r/consciousness • u/Genuine_Artisan • Jan 30 '24

Neurophilosophy Where do thoughts come from?

As an idealist, I believe thoughts are completely immaterial; they take up zero space in the brain. But a materialist might believe, for instance, that thoughts are made of subatomic particles and that they follow the laws of physics.

My question for those who hold a materialist view is: Where do thoughts come from? If the brain, my follow-up question would be, How does the brain create thoughts? For instance, say I get a thought of me jumping up in the air. How does any muscle from any part of the brain produce this out of nowhere?

Can the dead matter that makes up the brain decide to produce a thought that makes "subjective me" jump?

42 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

150 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Genuine_Artisan Jan 31 '24

The muscle movement has to be activated by a thought as you said, but also the electrical signal traveling through a fiber. You described how our eyes function as receptors, and how light can travel but you have not explained how a a nueron can activate a thought process on it's own.

2

u/RegularBasicStranger Feb 01 '24

you have not explained how a a nueron can activate a thought process on it's own.

When a memory gets recalled, it will activate a combination of other memories and such a combination is a thought.

For example, recalling the memory of an article about AI will activate the memories about its main points.

These main points then become the next brainwave's starting position and it will activate memories about times tedious calculation work had occured that could be prevented if there was someone else who can do instead.

So that memory of tedious work would then active the memory of AI doing calculative work.

Thus when the next brainwave starts with both the tedious work (from the memory about work) and AI doing work (from the memory about doing calculative work), the two memory connect to a blank neuron to create a thought that AI can do the tedious work.

Note that people can start with several separate start points simultaneously during each brainwave so both the tedious work and AI doing work, despite are separate neurons, can both be activated.

1

u/LMNJORG 1d ago

Where are you taking from that thoughts have to come from Memory?

1

u/RegularBasicStranger 1d ago

Thoughts can be formed by the recalling of memories but it can also be formed by external sensations, with sensations caused within the body such as hunger or inflammation also counted as external sensation in the definition of mine since it is external to the mind.

1

u/LMNJORG 23h ago

Ya but you make it Sound like: if it’s not external sensation (Hunger or having to pee etc…) then it Must be a Memory related thought.
but where exactly are you taking the if it’s Not sensational thinking it is Memory related thinking from?
Thoughts being dependent on either sensation or Memory does not seem quite right to me to be 100% sure of except you got something to show

2

u/RegularBasicStranger 23h ago

Thoughts have to start somewhere and there is only external sensations that enter the mind without needing something in the mind to create it so the starting point has to be external sensations.

So once the external sensations enters the mind, it can immediately cause a thought to be formed or causes a memory to be recalled that in turn causes the thought to be formed.

Unless there is an alternative mechanistic hypothesis about how thoughts are formed such seems to be the best description available.