What does thinking really mean?
Published on July 5, 2022
Thinking is the most intimate action there is. In the end, the only thing that truly matters is that it is something so uniquely ours, that it makes us ourselves
Pablo A Ruz Salmones
Someone once told me that if you were to put a poet and a physicist in the same room and asked them what time was, they would never end up agreeing. Something similar, I’m afraid, occurs with thinking.
Thinking is one of those things that can be defined from innumerable disciplines, but in the end, the only thing that truly matters is that it is something so uniquely ours, that it makes us ourselves. Just asking what thinking means, implies asking who we truly are.
Thinking is the most intimate action there is. I believe both the scientist and the artist would agree on this. In his Summa Theologiae, following Aristotle’s thinking, Aquinas states that “that which is known, is in the mind of that who knows, according to their way of knowing”. That is, a rock for example, is not physically inside us, what is inside us is the interpretation we make of our senses, and what our brain (mine, yours, and everyone else’s) makes of our touching, seeing and interacting with the rock. So when we say “the rock is gray”, what we truly mean is “to my understanding, the rock is gray”. But if we could see more colors, like some animals do, we wouldn’t call it gray, perhaps we’d use a more sophisticated, specific word.
Therefore, the process of abstraction is not completely generalizable. It is a particular action, which makes a definition of it quite impossible; the only possibility is talking about “your” way of thinking and “my” way of thinking. For example, when the human brain listens to a beautiful masterpiece, and when it sees a beautiful painting, the same area of the brain lights up with activity. This implies that the concept of “beauty” is inside us, as it does not depend on the channel itself (the eye or the ear in this case). However, what you or I may consider beautiful is a different story. That is where the process becomes intimate. We know it exists, we know we all do it, but how each of us does it is, precisely, what makes each of
us unique. It is not just “thinking”, it is “your thinking”.
That being said, it is crucial not to fall into believing everything is completely subjective. Things exist out there, in reality. Just like the concept “beauty” is inside us, the rock is out there with certain characteristics. What may be different is the idea we make of the rock inside ourselves. That does not mean we should approach reality under the assumption that if reality does not match our thinking, then reality is wrong. There is something real out there, even if we don’t fully grasp it.
The process is not either completely unambiguous, or completely ambiguous; it is not the same in every person, but it is also not completely different; it falls somewhere in between. There is a relationship between my thinking and your thinking; that is how we agree on things, and how we all understand math, for example, even if we understand it differently; that is the basis of our empathy, even if we don’t fully understand each other. Or, to put it in Schubert’s words: “We don’t really understand someone else’s pain; we just pass very close by”.
In the intimacy of our minds, in the complete intimacy of our neural connections, that is where our world is, that image we form based on reality.
My thinking is my searching for light and truth; searching in pure and total intimacy.
And you, what do you think?
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