Thoughtcraft draft 1.1. Of Thoughts and Thinkers
[I continue the draft of Thoughtcraft.]
Section 1: The Nature of Thought and of Thinkers
Chapter 1: Thought and Ideas
In discussing the workings of the human mind, it is all too easy to go down long paths in pursuit of useful terms and definitions. Better at the outset to admit that all our definitions and distinctions will be faulty, but to go ahead and state them anyway, as tools by which we may begin thinking about thinking, and refine our understanding as we go along.
Thought is any mental process of which we are in any sense aware. An idea is a result of thought, which we are aware of as being discrete from, and definable in contradistinction to, any other idea. While our awareness may be dim, we are aware of ideas as the beginnings of other things. An idea may be an impetus to action in the outward world, or it may be a tool whereby we guide further thinking. We are aware of it as a being connected to our actions or other thoughts.
Thought is the process by which ideas are formed and evaluated. But the result of thought is not always an idea. It may be an image, sound, word, or sequence of words, that is scarcely even evaluated. This is the stuff of dream and of daydream, or reverie. It comes and it goes. Only when a thought is held, evaluated, considered for use in some way, is it what we commonly think of as an idea, and this is what I will mean by the word in this essay.
The best working definition of an idea is that it is a thought which vies for territory. As any idea is put into use, or even evaluated for usefulness, it is in competition, potential or actual, with other ideas. The key difference between idea and daydream is that an idea gives rise to or embeds within itself a decision. Daydreams do not. Even the act of our evaluating an idea aims at a decision: is it useful and/or correct? Reverie (asleep or awake) is thought in the absence of such evaluation. It is the awareness of, and the perceived need to evaluate a thought, which makes that thought an idea. Its evaluation may be brief, its rejection swift. In such a case, its life as an idea was brief, may in fact be so brief that such a thought shows us the borderline case, demonstrating that we cannot truly distinguish between thought and idea. But just as hard cases make bad law, these borderline cases will distract us if we let them. Let us not. The ideas we are concerned with in this essay are far from the borderline. They are the ones which pass their first evaluation, and which go on to vie for territory in a process of which at least one person, for some time longer (and usually much longer) than a eye’s blink, is aware of.