Questions that come up when you think about Thought

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 Can you define Thought in a single line?

Anything done by the nervous system is thought.


The above statement does answer a lot of questions but not all, like…


  • What about organisms that don’t have a nervous system, do they not think? -No they don’t, because they cannot take input, process it, and give output.


  • Do plants have thoughts? Despite not having a brain, they have a sort of nervous system -Yes they do. The brain is not necessary for a single thought to appear; a single cell that has the same or similar ability to the nerve cell can also generate thought.


  • So are thoughts made of electricity? -Yes


  • Can we combine thoughts back to make electricity out of it? -maybe, if we do the math, theoretically it may be possible, but I don’t think we have the required technology to prove this hypothesis.


  • Do thoughts appear in living beings only? -no, if a non-living thing has something similar to the nervous system, then thoughts may appear in them too. For example, the AlphaGo computer which beat Lee Sedol learned GO by committing many mistakes while playing practice games. In today's times' computers can also have thoughts because of Artificial intelligence.



Can you tell the types of thoughts?

I can give you examples, which are somewhat types but I am not sure in the future what new things may add on.


  • Unrefined Thoughts : 

    • The reaction of the nervous system in response to data input coming from senses.

    • Thoughts generated by the unconscious mind. 


  • Refined Thoughts: Thoughts after the processing of unrefined thoughts. 

    • Questions

    • Answers

    • Ideas

    • Comments

    • Opinions

    • Memories

    • Images

    • Sounds

    • Judgments

    • Assumptions

    • etc.


Few things which I have left out from the above examples -


  • Dreams - they are thoughts produced by the unconscious mind.


  • Emotions - they are not completely thoughts. I think they are part thoughts and part sensations. 


  • Intuition - it is also a type of thought.



Few other questions related to thoughts 


  • Difference between thoughts and information? -thought is a subset of information, or we can say that every thought is information, but every information is not thought.


  • Difference between observation of thoughts and thinking? - thinking is done by willpower. It is the process of editing thoughts manually. Observation of thought is something that we do in meditation. In it we do not try to change our thoughts but we observe them.

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