The nature of thinking

[Aemma]

Is thinking a voluntary or involuntary activity or event?

I'm coming at this from a passive/unconscious (involuntary) versus active/conscious (voluntary) type of framework specifically.

Can the act of thinking ever be viewed as something as involuntary as breathing, done unconsciously or is it necessarily a conscious, hence active event?

Are there differences of degree or just differences in kind with respect to the activity of human thinking?

Discuss.

Cheers!...Aemma

[SuuT]

Is thinking a voluntary or involuntary activity or event?

I'm coming at this from a passive/unconscious (involuntary) versus active/conscious (voluntary) type of framework specifically.

Can the act of thinking ever be viewed as something as involuntary as breathing, done unconsciously or is it necessarily a conscious, hence active event?

Are there differences of degree or just differences in kind with respect to the activity of human thinking?

Discuss.

Cheers!...Aemma

Well, the 'anure' of thought may well begin (in the Western World) with The Apeiron (apeirwn) of Anaximander. But, without getting too overlty detailed at this point, thinking is both a conscious and unconscious activity of active agents being-in-the-world.

The (IMO) real question lies in the distiction between 'sub-conscious' motive/motivation; and, its realtion to conscious thought, in so far as the two are not so mutually exclusive as they are antipodal, yet concomitant, with one another.

[Loddfafner]

The whole question is tautological or circular unless one can fully separate the concepts of "thinking", "voluntary", and "conscious". I assume you are bracketing out the processes that Freud categorized as "unconscious". As for conscious reasoning, it might help to distinguish between spatial and verbal calculations, as spatial reasoning certainly feels like a more mechanical process than is verbal thought.

Yet - to muse further - verbal reasoning can feel as if it came from an external source - most evident in the auditory hallucinations of the sort reflected in the Iliad or the Koran.

[Ulf]

I'm not sure if this will exactly help, or even be on topic, but when someone one brings up thought and consciousness it always makes me think, what, exactly, is consciousness?

Phenomenal and access consciousness

Phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) is simply experience; it is moving, coloured forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies and responses at the center. These experiences, considered independently of any impact on behavior, are called qualia. The hard problem of consciousness was formulated by David Chalmers in 1996, dealing with the issue of "how to explain a state of phenomenal consciousness in terms of its neurological basis" (Block 2004).

Access consciousness (A-consciousness) is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we perceive, information about what we perceive is often access conscious; when we introspect, information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we remember, information about the past (e.g., something that we learned) is often access conscious; and so on. Chalmers thinks that access consciousness is less mysterious than phenomenal consciousness, so that it is held to pose one of the easy problems of consciousness. Dennett denies that there is a "hard problem", asserting that the totality of consciousness can be understood in terms of impact on behavior, as studied through heterophenomenology. There have been numerous approaches to the processes that act on conscious experience from instant to instant. Dennett (1988) suggests that what people think of as phenomenal consciousness, such as qualia, are judgments and consequent behaviour. He extends this analysis (Dennett, 1996) by arguing that phenomenal consciousness can be explained in terms of access consciousness, denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem." Chalmers, on the other hand, argues that Dennett's explanatory processes merely address aspects of the easy problem. Eccles and others have pointed out the difficulty of explaining the evolution of qualia, or of 'minds' which experience them, given that all the processes governing evolution are physical and so have no direct access to them. There is no guarantee that all people have minds, nor any way to verify whether one does or does not possess one.

Events that occur in the mind or brain that are not within phenomenal or access consciousness are known as subconscious events.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscio..._consciousness

That said, I think that thought is both active/passive and voluntary/involuntary. When I am not 'consciously' thinking about something my mind is still very active in thought, whether I remember what I was thinking of or not.

I'm not familiar with Buddhism or meditation, but is it not the goal of meditation to essentially turn off the active/voluntary thought process?

Hm, I've just woken up, so I may not even be thinking yet, so I'm not sure if this will make much sense.. More coffee

[Psychonaut]

I'm not familiar with Buddhism or meditation, but is it not the goal of meditation to essentially turn off the active/voluntary thought process

I've been engaged in similar auto-hypnotic practices for about eight years now. My personal experience has been that it's quite possible to "turn off" many different modes of thought. However, it's also been my experience that consciousness is a lot like an onion. For every "layer" that you turn off, there's another beneath it. Now as you enter into progressively deeper states of meditation (which can be visibly analyzed as a progression from Beta waves, to Alpha waves, all they way down to Delta waves) strange things begin to happen that appear to be at least somewhat dependent upon the cultural-religious belief system that has been imprinted upon the consciousness of the individual. We're finally starting to see a breed of scientists who are willing to combine experiential descriptions of mental states with scientific observations of brain functions. Hopefully the picture of what's really going on will arise someday.