On Thought

Thinking about thinking is something of a pastime of mine. Which is perhaps a bit disingenuous... my focus is not so much on what it means to think but rather why, to me at least, 'thinking' and 'acting' seem so very much distinct in relation to each other.

For example, as I type this I think about angling my arms up so as to raise my elbows higher then my tap dancing fingers. No, there isn't any real significance to this. I could just as easily imagine lifing my feet up off of the ground. Regardless... no matter which action I imagine doing, for all my mental exertion... no matter how hard I will my arms into motion... they don't move. Not one bit. And so I stop thinking about lifting them up and instead simply raise my arms. Up they go. And I am struck again by just oddly different these two states feel.

The awareness of willing my arms up... feeling an almost manifest pressure as I purely and ineffectively will them to move... and then to instead just raise them. Effortlessly. And without any corresponding feeling of thought driving it. I don't feel myself commanding them to lift. It simply gets done. No thought, just action.

This whole affair strikes me as very odd. Self-evident to others, perhaps... but to me... it is all very odd indeed. Shouldn't the part of me that thinks about raising my arm be functionally identical to the part of me that actually does the lifting? But I can feel the separation, and it proves disconcerting. I am in control of my body... should I wish it, I could extend my arms right now. I could get up and do the chicken dance. (Likelihood of me doing this? Not very. But feel free to hum the tune anyway!) But while I can easily perform such actions, I cannot think them into reality. I can simply... make the motions happen.

And I don't know how I do it. I can't feel the commands traveling from my seat of consciousness over on down to the fleshy assortment of muscles that comprise my body... I simply feel the basic nerve impulses that signal changes in pressure, orientation, and muscular tensing as my extremities shift position. If I look at them, I can visually confirm that, yup, there they are, blatantly and shamelessly up in the air to either side of me. But I am blind to the actual command that triggers the movement... it is like trying to feel how my eyes work. Yes, I know all the physical explanations... photons and focused on to my retina where they excite rods and cones that in turn relate electrical signals back to my brain. But where does the picture come from? When observing from inside my own head... where am I experiencing the sensation of vision?

It seems to me like there are three aspects which comprise my capabilities to effect change in the world. I am inclined to think that I am in no way unique in this, but not being everyone else, I can only vouch for my own perspective here.

- There is my thoughtful, sentient awareness... the consciousness resulting from the emergent behavior of my up-teen million nerves and synapses.

- There is the capacity for that physical action that can put into motion at a whim... walking, swinging, or typing on a keyboard to name but a few.

- There is the autonomous functions that run with little to no regard for either of these other two aspects... my heart beats, thankfully, without me needing to tell it what to do. My digestive system performs its strange alchemy purely on its own initiative. All it asks is that I now and then send it some appropriate materials, and it handles the rest.

And I wonder... in regards to those actions done at my biding and those done behind the scenes... how much difference is there between them, really? I can't will my heart to stop. But neither can I will my arms to lift up. I just raise them. It is like... something else does it for me. So... if it isn't my conscious thoughts doing it... and as far as I can tell my thoughts comprise the entirety of what I know of as 'me'... well, if it isn't me... just who's doing it, then?

How much of what I consider my mental self is simply the narrator rather then the conductor? Does my consciousness run the show, or just provide a running commentary explaining what the rest of me is doing?

I remember occasions of misbehaving in my youth. Now, such events were generally not malicious. But thinking back, what I remember most about such goings-on is the frequent occasions when I did things that, upon later reflection (or confrontation), I had no idea why I did them. Sometimes it would even occur to me immediately after the fact... "Why did I do that?" And more often then not, I didn't know. I just did it. Thinking didn't come into the equation.

I am inclined to suspect that self-awareness is a learned skill, and one whose acquisition could easily be missed without parents or society forcing individuals to analyze their own actions. It is a skill where we learn to narrate our own actions to ourselves so that we might catch blatantly stupid decisions prior to making them. And, in time, after sufficient time mentally 'talking to ourselves', we start identifying ourselves as the Narrator...our identity becomes that Voice In Our Head, and the thought-body disconnect has begun.

I wonder whether this is the core of the Introvert / Extrovert distinction? I am a pronounced Introvert, with my mental gaze focusing inwards far more powerfully then it looks out into the world at large. My identity is defined through how I think. What must it be like for an Extrovert? Do they instead base their identity on how they act, or how other people act around them? Are they made whole by surrounding themselves with people, because the more people they keep around, the more mirrors are thus available to reflect their identity back upon themselves? And is the same situation so exhausting for us Introverts because our inward gaze... the magnifying glass that focuses ourselves into a concentrated core of contemplative identity... it has to struggle to keep this focus from being disrupted by the cacophony of outside, alien personalities?

I do not know. What I see when I look upon my introspection is a topic for a different rambling. Suffice it to say, I personally subscribe to a philosophy of secular, individualistic self-betterment... to always strive to be more then I was before, but always to be a better me above all else. (How successful I've been with this is, perhaps, a topic better left for yet another future rambling.)

This relates to the topic at hand, since to try and puzzle out how to be a better me, I've got to have a concept of what shape the ideal 'Luke' might take. For that matter, I need to maintain some understanding of what it even means to be 'Luke' in the first place. This concept is built, by and large, from thought and meditation. So if my suspicions are correct, and what I think of as myself is really just an acquired mental narrator originally tasked to monitor and advise and in time instead developed the misconception that it was the one calling the shots... well, do I really know myself, then? Can I know myself? Is the part of me that possess the power to raise my arms, or kick my legs, or stick out my tongue... namely, the part of me that seems to act without need or regard for thought... well, what if it is also doing its own thinking? How many of my decisions are made by my thinking self, and how many are made... elsewhere... and simply justified by me, the apparent mental narrator?

Can I ever know this? How would I test it regardless? And how does whim, or impulse, or inspiration... how do these fit into the equation? Are these missives bubbling up from what I hesitantly call 'the rest of me', or are they just what I've always thought them to be... occasional sensory outputs that slip through the filters that block out all the other millions of signals which can be safely ignored at any given moment?

I don't know. It is like trying to explain 'purple' to someone who can't see; only in this case I am simultaneously the observer and the blind man. How does one judge thought when the only tools you have available for the investigation are thoughts themselves?

In the meantime I can at least take some comfort in the fact that while the engineer in me is interminably frustrated by not understanding how I work... and the philosopher in me can't be sure that I am who I think myself to be... ultimately, I do think, I can act, and my body appears to want to keep me trucking on for a while longer still. And hey... perhaps with time, I might gain the wisdom and awareness to possibly puzzle out just how separate these parts of me might or might not actually be. Or I might not. But whether I reach any matter of destination, at least the trip proves interesting!

Luke Rawluk, March 14 2006