dlorde » Mon Sep 29, 2014 11:45 am wrote:I think I understand what you mean, but I'm not entirely comfortable with your characterisation of daydreaming as subconscious thinking
rather than conscious thinking. I see myself as conscious when I'm daydreaming, (although I'm (mostly) not consciously determining the narrative), because I have conscious access to it, albeit without an explicit focus of attention, i.e. I am aware of the narrative(s). .....
... Regarding the diagram, I noticed that 'rationalising' spans both conscious and subconscious, whereas Kanheman explicitly characterises it as Type 2 (conscious, effortful) thinking. It may be that you're including the Type 1 contributions that underlie all conscious processing, but it looks odd...
Thank you dlorde, for your comments on 29th September. I have not seen Kanheman’s book and obviously cannot comment directly about his ideas. Neuro seemed to hold to the same position as you described for Kanheman, when he posted recently.
But it’s all very arbitrary. We don’t have an international committee adjudicating on what is or what is not ‘thinking’ or what is a ‘thought’. I gave some examples of a child simply conjuring up the notion of a circus, shops or a swimming pool and expressing a desire to be taken to the same. And I asked the question, could it be said that that child had had a thought about a circus, shop or swimming pool?
For that matter, we’ve all been plagued by small children pestering us with questions about anything or everything to the point where we’ve virtually told them to either shut up, or go and ask their mother (or father). Once again, the question whether every child on this planet has to have a thought about something come into their heads in order to ask the questions?
The sensory/imaging function I described, goes on in our brains from a very early age We all finish up with a virtual mini-replica in our brains of every aspect of the environment around our bodies. The obverse evidence that we have been taking everything in without being aware of the process, is when an environmental feature suddenly goes missing from around our area. Somehow the area seems naked. For this ‘feeling’ to occur, we have to have a firm set of images of all of the local ‘normals’ in our minds. The same effect occurs if a new strange object or person appears. Certainly if we see a person who is dressed or who behaves abnormally we notice immediately.
So logically, my opinion is that we sensory/image largely subconsciously. The conscious part of cerebral cortex image-building happens when we begin to become educated. You will remember picture colouring books and the first items we seem to encounter are A for Apple, B for Banana, and C for Carrot. You may remember another thread in this forum on the question of “Why do we always say ‘carrot’ when asked to name a vegetable. Of course this sensory/image building is not thought in itself, but the question to decide is whether the recall of an image in our ‘mind’s eye’ constitutes a thought.
At the child level, I believe that any indication of recall of a mental image of any kind constitutes a thought, particularly if that image results in a question of any kind. Certainly it is associated with the process of imagination, as neuro rightfully pointed out, but then I regard the process of imagination as a requirement of thinking.
As I said, it’s all very arbitrary.
My ‘RATIONALISING’ part of that diagram is the next step up from sensor/imaging. You will see that I portray it as a very thin block. I believe that reptiles have very limited sensory/imaging and very little or nil rationalisation. The latter requires a large number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and the ability to conjure up an image in the ‘mind’s eye’ and to build another image on some aspect of the first one, and a third and then, maybe continuous, train of images. I imagine that Dave Oblad’s brain would be doing this flat out most of the time. He has such a creative mind.
Given that every neuron has an average of 7000 connections to other neurons throughout our brains (I assume these connections go to other areas beyond the cerebral cortex), this is the process that makes us creative far beyond other species.
I’ve said before that my brain does this continuously at a subconscious level all day long and even during non REM sleep. The only time when I rationalise consciously is when I am thinking and writing in a forum such as this, or when I am participating in a meeting, or when I have to make or fix something or other. Hence the low percentage in my diagram for CONSCIOUS rationalisation! Obviously the ratio would be different between individuals depending on what they do every day.
It’s my personal opinion that we all do it so well that we do not realise we are doing it unless we get a prompt. Haven’t we all met an acquaintance who’s suddenly thought of the answer to a long-standing problem, and wondered where the thought came from? I imagine that Archimedes had such a train of thought when he called out “Eureka!” in the middle of his bath.
Owleye, I like the notion you raise with your chess-player example. “One difficulty with the neurological interpretations of what a thought is and what thinking is, though essential if one is going to understand it, is that it is in need of examples that lead us to understand it. For example, we take for granted that a chess player is thinking when he is contemplating her next move. And, on reaching a decision about that move makes it. And, of course, now that we have chess-playing machines, which even at the highest level of human abilities, are difficult to win against, the question arises whether we should count what the computer is doing as thinking.”
We really need as many examples as possible of the way we use the words ‘thinking’ or ‘thought’ in our everyday English usage before we can define what we are talking about. I’ve attempted to give quite a few examples and I’m open to any comments as usual about them.
The problem with the chess player of course is that he isn’t really playing against a computer; he’s playing against another human (programmer) who has worked out as many computations and permutations as possible regarding every move by the player.