Here’s my answer to a recent Quora question: Where do our thoughts come from?
Thoughts come from nowhere! And from everywhere! I think both answers contain an element of truth.
Subjectively, our thoughts come from nowhere: they just pop into our heads, or emerge in the form of words leaving our mouths.
Objectively, we can say that thoughts emerge from neural processes, and that neural processes come from everywhere. What I mean by this is that the forms and dynamics of thought are influenced by everything that has a causal connection with you, your society, and your species.
We don’t know exactly how thoughts emerge from the activity of neurons — or even how to define what a thought is in biological terms (!)— but there is plenty of indirect evidence to support the general claim that the brain is where thoughts emerge.
The neuronal patterns that mediate and enable thought and behavior have proximal and distal causes.
The proximal causes are the stimuli and circumstances we experience. These experiences have causal impacts on our bodies, and are also partly caused by our bodies. The forces inside and outside the body become manifest in the brain as ‘clouds’ of information. In the right circumstances these nebulous patterns can condense into streams of thought. We can add to these identifiable causes the mysterious element of randomness: that seemingly ever-present “ghost in the machine” that makes complex processes such as life fundamentally unpredictable. Perhaps randomness is what provides the ‘seeds’ around which the condensation of thoughts can occur.
The distal causes are our experiential history and our evolutionary pre-history. Our experiential history consists of the things we’ve learned, consciously and unconsciously, and the various events that have shaped our bodies and our neural connections in large and small ways. Our evolutionary pre-history is essentially the experiential history of our species, and more generally of life itself, going back all the way to the first single-celled organism. The traits of a species are a sort of historical record of successes and failures. And going even further, life ultimately takes its particular forms because of the possibilities inherent in matter — and this takes us all the way to the formation of stars and planets.
