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Where Do Thoughts Come From?

Where does that random idea, all with the imaginary bulb lighting up on your head come from? Where do thoughts come from? And how? If you’ve never thought about that before, here’s something to set the wheels moving in your mind.

The Chicken or the Egg

Ever think really hard about what came first: The chicken or the egg?

It’s a difficult question, at first glance, and an even more difficult one at second glance. Because at second glance one realizes that it’s not really only about the chicken and the egg. It’s not even primarily about the chicken and the egg, but about origin and the contradictions inherent therein. 

If everything originates out of something, then what did the first thing that ever was originate out of? If you say something, then what did that something originate out of. If you say nothing, then how can something come out of nothing, without cause without preamble. Was everything always there? Sounds just as unthinkable as if it had all come out of nothing.

Now think about origin in terms of thought. Where do thoughts come from? Think about a pink elephant. Where did this thought come from just now? The simple answer is: reading this.

Where do thoughts come from

Environmental stimuli or trigger is one obvious way we think of anything. We read about a unicorn, watch a cartoon unicorn on the TV, hear about someone talking about a unicorn—for whatever reason—and an image of a unicorn flashes in front of our mind. The thought of a unicorn comes and you cannot normally stop it from coming. Even if I tell you now, to not think of a unicorn, my mere saying it makes you think of a unicorn.

But is that the only way? 

Random Thoughts and Unicorns

What about when you randomly think of a unicorn? Where does a random thought, an idea that isn’t triggered by the external world come from? 

Activating a concept, for example, also activates the concepts it is related to. Thinking of an apple immediately makes you think if the color red, which then makes you think of a fire truck, which makes of a fire, which might make you think of a forest, which then makes you go green, which then reminds you of parrot, and this goes on and on and on but so so fast that you cannot even realize  that this is happening sometimes. 

Where do thoughts come from

All of our concepts, the building blocks of thoughts that we have gathered by our time on earth are connected to one or the other and thinking of one makes us think of the next and the next and so on. Or maybe we can think of several at the same time (Parallel Distributed Processing Model) a forest fire spreading in all directions simultaneously. 

The process of retrieval of concepts is on such a subconscious level, happening so fast and so far removed from our conscious realisation, that we arrive at something and we probably don’t even know where it came from.

Let’s go through two thought experiments—two radically different positions on the matter—before we try to answer the question

 Let’s tackle this problem using two thought experiments. The first is a popular philosophical concept adapted also in one of the famous film series—The Matrix.

Brain In A Vat Thought Experiment

If you’ve seen the Matrix, you’re already familiar with this concept. The Brain in a Vat is a compelling thinking exercise introduced most extensively by Hilary Putnam. 

Here is a science fiction possibility discussed by philosophers: imagine that a human being (you can imagine this to be yourself) has been subjected to an operation by an evil scientist. The person’s brain (your brain) has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc; but really all the person (you) is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings. 

If you actually really think about it, the Brain in the Vat situation seems, at least, plausible. After all, our sensations and our emotions are really just information carried via our neurons. 

If there could be found a way to directly stimulate our brain somehow, then why should it not be possible to doubt even our reality. The reality as we see it is subjective anyway. Everything we see or hear or touch or taste is transmitted to our brain through so many mediators. So many ways one thing can be perceived by each different person.

For example, the leaf that you see in the potted plant isn’t actually green. It’s just that the chlorophyll present inside the leaf absorbs most colors except green which is bounced back to you and received by the cones and rods in your eye. The leaf is, if you think about it, every other color except green.

But can thoughts really be fed into our mind, like in the Brain in Vat hypothesis, or like in Descartes’ Evil Demon hypothesis. Descartes suggested that it might be not completely impossible to think that all our thought and ideas are being fed into our head by a malicious demon sitting there (since a deceptive being like that could not be benevolent).

Descartes evil  demon was more of a way to show that there can be ample reason to at least attempt to doubt the way we perceive reality. And in this day and age, one might even give him enough credit to attempt to doubt something that was then taken for granted but is now being proven considerable. That reality is not local is something recently proven by the physicist Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger (for which they also received Nobel Price in 2022).

That reality is not local, that the universe is not locally real means that objects do not have independent properties prior to observation–something which is startlingly reminiscent of the Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna’s Śūnyavāda, and Advaita Vendāntin’s theory of Māya. (More on that in another Blog Post).

Can There Be Thought Without Experience?

Now imagine that a child that has just born is sent into a dark room, no light, no sound. Imagine that this child is being fed by tubes, and is kept alive like this until adulthood. It’s a cruel scenario, but we take comfort in the knowledge that it’s completely hypothetical.

The question is now this: Will this hypothetical child be able to think at all? The question is a compelling one. If one never had an experience of an apple, one won’t have the concept of an apple, and will not consequently be able to think of an apple. This particular child will not have a concept of anything. From this it is entirely possible to assume that this hypothetical child will have no thoughts whatsoever.

But what does this mean for our mind? Does this imply that our thoughts are grounded in experience?

Back To The Beginning

Where do thoughts come from

Where does a thought originate from? Is it only through a strange interaction of our brain and the external world? For example—when I think of an elephant, even of there is no elephant in front of me, I can do so because I know what an elephant is. My thought of an elephant in this case is due to the image of the elephant stored in my long term memory. 

Now when I think of a pink elephant, it is not because I have ever seen a pink elephant, or even because something like a pink elephant exists. But rather, this thought of a pink elephant is due to the fact that I have an image of pink and an image of elephant both stored in my memory and the combination of these two produces the thought of a pink elephant. 

This combinatory thinking makes up most of our imaginative thoughts, like unicorn, or golden mountain or chocolate house and so on. 

But this is only the answer to how our thoughts arise. The answer to where they come from still remains a mystery. Where do they come from. How do I even randomly think of something like a pink elephant without there being anything to remind me of it. 

Imagine this:

You’re lying in bed, staring at your ceiling, unable to sleep but too tired to get up and turn on the lights and get some work done. And suddenly you think of something. It can be anything. It can be how you need to buy a gift for your friends birthday this week, or how you think that there probably should be coffee machine at your workplace. There is no coffee machine hanging form your ceiling. There is nothing to put the idea of coffee machines in your brain. 

Then where does that thought some from? 

One scenario imagines a sort of domino effect, just with concepts. You recall something from memory—the first of many dominos to come—and there starts a catastrophic chain event that leads to whatever random thought you might be thinking at any point of the day. The only thing is that it isn’t random. It’s all connected in ways we can’t understand, we probably don’t even have the time to understand. It would take forever to track back to where you started thinking. 

Language and culture and external stimuli and internal mental states are so interconnected that they form the entirety of a person. An individual is not just a name and a face, but the entangled mesh of all of human evolutionary history and human culture and human thought. Everything is alive with meaning, with connected-ness. 

If you’d like an in depth knowledge about where thoughts come from, especially from a psychological point of view, I’d suggest you to read The Origin of Concepts by Susan Carey.

If you liked this post, you can also check out similar posts like Endless Possibilities: Unlocking The Illimitable Vastness Of Our Mind

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