Intelligence and Thought

Kinfonet Discussion
63

A cul-de-sac is a dead end, isn’t it?

Haven’t you noticed that we reach this dead-end constantly in our discussions over the years?

Partly it is a problem of not being able to communicate directly. Our conversations are dilated over hours and days, meaning that what was agreed upon before is now forgotten, and so we never get anywhere.

In my mind I thought we had discussed thought sufficiently yesterday or the day before (or whenever it was!), and come to an agreement about its nature and its limits.

But today you come along and say that - contrary to all we have been discussing over the last several days - thought can see the whole, thought can see the new, and thought is not different from perception.

So you will forgive me if I feel I am not solely responsible for creating this dead-end.

This is why I think we need - or you need - to be more explicit about why you are wanting to make thought into something sacred, something holy, whole.

I don’t feel that thought has anything to do with the whole of anything. I have given clear reasons for why I feel this way, and I had thought we were in agreement on why this is so. If you recall I summarised our discoveries by listing all the ways in which thought is limited:

I then said what thought can do (in reply to your question), while saying that thought cannot

I had thought - though clearly I was mistaken in this - that you were in broad agreement with me about all this.

But it seems that you want to go back to a point in the discussion that preceded all this: to go back, in other words, to your view that thought is the whole mind (i.e. that thought is also awareness, attention, intelligence, perception, the senses, insight, etc).

This is the bottom of the sack.

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So where are we Rick?

As I said above, the limitations of this platform is that it is very difficult to be in the same time-space as another person so that the conversation doesn’t dilate. It seems again that our posts are speaking past each other for this reason.

I honestly cannot sympathise with this perception of yours. Thought-feeling is not just pleasure, it is also attachment and suffering.

Furthermore thought-feeling are clearly not all there is. I am not the universe (except in some speculative or very abstract sense). My thought-feeling has no impact on the planet Venus.

I do not understand the question you are asking here (in relation to the two statements you made about intelligence and thought). If it is an important question for you, maybe you can ask it again without introducing a negative?

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Ja! It’s kind of our thing.

I think we co-create our dead ends. Our brains fall in and out of sync.

What I want to go back to is simple distilled definitions that accommodate the fine points we talked about during the last few days. Variants (improved versions) of:

Intelligence sees things as they are without bias.
Thought sees things as you are with bias from conditioning.

Would you say that this is a showstopper for you that needs to be resolved before you are able to move freely forward? (If not, we can let my feelings about the power of thought slide for now.)

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It’s the whole palette! The full human experience. (Or is it? That’s a big question for me.)

I’m asking what the statements still need to satisfactorily distinguish thought from intelligence:

Intelligence sees things as they are without bias.
Thought sees things as you are with bias from conditioning.

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This is what I attempted to do by writing:

I feel there is truth in these statements. Each of them can be stated at further length, amplified to accommodate different contexts, and I have given logical reasons for stating them in the way I have done.

As I said a couple of days ago, intelligence, for me, has to do with heightened awareness, with the degree of sensitivity, the capacity to perceive a situation in its wholeness. In this sense intelligence shares more with perceptual seeing and listening, as well as with awareness and attention, than with thinking.

For me, awareness is not thought. And because Intelligence, for me, relates to awareness, not to thought, I cannot follow you into the cup-de-sac of making thought synonymous with awareness (if this is what you wish to do).

Or perhaps I can ask this as a question of you?

Is awareness (or attention) - for you - the same thing as thought? or are they (awareness and thought) completely different, qualitatively distinct actions of the mind?

If you don’t see their difference, or if you want to conflate them according to some “integral” theory, then we are clearly using words in such a different way as to make communication very difficult.

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Would you be willing to distill the gist of your statements down to their essence and fold them into the statements here, staying as concise as possible (for my little brain to digest):

Intelligence sees things as they are without bias.
Thought sees things as you are with bias from conditioning.

intelligence shares more with perceptual seeing and listening, as well as with awareness and attention, than with thinking.

I get that.

Is awareness (or attention) - for you - the same thing as thought? or are they (awareness and thought) completely different, qualitatively distinct actions of the mind?

I understand awareness to be prior to and distinct from thought. Thought supervenes on awareness, awareness is more fundamental.

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Yes, ok.

Thought is memory.
Awareness is not memory.

Intelligence is related to choiceless awareness.
Memory is not.

What do you mean by the word ‘supervene’ here?

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Sorry but that doesn’t work for me. :frowning: I love the concision, but don’t agree thought is memory.

I guess we can agree to disagree and continue exploring with that in mind, or we can keep hashing things out and see where we get?

I’m using supervene (a bit loosely*) to mean that thought is dependent on (arises/emerges from) awareness.

* “X supervenes on Y” means, formally, that any change in X brings about a change in Y, and that is not necessarily true for thought and awareness.

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I don’t know. Does it? Thought - as far as I understand it - is dependent on the physical brain, as well as on one’s psychological conditioning, which is one’s memory, knowledge.

Awareness, on the other hand, may or may not depend on the physical brain. But it does not depend on psychological memory. It is a qualitatively different activity of mind. This is my approach anyway.

Prove it.

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I agree thought is dependent on brain, memory, knowledge, conditioning. And on awareness, in the sense that for any thought object to be seen/manipulated, there must be awareness of it. Awareness is like the light that illuminates mental objects, enabling them to be seen.

Agreed.

You need air to breathe, but breathing is not air. Similarly, you need memory to think, but thinking is not memory. The necessity of X for Y does not mean X = Y, except poetically?

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75

For human respiration to be life-sustaining, an essential element in a breath is that it must include oxygen. If one breathes only carbon dioxide, one will die.

So, similarly, for human relationship to be meaningful, for life to be perceived in the present moment, an essential element is that it must include awareness. If one is only living in one’s thinking, one’s intellect, then life can have no real significance.

Mind as a whole involves being aware, perceiving with the senses, and having the intelligence to perceive the quality or value of a thought. To this extent, the quality of our thinking depends on the degree to which we are able to be sensitive to our thoughts.

But the thoughts themselves are based on memory. There is no such thing as a thought whose content does not belong to the past. So thought is memory.

If you can think a thought that does not originate or spring from some previous stored up knowledge, then you have a miracle on your hands.

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My view is that every present event (a thought, for example) inherits from every past event and adds something truly unprecedented and novel to the mix. Which means I agree that every thought issues forth from stored memories. But that’s only part of the story, along with inheriting from memories, there is unprecedented newness in every thought. I have no objective proof that it’s true, it’s in the realm of metaphysical speculation.

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And though I’m drawn to the view that newness is present in every event/object, I’m interested in other views also. For example Krishnamurti’s view that thought is the past thus incapable of true newness is powerful and possibly life-changing if taken to heart. I get that, intellectually at least.

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Of course memory and thought are not the same thing! Obviously you understand that you can think rationally, you cannot say you memorise rationally. Thought tries to make sense of some sort whether purely rationally or creatively, memory is simply the result of experience. Now, thought is not past as well, it draws on the past which is a different thing altogether. And in the sense that it has the faculty to add to experience by using rationality and imagination, in this sense it is new. Also Krishnamurti speaks of the space between two thoughts… something rather enigmatic and prone to speculation, but this space may bring about something totally new as it is understood as silence… Anyway, I’m afraid you can elaborate on this as much as you please but all you get is getting away from the core of what Krishnamurti means to convey, which is to be present from moment to moment and take responsibility for what you are doing with your life.

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Active reasoning can involve sensitive awareness to perceive where one’s logic or reasoning goes astray. But sequential logical reasoning can be and often is a learned habit which does not require any awareness at all. For instance a computer algorithm - which is a set of predefined instructions designed to perform a specific task or solve a particular problem - excels at executing predefined tasks and following logical sequences; which is what makes A.I. (artificial intelligence) capable of carrying out and surpassing the reasoning capacities of human beings.

When I said to Rick that thought is memory I was articulating what I take to be thought’s essence. My understanding is that thought is the activity of memory in response to the present moment challenge, in response to active sense perceptions and present moment experience. But even though thought is the present active response of memory, it is still essentially memory, and nothing more than that.

To be more specific, the origin of thought lies in the accumulation of experiences, memories, and conditioning over time. So thought is based on past experiences stored in memory, which shapes our perceptions and responses to the present.

This means that there is no new thought. What we consider “new” thoughts are merely modifications or re-combinations of already existing thoughts, a rearrangement or adaptation of previously acquired information.

What is so-called “new” in thought - i.e. what happens when there is a new invention or creative breakthrough in science or art - is merely a radically refreshed recombination of previously established experiences and thoughts, which is the result of creative perception or insight. Such insights happen regularly in science and art (for example). This is what Krishnamurti called partial insight. Partial insight is not thought: it is a limited insight into thought which changes its configuration in a creative way. Creative perception has to do with one’s awareness and sensitivity, not with thought.

This is my understanding of it anyway. Feel free to critique what has been said.

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80

My understanding is that all thoughts, ideas, and concepts have their foundation in original sense perceptions. Our senses apprehend the external world, and the brain processes this sensory information to form ideas or representations of our experience. So it is sense perception which provides the original raw material for thought to generate ideas or representations.

These representations are then combined through associative imagination - which draws from the storehouse of our memory - to create so-called ‘new’ ideas. So they are the reconfiguration of previously stored up experiences, which were themselves originally representations of sensory perceptions.

This background of experience and knowledge (which is memory) then meets the present moment of new sensory perceptions or challenges in relationship, and is modified in line with one’s previously held images and knowledge.

So the actual novelty of thought, in my understanding, lies not in thought itself, or in any recombination of thoughts, but in the novelty of fresh sensory perceptions which are the ultimate ground from which thought arises as a secondary echo.

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81

Hello, James!
Alright, you made your point which is anyway what I understood you were saying. You’re quite assertive about what you call ‘the essence of thought’! I think you’re just paraphrasing what Krishnamurti says about thought, only he doesn’t specifically say essence of thought, and there might be a difference there. Personally, I don’t know what the essence of thought is, I simply understand thought the way I described before and as I also said before in that sense there may be newness there, for sure.

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Thought updates itself constantly, which means it can be the newest, most advanced, modification of thought, but never something completely, unprecedentedly new. It is dependent on sensory perception to update itself.

Awareness, direct sensory perception, is always new because it is not accumulative. Like light, it illuminates without being affected by what it reveals, and thought is constantly exposed, always trailing perception, always catching up.

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83

The word ‘essence’ came up as part of my response to Rick’s request that I summarise my understanding of thought in the briefest possible way (he used the phrase “simple distilled definition”).

You posted at the same time as my most recent post, a post which may clarify better what I understand thought to be. But one can be much more practical about this:

Imagine an apple in your mind. When I do this I instinctively imagine a green apple :green_apple:, presumably because my mother used to buy Granny Smiths apples when I was a child.

What was the origin of this image of this green apple :green_apple: in my imagination?

Clearly the origin is an actual experience of seeing, touching, tasting and eating an apple :green_apple: . My image of an apple is an abstraction drawn from all my previous experiences of seeing, holding, and tasting apples.

Perhaps when someone else imagines an apple, the image which comes instinctively to mind is a red apple :apple:. Or perhaps it is the partly bitten apple that a famous computer company has made ubiquitous. All such images of apples originally spring from actual sensory perceptions of that thing we call “apple”.

Thoughts can be much more abstract than this of course, one can have very abstract concepts about things which have nothing ostensibly to do with things we have directly experienced for ourselves. But if one slows the process of imagination down greatly, one begins to see that any image that one has in one’s mind, any thought, is traceable (at least in principle) to some original incident or experience that one has had in the past. And this is why one can think only in terms of the past.

Sense perceptions - and awareness - are present. Thoughts are past. This is my present understanding of the matter.

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84

Not confusing at all James. I am new here so didn’t know previous definitions discussed (and have been unable to post as exceeded posts for new person?). Based on K’s definitions, this makes sense