Thoughts - How to Manage Them
Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2023 12:59 am
Thoughts... how interesting and deeply mysterious they are.
They are with us since the moments we are born, when we live and until we die.
The sure thing is, no one knows what thoughts have ever been or from where they are coming after all? But a sure thing is that thoughts represent a more profound meaning than the usual "flashes of the subconcious" we have.
In this topic, we will analyze more about thoughts and how they influence us, where do they come from and how to make the difference between positive and negative thoughts and how to manage them better.
What are thoughts?
First of all, the word thought comes from the Greek word νόημα (no'-ay-mah) which stands for thoughts, purposes, feelings, the mind and the soul.
In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation. Their most paradigmatic forms are judging, reasoning, concept formation, problem solving, and deliberation. But other mental processes, like considering an idea, memory, or imagination, are also often included. These processes can happen internally independent of the sensory organs, unlike perception. But when understood in the widest sense, any mental event may be understood as a form of thinking, including perception and unconscious mental processes. In a slightly different sense, the term thought refers not to the mental processes themselves but to mental states or systems of ideas brought about by these processes.
(The Thinker by Rodin (1840–1917), in the garden of the Musée Rodin)Various theories of thinking have been proposed, some of which aim to capture the characteristic features of thought. Platonists hold that thinking consists in discerning and inspecting Platonic forms and their interrelations. It involves the ability to discriminate between the pure Platonic forms themselves and the mere imitations found in the sensory world. According to Aristotelianism, to think about something is to instantiate in one's mind the universal essence of the object of thought. These universals are abstracted from sense experience and are not understood as existing in a changeless intelligible world, in contrast to Platonism. Conceptualism is closely related to Aristotelianism: it identifies thinking with mentally evoking concepts instead of instantiating essences. Inner speech theories claim that thinking is a form of inner speech in which words are silently expressed in the thinker's mind. According to some accounts, this happens in a regular language, like English or French. The language of thought hypothesis, on the other hand, holds that this happens in the medium of a unique mental language called Mentalese. Central to this idea is that linguistic representational systems are built up from atomic and compound representations and that this structure is also found in thought. Associationists understand thinking as the succession of ideas or images. They are particularly interested in the laws of association that govern how the train of thought unfolds. Behaviorists, by contrast, identify thinking with behavioral dispositions to engage in public intelligent behavior as a reaction to particular external stimuli. Computationalism is the most recent of these theories. It sees thinking in analogy to how computers work in terms of the storage, transmission, and processing of information.
Various types of thinking are discussed in the academic literature. A judgment is a mental operation in which a proposition is evoked and then either affirmed or denied. Reasoning, on the other hand, is the process of drawing conclusions from premises or evidence. Both judging and reasoning depend on the possession of the relevant concepts, which are acquired in the process of concept formation. In the case of problem solving, thinking aims at reaching a predefined goal by overcoming certain obstacles. Deliberation is an important form of practical thought that consists in formulating possible courses of action and assessing the reasons for and against them. This may lead to a decision by choosing the most favorable option. Both episodic memory and imagination present objects and situations internally, in an attempt to accurately reproduce what was previously experienced or as a free rearrangement, respectively. Unconscious thought is thought that happens without being directly experienced. It is sometimes posited to explain how difficult problems are solved in cases where no conscious thought was employed.
Thought is discussed in various academic disciplines. Phenomenology is interested in the experience of thinking. An important question in this field concerns the experiential character of thinking and to what extent this character can be explained in terms of sensory experience. Metaphysics is, among other things, interested in the relation between mind and matter. This concerns the question of how thinking can fit into the material world as described by the natural sciences. Cognitive psychology aims to understand thought as a form of information processing. Developmental psychology, on the other hand, investigates the development of thought from birth to maturity and asks which factors this development depends on. Psychoanalysis emphasizes the role of the unconscious in mental life. Other fields concerned with thought include linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, biology, and sociology. Various concepts and theories are closely related to the topic of thought. The term "law of thought" refers to three fundamental laws of logic: the law of contradiction, the law of excluded middle, and the principle of identity. Counterfactual thinking involves mental representations of non-actual situations and events in which the thinker tries to assess what would be the case if things had been different. Thought experiments often employ counterfactual thinking in order to illustrate theories or to test their plausibility. Critical thinking is a form of thinking that is reasonable, reflective, and focused on determining what to believe or how to act. Positive thinking involves focusing one's attention on the positive aspects of one's situation and is intimately related to optimism.
Types of thinking
A great variety of types of thinking are discussed in the academic literature. A common approach divides them into those forms that aim at the creation of theoretical knowledge and those that aim at producing actions or correct decisions. But there is no universally accepted taxonomy summarizing all these types. In some cases, the same particular thought may belong to different categories at the same time. It may also depend on one's definition of thought whether some of the types listed here actually qualify as thought.
Entertaining, judging, and reasoning
Thinking is often identified with the act of judging. A judgment is a mental operation in which a proposition is evoked and then either affirmed or denied. It involves deciding what to believe and aims at determining whether the judged proposition is true or false. Various theories of judgment have been proposed. The traditionally dominant approach is the combination theory. It states that judgments consist in the combination of concepts. On this view, to judge that "all men are mortal" is to combine the concepts "man" and "mortal". The same concepts can be combined in different ways, corresponding to different forms of judgment, for example, as "some men are mortal" or "no man is mortal".
Other theories of judgment focus more on the relation between the judged proposition and reality. According to Franz Brentano, a judgment is either a belief or a disbelief in the existence of some entity. In this sense, there are only two fundamental forms of judgment: "A exists" and "A does not exist". When applied to the sentence "all men are mortal", the entity in question is "immortal men", of whom it is said that they do not exist. Important for Brentano is the distinction between the mere representation of the content of the judgment and the affirmation or the denial of the content. The mere representation of a proposition is often referred to as "entertaining a proposition". This is the case, for example, when one considers a proposition but has not yet made up one's mind about whether it is true or false. The term "thinking" can refer both to judging and to mere entertaining. This difference is often explicit in the way the thought is expressed: "thinking that" usually involves a judgment whereas "thinking about" refers to the neutral representation of a proposition without an accompanying belief. In this case, the proposition is merely entertained but not yet judged. Some forms of thinking may involve the representation of objects without any propositions, as when someone is thinking about their grandmother.
Reasoning is one of the most paradigmatic forms of thinking. It is the process of drawing conclusions from premises or evidence. Types of reasoning can be divided into deductive and non-deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is governed by certain rules of inference, which guarantee the truth of the conclusion if the premises are true. For example, given the premises "all men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man", it follows deductively that "Socrates is mortal". Non-deductive reasoning, also referred to as defeasible reasoning or non-monotonic reasoning, is still rationally compelling but the truth of the conclusion is not ensured by the truth of the premises. Induction is one form of non-deductive reasoning, for example, when one concludes that "the sun will rise tomorrow" based on one's experiences of all the previous days. Other forms of non-deductive reasoning include the inference to the best explanation and analogical reasoning.
Fallacies are faulty forms of thinking that go against the norms of correct reasoning. Formal fallacies concern faulty inferences found in deductive reasoning. Denying the antecedent is one type of formal fallacy, for example, "If Othello is a bachelor, then he is male. Othello is not a bachelor. Therefore, Othello is not male". Informal fallacies, on the other hand, apply to all types of reasoning. The source of their flaw is to be found in the content or the context of the argument. This is often caused by ambiguous or vague expressions in natural language, as in "Feathers are light. What is light cannot be dark. Therefore, feathers cannot be dark". An important aspect of fallacies is that they seem to be rationally compelling on the first look and thereby seduce people into accepting and committing them. Whether an act of reasoning constitutes a fallacy does not depend on whether the premises are true or false but on their relation to the conclusion and, in some cases, on the context.
Concept formation
Concepts are general notions that constitute the fundamental building blocks of thought. They are rules that govern how objects are sorted into different classes. A person can only think about a proposition if they possess the concepts involved in this proposition. For example, the proposition "wombats are animals" involves the concepts "wombat" and "animal". Someone who does not possess the concept "wombat" may still be able to read the sentence but cannot entertain the corresponding proposition. Concept formation is a form of thinking in which new concepts are acquired. It involves becoming familiar with the characteristic features shared by all instances of the corresponding type of entity and developing the ability to identify positive and negative cases. This process usually corresponds to learning the meaning of the word associated with the type in question. There are various theories concerning how concepts and concept possession are to be understood.
According to one popular view, concepts are to be understood in terms of abilities. On this view, two central aspects characterize concept possession: the ability to discriminate between positive and negative cases and the ability to draw inferences from this concept to related concepts. Concept formation corresponds to acquiring these abilities. It has been suggested that animals are also able to learn concepts to some extent, due to their ability to discriminate between different types of situations and to adjust their behavior accordingly.
Problem solving
In the case of problem solving, thinking aims at reaching a predefined goal by overcoming certain obstacles. This process often involves two different forms of thinking. On the one hand, divergent thinking aims at coming up with as many alternative solutions as possible. On the other hand, convergent thinking tries to narrow down the range of alternatives to the most promising candidates. Some researchers identify various steps in the process of problem solving. These steps include recognizing the problem, trying to understand its nature, identifying general criteria the solution should meet, deciding how these criteria should be prioritized, monitoring the progress, and evaluating the results.
An important distinction concerns the type of problem that is faced. For well-structured problems, it is easy to determine which steps need to be taken to solve them, but executing these steps may still be difficult. For ill-structured problems, on the other hand, it is not clear what steps need to be taken, i.e. there is no clear formula that would lead to success if followed correctly. In this case, the solution may sometimes come in a flash of insight in which the problem is suddenly seen in a new light. Another way to categorize different forms of problem solving is by distinguishing between algorithms and heuristics. An algorithm is a formal procedure in which each step is clearly defined. It guarantees success if applied correctly. The long multiplication usually taught in school is an example of an algorithm for solving the problem of multiplying big numbers. Heuristics, on the other hand, are informal procedures. They are rough rules-of-thumb that tend to bring the thinker closer to the solution but success is not guaranteed in every case even if followed correctly. Examples of heuristics are working forward and working backward. These approaches involve planning one step at a time, either starting and the beginning and moving forward or starting at the end and moving backward. So when planning a trip, one could plan the different stages of the trip from origin to destiny in the chronological order of how the trip will be realized, or in the reverse order.
Obstacles to problem solving can arise from the thinker's failure to take certain possibilities into account by fixating on one specific course of action.There are important differences between how novices and experts solve problems. For example, experts tend to allocate more time for conceptualizing the problem and work with more complex representations whereas novices tend to devote more time to executing putative solutions.
Deliberation and decision
Deliberation is an important form of practical thinking. It aims at formulating possible courses of action and assessing their value by considering the reasons for and against them. This involves foresight to anticipate what might happen. Based on this foresight, different courses of action can be formulated in order to influence what will happen. Decisions are an important part of deliberation. They are about comparing alternative courses of action and choosing the most favorable one. Decision theory is a formal model of how ideal rational agents would make decisions. It is based on the idea that they should always choose the alternative with the highest expected value. Each alternative can lead to various possible outcomes, each of which has a different value. The expected value of an alternative consists in the sum of the values of each outcome associated with it multiplied by the probability that this outcome occurs. According to decision theory, a decision is rational if the agent chooses the alternative associated with the highest expected value, as assessed from the agent's own perspective.
Various theorists emphasize the practical nature of thought, i.e. that thinking is usually guided by some kind of task it aims to solve. In this sense, thinking has been compared to trial-and-error seen in animal behavior when faced with a new problem. On this view, the important difference is that this process happens inwardly as a form of simulation. This process is often much more efficient since once the solution is found in thought, only the behavior corresponding to the found solution has to be outwardly carried out and not all the others.
Episodic memory and imagination
When thinking is understood in a wide sense, it includes both episodic memory and imagination. In episodic memory, events one experienced in the past are relived. It is a form of mental time travel in which the past experience is re-experienced. But this does not constitute an exact copy of the original experience since the episodic memory involves additional aspects and information not present in the original experience. This includes both a feeling of familiarity and chronological information about the past event in relation to the present. Memory aims at representing how things actually were in the past, in contrast to imagination, which presents objects without aiming to show how things actually are or were. Because of this missing link to actuality, more freedom is involved in most forms of imagination: its contents can be freely varied, changed, and recombined to create new arrangements never experienced before. Episodic memory and imagination have in common with other forms of thought that they can arise internally without any stimulation of the sensory organs. But they are still closer to sensation than more abstract forms of thought since they present sensory contents that could, at least in principle, also be perceived.
Unconscious thought
Conscious thought is the paradigmatic form of thinking and is often the focus of the corresponding research. But it has been argued that some forms of thought also happen on the unconscious level. Unconscious thought is thought that happens in the background without being experienced. It is therefore not observed directly. Instead, its existence is usually inferred by other means. For example, when someone is faced with an important decision or a difficult problem, they may not be able to solve it straight away. But then, at a later time, the solution may suddenly flash before them even though no conscious steps of thinking were taken towards this solution in the meantime. In such cases, the cognitive labor needed to arrive at a solution is often explained in terms of unconscious thoughts. The central idea is that a cognitive transition happened and we need to posit unconscious thoughts to be able to explain how it happened.
It has been argued that conscious and unconscious thoughts differ not just concerning their relation to experience but also concerning their capacities. According to unconscious thought theorists, for example, conscious thought excels at simple problems with few variables but is outperformed by unconscious thought when complex problems with many variables are involved. This is sometimes explained through the claim that the number of items one can consciously think about at the same time is rather limited whereas unconscious thought lacks such limitations. But other researchers have rejected the claim that unconscious thought is often superior to conscious thought. Other suggestions for the difference between the two forms of thinking include that conscious thought tends to follow formal logical laws while unconscious thought relies more on associative processing and that only conscious thinking is conceptually articulated and happens through the medium of language.
Positive thoughts
Positive thoughts are the greatest things to ever happen and to be encountered by living beings. Having positive thoughts makes you develop a strong immunitary system, helps ward off negativity and also any other worries ans, moreover, if you think positiv, your aura will increade in amounts of good and enjoyable energy and you will send your positivity to other people to. Always remember tothat share positive things and thoughts and keep a healthy mindset, without unnecessary negativity that is damaging for our heart and soul
Negative thoughts
Negative thoughts, as their denomination suggests are the opposite of positive thoughts. Negative thoughts operate at a total contradictory energetic pole that always tends to cause a lot of problems if not managed properly. Negative thoughts need to be controlled in order to not have the problems of energetic drainage and also cause damage to our health, both physically and spiritually. For starters, when we have negatice thoughts we need to work with our minds and our astral bodies to reject ang negative aura and mental residues that are from such thoughts, as this is.what we need to do continuously, especially in the modern stressful life, in order not to become.mentally unstable or worse, to get into extreme negativity.
One final note that I want to put here is that anytime, anywhere, beforr anything else, Satan always helps us ward off negative energies, even in moments when we think he wouldn't do that immediately.
Be sure to talk with Satan and your Guardian Demon everytime there is an emergency like this, of course, treating them with the required respect.
Negativity is the weapon of the Enemy - outsmart the Ebemy by not letting yourself engulfed by negativity.
