Intelligence and Thought

Kinfonet Discussion
43

If we give a number to the points already made, then the limitations of thought will become more clear (outlined in the response given after the quoted passage):

  1. Thought is not transcendent or spiritual. It is a material process in the brain.
  2. Thought is merely a pointer. It is not the actual thing being pointed to.
  3. Thought is parasitic on past experiences and sense perceptions, which have been stored up in the brain as memory. So thought is rooted in the past.
  4. Thought is conditioned by past knowledge and thought.
  5. Thought as mental time removes us from the present moment, occupying the mind in imaginary time.
  6. The contents of thought are not actual (similar to point number 2).
  7. Thought is only ever a limited, fragmentary abstraction of a situation (i.e. a situation considered in its living wholeness, its living present moment actuality).
44

So:

  1. Thought is not spiritual
  2. Thought (with respect to its content) is not actual
  3. Thought is the past
  4. Thought is conditioned
  5. Thought is not the means of contacting the present moment: in fact it is barrier to the present
  6. Similar to point number 2
  7. Thought is limited and fragmentary, meaning that is not the means of contacting or comprehending life, relationship or any situation or actuality in its wholeness
45

Is good for me.

  • Thought is essentially memory. It is the retrieval or revival or recognition or recollection of previously stored representations (in the form of images, ideas, symbols, words); these being the abstract mental representations of experiences and incidents that have occurred in the past.

“Thought is essentially memory” is a bit too strong for me. “Thought draws upon memory” works better. But it’s no biggie, not worth arguing over.

Before looking at other aspects of ‘mind’, if we look at the points that have already made about thought above, does it not become clear in which ways thought is significantly limited?

Thought’s limitations: Thought tends to see fragments rather than wholes. Thought is biased by the thinker’s conditioning. Thinking tends to kick you out of attending to non-thought-centered actualities. Thinking is dualistic in nature: a subject thinks of objects. Thought can be fooled into thinking things are true/real that are actually false/unreal. Accuracy of thought depends on accuracy of stored knowledge. Thought is deeply habit-driven, our dependency on it is similar to addiction.

For the sake of the breadth of the exploration, we should eventually look at what thought can do.

46

I would say that thought is memory. If there is a content of thought that has not been put there by memory, then it is not thought but a fresh perception. So all thought is memory.

Not “tends to see in fragments”. Thought is a series of fragments: limited sequential and fragmentary abstractions/representations of a situation in its wholeness.

Agreed.

Yes. “Non thought-centred actualities” such as the living present moment, the living quality of actual relationship, life, etc.

Yes. The content of thought, which is never actual, can be mistaken by the mind for a living actuality.

So if one wishes to find out the living quality of the present moment, or to find out what love or compassion or intelligence is, what actual relationship is, what life is in its wholeness, it is clear that thought is not the correct instrument to employ.

We have already said what thought can do: thought can represent in images, ideas, symbols, words, it can recollect, it can abstract, it can produce theories, it can use logic, it can invent, etc - all of which are necessary to make technology, art, literature, communicate through words, and so on.

47

Thank you both for this comprehensive explanation.

On this point, I do see a nuance difference. For instance, looking at the so-called future, this is a build-up on the past and a supposed creative progression where new things are imaged and thus no memory. However, it does have the limitation of not starting from a total image but from an incomplete picture.

I would say the ground, the source is the past and because of that limited.

48

I have probably not understood your linguistic meaning here Wim (it is the same issue I have had before of not understanding your English sentences), but are you saying here that

  1. when we project ourselves into the future using imagination, this involves new images that have come into being independently of memory?

Or are you saying that

  1. technology (“the future”) is always advancing because of breakthroughs in our scientific enquiry, and that these breakthroughs exist independently of memory?

If you mean 1), my reply would be that any image thought can conceive, whether in the projection of imagination or in daily life, has its roots in memory. For example, one can imagine a unicorn (which has no objective existence), but the unicorn is a combination of a horse and a horned animal (both of which are memories from experience).

If you mean 2), then my answer would be that scientific breakthroughs require some kind of insight (i.e. partial insight). Partial insight is not based on memory or thought, but is insight into a limited area of thought.

However, I may have misunderstood your meaning, because you end by saying that

with which I agree with you.

49

Absolutely agree with those dot points James. I would only add that thought is associative and parts of the brain are responsible for creating narrative (which serves to make sense of the past and add predictive value too). There are continual loops (default mode networks) that are constantly putting us in the context of self and other, and I would say our obsession with our subjective experience of thought was born from this endless stream of activity.
But as Krishnamurti encourages, observing the mind and its tendencies has helped me to see how thought for the brain is the same as beating for the heart, although I do not give my heartbeat such attention!). I love K’s conversations with David Bohm re this

50

Yes. My understanding of thought is that it is essentially an extension of the senses, a mental tool to aid the organism in making sense of its environment using one’s stored background experience and knowledge.

Thought makes judgements - which are essentially associative best guesses, based on previously stored up experience and knowledge - about the world of present experience, present sense-perception, to help the organism make correct practical choices for its survival and flourishing.

So thought has its right place. It is necessary for survival. It will always have its own movement in the brain, like

The only problem is when associative thought dominates the brain and becomes a mental tyrant. A brain dominated by thought takes the random associations of imagination and memory for real things, for actualities, and thereby loses contact with the actual.

As I understand it, intelligence is then to see this problem clearly, wholly, so that thought has its right place, but no longer interferes where it is unnecessary.

51

Thanks James. Yes I think the subject of free will (or lack thereof!) comes in to play here based on the programming of the brain and that the brain shows signs of decision making and association seconds before we become consciously aware of the thought. I would go so far as saying all thought is delusional in that it is a unique combination of stored experience (so around 8 billion versions of reality). And I totally agree re the quality of thought (and its impact on our emotional experience). We are imploding as a species I feel, as our machinery has outsmarted our ability to use it. But I’m not sure about ‘intelligence’ in its traditional definition being ‘right seeing’ (and ‘actual reality’ is a whole other subject!). Perhaps being evolved? Gaining wisdom? Only that I would say most of our thinking is unnecessary regurgitation, it has a tendency toward a negativity bias (prone to all sorts of dysfunction) and yes, is an obstacle to the only life there is and ever has been: the present moment

52

This seems to me a too simple argument.

On the one hand, I admire your almost surgical approach and on the other, I am left with the feeling :
‘Within the whole there are no borders!’.

So as attractive as your explanation is to adopt it is too analytical for me. There is no openness to a possibly different explanation, the organic , the living seems to have disappeared. This I don’t have from the Bohm - Kishnamurti dialogues.

Unfortunately I cannot articulate it better or come up with counter-arguments.

53

Yes. This is interesting. Conscious awareness is always late. I wonder if where there is total attention (which is not a conscious process, according to K) there is no more lateness? - But this is another matter.

Could you explain a little more what you mean here Kym?

Why do you object to intelligence ‘seeing correctly’? What is the particular issue you have with this way of articulating it?

And what is your objection to the words ‘actual reality’? (by which was meant the distinction between a thought-created reality, and the reality or actuality of one’s sense-perceptions, of nature, of the objective world, etc).

54

Are you able to express what it is you object to here Wim? Are you objecting to my reasoning, my logic? Or are you objecting to the statement that all imagination is born from the past (the past being knowledge, as memory, stored up from previous experience)?

I am not being argumentative, I am simply trying to understand your point of view.

You may be aware that David Bohm made a distinction between the creative imagination and fantasy.

Creative imagination - such as the creative imagination of a great artist - involves creative insight. While fantasy is just the movement of thought from the past.

Perhaps this distinction helps?

55

The traditional definition of the word intelligence (and testing of it) is using the very thing that we are saying is being overridden: memory/thinking. Whereas wisdom in my experience emerges from a space… a stillness, openness, a potential. It’s like the victor frankl quote: between stimulus and response there is a space…

And if everyone’s perception is obscured by thought, how can we speak to an objective reality? There can’t be one given what we have already concluded about thought. There can be an individual direct experience, but to then agree on that with another would bring back in thought and conditioning

56

I don’t quite follow what you are saying here Kym? If you have read the thread we are posting on you will see that I have said that for me intelligence has to do with quick perception, sensitivity, heightened awareness, attention holistically in the present moment (which implies “stillness, space, openness”). Intelligence for me is a form of creative perception. This is not the traditional view of intelligence as I.Q. (i.e. the intelligence of thought and memory).

This issue has been discussed many times on Kinfonet. Just recently there was a thread in which this topic was being explored:

So for me, there is a distinction between conceptual thinking (living in thought) and sense-perception (which can be distorted by thought, but left to itself perceives the world adequately).

So:

  • When we think, we are living in “reality” (to use Krishnamurti’s and Bohm’s language above).

  • When we perceive without the gross interference of thought we are living in “actuality”.

  • When thought (and the thought created ‘me’, along with all the thought-created contents of consciousness) has come completely to an end - if this is possible for us - then we are living in “truth” according to Krishnamurti.

I hope you don’t find this too confusing.

57

Must admit I’m still not convinced that perceptual and conceptual should be split. But even if we assume they are, what about the functional patterns of thought, its behaviors? A new way of thinking is built on old ways of thinking, sure, but it also adds genuine newness into the brew. As the integralists would say: Include and transcend.

I agree that conventional thinking sees in fragments. But I am entertaining the possibility that there is thinking that sees the whole, If such a thing exists, I doubt many people are up to it.

Good. I’d add that thought/thinking can solve problems, create, destroy, make decisions, invent and adopt and thwart moral codes, learn, imagine, daydream, analyze, reflect, communicate, plan, time travel, process emotions and information, form and store and retrieve memories, adapt, conceptualize, dream, extrapolate, etc. ad infinitum (well, maybe not infinitum). Its powers are truly, in a word: awesome. And dangerous as all get-out!

58

I don’t feel it does. Whatever newness there is which is injected into thought comes from creative perception, awareness, intelligence, insight, etc. It does not come from thought.

You are still assuming that a thought can exist de nouveau, out of nothing. But thought is not a miracle. Thought is the image-capture of memory of experience, stored up in the brain chemically and physically, and recycled (through associative reaction) as thought. There is no such thing as a thought which is not already based on past experience and knowledge. So thought is always from the known, from the past, as memory.

You seem not to accept this point, but we have been over it a dozen times or more, and you have nowhere convincingly explained how thought can exist independently of past knowledge and experience.

Sot thought is always the past. Creative perception - where it exists - is the new.

I think we can be certain that thinking does not see the whole, so such a thing does not exist. You seem not to accept this, but - as with thought being “new” - you have nowhere explained clearly and coherently how a fragmentary movement (thoughts are fragmentary by nature) can perceive or be in contact with a situation in its wholeness.

Awesome, yes. But the basis for the religion you seem to be intent on making it into? no. All thought is limited, and incapable of perceiving the living truth of life.

I feel that unless this is clearly understood, we will go around and around in these discussions to no purpose.

The memory of an experience is not the actual experiencing of it. The actual experiencing of it can only happen in the present moment of perceiving and living - not by regurgitating past memory (thought).

59

I suppose you know that one can be integral with an illusion? For me, integralism is just a word. Knowledge is not integral. One can delude oneself into thinking one has knowledge of the whole, but this is an illusion that knowledge has produced.

I think, Rick, it is worth asking why one wants to live in knowledge? What is the drive, the purpose, the meaning of wanting to live in thought and knowledge, and to invest them with mystery and miracle?

I can see that this is clearly a religion for some people.

Maybe it because it is satisfying to spend time escaping into the imagination.

When one reads a good book, or watches a really well made, well acted drama :performing_arts:, one can escape into a rich, imaginative world, and forget about the actual world. It is both fun and necessary to do this from time to time. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the imaginative release of great fiction, or of listening to beautiful music, and so on.

But there is clearly a difference between living in one’s imagination for a while, and living there permanently. To live permanently in one’s imagination is to be insane. It may be comfortable or fun to live in one’s thoughts, but thoughts are just thoughts. They are not real.

The danger of living in one’s thoughts is that one begins to lose contact with reality, with what is actually there to be perceived and to live.

And - at least at the level of rhetoric - you seem to me to be wanting to establish a worldview in which thought encompasses the whole of reality, in which thought is sacred, and so making an excuse for the mind to live completely divorced from the actuality of the world, of human relationships, war, nature, the destruction of nature, etc - as well as from the possibility of discovering true love, true compassion. You want to live in thought, and to integrate love, compassion and insight into thought.

60

Please let’s steer away from the cul de sac this yes/no volleying is heading towards. Can we reset and return to our earlier agreement, and restart from there:

61

Good question, definitely worth its own thread.

I’d say mind is sacred, though my understanding of ‘sacred’ is probably different from yours.

I love living in thought-feeling. But I wonder if “that’s all there is.” Hence my presence here!

62

Is there anything fundamental to the distinction between thought and intelligence that does not emerge from these statements?