April 2, 2023. What’s going on in your head right now? How about ... now? Or ... now? Answering this question is hard. As soon as you pay attention to your thoughts, you alter them, as surely as you alter an electron’s course by looking at it. You can’t describe your thoughts the way you describe, say, the room in which you sit, which remains stolidly unaffected by your scrutiny.

William James draws attention to this paradox in his essay “The Stream of Thought.” Examining your thoughts through “introspective analysis,” he writes, is like studying snowflakes by catching them in your “warm hand,” or “seizing a spinning top to catch its motion,” or “trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.”

I’ve always obsessed over my inner world, and more so as I age. That, I suppose, is why my books and columns have become increasingly personal. Below, I offer a few thoughts (second thoughts? afterthoughts?) about thoughts, the most inescapable and maddeningly elusive features of our existence.

META-THOUGHTS AND THOUGHTLESS THOUGHTS

A note on terms. James coined the phrases “stream of thought” and “stream of consciousness” and sometimes uses them interchangeably, but I distinguish thoughts from consciousness in the following way: Thoughts are the contents of consciousness, including fears, fantasies, recollections, realizations, deliberations, decisions and all the other flora of subjective experience. If consciousness is the medium, thoughts are the message.

I also like the easy self-referentiality of “thoughts about thoughts,” which captures a deep truth about us. Thoughts spring from thoughts in ways beyond our ken. We are what Douglas Hofstadter calls self-generating “strange loops,” akin to M. C. Escher’s famous drawing of two hands drawing each other. (Who draws the drawer?)

Thoughts also spring from brains via mysterious processes. Our brains contain roughly 100 billion neurons linked by one quadrillion synapses, each of which processes an average of 10 electrochemical signals, or action potentials, every second. The result of all this activity is that brains churn out thoughts as ceaselessly as hearts pump blood.

As James puts it, thoughts are “continuous,” they “flow,” they keep coming even when we pay no attention to them, and they keep changing; no thought is precisely like another. James thus doubts whether psychologists can reduce the human mind to a mental equivalent of atoms as physicists have done with matter.

With some effort, I can direct my thoughts, focus them, but they often seem to have a will of their own. They swerve this way or that for obscure reasons, a tendency that Buddhists disparage as “monkey mind.” When we do notice and reflect on a thought—perhaps to convey it to ourselves or to others—we instantly transform it, turning it into a different, higher-order thought. Call it a meta-thought, a thought about a thought.

Meta-thoughts—the thoughts I express to myself and to others through writing and speech—are my bread and butter. I make my living off them. But meta-thoughts constitute an infinitesimal fraction of my thoughts.

Most of my thoughts are unformed, incoherent, inexpressible, and they come and go without my dwelling on them. You might call them thoughtless thoughts. Thoughtless thoughts are what course through your head when no one is watching you, not even you.

CONSCIOUSNESS WITHOUT THOUGHT?

Religious scholar Robert Forman, a veteran meditator, claims that he and others have achieved “pure consciousness,” a mystical state devoid of specific thoughts. You are conscious without being conscious of anything.

Consciousness without content strikes me as a contradiction, an oxymoron, like a book without words or a film without images. And how would you know you’re in a state of pure consciousness? How would you remember it? Even Forman admits that states of pure consciousness, if they exist, are rare.

Meditation is touted as a route to knowledge of your deepest self, your innermost thoughts. I’ve had delightful experiences meditating, especially on a silent retreat in 2018. But meditation and other contemplative techniques are designed to control and suppress thoughts rather than to understand them. Meditation is self-brainwashing aimed at taming your monkey mind. I don’t want to tame my monkey mind; I want to comprehend its antics.

Although we may not notice them and may even deny their existence, thoughtless thoughts are always there, underpinned by our brains’ incessant chatter. Without thoughtless thoughts, we would lack meta-thoughts. Thoughtless thoughts are the dark matter of our minds, giving shape via hidden mechanisms to what is observable, visible, luminous in our inner cosmos.

Can we study thoughtless thoughts, the mind’s dark matter, given that simple introspection doesn’t work? Some neuroscientists predict that external brain-scanning devices, such as MRIs or arrays of implanted electrodes, will soon allow us to read minds. But this feat would require cracking the neural code, the set of rules or algorithms that turn neural activity into mental activity—that is, thoughts. The neural code is the enigma at the core of the mind-body problem; the more we investigate it, the more intractable it seems.

THE LIMITS OF STREAM-OF-THOUGHT FICTION

I try to describe my moment-by-moment thoughts in Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science, a lightly fictionalized account of a day in my life. In the first draft, to make my thoughts seem more raw and real, I expressed them as sentence fragments running into each other, with little punctuation. An editor who read this draft described it as “sludge.”

I rewrote the book with more conventional sentences. I added contextual information for readers, information that I wouldn’t have actually thought about because I knew it implicitly. These attempts to make my book more readable also make it less realistic when it comes to depicting my thoughts.

Writing Pay Attention deepened my already-profound appreciation of James Joyce’s stream-of-thought novel Ulysses. Joyce plops us inside the heads of characters living in Dublin in the early 20th century, so that we see, feel, remember what they see, feel, remember.

But Joyce’s notoriously obscure masterpiece isn’t entirely stream of thought. If it were, it would be far more obscure. To help orient us, Joyce occasionally shifts his point of view from inside characters’ heads to outside, that is, from a first-person to a third-person perspective.

Joyce’s final opus, Finnegans Wake, which I “read” in college, makes no concessions to readability; even Joyce’s admirers complained about its opacity. James defended his gobbledygookian tome in a letter to a friend: “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.”

But even Finnegans Wake, an unrivaled imagining of mental dark matter, consists entirely of Joyce’s hyperconscious, insanely erudite meta-thoughts. Not even Joyce can capture thoughtless thoughts.

HIDDEN-VARIABLE THEORIES OF THE MIND

A final point: I see analogies between quantum mechanics and efforts to understand thoughts. I’ve already mentioned that observing particles alters them, as does observing thoughts. Here’s another analogy: Some physicists, dissatisfied with probabilistic quantum descriptions of electrons and photons, seek to explain particles’ behavior in terms of “hidden variables” that follow deterministic rules.

Mind scientists, similarly, have proposed hidden-variable paradigms of the mind. Psychoanalysis holds that our conscious minds are yanked this way and that by deep-rooted lusts and aversions. Evolutionary psychology traces our emotions and actions to instincts embedded in our ancestors by natural selection. Cognitive science says our thoughts stem from computations carried out by neural machinery; these computations are as far removed from our conscious thoughts as the machine code of your smartphone is from the icons on its screen.

Although each of these paradigms has appealing features, each finally falls short, as do all theories of the mind. Will science ever discover a final theory of the mind? A theory that solves the mind-body problem and makes us fully transparent to ourselves? A theory that reveals the hidden variables underpinning our inner dark matter?

I doubt it. Physicists can’t grok the behavior of a single electron. So what hope do we have of capturing the thought passing through your head right... now? And if we can’t grasp a single thought, which vanishes under our gaze, how can we possibly understand ourselves? Think about that.

This piece is adapted from one I wrote for ScientificAmerican.com in 2020. This paywalled content must be free!

Further Reading:

I explore inner space in almost all my books, including my free online books Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment and my fictionalized memoir Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science. See also my recent columns “The Solipsism Problem” and “On God, Quantum Mechanics and My Agnostic Schtick.”