[kahirsch]

Emo Philips once said "I used to think that the human brain was the most fascinating part of the body. Then I realized, whoa, ‘look what’s telling me that’."

There seems to be this naïve view among some philosophers that what our verbal stream of consciousness reports is somehow the most important part of our "mind" or our "consciousness", some even saying that verbal thoughts are the only thing that are important enough to be called "thoughts"!

I say: look what’s telling you that! I mean that very seriously.

I've always assumed that the brain has to have many parallel things going on at the same time and we have some limited awareness of these things and some ability to coordinate and direct the different parts of the brain, but it seems to be rather limited. It can't be complete, just on a Turing/Goedel basis, but anything approaching completeness would mean slowing our thoughts down to the slowest parts.

I remember reading about the Libet experiment decades ago and how some people thought that it disproved "free will"— whatever that could possibly mean. The impulse to report a decision to move a finger came after the impulse to move the finger. So? They were apparently assuming that the mind was some synchronized, sequential process and that the verbal report of what "the mind" was intending to do was supposed to come at the same time or before the impulse to move the finger. What???

Even a view of a single stream of "attention" or "executive process" seems dubious. Yes, we have all had the experience where something that's mostly automatic/unconscious suddenly requires our attention. For example, you're driving a car and suddenly a novel situation comes up and you need to turn off the radio or tell the passenger to shut up so you devote all your attention to driving. But just normal driving requires an enormous amount of processing of different concepts and coordinating different parts of the brain.

There was an experiment (Maier's two-string puzzle, I just found by google), where a scientist tested people's ability to solve a problem figuring out how to tie two strings together that were hanging from the ceiling, too far apart for anyone to grab both at the same time. Some of the participants were given a non-verbal "hint" of how to solve the problem. But, when asked later how they solved it, most of those given the hint didn't mention it! Were they "consciously aware" of the hint at all? That was an actual experiment relevant to the idea of a unity of consciousness.

Anyway, mine is a very limited, amateur, mostly 20th century perspective on the ideas. I'd be interested in what others have to share, especially actual experiments and not so much philosophers examining their verbal thoughts.

[a_cardboard_box]

> some even saying that verbal thoughts are the only thing that are important enough to be called "thoughts"!

For anyone who thinks this, what happens if you start thinking a thought in words, and then stop partway through the sentence? When I do this, I understand the meaning of the full sentence even if I stop after a single word. Because, how could I say something without first knowing what I was going to say?

For me, that meaning is the real thought. The words are just a representation of it.

[mannykannot]

> how could I say something without first knowing what I was going to say?

Maybe it’s just me, but it is not that uncommon for me to start to say something that I thought was clear in my head, only to realize that it was not. It happens even more when I write, and especially when I write programs.