without language, do we think?

The trouble is, we don’t know that those things are shared or different, do we?! The environment can’t get at them.

Each of us has a different experience and represents a different history. It is up to each to describe what thinking is to them and that is a function of culture, timing, training, etc.

That is part of the argument for thinking is not the same as ‘behavior’.

No, I am not concluding anything like that anymore than one would conclude in 1960 humans would never get to the moon. I am postulating that with the tools we have… paired with some empirical definitions of behavior (that separates it from metaphysics and mystical expression) that the thinking we all do does not qualify as “behavior” today.

For all the reasons mentioned, plus thinking has no start and never seems to stop – despite how we want to characterize our boss… there are parametric problems that need to be solved. Having the wrong model [purpose, meaning, and assumptions of prediction and control] wreaks havoc with how we approach “what the heck is going on?”

Once we stop trying to find the seat of this and that in the brain and start to absorb its neural net patterns and chemistry, thinking could come to fall under the classification of behavior; i.e., we can manage contingencies, tell if “it” (thinking) changes independent of the thinker and other cultural filters.

What I would also posit is that only by using our strengths in science and will we rid ourselves of 2000 years of garbage and superstition.

To get to where we know what is going on inside the ‘vault’ is not easy and the successive attempts to short-circuit the hard stuff in favor of the blab stuff has not been kind to us as a species or as thinking organisms.

there are covert things going on (events we cannot report or observe) that we’ve come to group and label as “thinking”, but it’s a bit like saying a swarm of bees has “intelligence”. we sorta know what we’re talking about, but really it’s nothing you can analyze concretely.