What is the essence of thinking?
My starting point is: Thinking divides the world/self into conceptual chunks and manipulates them via comparison, judgement, transformation, usw.
What comes to mind is âsyntaxâ. The way that thought follows the rules of syntax and moves using associations.
The French psychiatrist Hubert Benoit went into the subject deeply , even came up with a âmethodâ to control thought and got into some mental trouble! Talks about it in his little book âLet Go!â.(Lacher prise)
What is the essence of syntax? Rule-following? Conditioning? Pattern recognition?
Making sense rather than jibberish? But in order for it not to be jibberish it must also be associative. Thatâs what Benoit tried to break. Keep the syntax but avoid any association between words. Nonsense writing which he thought could have a positive effect on bringing thought to a central place in the range of sense / nonsense. Bad idea.
Thinking makes sense of things? Tries? What does âmake senseâ mean?
Accurately describes in words a situation: âDick has the ball.â
For whom-what is it accurate? The thinker? Another person? The âobjectiveâ world?
Anyone who sees that Dick has the ball! Even Dick!
Trump: â I won the debate ââŚnot so obvious, room for questioning.
Are we able to think in wholes rather than fragments? What would this mean?
Show us how that would be done. An example.
Seeing the fundamental interdependency and interconnectedness of all aspects of whatever you are looking at? Systems thinking, grokking the whole. Not losing the forest for the trees?
The brain might see that , not thought,which is the response from memory, from the past. Thought could describe it as âall is oneâ. But as has been said the description is not the described. Just words in syntax.
Like âDick has the ball.â
If you canât see Dick, youâd have to take my âwordâ for it.
Is this your âlitmus testâ for whether a type of mentation is thought: It is a response from memory?
Thatâs Ks line which makes sense. Takes some investigating though. Not obvious since we think that âwe are doingâ the thinking.
When I (the brain) doesnât know what itâs experiencing, it is scrambling for the answer, and the answer is sought for in its files, its recorded experience. So what typically happens is that unless another brain can come up with a better answer than it can draw from its own content, an answer is found.
But with self-knowledge, the brain knows that its content is not always (and can never be) adequate to provide the correct answer, and there is nothing to do but remain with the experience until something conclusive or determinative occurs.
The past embodied in memory/conditioning certainly seems to be involved (in varying degrees) with all types of thinking: reason, logic, imagination, speculation, intuition. But Iâm with Whitehead and believe that every event carries within it every previous event, but also brings unprecedented newness into the world. Thus the notion Krishnamurti has of thinking being dead, a dried-out relic of the past, does not really resonate with me. There is room in thinking for the new to emerge and blossom. Maybe this is why the verdict is still out for me as to whether thinking is inherently limited. We may just have to do it better!
You are suggesting that âmaking sense of Xâ = assessing and categorizing X within our internal library of patterns, memories, mental templates. When we cannot find a good stored pattern for X we feel: X doesnât make sense! Making sense = residing in the known.
You may be right but here it seems that itâs insight not thought that may cause theâ new to emerge and blossomâ and thought is rather like the âstenographerâ trying to put words to what âhas beenâ seenâ. At best like an artist trying to re-present the indescribable?
Itâs one of Kâs provocative statements that there is no such thing as âcreative thinkingâ.
Yes, because this is the only place we know or can imagine. Admitting what we donât know and canât imagine is as close as we get to the next dimension wherein thought plays the minor role of accompanist to intelligence.