In remembered-thinking-theory I develop a lot of information from units of remembered-thoughts. The units and their boudaries are something I believe I observed during a deeply introspective phase, but I don’t think day to day thinking allows for an easy conception of units of thought. The mind feels most comfortable perceiving continuity in thinking. It likes a landscape that is similar to the external physical landscape, where objects have permanence, and thus seeing a tree some moments but not others doesn’t actually feel like seperated events unrelated to each other. But for anyone who wants to try perceiving their internal world through the lense of my theory, they need to see separated units so they can see the relationships remembered to exist between those units. This is where the concept of methods-of-thought is quite handy.
Methods-of-thought definition: Types of thinking that can be distinguished from each other in such a way that the mind can perceive itself oscilatting between the different methods.
My own methods-of-thought: conceiving of sentences; optic, auditory, touch, taste or smell visualizations, conceiving of my location or relative positions of things in space, experiences of awareness of emotional sensation in my torsoe, experiences of awareness of particular sensory activity, contemplation of intention or strategy, experience of awareness of a desire, and of course there’s potentially many others. For myself, these are all methods-of-thought that I have seen in combination, but through distinct oscillations. So I may visualize a dialogue, and upon reflection see that the dialogue involved sometimes simply conceiving the sentences, sometimes visualizing the facial expressions of the actors, and sometimes visualizing the tones of voices involved. The thinking event is made up not of all these things happening at once, but the oscillation through them.
What’s useful about this is the oscillation between methods-of-thought allows for the conception of units that have relationships. If I say chocholate cake in my mind it’s likely I’ll remember visualizing a chocholate cake right after, and thus remember the conception of language causing a visualization. In this way my ideas presented in “Thinking, Remembering Thinking, Thinking about a Memory of Thinking, and how that Messes with Time” become applicable to a reconception of one’s internal landscape.