Friday, January 13, 2006
A reflection on what is a thought
I have been for many years intrigued by what exactly is a thought. I must say that I have remained mostly in my intrigued state, with very old questions lingering, and that I have not had the luxury of seeking other explanations or contributions (that is, seeing if other authors/people ) have answered or elaborated a series of insights regarding what is the nature of a thought.
Given that this is just another enormous subject, and that I have many reflections and thoughts about it, I just wanted for now to pose what I consider an intriguing characteristic of thoughts. As you will soon see (or I hope that you will soon see, because it is not that easy for me to articulate this in the most sophisticated way), what intrigues me is the disconnection between thought and language, or its varying degrees of independence.
I will try to give my most clear example I can think of to illustrate this independence. I have come across a subject and I have understood, by reading, many things about it. However, when I try to articulate a certain thought about this subject, I fail. I know that I have not expressed well what I want to say. Therefore what I want to say remains in my mind in some non-articulated form, which allows me to know that it is different than what I succeeded in articulating. The two are not the same, yet only the written form is the form that has been articulated through language and words. Then I come across a text where another author has articulated with great clarity or complexity or sophistication exactly what I was thinking and had understood, but which I could not materialize in words with the same degree of quality as they did.
Therefore it is clear that somewhere in our cognitive capabilities, we have a knowledge processor that is independent of language, at least to a certain degree.
Obviously this intriguing characteristic of my (our) brain has to do with how we process, store, and communicate knowledge and what exactly is a thought.
Another related aspect of this subject that has always intrigued me is the very ancient "power of thoughts" and this is something that I constantly seek to understand better so that I can consciously make my thoughts work for me, specially in difficult situations or in any situation where I am presented with some difficulty, independently of the degree of the difficulty.
Given that this is just another enormous subject, and that I have many reflections and thoughts about it, I just wanted for now to pose what I consider an intriguing characteristic of thoughts. As you will soon see (or I hope that you will soon see, because it is not that easy for me to articulate this in the most sophisticated way), what intrigues me is the disconnection between thought and language, or its varying degrees of independence.
I will try to give my most clear example I can think of to illustrate this independence. I have come across a subject and I have understood, by reading, many things about it. However, when I try to articulate a certain thought about this subject, I fail. I know that I have not expressed well what I want to say. Therefore what I want to say remains in my mind in some non-articulated form, which allows me to know that it is different than what I succeeded in articulating. The two are not the same, yet only the written form is the form that has been articulated through language and words. Then I come across a text where another author has articulated with great clarity or complexity or sophistication exactly what I was thinking and had understood, but which I could not materialize in words with the same degree of quality as they did.
Therefore it is clear that somewhere in our cognitive capabilities, we have a knowledge processor that is independent of language, at least to a certain degree.
Obviously this intriguing characteristic of my (our) brain has to do with how we process, store, and communicate knowledge and what exactly is a thought.
Another related aspect of this subject that has always intrigued me is the very ancient "power of thoughts" and this is something that I constantly seek to understand better so that I can consciously make my thoughts work for me, specially in difficult situations or in any situation where I am presented with some difficulty, independently of the degree of the difficulty.
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