I suppose thinking can mean the gamut of instinct to deliberation. I was
talking about thinking from the point of basic volition. Even though dogs
et al. aren't fully equipped to express themselves using linguistic means,
they still have some capacity to communicate if only intercranial.
> Intentional thought usually involves some sort
> of symbol manipulation, and can be characterized by the tasks well
> attacked by Artificial Intelligence. Unintentional thought does not deal
> with symbol manipulation and are often the tasks AI finds difficult,
> better handled by neural networks or Artificial Life.
What's the difference between AI and neural-nets?
> Intentional thought is what occurs when you are trying to learn a new
task,
> integrate a function, or find the best route to a destination.
> Unintentional thought is what helps you make more instictual decisions,
> often times actions or procedural things.
Unintended (re)actions and intuition can in large part be explained by
implicit memory, I think. Wouldn't you say that habitual and routine
actions are a lot like computer scripts?
> Many people it seems put almost no intentional thought into talking.
> There are people I know that I cannot stand to be around, simply because
> there [sic] conversations are so completely repetitive. It seems they
spend no
> time thinking of what to say, and just say whatever feels natural.
I think those people speak repetitively because that's how they think. If
they did have a well-composed pithy thought, wouldn't they be likely to
express it aloud? A lot of what you're able to say at any one point has to
do with how much of what you've pondered beforehand. If someone has read a
book, they will bring up the subject it was about and talk about it
authoritatively and with a somewhat esoteric diction. Those who are "doers"
almost to the point that they're not really "thinkers" (they think about
the task at hand and even afterwards) won't have much to say most of the
time. Something like that...
> Back to the topic. I would say that before language the
> ability for unintentional thought was there, but the ability
> to manipulate symbols (intentional thought) may have developed
> after/as a consequence of/ or symbiotically with language.
But language isn't completely intentional thought. It may be in writing
here for the most part but sometimes when I talk I use words I didn't
expect to say but unconsciously I knew it was appropriate for the context.
And thinking to yourself using language is no more intentionally thought as
walking or mouse-clicking. So you're saying that before language people
didn't think to themselves for whatever reason, not even in a primal
nonverbal sense (like how some people try to show what a dog must be
thinking... but the words are just for explanatory purposes)? Doesn't that
mean that the <Self> was brought about due to language? That would mean
that no one spoke in the first person in the beginning and when they spoke
in second person, the other person wouldn't realize that it's himself
that's being addressed.
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"Many people would rather die than think;
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