I've had the experience of talking with a friend and having a conversation along the lines of "Do you remember the guy that was in that movie?". If there's enough shared context, I might "know" exactly who they are talking about, but not the name of the movie or the name of the actor. I'm internally apprehending some kind of abstract "node" to which properties are attached, but not immediately available for recall.
I'm not thinking about the phrase 'that guy in that movie'. I'm not thinking about the name, because I don't (yet) recall it. I apprehend a connection between a person-node and perhaps as well a recent-experience node, the latter being an unsymbolized apprehension of the recollection of having shared an experience.
If I focus on the apprehension, I can begin to recall its properties.
To abuse a computer science analogy, it's as though there's some kind of abstract associative cache between nodes, linking them to other nodes but referring only to their object-ids. To further abuse the analogy, raw object-ids are a private type that have very few public methods. Mostly:
- more_or_less_the_same_thing_as(oid1, oid2)
- randomly_select_a_few_related_oids(oid) returns set<oid>
- recall_concrete_properties(oid, timeout) returns maybe<propertyset>
These apprehensions don't have an appearance or a sound, but they have a... brain feel? They have connections between them, and they have rough quasi-shapes, and can "fit" or "not fit" into certain other apprehended "structures".
Depending on what mode my brain is running in, I can generally render these apprehensions into words. Sometimes I can't seem to get them to cross the idea->word barrier.
The half-remembered movie is a great example. I see an actor whose name I don't recall. I remember that I've previously seen him doing something in some other movie. I do not at any point think the words "he played that FBI agent who was a reformed alcoholic chasing down a serial killer who leaves little whiskey bottles at the scenes of his murders" but all that is suddenly right there in my mind. I didn't think of any of those words, but all that is right there in my head.
Is recalling memories thinking? If not, if I then act on those memories, is that thinking?
While semiotic has become something of a joke, it has been seriously investigated[1]. We don't really think in language or even in symbols, it's rather a lot more complex than that.