ON “THOUGHT” by Propertarian Frank Thought is a tricky name to use because it’s

ON “THOUGHT”

by Propertarian Frank

Thought is a tricky name to use because it’s too entangled with Platonic assumptions. Tentatively I operationalize it as ordered stimulation (activation of those neural circuitries that normally get stimulated by specific external stimulants, or that are on the activation path of externally observable behavior (thinking a clause is the activation of the circuitry that is antecedent on the path to (1) vocalizing of (2) visualizing associations of, (3) associational perception of , or (4) a combination of other preset modes of action involving the clause in question)). I don’t know if this is correspondent with our current understanding of cognitive science, but I’m confident the end result will look like a variant of this.

So some of the things (I think) you would call ‘thought’, I classify as action. For instance mentally calculating 567*93 is an action. By vocalizing the correct result, you demonstrate that you can compute it (carry out the operations constituting the action). The idealization of language is due to an artificial separation of mental transformations from demonstrated action. The latter is just a special case of the former.