it? You may be able to deduce/ guess what others are thinking by their behavior but if you are a fool, that won't work.

If I ask you, "Don't you think it is stupid to present 'speech' as 'thought?'" Well you may answer yes, but your answer 'speaks' of your worldly concept; it doesn't 'think' about it. So that makes sense: your answers to others 'speak', they don't 'think'.

Rather, here I wish to go into a conviction that has gradually grown with me for a few decades: and that is that setting your thoughts in a solid medium (as opposed to speaking in the moment only either in voice or signs) isn't speech: it is thought.

I mean, if some machine record your signs or voice, that doesn't mean you are setting your thoughts in a solid medium; it only means that another does that, and that's not the subject of this thread. However, whether when memorizing what another is saying you are actually setting thought into speech would be a side question of interest here..

So, when we get our red light signal at an interesection, it doesn't speak to us, it is just a thought. And it's a thought that has a legal power over you. I am concluding that this is wrong because thinking should always remain free. When you are compelled to obey thoughts you are, as a matter of fact, being treated in a derogatory manner, as if you were a computer that when the X signal is entered into it, it will respond automatically with reaction Y. If not then the computer is bad and must be fixed (by fines?).

So, my point here is that if what I am saying is right, going through a red light should never be penalized other than by the evil natural consequences that can occur when you do this.

There are evil consequences to forcing people to treat thought as speech: you force people into robotic behavior and you appear to be encouraging and approving of such demeanor. I would argue that this approach is potentially injurious to the healthy development of a person. It's not helping to make others smarter, but then again, we live in a world where a lot of people don't want you smart; they want you obedient. I would argue that this isn't helping society reach its highest potential. The time has come to fix this problem?

If, as I claim, thought can be set in solid form in addition to existing in individual minds, then the question of knowing who possesses certain 'thoughts' would come up when the 'thoughts' in question appear to be located outside a living entity's body.

Through copyright, some people are believed to own what I consider to be 'thought'. That's obviously wrong as well. Thought must remain free. If some of us are greater at producing valuable thoughts, providing them with possession rights over the 'thought' isn't right; it is simply trying to adapt the capitalist system to all things, even including instances where that makes no natural sense.

Hello fellow philosopher!

I'll contribute! The metaphysics of thought starts with or presupposes that "thoughts are things." The word 'things' expresses poorly the active and very vital character of the thoughts to which the mind gives life, substance, and intelligence. We see many inanimate "things" around us in the material world. For example, if we compare our creative thoughts with them we get an inferior conception of the marvelous ability of our mind in its creative capacity. And most certainly, if we once again compare our qualitative properties associated with the human experience/sentience, we quickly realize those (material) 'things' are not a complete description/explanation of mental phenomena.

When we talk about things that our mind's eyes see, and not the things our physical eyes see, we are talking in the language that is metaphysical. The language of cognition that appears to us as an independent 'thing' (thing-in-itself) is called our stream of consciousness; our flow of thoughts. We may not consciously select what object initially appears from that awareness, but we do choose to either hold that object with our attention or not, once it appears.

Consider that thinking is a purpose oriented process and, a great deal of what propels our thinking forward is the feeling of satisfaction that we get as we perceive our next thought taking us closer to our purpose or goal. The conscious awareness of having such thoughts can be easily perceived as an unending parade of feelings, images, ideas, sensations, conceptions, emotions, etc. that appear before our conscious awareness and then pass away. In many cases our Will to pick and choose from these thoughts correspond to the exciting freedom that we perceive in realizing a purposeful existence.

Finally, if one wanted to ask why or where do certain thoughts come from, we would eventually confront an existential feeling of the a priori; something fixed within the brain that causes one to ask about causes, that just is. For instance, when we ask or proclaim 'all events must have a case' or, 'all events must not have a cause', what is causing us to wonder about that? The infamous synthetic a priori causes this sense of wonder or intuition about a 'thing' (an object of thought) that is mysteriously fixed, or innate to the human species.

For if no intuition could be given corresponding to the concept, the concept would still be a thought, so far as its form is concerned, but would be without any object, and no knowledge of anything would be possible by means of it. So far as I could know, there would be nothing, and could be nothing, to which my thought could be applied. B146


I would add that not only without intuition, but without the metaphysical Will (the will to even want to make choices about 'things') causing the need to wonder about causes, we would have that unending stream of consciousness (as described above) that has no purpose. Like a leaking faucet or flow of unending thoughts that does not reach the turbine.

Of course, arguably without a Subject, the flow of ideas either doesn't exist subjectively or empirically (or exist at all), but instead only exists in a theoretical state of objectively (perhaps in an independent existence of some kind waiting to be realized-process philosophy). The so-called emergence of conscious existence itself can be thought of (no pun intended) as being much like abstract mathematical models' describing phenomena; the tree that falls without the Subject to hear it, still falls.

[Tom Butler]

As I understand current thinking, our mostly unconscious mind is immersed in a mêlée of environmental signals, mostly from our five senses ... but also from other minds. Our mind is apparently hardwired to decide about that sensed information before it is relayed to our conscious perception. This "filtering" is based on attention and worldview. As I would model that filtering, our mind decides if it is interested and how well it agrees. The result is a possible ignore, possible reject or possible agree. Usually, it will be a conditional agree resulting in a modification of the initial information to make it more agree with worldview.



If this is reasonably true, it is useful to question how perception is formed from the perspective of our mind. When we ask about thought to speech, we seem to be using a body-centric perspective. That is limiting.

[stevie]

If you open your mouth to say it, then it's no longer 'thought' right?

It appears to me that there is accompanying thought when speech sets in and that the verbal expression of speech is based on that thought. It is just that "'The following are my thoughts on ...'" actually refer to some preceding thought no to the thought accompaying the verbal expression which actually is expressed. This is so because spontaneous thought usually doesn't have the structure of spoken language and thus has to be transformed into a structure that complies with the rules of language to be linguistically expressible.

[JackDaydream]

Hello fellow thinkers and speakers,

Here, I won't go into the common definition where 'thought' is an unheard mental process but still 'reportable' out loud. Isn't it a contradiction if you are going to say out loud, 'The following are my thoughts on ...' If you open your mouth to say it, then it's no longer 'thought' right? Isn't it impossible to let others know what you are thinking without speaking about it? You may be able to deduce/ guess what others are thinking by their behavior but if you are a fool, that won't work.

If I ask you, "Don't you think it is stupid to present 'speech' as 'thought?'" Well you may answer yes, but your answer 'speaks' of your worldly concept; it doesn't 'think' about it. So that makes sense: your answers to others 'speak', they don't 'think'.

Rather, here I wish to go into a conviction that has gradually grown with me for a few decades: and that is that setting your thoughts in a solid medium (as opposed to speaking in the moment only either in voice or signs) isn't speech: it is thought.

I mean, if some machine record your signs or voice, that doesn't mean you are setting your thoughts in a solid medium; it only means that another does that, and that's not the subject of this thread. However, whether when memorizing what another is saying you are actually setting thought into speech would be a side question of interest here..

So, when we get our red light signal at an interesection, it doesn't speak to us, it is just a thought. And it's a thought that has a legal power over you. I am concluding that this is wrong because thinking should always remain free. When you are compelled to obey thoughts you are, as a matter of fact, being treated in a derogatory manner, as if you were a computer that when the X signal is entered into it, it will respond automatically with reaction Y. If not then the computer is bad and must be fixed (by fines?).

So, my point here is that if what I am saying is right, going through a red light should never be penalized other than by the evil natural consequences that can occur when you do this.

There are evil consequences to forcing people to treat thought as speech: you force people into robotic behavior and you appear to be encouraging and approving of such demeanor. I would argue that this approach is potentially injurious to the healthy development of a person. It's not helping to make others smarter, but then again, we live in a world where a lot of people don't want you smart; they want you obedient. I would argue that this isn't helping society reach its highest potential. The time has come to fix this problem?

If, as I claim, thought can be set in solid form in addition to existing in individual minds, then the question of knowing who possesses certain 'thoughts' would come up when the 'thoughts' in question appear to be located outside a living entity's body.

Through copyright, some people are believed to own what I consider to be 'thought'. That's obviously wrong as well. Thought must remain free. If some of us are greater at producing valuable thoughts, providing them with possession rights over the 'thought' isn't right; it is simply trying to adapt the capitalist system to all things, even including instances where that makes no natural sense.

One major difference between thought and speech is that speech is more of deliberate intent. With thought it is like the assembling process. It can involve inner speech, like the dialogue of different competing thoughts. However, there is more control and volition in speech, and this implies to ideas voiced through chosen words. Writing is part of this and more so, because it is etched in text and less spontaneous than speech. It is possible to be mindless or careless in spoken word because it may be just as easy to speak rather than thinking about what one is going to say, although there may not be that much reflective time and space in the act of conversation. The planning process is important. For example, if going for a job interview, or even a doctor's appointment, it is useful to think iin advance what one wishes to say, even though it may this may be have to be modified according to what the other person says. This requires thinking and reflection in the process of communication.

[3017Metaphysician]

As I understand current thinking, our mostly unconscious mind is immersed in a mêlée of environmental signals, mostly from our five senses ... but also from other minds. Our mind is apparently hardwired to decide about that sensed information before it is relayed to our conscious perception. This "filtering" is based on attention and worldview. As I would model that filtering, our mind decides if it is interested and how well it agrees. The result is a possible ignore, possible reject or possible agree. Usually, it will be a conditional agree resulting in a modification of the initial information to make it more agree with worldview.



If this is reasonably true, it is useful to question how perception is formed from the perspective of our mind. When we ask about thought to speech, we seem to be using a body-centric perspective. That is limiting.

TB!

Interesting, when you use the concept of the unconscious mind I think of Freudian behavior. I wonder why Freud, for example, replaced the subconscious mind with the concept of the unconscious mind:

Freud used the term "subconscious" in 1893[4][5] to describe associations and impulses that are not accessible to consciousness.[6] He later abandoned the term in favor of unconscious, noting the following:

If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically – to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness – or qualitatively – to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious.[7][5]


According to Freud, thoughts and emotions outside of our awareness continue to exert an influence on our behaviors, even though we are unaware (unconscious) of these underlying influences.

The unconscious can include repressed feelings, hidden memories, habits, thoughts, desires, and reactions. Memories and emotions that are too painful, embarrassing, shameful, or distressing to consciously face are stored in the enormous reservoir that makes up the unconscious mind.

In Freudian theory, the human mind is structured into two main parts: the conscious and unconscious mind. The conscious mind includes all the things we are aware of or can easily bring into awareness. The unconscious mind, on the other hand, includes all of the things outside of our awareness—all of the wishes, desires, hopes, urges, and memories that we aren't aware of, yet continue to influence behavior.


What strikes me as intriguing is this notion of a some-thing existing 'outside' the mind. It's as if a parade of novelty or new thoughts are out there waiting to be realized. Another sense of becoming over being, as it were. At the very least, proof that life is a process (process philosophy/theology/teleology). Those kinds of qualitative differences seem to transcend the Darwinian basic 'survival of the fittest' needs for reproductive success. When it comes to consciousness and quality of life concerns that all individuals have (what keeps people from killing themselves), evolutionary theories seem woefully inadequate.

[3017Metaphysician]

Ahh, teaching moment. I've been on a Unity of Opposites soapbox lately; I didn't realize that I think I've answered my own question as to why Freud had chosen conscious/unconscious terminology over conscious/subconscious. Freud said:

"The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious.[7][5]"

Unity of Opposites philosophy, as well as Kantian metaphysics of antimonies/contradictory determinations all now seem to have pragmatic implications there!

Perhaps like quantum observation (Wheeler's PAP), when one puts conscious thoughts out there in the universe, the probabilities present themselves as logically possible realizations! The synthetic a priori is alive and well!!

Keep philosophizing!

As you were

[Empiricist-Bruno]

Hello!
Your idea about thought and speech is certainly very interesting. I wonder how much of what we say we really think. Am I even thinking right now or just speaking?

Thanks for the reply and compliment, Vita.
There are other implications to my worldview about this issue of knowing the difference between thoughts or speech that would cause trouble in the business of wills and inheritance.
Since a will is a written document, it contains thought and not speech. So, a person that correctly differentiate thought from speech understands the natural invalidity of wills. So, when a person dies, the issue of what to do with the deceased's possessions needs to be reassesed or reviewed. For instance, people who remember or claim to remember the expressed wishes of the deceased person might be in a position to direct the inheritance but that opens up a can of worms.

I also like your question as to whether you are thinking or just speaking right now. What I'll say next may upset you a bit because most people have accepted---and are accepting--- electronic communication as the word/ voice of another located elsewhere.

My rejection of this concept has been interpreted by some others as a personal rejection of them since they think they move through the electric wires. So, what I have to say, from my current perspective is that you are now to me only 'written words' and so, according to my theory, you are being perceived by me as 'read thought'. However, there is indeed a difference between what you are perceived as and what you really are. Your question also lacks some specifics since if I were right next to you as you dictate this email message to your assistant, I would consider that communication as speech. But if you are referring to me as some kind of worldly (and imaginary?) god who can look and assess your thoughts as they appear (or perhaps even enter your thoughts there) from far away then what you think wouldn't be speech; it would remain thoughts.

Does that sounds right and understandable?

[Tom Butler]

The synthetic a priori is alive and well!!
As you were

"Unity of Opposites" seems a little like asking if the implicate order requires the existence of all states, even though only one may be experiences at a time. It is an interesting philosophical question. I have no idea, but my first thought is state analysis. If we examine the possible states of a function, each next state is predicted by the function.

I am not sure I properly understand Bohm's Implicate Order. I think he would argue that the opposites are implied by naturally occurring principles. In a no magic allowed reality, the operation of everything is predicted by hardwired principles. In the end, I am a metaphysical reductionist because I think that is a true condition of all of reality, be it constrained by the physical or included by the etheric.

One of the shining lights of my study is James Carpenter's First Sight Theory https://ethericstudies.org/first-sight-theory/. Here it is paraphrased:

Proposition One: People sense their environment psychically as well as with their physical senses.

Proposition Two: People process this information unconsciously, and it is the conclusion of that processing that they are aware of and react to … not what has been psychically or physically sensed or unconsciously considered. A person might psychically sense someone near or far, a person’s actions and apparently their thoughts when they are expressed as intention.

Therefore

The following 13 corollaries address the perceptual process: (paraphrasing):

1. Personalness Corollary: The unconscious processes that constitute consciousness are personal and deliberate.
The more important it is to us, the more we unconsciously pay attention.

2. 2a. Ubiquity Corollary Part 1: Psi sensing is not limited by time or distance.

2b. Ubiquity Corollary Part 2: Psychokinesis contributes to the formation of experience by bringing intention to bear upon the physical processes of the nervous system.

3. Integration Corollary: Other preconscious processes are processed together with psi in a rapid, holistic, efficient, unconscious manner to format experience and action.

4. Anticipation Corollary: The mind seeks to anticipate events.
If this is true, a characteristic of the Attention Complex in a life field would be to always look for patterns with which to recognize emerging potential futures.

5. Weighting and Signing Corollary: The importance of sensory and extrasensory information is weighted as being more or less important before it is acted upon.

6. Summation Corollary: The content of conscious experience, emotional states and behavioral choices are constituted in a summative way by unconscious thought.

7. Integration Corollary: Other preconscious processes are processed together with psi in a rapid, holistic, efficient, unconscious manner to format experience and action.

5. Intentionality Corollary: Including or excluding information is a function of unconscious intention in regard to an element of potential meaning.

6. Switching Corollary: A person will be fairly consistent in how information is processed, (but) may switch in how information is weighted, the sign attributed to it, and therefore, whether or not it is included in behavior. This switching will occur rapidly or slowly depending on the consistency and purity (focus) of unconscious intention, and this, in turn, is determined by the relative weight of the information over time, situational factors that promote or diminish critical analysis, changes of approach in a task and mood.
Switching, which is influenced by personality style, is not necessarily a good thing.

7. Bidirectionality Corollary: In this summative process, the person may turn toward information (signed positively) to include it in the construction of experience, affect or action, or turn away from information (signed negatively) and exclude it.

8. Intentionality Corollary: Including or excluding information is a function of unconscious intention in regard to an element of potential meaning.

9. Switching Corollary: A person will be fairly consistent in how information is processed, (but) may switch in how information is weighted, the sign attributed to it, and therefore, whether or not it is included in behavior. This switching will occur rapidly or slowly depending on the consistency and purity (focus) of unconscious intention, and this, in turn, is determined by the relative weight of the information over time, situational factors that promote or diminish critical analysis, changes of approach in a task and mood.

10. Extremity Corollary: The frequency of switching affects the relative density of accumulated additive or subtractive references to the meaning in question. Rapid switching renders potential meaning irrelevant to ongoing experience.

11. Inadvertency and Frustration Corollary: Information gathered via psi is not available to conscious experience but does contribute to the formation of conscious experience by the arousal of anticipatory networks of ideas and feelings (assuming that they are heavily weighted, afforded slow switching and approached with the intention of assimilation). Because of this arousal, their action can be glimpsed consciously only by observing thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are inadvertent; that is, not intentional and not obviously caused by any current experiences. Someone who has become skillful in interpreting them is thought of as relatively psychic.
My effectiveness as a mental medium has always been highest when impressions come to me which are unexpected. The surprise factor is an indicator for me that the information is less likely to be stream of consciousness storytelling by my mind based on environmental clues.

12. Liminality Corollary: The arousal of anticipatory networks of ideas and feelings resulting from unconscious psi information may be considered liminal ones, in terms of the boundary between conscious and unconscious thought. Habitual interest in liminal experiences facilitates expression of psi processes (openness), leading to unconscious reference to psi material (and other streams of unconscious material). A more positive, open, secure state of mind will tend to facilitate reference to a broader spectrum of contextual, potentially liminal experience.
-------------------------------------------
First Sight Theory has gained some acceptance in parapsychology. I use it as the rule set for the conscious-unconscious interface--the diagram I included in this thread.

A last note is that seekers after spiritual maturity (discerning Intellect) seek to align their worldview with the actual nature3 of reality. In effect, that is the same as becoming conscious of unconscious processes. It is a measure of a good medium or psychic.

[Empiricist-Bruno]

As I understand current thinking, our mostly unconscious mind is immersed in a mêlée of environmental signals, mostly from our five senses ... but also from other minds. Our mind is apparently hardwired to decide about that sensed information before it is relayed to our conscious perception. This "filtering" is based on attention and worldview

I would argue thata person's training does quite a bit of filtering too. A worldview can be understood as a training or culture.

As a matter of fact, I am starting to see how culture is key in determining our view of thought versus speech. Say you end up living among people who delimit thought and speech as I suggest, then for them, to rely on written wills to determine who gets what after a person's death is sheer idiocy; it's for people who can't tell appropriately the difference between the two and such failure to understand helps to generate madness simply to facilitate economic ideas and economic culture that are destructive to our environment but enable a certain creed to feel dominant.

So, the differentiation of word and speech could open the door to a new culture within the world that would perhaps have difficulty finding a foothold as it would contradict capitalistic culture.

[The Beast]

The synthetic a priori is alive and well!!
As you were

"Unity of Opposites" seems a little like asking if the implicate order requires the existence of all states, even though only one may be experiences at a time. It is an interesting philosophical question. I have no idea, but my first thought is state analysis. If we examine the possible states of a function, each next state is predicted by the function.

I am not sure I properly understand Bohm's Implicate Order. I think he would argue that the opposites are implied by naturally occurring principles. In a no magic allowed reality, the operation of everything is predicted by hardwired principles. In the end, I am a metaphysical reductionist because I think that is a true condition of all of reality, be it constrained by the physical or included by the etheric.

One of the shining lights of my study is James Carpenter's First Sight Theory https://ethericstudies.org/first-sight-theory/. Here it is paraphrased:

Proposition One: People sense their environment psychically as well as with their physical senses.

Proposition Two: People process this information unconsciously, and it is the conclusion of that processing that they are aware of and react to … not what has been psychically or physically sensed or unconsciously considered. A person might psychically sense someone near or far, a person’s actions and apparently their thoughts when they are expressed as intention.

Therefore

The following 13 corollaries address the perceptual process: (paraphrasing):

1. Personalness Corollary: The unconscious processes that constitute consciousness are personal and deliberate.
The more important it is to us, the more we unconsciously pay attention.

2. 2a. Ubiquity Corollary Part 1: Psi sensing is not limited by time or distance.

2b. Ubiquity Corollary Part 2: Psychokinesis contributes to the formation of experience by bringing intention to bear upon the physical processes of the nervous system.

3. Integration Corollary: Other preconscious processes are processed together with psi in a rapid, holistic, efficient, unconscious manner to format experience and action.

4. Anticipation Corollary: The mind seeks to anticipate events.
If this is true, a characteristic of the Attention Complex in a life field would be to always look for patterns with which to recognize emerging potential futures.

5. Weighting and Signing Corollary: The importance of sensory and extrasensory information is weighted as being more or less important before it is acted upon.

6. Summation Corollary: The content of conscious experience, emotional states and behavioral choices are constituted in a summative way by unconscious thought.

7. Integration Corollary: Other preconscious processes are processed together with psi in a rapid, holistic, efficient, unconscious manner to format experience and action.

5. Intentionality Corollary: Including or excluding information is a function of unconscious intention in regard to an element of potential meaning.

6. Switching Corollary: A person will be fairly consistent in how information is processed, (but) may switch in how information is weighted, the sign attributed to it, and therefore, whether or not it is included in behavior. This switching will occur rapidly or slowly depending on the consistency and purity (focus) of unconscious intention, and this, in turn, is determined by the relative weight of the information over time, situational factors that promote or diminish critical analysis, changes of approach in a task and mood.
Switching, which is influenced by personality style, is not necessarily a good thing.

7. Bidirectionality Corollary: In this summative process, the person may turn toward information (signed positively) to include it in the construction of experience, affect or action, or turn away from information (signed negatively) and exclude it.

8. Intentionality Corollary: Including or excluding information is a function of unconscious intention in regard to an element of potential meaning.

9. Switching Corollary: A person will be fairly consistent in how information is processed, (but) may switch in how information is weighted, the sign attributed to it, and therefore, whether or not it is included in behavior. This switching will occur rapidly or slowly depending on the consistency and purity (focus) of unconscious intention, and this, in turn, is determined by the relative weight of the information over time, situational factors that promote or diminish critical analysis, changes of approach in a task and mood.

10. Extremity Corollary: The frequency of switching affects the relative density of accumulated additive or subtractive references to the meaning in question. Rapid switching renders potential meaning irrelevant to ongoing experience.

11. Inadvertency and Frustration Corollary: Information gathered via psi is not available to conscious experience but does contribute to the formation of conscious experience by the arousal of anticipatory networks of ideas and feelings (assuming that they are heavily weighted, afforded slow switching and approached with the intention of assimilation). Because of this arousal, their action can be glimpsed consciously only by observing thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are inadvertent; that is, not intentional and not obviously caused by any current experiences. Someone who has become skillful in interpreting them is thought of as relatively psychic.
My effectiveness as a mental medium has always been highest when impressions come to me which are unexpected. The surprise factor is an indicator for me that the information is less likely to be stream of consciousness storytelling by my mind based on environmental clues.

12. Liminality Corollary: The arousal of anticipatory networks of ideas and feelings resulting from unconscious psi information may be considered liminal ones, in terms of the boundary between conscious and unconscious thought. Habitual interest in liminal experiences facilitates expression of psi processes (openness), leading to unconscious reference to psi material (and other streams of unconscious material). A more positive, open, secure state of mind will tend to facilitate reference to a broader spectrum of contextual, potentially liminal experience.
-------------------------------------------
First Sight Theory has gained some acceptance in parapsychology. I use it as the rule set for the conscious-unconscious interface--the diagram I included in this thread.

A last note is that seekers after spiritual maturity (discerning Intellect) seek to align their worldview with the actual nature3 of reality. In effect, that is the same as becoming conscious of unconscious processes. It is a measure of a good medium or psychic.

As I make myself a cup a tea with the root of irony, I propose that sculptor aligns the self with proposition 2 and the apparent thought of “the soul” (an intention of ownership).
We then apply corollary 11: Inadvertency and frustration. From Sculptor, It is a clear consistent reaction with no extremity corollary. Then he may apply integration corollary to instantiate the extremity corollary. Maybe he should use first the bi-directional corollary to soften the psi energies. The switching. Before recommending switching, I will need more info as to why it is a bad thing.

[Tom Butler]

I would argue that a person's training does quite a bit of filtering too.

I agree. From my experience, worldview is the arbiter of what we consciously experience. I generalize that worldview is like a database containing human instincts, memory, cultural training and acquired understanding. Cultural training is probably the most influential, but how it influences perception is apparently greatly biased by instincts. Altruistic influences seem to require a lot of determination while human instincts are more spontaneous.

I refer to the Creative Process as changes in reality are expressed via personality’s attention on an imagined outcome with the intention to make it so. That process builds worldview. A spiritual seeker is one who consciously seeks to manage that process. Since our primary mode of influence on the perceptual process is intention, a good way to manage worldview is by habitually examining the implications of our expressions.

[The Beast]

It would be my opinion that although experiential and informative the corollaries do vaguely resemble psychiatric procedures that are used in therapy cases and do not correlate with the actual methods of multisensory processes and their chemistries. Moreover, let’s not forget Freud’s root of human behavior when assessing “instincts”. Another way: It would be that language and reactions of the limbic system may have their own methods and personal space. IMO they are dominant structures in a high percentage of humans and therefore dominant in the structures of Society. Finally, to intention: I might bring the transcendental dialectic definition: “This as the study of the fallacious attribution of objective reality to the perceptions by the mind of external objects” I will use it if I ever take to the couch as the first question will be: What brings you here today/…tonight?