Thinking to yourself.... how?

[Eli]

Originally posted by Gasmaske
I would say that I tend to think in symbols and a lot of time I don't think at all. In my job I have been trained to reach decisions quickly based on the information available. A lot is interview based and questions just pop up in my head without prompting. So much of what I do is subconcious it frightens me sometimes. Its almost as if I have been turned into a human computer - feed information in get answer out with little concious analysis of what I do. (Alright for the rest of you garbage in - garbage out). On one occasion I was training anew colleague and after a 8-9 question interview he asked me to explain my thought processes. It turned out that 15-16 different elements had gone into my decision but at no time was I concious of any thought process - just questions and an answer appearing in my mind.

Very similar thing happens also while playing Civ(as an example familiar to everyone).
Simple decisions like unit movement or selecting a spot for a city site are being done instantly, but when you think about it there are at least 3-4 factors that influence it, and we calculate them all subconciosly. It's even more complicated for deciding on what to build, and whether to declare war or not.

Another example, similar to the ball and the parabolic curve we automatically "draw" is walking in mountainious terrain(I just returned from a school trip ). We instantly know where to put our leg, how to balance our body, how to move our hands to the optimal position to stop a possible fall etc.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Sagacious Dolphin
Chaos theory is based on classical theories and still makes the presupposition that nature is predictable given a high enough level of detail. It is the miniscule variations from "perfect" knowledge that leads to huge variation, and hence the appearance of randomness. In the classical world it would be assumed that nature has all the information available, perfect knowledge of all the variables, and so from that viewpoint nature can make a perfect prediction of the future. The fact that one reference point (i.e that of nature) can make a 100% accurate prediction procludes any randomness. Maybe that is a philosophical point but its what classical theory would suggest.

There's clearly conflict between Quantum Physics and the rest of the field. Fudamentally, this world appears to be probabilistic, but quantum effects seem to be too small when things become macro. Classical Newtonian mechanics can still be used in many areas with a great degree of precision. If that's not sufficient there's always Relativity. So indeed there seems to be some kind of split personality.

Chaos Theory IIRC states that one cannot precisely predict the future because any small inaccuracies will tend to be amplified. Since it seems that perfect accuracies is impossible to attend, we can roughly guess what probabilistic future courses are there, but not with any sort of accuracy.

[PsionicMind]

On the topic of quantum theory, classical mechanics, and free will, my knowledge of quantum theory comes from a book called Taking the Quantum Leap that kinda dumbs down quantum theory, takes out all the math, and explains it to the lay person. But this book said that classical mechanics took out free will, because everything could be determined by what happened before. However, quantum theory, things exist and dont exist at once, because they only come into existence when they are observed, and it is observation that is free will. We have the freedom, at some quantum level, to choose to notice or not notice some quantum event, like the firing of a neuron or a photon from a distant object. Stuff like that. Well, thats my understanding.

As to how I think, I would say in symbols and words, mostly. Movie scenes also. But more than that I think in colors. Its an actual psychological condition, called synesthesia. Every alpha-numeric character is associated with a color in my mind. the letter A is red, the number 1 is white, and so on. When I read, the flashes of color tell me what the word is. Doing math, i am combining colors. All this is very subconscious, I wasnt even fully aware of it until i read about it in a magazine article some months ago. But its just as natural to me as talking or thinking.

[connorkimbro]

To me language is a nothing more than a communication interface.

As a linguist, i agree very strongly with this. I study Korean, which is a VERY different language from english, obviously. They've got a whole different culture, and a whole different way of viewing and describing the world around them. Consequently, there are words in korean that just do NOT have english equivilants. There are in fact, lots of them. Therefore you cannot just plug in a foreign vocab word inplace of the english equivelant. You can't think, well the english say this, so what are the equivelant koreans words? All too often, it does NOT work that way. You've got to learn and understand the word concepts of the foreign language. This leads to some interesting results. . . Often times, i'll be reading a native korean text, and i'll understand a sentance in korean perfectly, but i'll have a VERY difficult time translating the sentance into english. Often, in order to do so, you'll need several sentances in order to really translate the ideas adequately. Something so odd really needs to be experienced to be understood, but it is a wierd thing when it feels like you can speak korean, but not english, and english is your native language.

[Dauphin]

However, quantum theory, things exist and dont exist at once, because they only come into existence when they are observed, and it is observation that is free will. We have the freedom, at some quantum level, to choose to notice or not notice some quantum event, like the firing of a neuron or a photon from a distant object. Stuff like that. Well, thats my understanding.

That is very implausible. If it is human observation that determines quantum effects we have the whole problem of explaining what happened before humans existed.

My take on the world is that its not predetermined, but also that we don't have free will. For an analogy, when you toss a coin it has two possible outcomes - not predetermined, but it has no control over its outcome. I am open to change this opinion, only when there is a paradigm shift from quantum physics as the purely probabilistic set-up it appears to be.

Chaos Theory IIRC states that one cannot precisely predict the future because any small inaccuracies will tend to be amplified

The opposit is also true. Massive errors can be attenuated such that two wildly different start points end up in the same meta-stable state called limit cycles.