| > But people can have more or less awareness of their thoughts, and they can be having thoughts that they don’t consider to be thoughts. Yes, that is my experience. If I try not to have thoughts, then what happens is not that thoughts stop happening, it's that I stop noticing them until they're more fully developed. This "not noticing" results in a relative lack of remarks upon those thoughts, but the thoughts themselves are not made of or depending on language. They just are things. Technically, they are "derived meaning". When on psychedelics I can have thoughts that not only don't depend on language, but don't have language. It's not possible to describe them because they represent indescribable things. It's possible to feel them and interact with them in a way that seems to makes sense to me, but it's not possible to communicate them. If I try, they can actually result in words being generated, but those words sound like a bad phone autocomplete - stuff like "can have a haves and take a three sixteenth quarters" (real excerpt from a past trip). (My guess is that my brain has some sort of internal format that real-world concepts are translated into in order to be operated on. That's the "meaning" that gets derived. I wonder if psychedelics allow me to create or perceive meanings that no real-world concept would ever actually translate into, and therefore don't have any way to communicate as a real-world concept.) > I am doubtful that anyone can truly stop thinking. This statement is a perfect example of benrutter's point: > - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. Don't be so sure that nobody has thoughts that can truly stop, even just for a short time. |