Are thoughts completely transparent to the thinker? Or can a person be mistaken as to what they are thinking? In other words, they assume they are thinking a thought T, but they are actually thinking T'. Personally, I believe it is impossible for someone to be mistaken about what they are thinking. But have any philosophers discussed this question? If so, can I see some references?
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what sort of thougts?– user71399Commented Aug 11 at 20:30
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Consider this real life example. Someone asked me recently: "How old is that article?" I said "Hm, let me see, ehm, it was written in 1981, and now we are in ehm, 1924... so ... " (doing the mental arithmetic in silence) "... so it's about 34 years old". The other: "Huh, what are you saying? Should I get worried about you?!" Me: "Oh... wait, wait, I really thought I had that right! What was I thinking?!" -- You should read Oliver Sachs' books about various strange forms of (self)-awareness and aberrations of awareness.– mudskipperCommented Aug 11 at 22:06
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2I tend to think that introspection reveals less about ourselves (and must be at least as much a result of construction) than perception reveals about the world around us. "Being in a particular mental state" (even one with conscious awareness) is not the same as "knowing that one is in that state" (acute self-awareness). During normal activities, we're usually not aware of our mental states, we're just in those states (we are those states), even though we can later recall what we did (or we think we can recall - which can easily be an illusion - think of hypnosis and false memories)– mudskipperCommented Aug 12 at 1:34
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1So, I'd say that not knowing what we're thinking is - in a sense - our normal, usual state.– mudskipperCommented Aug 12 at 1:36
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1Also, paying deliberate attention to one's own mental state(s) necessarily changes the state. Even with such apparently "immediate" states as pain. One way to alleviate intense pain is to try to deliberately focus on it, to become "one" with it as it were.– mudskipperCommented Aug 12 at 1:44
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4 Answers
Can I be mistaken about what I think I am thinking?
Yes — This is almost trivially true for "emotion-thoughts".
Consider a man acutely suffering the throes of a divorce:
I am leaving her.
Fine. But why?
We don't love each other any more.
Ok but then why so much suffering?
She did xyz to me. She's a bad person (sob)
Many people do xyz. Many more people are bad. Why is her xyz special?
Invariably we would find
- We don't love each other
- We want to separate
- etc
... are as confused as thoughts could possibly be!!
From here it's not a very long shot to the unreality of the whole world and therefore of all our thoughts.
People reject this idea on purely cognitive grounds. They would see it's trivially true on emotive grounds — everyone can remember situations where some situation made one upset and hot under the collar one day but seemed to matter much less after sleeping over it.
Chinese story:
Chuang Tzu's wife had died. He was sitting on the road enjoying playing the drum. A person asked him: Chuang Tzu! Not grieving over your wife's death is bad enough but merrily playing the drum?! This is obscene!
Chuang Tzu: Why? I was happy before I was married. How is it different now?
Yes, in very many cases we are mistaken about what we are thinking.
We use language for our most organized thinking, and language is often not up to the task
Here are some examples we can all try on our own.
Go enjoy a sunset, or a fire. Now describe what you were thinking.
It was mostly non-linguistic. Language, will basically never be able to translate all the thoughts and experiences.
Now do some daydreaming, about something you find interesting, or a problem. what were your thoughts?
William Faulkner is famous for his stream of consciousness writing, where he tries to capture the flitting way our actual consciousness works, jumping very rapidly from one subject to another, with the thoughts incomplete, based on unclear associations, following a meandering path, that after 10 pages of a single run-on sentence, leaves readers with a theme, where dark secrets get returned to from different angles, with feared consequences mentioned, the hope that everything can be ignored, unrelated thoughts keep intruding, but the theme is still communicated, as is the obsession of the character...
Most of us when asked what we were thinking, just try to summarize the theme, or settle for "nothing much, just daydreaming". But when not asked by someone else, what do WE think about what we were thinking? Nobody ever documents a Faulknerian run on sentence!
Finally, do something stupid, or that you are ashamed of. Now explain to your significant other, or in detail to yourself, what you were thinking. This is a process that when raising kids it is very useful to regularly put kids through, to try to teach them to be more careful and considerate. But the answers to the question are often very difficult to articulate beyond "I thought it would be fun", and "it didn't work out the way I thought it would." Getting to the actual decision logic one used is to try to extract themes from a series of Faulknerian run-on sentences, after the fact. The actual goal of the question is not to find out "why", but to try to CHANGE the "why" the next time one is in a similar situation.
We lie to ourselves about what we are thinking, then embrace the lie
This has been studied and documented in lab testing by multiple researchers.
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman details how our non-rational system 1 does most of our thinking, and our rational system 2 often just rubber stamps what system 1 concludes, and comes up with rationalizations for why it was a good idea.
In split brain patients, this was illustrated very effectively in a test with the two eyes seeing different visual images, and the subject was asked to pick up the appropriate object from a set on the table, with the non-verbal hemisphere's hand. The verbal hemisphere saw an image of a chicken, the non-verbal one an image of snow. The non-verbal hand picked up a shovel, not the feather also in the collection. The verbal side, when asked to explain why they did that, said "when you have chickens, you will need to shovel the crap, that's why I picked up the shovel". One can find this, and many other cases of our being mistaken about what we are thinking in Susan Blackmore's excellent A Very Short Introduction to Consciousness.
And it is not just our consciousness lying to itself. Our UNconsciousness misleads our consciousness about what is in the world. Listen for something -- one is "sound-blind" to continual noises. They are de-emphasized in our qualia experiences. Look at a scene. We THINK we look like a camera does. But our unconsciousness basically constructs our visual field for us, with highlight cues for faces, human shapes, other shapes of interest (animals, signs), anomalous colors, things that are moving, etc. The belief we have a camera-type image in our heads is refuted by several examples form Blackmore's book. One is the "count the basketball passes between players wearing the black jerseys" video of 10 players passing 3 balls around a court. 70% of viewers do not notice the man in a gorilla suit walk through the court! Another is a picture of a balcony with scene behind - shown in a slide, which the subject studies, then another picture is projected of a very similar balcony and background. There are multiple differences, but subjects struggle to identify more than a few of them, because the differences all fall in the same logic categories picture to picture.
Our unconsciousness creates a "Grand Illusion" Cartesian Theater
What happens in our heads is explained by David Eagleman in his book Incognito. Our unconsciousness makes use of our "storytelling" inclinations, that theater companies take advantage of. Put characters in costume on a stage, put a few props out there, and one is now looking at Macbeth's castle. Similarly, if our unconsciousness communicates with our consciousness with the key qualia to focus on, and a few nearby important qualia, and logic categories like "trees with a stream meandering over this way", and "thick white smooth railing with thin metal bars at about this height", and one's consciousness will not notice the number of trees, and bars and exact railing dimensions changing in a different but similar picture. Our unconsciousness uses these shortcuts to pass much fewer qualia to our consciousness than we THINK it does -- just enough to create a "story" for our consciousness to act on.
Summary
So -- we often don't even know what we are seeing, hearing, and thinking, and regularly lie even to ourselves about them.
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2+1 "We lie to ourselves about what we are thinking, then embrace the lie" Not only true, but this has major psychologically therapeutic implications. I always thought psychological projection was a hokey, prescientific idea until I had ended a relationship with a vulnerable narcissist. Accusations against me were a laundry list of personal faults, and at first I thought it was disingenuous, but eventually realized that the person in question in quite a literal way believed it. It's frightening how detached some are from fact.– J DCommented Oct 5 at 17:01
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1+1 from me too. But (if you extend this to "believing that one is rational" or "makes rational decisions") there is also something like what I'd call the Fallacy Fallacy. For instance the Allais paradox is a really fallacious way in which our preferences "work" (fallacious in that it could be exploited), yet there may be a good evolutionary rationale behind it. A prereflective intuition about what is best for us may indeed be best in many real life situations (it better be). --But the best manipulators know that the best way to manipulate someone else is to give them the illusion of control :) Commented Oct 5 at 18:00
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@JD This point is why I often defend the Delusionists about consciousness, even though I think they are nearly insane. They have accurately identified that we ARE often wrong about what we think and have compiled a lot of data to support that. They over extrapolate from that, to "therefore we are wrong about being conscious", which is NOT true. But "we know what we know" is not.– DcleveCommented Oct 5 at 19:21
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@mudskipper An interesting point I take from Kahneman and Eagleton is: both propose consciousness explicitly in the role of a "homunculus". Calling Cartesian dualism a "homunculus in a machine" theory is a common tactic of ridicule of spiritual dualism. But the best current science on consciousness is supporting a homunculus role for consciousness.– DcleveCommented Oct 5 at 19:25
From Conifold:
One certainly can be mistaken about one's own thoughts for trivial reasons, like compromised faculties. But it was a tenet since Descartes that introspective mental states are "luminous", i.e. if one is in such a state then one can know, in principle, that one is. More recently, serious doubts have been raised about some states, and Williamson recently argued that no mental states are luminous at all, see SEP. If so, then a thinker can be mistaken as to what they are thinking even when they are in good health, pay attention, etc.
I think that thoughts are completely transparent to the thinker in their mind but the difficulty comes when trying to tell others about our thoughts, we can only be 100% sure of what is going on in our heads. And even if we are thinking about a topic we don't know much about we still can acknowledge the extent of the information we hold on said topic.
If we are thinking then we can acknowledge what we are thinking about and what it means to us in every aspect within our minds. Even abstract thoughts can be assigned meaning.
On the contrary, if anyone disagrees with what I am saying perhaps it could be used as an example to prove that yes, we can be mistaken about what we are thinking, Because I am human and, so is everyone reading this. If you interpret I had no idea what my thinking process was while typing this, you must have had moments like this as well.
But imagination on the other hand is different and can be wild, dreams are imaginative but we can't control our dreams for the most part. (Lucid dreaming)
Imagination can be considered the picture of thought. But not everyone has the same imagination, there are levels. Aphanstasia is "when your brain doesn’t form or use mental images as part of your thinking or imagination."
During the flow state, our brains are fully immersed in the task at hand. we aren't really "thinking" in the context you are asking about but we are still functioning. The flow state can be achieved by "finding a balance between a skill and how challenging that task is."
similarly, automaticity is when we are doing activities but aren't actively thinking about them. According to Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman. "What we think is largely hidden from us. In other words, most of what we know we don’t know we know. Probably 95% of all cognition, all the thinking that drives our decisions and behaviors, occurs unconsciously—and that includes consumer decisions."
sources for aphantasia:
[https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/25222-aphantasia]
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38548492/]
Sources for flow state and automaticity:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)]
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/automaticity]
[https://open.spotify.com/episode/152ppyrBMRpdFhpicJcgw3?si=00e0d59a77724af6]
Sources for the subconscious mind:
[https://hbr.org/2002/06/hidden-minds#.]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_BTVN68-ZA]
