THOUGHT

Thought occurs; it pours forth unbidden; it cannot be stopped, except perhaps in some meditational exercises, but sometimes thought can be directed. Thought moves; the nature of thought includes change and variation. Thought is a major part of our life; thought could even be described broadly enough to include all of our personal and subjective experience, although we shall tend to consider thought as part of that subjective experience.

In the common life we all know what thought is, what the word thought means. Well, sort of, until we stop to think about it. Thought is something we experience personally and very directly. We have available a collection of English words which refer to the mental being of subjective experience; these include awareness, consciousness, thought and mind. While each of these words refers to some aspects of personal experience, their individual significations can also be differentiated from each other. Although in common usage the connotations of these terms are often indistinct, we will find it useful to attribute distinct meanings to the various names. The following concise statements are merely introductory and will be enlarged in the subsequent writing.

I use language in at least two distinct modes; one, the most important, is as the natural and historic English which I have learned from my mothers and my poets, which is a great webfooted thing able to walk on land or water, which is only limited by connection to its central essence, its core of actualities in speech and writing, by what is expected by its speakers from its writers; the other mode is the articulated exception, wherein words and eventually structure are refined in constrained definitions, explicit and explained, for special use, wherein the philosophical arrows must be straightened for true flight. (Philosophy does differ from rhetoric in this: philosophical arrows are straightened for true flight while rhetorical arrows are sharpened for penetration.)

All through this writing, as well as in all other writings, language has both liberated us into connectivity of ideas and, which is another way of saying the same phenomenon, dissolved our exactitude: the connector is the solvent. A small dictionary will give one or a few definitions of meaning for a word, a large dictionary will give more, my observations of any word which I care to use correctly is that there is a sliding scale, polyform wave and multiple possibilities of the uncollapsed wave function; every word I write with any weight has meanings which stretch, oscillate, magnify and refract, holding the metaphors on a physical leash, some supposed intent of mine to make magically transparent my imagined mind.

Awareness is named as the closest approach to a fundamental essence of subjective experience. Thought is the name for what actually occurs, including both form and content, in subjective experience. For consciousness we will reserve an open space of understanding somewhere between awareness and thought. Mind is used in thoughtext with multiple intent; one is almost as a synonym for subjective experience, sort of as a combination of subjective experience and the content of subjective experience, if such a discrimination can be made; another use of mind is to name that cast of thought which is shaded by rationality and coherent structure; finally, after much examination of thought and thoughts, we shall reintroduce mind as a subset of the set of sets of thoughts; the context should make clear which use of mind is intended, at least in those places in thoughtext where such distinctions are needed. I do not call these statements definitions because they are not intended to provide exact boundaries for the words described but rather to indicate the locus of significance for each term.

In this writing I shall make many references to subjective experiences of thought, experiences of which I can only write with certainty when they are my personal experiences. In order for this writing to be effectively communicative it would be most useful if you would compare the experiences I claim with your own experiences of thought. Can you reproduce in your own experience the thought forms which this writing purports to describe? Do you find other thought forms unmentioned here to be of equivalent or greater importance than those discussed herein? Are there other limitations or improvements which your own thoughts suggest? If you were to read these words and compare your corresponding, or not corresponding as the case may be, subjective experience which that which the writing seems to imply, then reading this essay might be a useful experience.

This writing consists of confluent streams. One is a natural history of thought which describes the forms, structures and subjective experiences of thought and of thoughts. This is an easy part where one cannot go too far wrong by sticking close to the phenomenology of observation. Another stream is less clear but equally essential. Thought is thought to have meaning, here also we must attempt to navigate. The Rio Negro joins the Rio Solimoes to form the Amazon and two currents, dark and light, are said to flow side by side in the same bed for many miles before they mix their waters into a single flux. A nice metaphor except that it implies only dualities eventually synthesized into unity, whereas actual reality may be far more complex.

We have made good progress in this thoughtext toward explaining the preliminaries to a discussion of thought, a writing about thought, WT, which is what is really intended to happen here. As we turn more directly toward our main theme of thought we will also renew our phenomenological directness.

Look and see. For at least that part of this writing, the geographical, phenomenological or geometric part, which attempts to describe forms of thought, images of forms of thought, metaphors of thought and structures of thought, what is to be introduced is simple and definite exposition. Certain descriptions of possible forms of thought will be written; you will read them, if you do continue. Having read and thought of the thought forms I present, you might want to look at these forms in your own thought. Do you find them there? I would expect you to find some of them, but also other forms of thought and descriptions of forms of thought which I have not found or included.

Thought about thought is thought enfolded in thought. Thought is the subject matter of thought about thought. Thinking about thought is actively self referential. Thought as subject matter might seem distinct from thought primordially considered, but reconsider: thought is always also the subject matter of thought; if I think about a raven then although we could call the raven the subject matter of that thought, we can also say that the thought of the raven is the subject matter of that thought; in the case of such a particular thought, thought as container is not entirely separate from thought as substance; no unthought form is known, there is no form for thought except that which is thought, which is part of thought, which is included in the subject matter of thought. Thought about thought is a part of thought referring, at least in implicit claim, to the whole of thought. Also, thought about thought requires a focusing or limitation of thought, as does any intentional theme of thought. From both of these considerations we can see that thought about thought can never be a complete description of thought; thought will always over spread any limitations produced by thought about thought and, furthermore, even when thought about thought goes forth in a generative sense, producing thought, there will always be room for thought more than and beyond such generated thoughts.

It is interesting to look at the foldedness of thought from a biophysical perspective; thoughts fold into one another as if they were electrical or magnetic foci moving along the inner and outer surfaces of the neocortex. Experience in the life world seems folded in a very similar manner. Folds include concavities and convexities, ridges and bottoms as well as saddle points and other cuspoid phenomena. All of the geometric forms of foldedness may have a correlation with thought forms and the content of experience. Thoughts slide into a fold and remain there until they climb a ridge or fall across a saddle point. Thought in a fold is another image for tunnel thought. Apparently the thought zone, consciousness, is a finite mobile quasi stable electromagnetic field conjunction, a more or less permanent in itself but moving basin of self attraction, which is itself moving in and out of other basins of attraction, the fold valleys of tunnel thought, which may or may not correspond to the space folds of the brain surface.

In mathematical physics there is a curious simplicity found on some expressions of fundamental equations. Every physical equation may be expressed in the form A = B where A and B are previously distinct physical quantities. For examples, the Schrodinger equation may be expressed as E = H (where E is the energy and H is the Hamiltonian) and the equation of general relativity may be expressed as M = G (where M is the curvature of space and G is gravity); the trick is in the interpretation of the symbols on each side of the equation. From that most abstract point of view we can see an equation for thought: T = T, where T = thought. Perhaps this is a difference between philosophy and physics, in philosophy both sides of the equations have the same name. There is also a non trivial point to this. Thought is thought's subject matter; there is no abstraction called thought which exists outside of the substance of thought; thought is what is thought. What we call forms of thought are subsets (although 'set' is only approximately equal to its mathematical usage) of experienced thought.

While thought is, as said above, ontologically self identical, we can make names for the subsets or forms of thought. These names themselves are also part of thought. In this sense the abstraction of naming forms of thought is real, is substantial, in that it is also part of consciousness. If you recall Russell's theory of types, wherein a set occupied a different level than its elements, and sets of sets yet another level, and so on, this is not true of thought and the forms of thought, since the forms of thought, as thought, are also part of thought. Whatever we might call a form of thought, which form itself being unthought, is also not part of being but rather of the void.

We should be able to draw some deeper understanding, if not conclusions, from the self referentiallity of thought. This self referentiallity is, as presented, merely a phenomenological observation, but having made such an observation it would seem meet to find some meat to it. As a thought experiment, suppose thought was not self referential, then one could not think about thought; this reminds me of what it feels like to push being or awareness to their abstract limits, to some supposed purity beyond reflection, wherein in the most primary sense being is, but this primary being is prior to any knowing of being and is hence unknown, and also in the most direct sense awareness occurs, but is not aware of being aware. Clearly thought, being self referential, is not like pure being or awareness, neither so abstract nor so absolute.

Very little of the history of philosophy has been included in direct reference in this writing, only an occasional comment, but a few recent paragraphs do seem to entwine it. Having described thought, being and awareness as I recently have, it would seem to me that Parmenides and Plato would grant priority to being and awareness while Husserl and perhaps Aristotle would give that priority to thought. I incline now, as I write this, to thought, while reserving absolute commitment. What do you think?

Thought is instanced as private. The actual thoughts of each one of us are to some degree, at least in the normal politeness of this society, our own alone; really, I wonder if they are our own; for if we have any self of significance, it is more likely in the content and arrangement of our personal thoughts than in the situation of our body; there may be some deeper essence derived from God, which we might call soul, but here in this life it is hard to imagine how we might describe that soul except in the expressions of forms of thought, although we might know it intrinsically in broader fields of subjective experience. We might know our own soul more directly than thought in some deeper recesses of consciousness or awareness but it is hard to imagine how we would share that knowledge without thought and even the expression of thought. We never, in my experience, although I have tried, share the actual personal consciousness of a thought, including the consciousness behind the thought and the awareness in which the consciousness is embraced, however much we may intend to communicate its form or meaning through speech, art, telepathy or any media. A medium is a mediation between thoughts in one person's consciousness and thoughts in the experience of another. At least this paragraph expresses a common point of view of the privacy of thought and a good starting point; we will revisit this theme later.

Although individual thoughts are private a question arises as to how much the general process of thought is similar between different people.

Here arises a serious dichotomy, between cothought, thoughts shared by different consciousnesses, and absolute individuality. It would seem more moderate to accept some cothought and some other distinct self. But is cothought on the surface, a connection between projections, or is cothought arisen from the very depths of being or is cothought an intermediate recombinant, an interference pattern between the projections or receptacles of separate entities?

Here there must be a presumption of some degree of correspondence, otherwise this writing is as meaningless as a crow flapping its wings in outer space. At this point it seems natural to expect that the basic essence of awareness has some intrinsic identity across the spectrum of aware beings, although we may well imagine, and I know of no contrary evidence, that awareness could come in different flavors or colors, which of course are metaphors, for different people. This idea seems to call for further explication; as the development of knowledge proceeds might we not become able to explicate those different senses of even primal awareness, to somehow communicate to each other the differences of personal experience, to share in each other's awareness? Above awareness lies the large and still somewhat confused arena of consciousness where it is still natural to suppose that we may share some similarities between us but it seems also to be expected, more definitely than for awareness, that we also have individual differences. Focusing above general consciousness into the realm of thoughts and thoughts we might still not be surprised to find some correspondences in the general geography and perhaps even meaning of thought, but when we come to the final speciation of individual thoughts, there it seems clear, naively speaking, that, unless some higher form of psychic syncopation than language is assumed, we can only partly, and that part, except for accidental congruence, some higher topological centricity, again metaphorically speaking, share near identity or close similarity of thought forms. Otherwise it seems likely that, except for some more or less skeletal structure of linguistic communication wherein we may congrue, that when a thought of one individual is attempted to be communicated to another individual by language, thoughts differ in each person's personal experience. It would also not be a one to one relationship between a thought occurring to the first subject and a skeletally similar thought in the experience of the second subject but rather more like a composite, a swarm, of thoughts in one subject's experience correlating, and perhaps in part even causing, in time, another swarm of thoughts in another individuals personal experience.

But how similarly our personal experiences correlate is as well judged by you as you read and reflect upon these words as by I who write them. You have an advantage in that you can read these words and thereby see at least the result of my thought as it crystalized into language while I also have an information that if you are reading these words and the upper part of this paragraph then you are receiving, attending to, reading, the linguistic skeleton of my thought.

There is thought and in English there are also thoughts. It is not so simple that thought is the set and thoughts the elements, thought the genus and thoughts the species. Those which are called thoughts do appear to be nounable, to be thought of as things which can be, not always exactly but generally and meaningfully, thought of, spoken of, written of, as things, entities, events separable at least in principle. Thought can be used to describe a set of thoughts but its actual and most common connotation appears to be closer to a verb, a verb both active and passive. Thought is a verb active in that one can grasp hold of and direct thought and it is a verb passive in that one sometimes allows thought to flow. Also one can say that thought is a verb passive in that thought is subjectively experienced, although this begins to go beyond the simple grammatical distinction, as thought goes beyond the grammatical simplicities of noun and verb. Thought is thought and a person thinks thoughts and there is much more to it than that.

As a verb, thought is both passive and active, that is to say, thinking can be both a passive or active process. Sometimes we receive thoughts which seem to proceed without the direct intervention of our will; at other times we think actively, we focus and intend the direction of our thoughts. In real experience thought sometimes approximates but rarely rests at either of the extremes of pure passivity or complete intentionality, it generally is an always varying flux containing both passive and active elements. Thought can be defined so broadly that it includes most or all mental phenomena and even all the contents of awareness, which I have called being. Near the opposite measure thought can be ascribed only to intentional, consecutive and indeed even rational mental forms. We will not fix our position now to either end of the spread nor in the middle but try to reach appropriate understandings pertaining to different degrees of extensiveness of what is called thought, although my personal inclination is toward the broader usage.

Thought could be described as consciousness in focus and thought could be called the foreground of consciousness. Behind the phenomena of thought lies the presence of consciousness which yet more subtly rests in the arms of awareness, the primordial essence of the subjective experience above which consciousness is the experience known by the self and then there is thought which includes focused moduli, the thoughts and intentions of consciousness, or at least this is how I am using these words.

Thoughts are always with us; they are our poor little children in time who tug at our hands and follow us about. Thoughts fill our whole time; they skitter about like lizards in the underbrush; they rest in sunlight on stone; birdlike they call from bare branches swaying under their weight. If time is a pile of wood, thoughts are the logs. Bushes grow thick and matted along the river bank; water flows on through.

Thought includes our ability to produce thoughts and our inability not to. Thought is also the landscape of thoughts, their collectivity. Thinking about thought makes me happy. It is an all out engagement, a direct encounter, what I personally ought to be doing.

Thoughts, thought and thinking are all wild words, commonly used but uncommonly known. I have previously attempted to tame the word awareness. Consciousness and mind are also in the natural collective of thought and awareness. The predicate here is that thought is the wild bullsnake-bullwhip writhing in the foreground of attention, awareness is the tamed, more or less, bronco which we now ride and consciousness and mind are still waiting wild in the desert.

Open a metaphor of sea thought, watery flux of consciousness onrushing. Individual thoughts correspond to waves: energy patterns transmitted across the surface of consciousness. Think also of the little wavelets, finer grain pattern that you can see running up and down the sides of what we usually call waves, so does thought appear to have little thoughtlets frisking around a central theme, the thought so called. And like the waves in a sea, thoughts are of different forms; in a choppy sea of curved pyramids the waves are individual, appearing to arise for their time, only to sink back into the water surface from which a new wave arises, so are some thoughts specific entities that occupy consciousness for a while and then disappear back beneath the surface of consciousness; some waves progress in moving lines of energy as do wakes expanding from the path of a boat, so do some thoughts progress in ordered forms, forms of logic, of mathematics, goal directed thought seeking solutions to abstract or practical problems; sometimes the surface of the sea rises and falls in long smooth swells of glassy energy, so is thought sometimes fallow, rising and sinking with the breath of time; sometimes breakers crash and spray their foam upon the beach, so do thoughts.

Correct the metaphor of sea for thought. Although, like the sea, thought is one, from which distinct thoughts arise, those thoughts are connected across greater distances in subjective experience than we yet know the energy convergences of waveforms to be across the sea. When a single thought pops up out of consciousness it is often related to some other specific thought which was thought some time past, often connected to a whole series or nonlinear set of other thoughts, by connections which can be perceived intuitively and traced so far as intentional focus can retain interest; such connections between waves appear much more abstract and random, although such appearance may be due to our lack of knowledge. The sea surrounds the land but I would be reluctant to claim that thought surrounds some more fixed and substantial being, such as matter; thought appears to be more like an interface between primary awareness and the diffusion of that awareness into complexity. Put another way, the sea is less dense and fixed than the land but thought is thicker than pure awareness. The metaphor of sea for thought is good, it is rich and deep, but it will take many metaphors to circumscribe thought, as well as some more direct wordplay.

Heaps of knowledge, intermingled yet distinct: the heap of all things seen and all colors and forms of images of the eyes and the heap of all of the sounds heard and their rhythms and words and melodies and the more organized piles of mathematics learned and of physics learned and of philosophy and history learned and the set of all the people met and encountered in a life and the memories and skills of the body where it has walked and swum and ridden and what work it has done and the play also and all of the thoughts which have passed through personal experience over the years and all that can still be recalled as memory.

Frederick Joseph Staley