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people use the word "thinking" to refer to dozens of unique mental processes and generally don't seem to notice or care that others in a convo aren't on the same page this drives me crazy, imma list out a bunch of specific things that i've seen this word deference to
thinking = verbal thoughts "inner monologue". experienced as words, either through your phonological loop or sometimes prekinesthetic (your lips don't move but you feel 'echoes' of motor impulses to them) happens at speed of speech, maybe disjoint, can be full sentences
thinking = imagining/fantasizing you can experience "imaginary" version of all your sensory modalities, conjuring up some "scene" and then experiencing it in a way that feels distinct from reality* "thinking about pancakes" "thinking about sex" "thinking about being popular"
thinking = anxiety often experienced as imagining/fantasizing about bad scenarios, experiencing them negatively, and also leaving them as "rhetorical question" "what if BAD thing?" and you don't answer the what if, you just experience the negative hypothetical
thinking = utilizing working memory "i had to think to get 15543 + 58473, i didn't have to think to get 1+1" when i'm learning a new magic trick i have to keep the script in working mem and keep referencing it, not so when i've practiced a ton
thinking = manipulating symbols with an algo that leaves a trace in working memory the diff between doing long addition and organizing SNL night of. both involve strong working memory load, SNL doesn't involve much symbolic algos https://t.co/lOtUwYry1x
solid list https://t.co/1FrwMSgFCN
thinking = using a non-online model (that also requires no trivial translation) to interact with something in realtime analogy: navigating thru acquired sense of a city (online, low translation model) vs google maps. here offline -> exit the irl situation and "go into" model
^ in more detail. when i look at my phone, i can't pay attention to my surroundings. my attention&awareness leaves my irl environment and into my offline model. i also have to translate/orient, figure out what part of irl maps onto the model.
the "exit the sitch" is the offline part. compare to "acquired sense of direction". I still have a model of the city in an important sense, it's just "on-line". I can be attending to irl, and just have "go that way" bubble up. no loss of fluency from hopping back and forth
^ a good example would be "intellectualizing your feelings". instead of recruiting the rest of your nervous system to do to interact with your actual feelings and cognate with them, you create symbolic representations of them and cognate symbolically on those representations
^ this can blend into the "using an offline model with non-trivial translation required". they might be diff ways of talking about the same thing they both seem to describe the type of "thinking" that people instruct you not to do while dancing
ah, the difference is probably "are you interacting with the world of yourself?" offline models have a fluency penalty, but you still *interact* with what you're trying to interact with. with the VM thing, you can just miss it entirely.
right, cuz "intellectualizing" your emotions is not just a dis-fluent way of doing emotional processing, it straight up avoids / skips over the thing that is emotional processing. you interact with the VM representations, not the actual load bearing structs in your mind/body
thinking = spending a noticeable amount of time deciding what you are going to do before you do it. premeditation "i wasn't thinking, i was just in the moment and doing" - a blitz chess player who was 100% doing a form of "thinking", just not this one
thinking = using a script/decision making algo that someone in a position of authority gave you https://t.co/sDzSawKAn8
thinking = literally any experience of negative dis-fluency disfluency pops up anytime your doing a non-routinized task, and i'd guess it's experienced negatively if there's any sense of threat or worry about not being able to be fluent (play often involves enjoying disfluency)
some people who have expressed to me "not liking to think about things" seem to not want to experience any situations where they'd be dis-fluent. to them "thinking" is "dealing with a novel situation + pressure" and they don't like it
i think i'll stop here in case it wasn't clear, i've mostly focused on types of "thinking" that i hear people telling each other to do less of there's lots of all-around-awesome things that "thinking" can deference to as well