[MD] Thinking

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Marsha]
I agree that the concept of 'thinking' is an intellectual pattern. But I 
thought it was stated, somewhere, that the activity of thinking 
indicated the intellectual level.

[Arlo]
How would you define "thinking"? Or, what "activity" would you witness 
and point to and say "that's 'thinking'"? What has to occur to 
differentiate, in your opinion, "thinking" from "not thinking"?

As for a cultural, common use, I think we tend to use the term loosely 
to refer to some degree of information processing embedded in some 
bio-neural mass. It's outside the cultural norm, for example, to use 
"thinking" to describe the activity of the sun, or a computer, or a 
tree. If I say, "that tree is thinking about the next rainfall", would 
that make sense (within the cultural use of the term)? What evidence 
would I point to in a tree to differentiate a "thinking" from a 
"non-thinking" state?

Granted, there is an inherent reductionism in defining "thinking" as the 
firing of neurons in a brain mass, but this tends to be the evidence we 
look for to support our shared cultural understanding of the term. 
Interestingly, if we equate "thinking" in some way with neural activity, 
we may have to grant that "computers think", since a similar "firing" of 
nodes occurs within computer processors when it processes information.

For example, if I ask the person sitting next to me "what is two plus 
two?" and he responds "four", is that evidence of "thinking"? If so, why 
would I not say my calculator was "thinking" as well when it gives me 
the same answer?

I've read some post-Peircian work that speculates that abduction (or 
hypothetical inference, which ties into Pirsig's works) may be a 
differentiator between human and machine information processing in 
determining "thinking". So "thinking" isn't JUST the processing of 
information, or inducing or deducing, or making input-output decisions, 
but rests on the ability of the "thinker" to abduce, or hypothesize, or 
(maybe too simplistically) the generation of something "new".

What do you think?