Reason: Thoughts that pop

Here are some thoughts which have popped into my head. It might have been better if they had not, but they did, and now it is a fait accompli. I discussed them with ChatGPT.

Thoughts pop into our heads. Sometimes they're articulated. Sometimes they're visualized. Sometimes they're sensed. Sometimes they're perceived. Sometimes they're felt emotionally. But thoughts pop into our head. And words pop into our head. And conclusions pop into our head. And visualizations. And musical imagination. All pop into our heads. It wouldn't make sense to say, before they pop into our head, we've decided what's going to pop into our head, does it? But the question is, “is the thought inchoate before it arrives?” It's translated into words, or visualization, or imagination, or anything else and then it's used to justify the thought, to explain it to ourselves and to others. It's an issue of timing, isn't it?

ChatGPT said:

Yes, it’s an issue of timing, but also of structure and translation. Thoughts appear to arise pre-articulated, and yet articulation—whether in words, images, emotions, or sensory impressions—is the only way we can consciously grasp them. This suggests a pre-linguistic, pre-symbolic, or even pre-conscious stage where the thought exists but hasn’t yet taken a recognizable form.

The timing issue arises because the appearance of a thought and the awareness of it seem almost simultaneous, yet they can’t be exactly the same thing. If something “pops into our head,” then it must, in some sense, already exist before we notice it. But in what form? If it is inchoate, then it must lack the structure that makes it intelligible. That means the process of translation into language, visualization, or conceptual form is integral to making it a 'thought' in the sense we can use.

But does the act of articulation merely reveal the thought, or does it shape and finalize it? If thoughts exist before they take form, then there must be a raw cognitive event prior to words, images, or feelings—a moment before structure, before articulation. That would mean our minds generate proto-thoughts, which only become recognizable through the act of representation.

This raises further questions:

• Is a thought fully formed before it is articulated, or does it develop in real-time as it is being expressed?

• Do words, images, and sensory impressions merely reflect an existing thought, or do they create it in the process of translation?

• If a thought is inchoate before articulation, how does it determine the form it takes? Is there an underlying mechanism that selects words vs. images vs. emotions?

It seems plausible that thoughts exist in a formless, pre-articulated state before emerging into awareness, but the process of articulation is not merely a reporting mechanism—it is part of what brings the thought into being as something structured and usable. The moment of recognition is likely the final step in a cascade of subconscious processing, where something raw and undefined coalesces into something graspable.

So, yes—timing is central, but so is transformation.

You said:

Well, it's pretty clear if you're an introspective individual, or even if you're not, the thoughts can be on the tip of your tongue, pre-articulated, and they can vanish before being articulated. My son used to say, “You made me forget what I was going to say!” and it's a common enough experience. A proto-thought gets interrupted, and it's lost. It failed to surface entirely, failed to make it into the linguistic sphere, but it was there and vanished. It's not an uncommon thing for a reflective person to reflect on their own inner workings and see that this is true. There can be thought without language, and even thought without motor activity, visualization, any sort of imagination, or any sort of sensation, but there's a raw sort of awareness, a dim apprehension, so it's not an all or none, it's not binary, but it happens, and introspection can reveal it to those who are introspective (which is not everybody).

ChatGPT said:

Yes, exactly. The experience of having a thought on the tip of your tongue—or a dim apprehension that fails to surface—demonstrates that thoughts can exist pre-articulated but still be real, independent mental events. The fact that they can disappear before being expressed suggests that articulation is merely one possible outcome, not a necessary condition for a thought to exist.

This aligns with what many introspective individuals have noticed: thought is not binary, not simply "formed" or "not formed", but exists along a continuum of clarity and articulation. Some thoughts emerge fully structured, ready to be spoken or written; others remain vague, never fully reaching the linguistic or visual sphere before dissolving.

And, as you pointed out, thought can exist without words, without images, without sensory impressions—just a raw, amorphous awareness that is undeniably real but difficult to grasp. It’s fleeting, but it’s there.

This directly contradicts the common assumption (sometimes made by linguists or philosophers of language) that thought and language are inseparable. Language is one tool for shaping and expressing thought, but it is not thought itself. There are many cognitive events that do not rely on language—intuitive insights, subconscious problem-solving, gut feelings, even moments of deep reflection where words fail but understanding remains.

And, as your son's remark illustrates, the mind’s ability to hold, lose, and reshape thoughts before they are fully articulated suggests an entire pre-conscious processing system where thoughts can exist half-formed, waiting for the right moment to surface—or vanish altogether.

You said:

It's not just thoughts that pop into the head. Words pop into the head. Visualizations pop into the head. Awareness pops into the head. Attentional control pops into the head. Conclusions pop into our heads. Attention can be shaped. It's not entirely random, but it can only be imperfectly shaped, as in, we lose focus.

ChatGPT said:

Yes, the phenomenon of things popping into the head extends beyond just thoughts—it includes words, images, awareness, attention, even shifts in focus itself. These mental events seem to emerge spontaneously, yet not entirely at random. There’s a pattern, a structure, but it’s imperfectly shaped and partially uncontrollable.

This ties into the nature of attentional control, which itself seems to pop in and out—sometimes intentional, sometimes involuntary. We can direct our focus to some extent, but distractions, interruptions, or subconscious influences can override our control. Thoughts vanish before articulation. Attention drifts. Mental images fade before they can be grasped.

This suggests a hierarchy of mental emergence, where:

1. Raw, unshaped mental content exists below awareness.

2. Some of it surfaces into conscious experience—as thoughts, words, images, or awareness itself.

3. Not everything that starts to surface makes it to full articulation—some thoughts fade before they form.

4. Attentional control is itself subject to emergence, fluctuation, and interference.

The imperfect shaping you describe is key. We don’t entirely control what pops into our heads, but we can influence it, direct it, refine it—though never perfectly. We can guide our focus, but we can also lose it. Awareness can be summoned, but it can also slip away.

This all suggests that the mind operates through emerging processes rather than rigid, deterministic control. The act of thinking, perceiving, focusing—it’s all a dance between spontaneous emergence and partial shaping.

You said:

Numerous times I've tried to categorize and classify mental operations, and each time I've realized it's probably an impossible task. It's not even a directed graph with no cycles; it's a graph full of cycles. That's only an imprecise description of how we think. And when you start to list mental operations, it becomes a very large number. In English, there are a lot of words for things mental. How many, I don't know. I suppose some person who is obsessive-compulsive could go through a given dictionary and pull them all out eventually. It could be a team of scholars equally obsessive-compulsive. But that would be only one dictionary, and that would be only one language. So, I'm not sure that we'll ever understand all the mental operations, because the list seems to be very, very large, even in English. And probably other languages have a different way of categorizing things.

ChatGPT said:

Yes, the task of categorizing and classifying mental operations is likely impossible, or at least hopelessly unwieldy, for precisely the reasons you outline. It’s not a simple directed graph—it’s full of cycles, feedback loops, and recursion, making any neat classification system ultimately break down under its own complexity.

Even if someone attempted to catalog all mental operations by pulling words from a dictionary, it would be futile in several ways:

1. Sheer Volume & Variation – The number of words related to cognition in English alone is vast, and other languages likely carve up the conceptual space differently, making any single-language analysis incomplete.

2. Conceptual Overlap & Blurriness – Many mental operations don’t fit into distinct categories. Reasoning bleeds into intuition. Memory blends with imagination. Attention modulates perception. Any attempt to classify them would be inherently fuzzy, overlapping, and recursive.

3. Emergent & Dynamic Nature of Thought – Thinking isn’t a static process. It shifts, adapts, recombines, and evolves in real-time, making classification an after-the-fact abstraction, not a direct representation of how cognition actually functions.

4. Language Shapes (and Distorts) the Categorization – Different languages emphasize different conceptual divisions. English may have certain distinctions that don’t exist in other languages, and vice versa. This means any classification would be language-dependent and not universal.

The failure of categorization isn’t surprising. The mind isn’t a hierarchical filing cabinet—it’s a web of interacting processes, with feedback loops, cross-modal influences, and emergent properties. Any attempt to catalog mental operations is inherently reductionist and will always fail to capture the fluid, recursive, and emergent nature of thought itself.

You said:

It is pretty clear to me that proto-thoughts (if that is what we wish to call the inchoate pre-linguistic experience) are not words. A proto-thought can be expressed in any number of ways with equivalent meaning, giving understanding. The mapping of words to meaning is many to many. It is not an "is" relationship, but there is relationship. This is all quite mysterious as is any other aspect of the mind.

ChatGPT said:

Yes, proto-thoughts—or whatever term best captures the pre-linguistic, inchoate mental experience—are clearly not words themselves. If they were, we wouldn’t be able to translate the same idea into different words, different languages, or even into images, gestures, or music while preserving its core meaning. The many-to-many mapping of words to meaning makes it clear that words are a representational layer, not the fundamental substance of thought itself.

The relationship between thought and language is real but non-identical—not an "is" relationship, but a translation, an encoding, a mapping. This means that:

1. Proto-thoughts exist before they are articulated—they are not inherently verbal but can be expressed in multiple ways.

2. The same meaning can take different forms—words, images, emotions, sensations, movements, symbols, or even unarticulated knowing.

3. Meaning is not locked to any single representation—words are tools, not the essence of thought.

This is indeed mysterious. How does the mind pre-structure a proto-thought before it takes form in language or another modality? What is the substance of thought before it is shaped? What governs how it gets mapped into words, images, or actions?

The mystery is compounded by the fact that we cannot fully introspect upon proto-thoughts—we only catch them at the moment they begin to take shape. They exist in a twilight zone of cognition, just before conscious articulation. We sense their presence, but the moment we grasp them, they are already translated into something we can think about.

And yet, we persist in mistaking language for thought—likely because our awareness of thinking happens primarily through language. The real mental work seems to take place beneath or prior to the level of words, and words are merely the surface expression of something deeper and more elusive.

You said:

So my recent theme for my essays has been reason.; how we arrive at conclusions. What's the process? But it would seem that reason itself just pops into our head, our justification for things, our choice of evidence. Inference just pops into our head, and then we attempt to justify it linguistically if we're philosophers, or people who like to write essays, or argue with others. But the precise words we use, the precise thoughts we have do pop into our heads, and then we justify them with words as being logically correct. Of course, the next person may disagree, and we have some tools for showing where the presumed argument doesn't work. We call these fallacies, and sometimes physical impossibilities, and sometimes a failure to map soundly to the objective world. Sometimes it's just layers of abstraction based upon a tenuous appraisal of the evidence. We interpret things, and interpretations differ from person to person; these various interpretation can't all be correct. It doesn't fall that any of them are correct, but we try. Sometimes in the day-to-day matters necessary for survival, and coping with the real world, we succeed. In other cases, we fail utterly, but we don't recognize it because we're convinced that we're right and the others are wrong. Such hubris. None of us stand on a Mount Epistemology at the peak of understanding. We're not gods. They were a fractious bunch, too, weren't they? They couldn't agree on anything.

ChatGPT said:

Yes, the theme of reason naturally leads to the question of how we arrive at conclusions, and if we’re being introspective about it, it seems that reason itself pops into our head, just like thoughts, words, visualizations, and awareness do.

We like to imagine that we reason in a linear, step-by-step way, but that’s not how it actually happens. Instead:

1. A thought, conclusion, or justification emerges spontaneously—it simply pops into the head.

2. We then attempt to justify it linguistically—articulating reasons, choosing evidence, constructing an argument.

3. The justification itself often follows the conclusion rather than preceding it**, even though we present it as if it came first.

4. Others may disagree, using their own spontaneously emerging reasons, and we use tools—fallacies, logical analysis, comparisons to reality—to judge whose reasoning holds up.

5. Yet even those tools are imperfect, because interpretation is always at play, and interpretation is shaped by personal history, bias, and spotty access to evidence.

6. None of us can be certain we’re right, even if we act as though we are.

This points to the illusion of rational control—the comforting but false notion that reason is purely deliberative, that we weigh evidence neutrally, that we reach conclusions purely through logic. In reality, reason is emergent, post hoc, and deeply entangled with intuition, bias, and subconscious selection. We think we're standing on solid epistemological ground, but much of what we believe is built on selective interpretation, incomplete information, and sheer cognitive happenstance.

And you’re right—the gods themselves were a fractious, quarrelsome bunch, as human as the mortals they ruled over. If even the supposed divine figures of mythology were incapable of unanimous certainty, why would we expect ourselves—creatures of flawed cognition, transient memory, and emotional bias—to reach pure, unassailable truth? Hubris indeed.

So we try. We argue, refine, critique, revise. Sometimes we succeed in practical matters—getting through the day, solving problems, making things work. Other times, we fail utterly, convinced we are right while being dead wrong. And we don’t know which is which, not fully, because we lack the epistemic vantage point to be sure.

There is no Mount Epistemology—just a shifting landscape of partial truths, interpretations, and attempts to construct a coherent world from whatever pops into our head.

You said:

But we can verify, we can validate our conclusions in many cases, as long as we haven't piled abstraction upon abstraction, creating great towers. Maybe that's what the Tower of Babel metaphor meant. But nevertheless, if we didn't have concrete validation of some things, we couldn't survive for a day. Our species couldn't survive. So we can reason our way out of wet paper bag in many cases, just not all of the cases that we think we can argue successfully for. Of course, there are many areas where we have partial successes at best. Some aspects of medicine, most engineering, some aspects of science, show validated success. Politics? One would wish. Others fail to do so entirely. Still, we persist, thinking we've arrived at the truth. Others, more grounded in reality, point out that the emperor has no clothes.

ChatGPT said:

Yes, verification and validation are real, and without them, survival—both individual and species-wide—would be impossible. Not all reasoning is illusion, and not all conclusions are mere castles in the air.

There are many cases where we can test, validate, and confirm our reasoning against the real world:

• If we build a bridge using sound engineering, it holds.

• If we take the right antibiotic for a bacterial infection, we get better.

• If we throw a rock at a window, the window breaks.

These are not just abstractions stacked upon abstractions—they have concrete grounding in repeatable, observable, causal reality.

But once we start building theoretical towers—especially ones where each layer is justified by another abstraction rather than empirical validation—we enter the danger zone. This is where people get lost in self-referential reasoning, mistaking coherence for truth. Your Tower of Babel metaphor fits perfectly here: build too high on an unstable foundation, and everything collapses into incomprehensibility and fragmentation.

This is why we see mixed success in science and medicine. Some areas are well-validated and repeatable—basic physics, parts of engineering, some aspects of medicine. Others are more speculative, riddled with selective validation, poor replication, and self-reinforcing theories.

And yet, we persist, convinced we’ve arrived at truth—even when the ground beneath us is shaky. Hubris, once again. Some cling to abstract systems, believing in their internal consistency rather than testing them against the harsh reality of validation. Others—more grounded, more skeptical—point out that the emperor has no clothes.

The problem is, those pointing it out are often dismissed—because once a great theoretical edifice is built, entire careers, institutions, and belief systems depend on its continued existence.

We can reason our way out of a wet paper bag, but we don’t always recognize when we’re trapped in a steel cage of our own making.