HOW THOUGHTS ARE REPRESENTED IN THE MIND

              HOW THOUGHTS ARE REPRESENTED IN THE MIND

What is a thought? 

In loose terms - anything that arises in the mind.

Thoughts will arise in the mind to serve the regular goals as well as the latent commonsense-goals in our system. A thought is to serve a goal. Let me explain this. Thoughts can be something active/proactive like “what if we do this?”, “we can put this inside this'' etc. to something passive (say, mere passive observations) like “oh, these three men have the same coloured shirt”, “this window is so big!” etc. In case of the proactive ones, there is clearly a goal that is at stake. Even in the case of the seemingly “dull”/inactive and passive ones, there are latent commonsense goals like - spotting of contrasts, contradictions, repetitions, too much change in a short space/time, instinctively interesting things like ‘first and last times of anything’ or ‘minimum and maximum values of anything’ etc. Hence I say that thoughts are/arise to fulfill goals. 

Nobody is going to think of “odd” thoughts, just like that - say, “this point on the wall (some arbitrary point on the wall where there is nothing but plain paint) is 3 centimetres to the right of the window” upon entering a room. This doesn't serve any latent commonsense-goal in the system (and clearly not any proactive/active goal).

So, there are Goals in the inner system (mind) and there are potential Opportunities in the external world or “external to the Goals”. The latter fulfill the former. 

Explanation of the above diagram - 

As said above, there is a Goal (inner) and an Opportunity (outer). Intelligence connects the two - sees the potential connection between two such. But this ‘intelligence’ is again a process which works. In it, there will be its own internal Goals and Opportunities, which will be spotted by intelligence again; this goes on infinitely recursively. 

Here is one immediate potential objection - What about the representation of these Goals and Opportunities themselves, in the ‘Intelligence’? These are mere data/knowledge and not thoughts. So this issue is addressed as that of knowledge-representation.

Thoughts are connections between these Goals and Opportunities. So, if we accept the above model of thoughts, we need to solve - how are these “connections” represented in the mind?

Let's see what these connections are and how they happen. 

A Goal goes in memory (short-term memory) obviously. Further, using memory again, a bubble of connected things to it, arises around it. Simultaneously the mind is looking at the external world, for Opportunities. An arbitrary opportunity too is picked up - goes in memory and there arises a bubble of connected things (using memory again) to it. There is something common (repeated) to the 2 bubbles (as they overlap) and that forges the connection between them, and thereby between the Goal and the Opportunity. THIS SPOTTING OF COMMONALITY, WHICH IS REPETITION, IS A MEMORY-PHENOMENON (repeated bells ringing). SO THIS ITSELF GETS REPRESENTED IN MEMORY. THE REPRESENTATION OF THIS VERY KNOWLEDGE (OF THE COMMONALITY/REPETITION/OVERLAP) IN THE MEMORY IS THE ‘THOUGHT’. 

Thus, thoughts are a special case of knowledge-representation.