In humans thoughts are intricately linked to consciousness. Thoughts are a narration that occurs within ourselves (that is, observable by no one else). So the question I have is: do thoughts give rise to consciousness, or does consciousness give rise to thoughts.
I think that thoughts are a mechanical process, we speak to ourselves in what ever language is convenient, and remember (or write down) the pertinent content. Observation, speech, and memory are probably mechanical processes. It is a sort of Socratic method of learning that takes place entirely inside our heads. We propose a solution to a problem (an idea) and then ask questions about it trying to prove it wrong. We become two members of a debate team at once, taking turns scrutinizing and defending an idea.
The better we are able to abstract a problem, the more convenient it becomes to discuss it with ourselves. If we are able to generalize a set of problems into a single meta-problem, we only need to go through the dialog once, and can then try to apply a solution to specific instances. The ability to generalize and then specialize a problem are fundamental abilities of our brain, which evolution has given us to make predictions in unfamiliar circumstance based on similarities to remembered (known) circumstances. This is based on memory recall that is not exact, but is induced by similarities.
There is a tuning process here that evolution has probably had it's hand in for hundreds of thousands of years. How much memory is recalled based on what level of similarities. Within the modern human there is a variance from person to person, and that is one aspect that we measure as intelligence, or creativity. The person that is able to make a wide range of memory recalls based on a particular sensory input (or psuedo-sensory input, such as conjuring an image of a past event or future possible event), can establish a generalization that a person with a narrower range would not be able to. This, of course, only works up to a limit, with too wide a range giving irrelevant recall filled with non-sequiturs that must be weeded out and could possibly lead to personality disorders.
Once a generalization has been worked out, specializing is a simple process of applying the generalization and seeing if the outcome matches the expectation that the generalization predicts. Language is an important part of this equation, since if thinking is a dialog with ourselves, we need a medium of exchange of not only the description of a problem, but the set of possible solutions to mull over. So language and thinking go hand-in-hand, and are boot-strapped and build up over time. More sophisticated thinking requires more sophisticated language, so over time we add to our repertoire of thoughts and words in a upward spiral.
Language my have evolved as a means to communicate with our fellow humans about present circumstance, but soon became a convenient medium of teaching and passing along a store of knowledge from generation to generation, and being able to convey possible outcomes to avert tragedy or increase desirable outcomes. So story-telling is built into our psyche as much as our inferential abilities. We love stories and share them at all opportunities with each other. Evolution provides an obvious mechanism for the refinement of these processes, since our ability to pass along knowledge and predict future events has a direct impact on our survival. Written language amplifies this ability tremendously as it broadens the scope of our audience far beyond what is physically possible for a person in a single lifetime. But it also solidifies knowledge so that as circumstances change, we my be tempted to misinterpret written knowledge, while oral knowledge has the ability to evolve on it's own. Something to consider when reading the writings of antiquity, even people that we consider geniuses think in the terms of their times, and few truths are absolute across time and space.
So the story of the boy who cried wolf, isn't about some specific boy and what he actually did. His existence or non-existence does not diminish what we learn from the story. The story is about us and how we should live our lives. For simpler people, that moral of the story is added at the end to emphasis the fact that this is a generalization that we should apply in many different circumstances. It adds a pseudo-memory that we can recall in similar circumstances. We remember the generalization, and then based on the wideness of our ability to recall the generalization based on specific circumstance, the better we are able to apply this general knowledge to actual events.
So if we can tell stories to others, it seems obvious that we should be able to tell them to ourselves. This becomes a convenient way of mulling over problems and generating a set of solutions quickly on our own. Once we have a set of solutions, we can use our inferential abilities along with thought-experiments to narrow down the possible correct or optimal, or even sub-optimal but possible solutions to actually try. This can greatly reduce the effort of finding solutions to problems, by working out a smaller subset of the solutions in our mind, and only implementing the ones that pass the critical thinking stage. People that are more intelligent are more efficient at reducing the number of solutions that actually need a physical experiment to confirm it's correctness and compare it to other solutions.
So our intelligence is built up of several intrinsic brain activities. 1) The ability to remember past events. 2) The ability to recall those events based on present circumstances or perceived future circumstances. 3) The ability to weed out irrelevant memories through critical thinking. This last one is perhaps the most important to higher intelligence, we weed out irrelevant memories by telling our ourselves 'what if' stories to test for correctness/applicability. The faster and better we are able to weed out the irrelevant memories, the faster we are able to come up with a smaller set of possible solutions to try.
The implication of this hypothesis of thinking is that we have no deductive power at all, only inductive abilities. Our ability to deduce is simply a 'try all reasonable possibilities' and see which ones work approach. I believe this is confirmed in our history of hundreds of thousands of years of the existence of modern man, with only the last small fraction of it making any progress at all in mastering our environment. Intelligence is simply a measure of how much we can do in our minds before actually verifying/trying them in the real world. Our sophisticated language, and specialized analytical language such as math and first order logic, help speed up the process, but are not the process themselves. These are processes that build themselves around our core inferential abilities, and provide a feedback loop by which we can take a generalization and refine it to the degree necessary to be useful in our lives. Our ability to communicate via our sophisticated languages allow more than one mind to be involved in this refining process, thereby speeding it up even further, and producing the accelerated buildup of knowledge we have seen over the last few millennia.
The problem with innovation is that all of the easy solutions have already been solved. That only leaves difficult solutions for us to work through. There are two ways of finding solutions to difficult problems: going in through the side door, and simply formalizing intuition. The first solution, we should assume that everyone has tried going the the front door to an unsolved problem, and has failed. If there is a solution, we probably need to go through the side door, which can be tricky, because our natural path of thinking always leads us to the front door. Sometimes it is necessary to abandon everything we know about a problem before we can see clearly the secondary and correct path. This Rene Descartes advocated by abandoning everything that could be doubted (and for the truly skeptical EVERYTHING can be doubted) and build up from there. The second path is to take a problem that is 'intuitive', that is everyone understands the solution but no one is able to communicated it due to a lack of vocabulary. We can see this in the solution to Zeno's paradoxes which I believe were intuitively understood at the time (no one took as true Zeno's assertions), but it took 2000 years of mulling over this problem where the model didn't reflect reality, and all it took was for Newton and Liebniz to formulate a vocabulary that could be communicated exactly and built upon.
This all brings us back to the relationship between thinking and consciousness. While we are thinking these thoughts, 'someone' is listening. Who is this second person in our dialog with ourselves? What is it that gives us this lucid observation of present reality? Animals with no obvious characteristics of consciousnesses have the power to observe, induce and react. Could consciousness be the interplay between the side of us that observes and the side of us the thinks? As we observe we give a constant narration of what is going on, and what could happen. The medium of that conversation is language, so language seems tied up in the whole mess. Certainly as children have imaginary friends, we can have imaginary thought partners that we consider 'the real us' and distinct from our physical bodies. But then who is this 'we' that imagines our thought partners, and so the circle continues.
Perhaps consciousness is a part of the human psyche that disassociates our internal narrator from our physical selves, and considers themselves to be a separate entity. We certainly have the ability to go into a dis-associative state when faced with a traumatic experience. Perhaps consciousness is a partially dis-associated state that is normal during waking hours. As we lose consciousnesses every night when we sleep this dis-associated state separates itself even further from our observatory selves as we dream in thoughts that have little to do with our surroundings. And then we lose consciousness completely. To me this is the greatest argument that consciousness is a mechanical process that can be turned on and off. Coming into and out of sleep tear down and build up this mechanical process and begin it again each day.
An article I read in a recent Scientific American describes an experiment where the conclusion was that we make split-second decisions first and then become conscious of them. And yet for the people in the experiment, it seemed a conscious decision. Obviously, for decisions that are not split-second our consciousness plays a primary role, but it begs the question, how many of our decisions are made without the benefit of our consciousness, and our consciousness is only brought into play to rationalize the decision by creating a story. This becomes even more like the scenario that our consciousness is a person watching a movie of our observations (and our own un-consciously motivated actions) and then creating a story by which we can store in our memories.
The problem of consciousness seems a forever circular one, as it is our own consciousness that is considering our consciousness. Again Rene Descartes' first principle 'I think therefore I am' is inherently circular as it pre-supposes the 'I' in the first part to draw the conclusion of the existence of 'I' in the second part. Upon this wobbly foundation he proceed to build an entire philosophy which might fall like a house of cards if the pre-supposition at the base is removed from the structure. Descartes' argument is that 'I' becomes self-evident through thought (if thought is taking place, something must be thinking), but that assumes that thought is not a mechanical processes, in which case 'I' simply becomes part the body we live in. I would separate consciousness from thought, so I might be tempted to say 'I am conscious therefore I am' But then I must define consciousness or my first principle becomes as wobbly as Descartes' And I can't define consciousness aside from the conjecture that I presented above.
As with any circular problem, we can produce any solution we want, interject it into the circle and it becomes a reasonable self fulfilling conclusion. And this is played out in our stories of consciousness which are countless and run from absurd to mystical, to pragmatic. So, unfortunately, until I can somehow rise above my own consciousness, and provide an outsiders view, my only advise it to pick a solution that best suits your belief set and stick with it. It probably doesn't matter anyway which belief we choose about consciousness, it is merely a curiosity for the pathologically inquisitive, similar to mathematicians fascination with prime numbers. I would actually follow Voltaire's advice that tending your garden is a more productive activity.
Happy gardening everyone!
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