A short reflection on thinking
The whole world is driven by thinking and no high school biology manual ever told us what thinking actually is. Maybe it’s so obvious to everyone that we don’t even need to discuss it. Here’s what I ‘think’.
Thinking is a reaction of the memory you accumulated in the form of concepts to outside inputs coming from the world. It is a merely automatic process that is generated by the synergy of your brain cells and the environment in which you live.
They teach you what a dog is when you’re 2 years old. More precisely they make you recognise an abstract pattern and classify it verbally as ‘d’ + ‘o’ + ‘g’ = ‘dog’.
Do you see this hairy four-legged moving thing? You’ll call it a dog until the day you die.
And in the course of your life, as soon as you see one of those things, you don’t have a choice but call it a dog, think of it as a ‘dog’. But what is ‘dog’? It’s just a word linked to an image you saw when you first associated the actual ‘thing’ with a word.
The accumulated memory is a result of being exposed to the outside world in a particular way. Hence the culture and mentality differences between people and the gradual disappearance of any cultural difference for kids growing up on the internet.
Thinking is a mechanical thing but our identification with it has given it enormous importance. This kind of importance makes us sometimes angry when our interlocutor appears to have a completely different pattern of thinking.
We define ourselves as persons based mainly on the contents of our thinking processes and believe, implicitly of course, that WE are generating the thought process. If it is WE who generate the thoughts, can WE choose our next thought? Did WE choose the thoughts WE had five minutes ago?
We can just witness the thoughts that are already happening automatically and mechanically, appropriating them and calling them ‘ours’. Are they really ours? What is ‘ours’? Who is the owner of the skull in which all those processes appear to happen? Is there a boss managing and controlling the whole process? It must be the same boss that beats the heart and transfers the electromagnetic signals from your sense organs to your brain. If there’s a boss, who is he?
So what happens when we consider ourselves (whatever the meaning of this term) to be at the origin of the thought process and associate our sense of identity with it? We become a mechanical thing ourselves.
Thinking is a tool, a very useful one. It’s the best tool we’ve got for survival and making our lives comfortable in this hostile environment called planet Earth. The evolution of technology wouldn’t be possible without thinking. Thought is great at putting concepts together and building systems of concepts describing processes and formalising abstract patterns into logical constructions that we can use to create practical stuff.
A monkey can’t conceive and build a home heating system because its brain isn’t able to hold so many concepts in its head at once. But a monkey can’t either be anxious about what other monkeys will think of it in a certain situation because it doesn’t have a self-identity or a ME linked to the thought process (as far as my study of monkeys is concerned).
We rarely ever question this marvellous tool and inherent process on which the quality of our existence depends. I think we should. Who is this ‘I’ and is there one at all are questions that can only find answers beyond ‘w’ + ‘o’ + ‘r’ + ‘d’ + ’s’.
