The Problem With (Just) Thinking
The promise of thinking for yourself is enticing. It sounds something like blasting a hole in a prison wall and storming out into a world of freedom and possibility. But we’ve seen that thinking by itself doesn’t change our lives a whole lot. Let’s say I’ve reached the unassailable conclusion that it’s better for me to quit my stable but unrewarding job and seek work that I enjoy, though it may be difficult to break into. I arrive at a perfectly rational reason for a course of action, yet I’m still paralyzed by fear and inaction. What good did all that thinking do me? I suspect what we really want is for that thinking to lead to new perspectives that bring about different emotional states (like joy, instead of fear) and different actions. It’s not a single point, but a sequence we’re after.
When we’re awake and conscious, we’re usually engaged in a cognitive state that we can call “thinking.” I’ll use that term even when it means automatically repeating thoughts that others have expressed without critical examination. Thinking need not be independent. But we’re also doing other important things that, like in the previous example, can alter the whole sequence of events. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll call those other two functions “emotion” and “action.” All three of them weigh on our minds and how we respond to our environment. What’s more, they aren’t equal. These functions exist in a hierarchy.
At the basic level, all living things act. The simplest of organisms moves on instinct, and those instincts exert a terrific pressure on every animal, right up through the noble homo sapiens. In fact, what I called “inaction” with reference to not seeking a new job is, in fact, still action. My body still pumps blood and digests food, and I sit or stand, or meander to work. While we live, we take action. Whether those actions are driven by instinct, personal habit, or some more thorough process is the only thing in question.
Not all species exhibit emotion, but a great many seem to share the same basic palette with us. In addition to the instinctive ways of responding to the world, these critters can demonstrate complex emotional patterns that at times alter behaviors that would otherwise be purely instinctive. An animal that we’d expect to respond to food by eating it may refuse to eat if it’s feeling sad. I operate on the assumption that we’ve evolved the emotional set we have because it is—or recently was—beneficial to our survival as a species. Emotions couldn’t exist without the more fundamental layer of basic functions that sustain life. Things like hunger, pain, illness, satiety, etc. all have the power to override emotions in many cases. It’s also worth noting that in other cases, their effect is diminished, ignored, or remapped.
Thought, too, probably couldn’t exist without the other two structures on which it’s built. The reason it’s so hard to make the transfer from thought to action is that animal instinct and emotion, since they are fundamental to thought, have great power to override it. When the three don’t align, thought has the weakest position from which to convince the others. We’re happiest and healthiest when all three work toward a common goal, but it’s possible for them to disagree. At its mildest, that produces discomfort and inner turmoil, and can stray as far as madness and physical death.
Just as external forces can influence our thoughts to the extent that we can’t call them our own, so it is with emotion and action. Instinct by definition is such an influence, but other classes of action that are subject to potential control can also come from outside us. We may have habits that mimic others, or that came about due to certain circumstances, and never left when the circumstances did. We may lean to the left in every seat because the arm rest is to the left of our favorite couch cushion, or turn sideways through every doorway because the one that leads into the bathroom is particularly narrow. Our emotions can imitate others who we admire or detest. We learn early on whether we get better results responding to things we don’t like with anger, or sadness. The smell of fresh cinnamon rolls makes us feel warm and nostalgic because we enjoyed them on special weekends as children.
As few people as there are who examine their thoughts to make sure they’re natural and independent, how many do you reckon do the same with their feelings and their physical actions?
The Cartesian Split
I’ve talked a lot about sequences, hierarchies, dependencies, and capacities being overridden by others. That probably conjures up notions of rank, priority, order, and separate entities squabbling or flexing muscle with one another. Let go those ideas. They were another cruel trick. Those are the ways we habitually think about our minds and our behaviors, so they make for useful doorways into unfamiliar chambers. Look around, though, and realize that they lead not to separate rooms, but a single chamber at the start of a vast labyrinth.
Western culture envisions a human as a body and a mind. To the former category go our blood and guts and bones, and all the ways they move. To the latter, emotion, memory, reason, and everything we can imagine but not touch. This way of thinking about the world emerges from the work of Rene Descartes. It’s one way of many—useful, but not universal. When we’re only capable of seeing something one way, there’s no possibility of testing other possibilities against it. What we’re left with is the inertia of a perspective we didn’t personally come up with. We’re “thinking for ourselves” within narrow margins set by a 17th century French philosopher. There’s always a substratum for our thoughts, and I said that independent thought amounts to variations within those confines. The broader the confines, the more freedom we have to work. The more we’re capable of thinking.
It turns out the mind-body split brings about a few problems.
We’re encouraged to imagine the two as separate entities, sometimes cooperating, often dueling for control. The mind is seen as the higher power, the seat of reason. With the body lie the animal passions. This antagonistic relationship makes us feel as though we’re serving two masters. We end up torn between two different choices that seem as obvious to the thinking mind as to the hungry flesh. I can come up with very rational arguments for harming the body with a misguided diet, for example, or eat myself sick to satisfy a craving, despite knowing I’ll pay for it the next day. But if I harm my body, did my mind really benefit? If I acted stupidly, did I really know better? Standard thinking compartmentalizes the self, like a married couple who resides in the same house but refuses to speak except through passive-aggressive notes stuck to the fridge and curt threats flung over the banister in passing. Instead, they roam about rearranging furniture to their liking, only to find it returned to the original position the next day; hiding objects to protect them, or anger the other; inviting hated friends to visit, and occasionally, negotiating some elaborate truce that both parties know they will stretch until battle once again rages over the neutral ground.
From the original mind-body split, there’s been a second, stealthier division among the mind camp. Emotion has divorced from reason. We speak of wanting one thing but thinking another, and blame our moods for ugly behavior, or an excess of rationality for a lack of compassion. This perspective runs so deep that I’ve honored it throughout this introduction, partly to call it to light, but partly because I don’t know how else to talk about the world. Body-thought-emotion is a Frankenstein’s monster of modern philosophy, arguably with roots as deep as Plato’s three parts of the soul.
In truth, it’s impossible to say anything meaningful about a whole unless you have another whole to compare it to, or you can divide that whole into parts for contrast. I’ll maintain the division throughout, but I do so with the intent of repairing a schism. Let these categories be a useful tool for thinking about certain aspects of human experience, not a model of objective reality.
Rejoined
In what sense are the body and mind separate? In fairness to the idea, I can agree that one is physical, while the other is immaterial. We can scoop out a brain, but that collection of spongy matter, with its electrical impulses and chemical exchanges, is not what people usually mean by “mind.” Usually, the mind is envisioned as the way we experience and elaborate on processed data from the five senses, including through thoughts and feelings. If they’re functionally separate, they must still be in contact via wifi or signal flags, because they definitely exchange information.
In practice, the senses, emotions, and thought all influence each other in every moment. A memory of an appointment can make my heart race, the sight of a train can stir a frenzy of thought, both can elicit fear that I’ll miss the closing doors, which causes my body to sweat and my legs to pump, and my rational side to begin concocting excuses. None of these supposedly separate capacities can do anything without affecting the other two. The only exceptions I can think of involve altered states that impair the higher capacities like thinking, while the body still acts to preserve life. In that case, we return to the model I mentioned earlier where feeling and thought are founded upon involuntary and barely-voluntary actions, and can be suspended temporarily through injury, intoxication, etc. Or in the event of brain damage, when any of a wide variety of capacities can cease to function. None of these are states of a healthy individual, and they aren’t what anyone means when they talk about the decision-making process. A body can live without arms and legs, but that doesn’t prove that arms and legs are not connected to the body except through a communication network that can be fired up and powered down.
It makes more sense to me to imagine ourselves as a whole being with many capacities, some more fundamental than others, but all interrelated and essential for healthy living. When any two of these disagree, we have a being at odds with itself. Further, when problems arise, it makes no sense to focus on fixing a single area to the neglect of the others.
The Making of a Dude Named Leon
A man awakes in total darkness. Actually, “awakes” is a strong word. It might be more accurate to say that he begins sensing in a fog of sleep. At first, there’s nothing to sense. The room feels foreign. It seems to rotate one way, then the other. A hard blink does nothing to bring clarity. But there was something to sense. Vaguely, without even thinking as much, our man felt the pressure of a flat object over the length of his back. From some collection of cues—that flat object and the feeling of being pulled into it, the lack of certain sounds, maybe a memory just beneath the surface of having had this experience before—he knew enough to know it was a room that spun, as opposed to a ditch outside, though he wasn’t yet able to come up with the word “room” or extrapolate a location from it.
Another blink. Still dark, but now his eyes must be open. It’s night. All at once, an orientation to certain walls and objects, furniture, a place, comes to him. He imagines his bedroom as it would look in dim illumination. But a faint streak of silver from one corner makes itself known. There were sounds—the scrape of a road under sparse traffic that he didn’t notice, and a humming machine somewhere closer. A panic grips him, as this can’t be his home. The pale streak is the window, in the wrong place. And the bed feels hard, the covers rough.
His fear melts as he realizes he is traveling, and this is the motel room he rented. It must be. His name is Leon, and he’s a day’s drive from Stillwater, Oklahoma. At once, a flash of his car in the parking lot occurs to him, and he places the hum with the ice machine by the stairwell. Leon considers how tired he was when he made it here just after 10pm, and already makes a mental note to find coffee before he hits the road tomorrow.
The dark is too much, so he fumbles against wood and metal until his finger finds a raised piece of plastic. He switches on the lamp. There are two twin beds, one still packed tight. A TV, a dresser, a table and chair. This is enough like what he calls “motel room” that he’s satisfied with the experience. He checks his phone. It’s 3:22 in the morning. The lack of red graphic indicating a new text makes his stomach ring hollow for a second. He should have received a reply by now. Leon climbs out of bed and bumps his leg on the corner as he rounds it. He’s so sleepy, he only bothers to open one eye in the glaringly bright bathroom. While he pees, he hopes again that this trip is worth it, and thinks about that coffee, still a few hours of sleep away.
A smell of old cigarettes lingers in the non-smoking room. He’s mildly annoyed, and confident that whoever did it escaped a fee. Leon collapses back into bed, worried that the odor will prevent him from falling asleep as easily as he hoped. It reminds him of his grandmother’s house, the outdated furniture, the scratchy bed sheets. He grabs his phone again and opens his texts to read through the recent thread. He messaged on arrival at 10:16, so maybe she had just fallen asleep already. A little anger rolls over from the cigarette issue. Would have been nice to at least have confirmation someone would be home when he arrived the next evening. But there’s time for that, he reminds himself. Leon switches off the light, and the afterimage of the other bed lingers a second on his eyelids.
He crumples a pillow beneath his head, and lays down with a sigh. His thoughts play back over a section of the drive. Only then does he recall the game he missed, and sets a vague intention to look up the score tomorrow morning. Over coffee. The smell of black gas station fare mingles with that of cigarettes in his mind. His bitter tongue tells him he forgot to brush his teeth. The ice machine cycles down. Leon’s back aches at the thought of sitting in the car for another ten or twelve hours.
But a face appears, a sense of exhilaration floods him—maybe too much. He’ll never get sleep now, he thinks. His leg shakes a steady rhythm, and he makes a plan to stop at a gas station in Stillwater to brush the coffee from his breath. A bit of a dream flutters past like a spooked bird, jolting him awake, but within minutes, this new strange world is absorbed once more by darkness.
Meet the Humble Sign
Our world is constructed at every moment from raw sense perceptions in the body, emotional references, and intellectual judgments, all of which can become objects for the other two to evaluate and respond to in turn. As we saw in the previous scene, this process is not linear. Call it a spiral, a web, a four-dimensional Moebius strip—anything sufficiently ordered yet bewildering. It’s difficult to separate thinking, or any other human function, from life. Each affects the whole. One seems like the cause of the next only in the way that Abraham Lincoln’s bust appears to “cause” the Lincoln Memorial to appear on the back of a penny. Maybe the reason it’s so hard to think for ourselves is because there’s no such thing. To dissect thinking from the living organism is a surgery performed entirely through an abstraction of perspective.
If what we hope to gain is more agency—a degree of awareness and choice during our participation in these processes—might we get better results by working on every aspect of it? Not on one piece or another, but the whole? I don’t know. What intrigues me is that I haven’t seen it tried, at least not via the means I’m proposing. To do this, we have to have an understanding of how we make sense of our world. I mean that literally. What we experience is not the thing itself, but a map. A clever representation constructed from sense data, indexed in memories, and projected forward and evaluated by thought. There are many ways to model this experience, and all of them suffer from the problem that we can’t observe it from the outside. There’s no neutrality or objectivity. It’ll have to suffice to acknowledge that, and choose a starting point from which we’ll do the best we can. Fortunately, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
Semiotics is hard to define without ruffling a feather or two, but to oversimplify a diverse and hotly-debated field, it can be described as the study of signs and their meanings. A sign can be anything that we take to stand for something else. That means all words and speech sounds are signs, but so are road signs, bodily tics, clouds, colors, and emotions (and their “meanings”!). In fact, the term is broad enough to encompass anything at all that we can perceive. Everything we sense has meaning to us, even if we can’t name it or explain it. All of it relates to something else, and often many things. Those relations are at least a little different for each subject who takes in the sign. There are lots of different opinions about signs, and quite a few would disagree with everything I just said. I don’t make pretenses of fairly representing the entire range of semiotic fancies. What you’ll read is one amateur’s take on a particular branch of that rich tradition.
The field of semiotics is relatively new. For practical purposes, it only cropped up in the late 19th century, and immediately ran off along two major currents: one following the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and the other, American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (that’s pronounced “purse”). It’s the latter that informs my take.
Peirce was the father of Pragmatism, sometimes called the only original American philosophy that wasn’t just a variation on European traditions. (Native Americans, who had a wide range of cosmologies and a love of wisdom for centuries before and after Peirce’s forefathers set foot on the continent, may take umbrage to that claim). The primary difference as I see it between Peirce’s work and the offshoots of the European school is that the latter, though they admit and deal with signs of all sort, tend to wind up placing a tremendous emphasis on language, words, text, and speech. These are important parts of Perice’s sign system, but they’re the tip of a rather deep iceberg. My bias is that Peirce’s signs are more complete, and put a great deal of emphasis on all of the signs that we make and take before words come into the picture. A great deal of our lives happens before we comment on the happening, and even those comments have a way of returning to pre-verbal signs in consequential ways.
While much of semiotics borders on mere linguistics, Peirce’s version gives word signs an important but not preferential place alongside the others.
My understanding of Peirce’s signs comes through the work of Floyd Merrell, and particularly his book Sensing Corporeally. That’s where I’ll send anyone interested in the nitty-gritty details. For our purposes, we’ll take Peirce’s ten signs and group them into three broad categories.
Firstness
Before we can speak of the world, we have to experience it. Everything we think we know begins with a sensation. Through sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, we take impressions that form the basis for memories and thoughts, and our entire model of ourselves and the outside world.
That happens later. The signs of firstness correspond to the present, and our capacity to act. They’re what we sense now. A vague bit of light, a tingling on the skin. These are isolated individual experiences. As soon as you refer them to a previous experience, you’ve entered signs of secondness. Give them a name, and you’re rushed to thirdness. Signs of firstness are fleeting. They dissolve under our attention—or rather, evolve.
Failure to deal with these signs leaves us unable to take in new information. We’re stuck in past loops, or wandering in vague theories about the future.
Secondness
Having sensed something, we hurry to put it into context. Is it similar to anything I’ve sensed before? How does it relate to the surrounding sensations? Signs of secondness are indexed in memory. As such, they correspond to the past, and our capacity to feel. These signs are more generalized, losing those attributes that make them singular experiences that will never happen again—which of course all signs of firstness are. We still haven’t started using language, with a few exceptions. While we aren’t speaking of them, they do give us our first opportunity to find meaning in what we’re experiencing. If you see a pen and a notebook and sense a relationship, but haven’t yet named them or put them into the category “writing supplies,” you’re dealing with a sign of secondness.
It’s in this pre-conscious realm that our emotions dance. We can’t feel anything for a sign of firstness because to a degree, it’s incomprehensible. We haven’t yet related it to anything past or present to understand what it might mean. Nor do we have emotions only after careful arguments in their favor, which would place them in thirdness.
Poor ability to deal in secondness leaves us emotionally stunted or confused. We’re unable to put things in proper context, or share experiences with others.
Thirdness
Finally, we arrive at language. Words, sentences, arguments, and these essays traffic in thirdness. While ink on a page, or the bare sound of my voice can be a sign of firstness, by the time we recognize it by comparing it to past experiences and comment on it, we’re beyond secondness. These signs correspond to the future, and our capacity to think.
They are very generalized. “Dog” might refer to a specific canine, but the word as a sign is a broad category. Much of semiotics deals with signs of thirdness, to the neglect of firstness and secondness. When people try to think for themselves, they typically do it with a host of techniques mired in thirdness, which is why it’s notoriously hard to pull off.
On the other hand, folks who struggle with thirdness are generally considered “dumb.” They have a hard time with abstractions, with expressing themselves in writing and speech, and in imagining ahead of time how actions will play out in the future. This “dumbness” is a fallacy I hope to strip away.
The Method
We’ll talk much more about the three categories of signs and how errors in each of them can lead to a variety of behaviors that all look like “people who can’t think for themselves.” My basic assumption is that a healthy person deals with all three types in a balanced manner. They can think, feel, and act according to their own will, as a whole person.
What follows is new ground. There’s plenty of literature on thinking for yourself, but I’m not aware of any that addresses the whole self (minus that annoying Cartesian duality), much less in terms of semiotics. That means it might not work at all. Or it may fill the fundamental gaps that prevent so many well-intentioned souls from thinking, feeling, and living autonomously.
The ensuing essays will present a series of exercises. I’ll discuss the problems that prevent us from following our own lead, and offer ways to shore up those deficiencies. There will be exercises to bring us into the present and force us to take in sensations without correlating them (firstness); exercises of memory, past connections, feeling without word or judgment (secondness); and exercises of rational evaluation and meaning-assignment (thirdness).
For the most part, people get mired in that third type. Much of the material will deal with words and arguments (this is text meant to be read, after all), but wherever possible, we’ll set them on a solid foundation by considering the aspects that happen before a word ever enters our minds.
It’s become apparent to the general public recently that not everyone thinks in words and narrates their life in real-time voiceover like Forrest Gump. Some people think in images, relationships, or in the case of certain kinds of aphantasia, are unable to summon anything to mind at all. Yet all get by well enough that we hardly seemed to notice these differences for most of human history. I suspect most people who would read something like this are word-lovers, as am I, but I hope to provide alternatives for those who use other modes of thought, as well as those who prefer intuition and feeling to cold logic. I can’t imagine it will work equally well for everyone. Please accept my open invitation to provide feedback and suggestions at every stage, especially if your way of processing the world differs from the one I describe.
How to Do the Exercises
Unless otherwise stated, read the preceding text, then perform each exercise daily for 3-7 days. Once per day is enough. Twice is fine. Don’t be neurotic about it. There are a few habits that usually hamstring people who start this type of work. The minimum is there for the lazy and the impatient. You’ll get nowhere by doing something for one day and abandoning it.
The maximum is for the perfectionists. It’s easy to get stuck doing one exercise over and over because you haven’t mastered it. If you’ve performed it once a day for seven days, move on. I repeat: MOVE THE $#@% ON. You’ll never master them, but you will get better overall by working through the whole system. You can always come back and repeat the work as many times as you like once you’ve finished.
Try not to take breaks. I do my best to keep them short and simple, usually no more than a few minutes. If you do—and you will miss a day eventually for memory or catastrophe or plain old boredom—start again immediately. The Self with a capital “S” can be very defensive of its pet habits that keep it from suffering blows to the ego, or having to make exhausting character changes. You, the conscious you with a lowercase “y,” should not be deceived. These are paper doll excuses, and they’ll crumple under even a modest boot.
The master alchemist’s advice to his student is as pertinent now as it ever was:
“Lege, Lege, relege, ora, Labora et invenies.” (Read, read, reread, pray, work, and you will find).