Most of our thoughts “occur to us” rather than being constructed by us. That is to say, we do not generally have an active role in the formulation of the epiphanies, theories, postulates, and ponderings that show up in our minds. At least, I don’t. Yet, if we do not construct some of our thoughts, then from whence cometh they? I can think of three possible answers:
1. It’s possible to say that their construction goes on subconsciously.
2. It’s also possible to say that thoughts are given to us.
3. And it’s a yet further possibility to say that thoughts are things in themselves that our minds somehow perceive, like our eyes do with color.
And there may be however many more explanations as well. Even with just these, I don’t know how to pick between the three. At the very least, the realization that even my thoughts are not my own (I can hardy call the subconscious me) should lead me to greater humility, but what more can I say?
18 December 2007 at 8:00 pm
so . . . where’d you get that idea?
27 December 2007 at 11:36 am
I used to express this to myself as “I don’t think I think.” Somehow, by the way it’s always talked about, thinking is some sort of arduous assembling of small thoughts into larger ones. Upon introspection, however, I realized that I never think this way. If I “have” a thought, there seems to be no birthing process involved, just an arising from the deeps of the subconscious, which has been slowly simmering with all received perceptions. The closest I have come to defining real thought is “insight” — that is, a flash (possibly ‘given’) of awareness of the relationship between two previously held ideas, an old idea and a new one, two new perceptions, etc. What do you think? ;)
29 December 2007 at 12:07 am
I like it. We should make tshirts.
This sounds very much like my experience as well. I wonder though, how you can trace the source of the “arising” to the subconscious? I feel fairly confident invoking it in regards to memories, and sometimes with the sort of relational, thought-connecting epiphanies that you have here described, but when it comes to other sorts of circumstancionally applicable and seemingly original thoughts, I just don’t know what the foundation for placing them there is.
Quite frankly, I am rather strongly drawn to the idea that we have less to do with ourselves than we want to think we do, at least in this area, and thus drawn away from the idea that our thoughts all spring up from our subconscious like RNA from the primordial ooze.
Did you find this particularly troubling (or perhaps reassuring) when we read Locke, Hume, etc? It seems rather easy to pop their construction hypotheses.
Your “flash” language is very apt, I think. Would you call these insights (say on the relationship between two new ideas) to be third ideas? And from whence do you think the two new ideas came, much less the insight connecting them?
29 December 2007 at 11:44 pm
Well, you caught me in a bit of sloppy terminology I’m afraid: I grabbed onto ’subconscious’ as code for ‘that of which I know nothing’ which was, besides being shamefully materialist, untidy presumption on my part. Beg pardon. I am always very aware when I have an original thought, though it is usually in the clever crafting of an articulation that I come to the part where I can sit back and be pleased with myself. Thoughts just happen to me. Because they seem to emerge from nowhere to bob on the surface of my consciousness, shiny and new, I presumed that they came from underneath. This need not be of course.
I am totally on board with your inclination to think we know very little about how we know. My Modern Phil professor this semester made the excellent point that it is well nigh impossible for us to get back into a pre-Freudian conception of the consciousness (just look at my willingness to throw the subconscious about as a solution…). Locke, Decartes and the rest presumed a sort of self-transparency that Freud has forever exploded and which, I agree, it pretty hard to swallow if read with any preference toward ineffable reality over tidy theories.
Insight is, as far as I can tell, the only way we “have” new ideas. We can certainly receive a novel thought from without, but to “create” one seems to take just such a flash. I am almost entirely convinced that novel ideas are only new perspectives, new permutations, a new combination of existing mental and experiential substance. Forgive again the sloppy language: by “two new ideas” related by insight, I meant that it was possible to learn two things experientially and then insightfully relate them, creating a third thing.