Developing a scientific understanding of how our thoughts work

I believe that our thoughts are predictable and consequent of our behaviors and immediate events. I would like to develop a scientific understanding and derivation of all possible sources of our thoughts, and what things we can do to willfully modify them. An easy example would be where you want to do something, and then suddenly you find yourself repeatedly thinking about it.

In my personal experience, I have suffered from the following conditions and at one point I was able to begin removing these problems by changing my behavior patterns. I believe they occur for some particular reason or another and that we can use the scientific method to understand the underlying principles that cause them. It seems that whatever it is that causes these thought patterns is some echo of our own recent behavior.
> Thinking in words (rather than conceptually)
> Absence of planning and forethought
> Blocked thoughts (e.g. midway through a thought, the thought is stopped)
> Absence of emotion, feeling, and empathy
> Self-antagonizing and harmful thoughts (including criticism of self and suicidal thoughts)
> Social anxiety (thoughts of worry about what others will do or say, repeatedly thinking about what words to use to express myself to others)
[among other unwanted thought and behavior patterns]
I wonder if anyone else has managed to successfully change their thought patterns and via what means.

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Here are some other behavior and thought patterns that I do not want but seem to have for some reason.
> Fidgeting
> Time wasting (absence of productive or wholesome activities)
> Discouragement from attempts to comprehend the origin of my thoughts
> Manipulations to certain behaviors (theft, masturbation)
> Sexually obsessed thought patterns
> Double think (thinking the same thing [including specific word sequences] twice or more in short order)
> Spaced thoughts (e.g. instead of thinking the word "shift," this thought pattern involves thinking each letter with some spacer in between, such as "underscore; such as "s, underscore h, underscore i, ...")

Classic prefrontal symptoms. Try excercise, socialising and meditation. Also try to explicitely deconstruct your problems. i.e you get a problem, what is it, what do you want from it, how do you do it, what are the steps, if it conflicts with other things you want, what are the possible outcomes if you go one way or the other. Think in terms of small steps. I'm the same to be honest.

lot of work being done on that
here is my feeble napkin tier work at identifying a semiotic

You suffer from what I identify as a lack of mental evaluation. Your mind is assigning at least a third state to what should be a choice
between on/off true/false yes/no states. Chemically this translates into dopaminergic function, and the frontal lobe is a specialized brain part for binary thought. The effects are: you ask open questions which you don't even know the purpose of, you have a dependency on novelty which is what satiates those open questions, and you are left with confusion since you never continually evaluate if something is true or not. Take a look at this lovely child with ADHD compared to a normal boy, see how eventually a contrast appears when the healthy boy answers with simplicity very often, while the ADHD girl replies with a depressed ambiguous wall of text irl

youtube.com/watch?v=-IO6zqIm88s

Also, anxiety or depression maybe a thing.

Take a (you)

Is this bad?

>anxiety or depression maybe a thing
Completely agree, however the process by which it is inflicted and can be removed may not be the traditional medication process, but perhaps we can develop other hypotheses that validly describe the relationship between such behaviors and thought patterns, and the thoughts that we consequently have, as well as how we can change our behavior patterns to establish thought patterns that we desire.

>You suffer from what I identify as a lack of mental evaluation
>Your mind is assigning at least a third state to what should be a choice between on/off true/false yes/no states
I disagree, however I do have symptoms of childhood trauma, and I have spoken to my parent who has confirmed that my behavior changed after I was kidnapped as a child. Here are the symptoms of childhood trauma that match my typical behavior patterns:
>problems with relationship boundaries
>lack of trust
>social isolation
>difficulty perceiving and responding to others' emotional states
>lack of empathy
>difficulty identifying and expressing emotions and internal states
>difficulties communicating needs, wants, and wishes
>depersonalization
>problems with impulse control
>sleep problems
>difficulty regulating attention
>problems with a planning, judgement, and self-monitoring
>difficulty focusing and completing tasks
>poor object constancy
>problems with 'cause-effect' thinking
>low self-esteem

no, good!

its so difficult though isnt it#?

How do I stop thinking in words? It started around a year ago and has noticeably damaged my ability to learn new concepts and think abstractly.

Here are some things I have tried which do not seem to have yielded any noticeable result in improving my thought patterns
> Apologizing for wrongdoings
> (Mentally) Requesting information on how to resolve these unwanted things that are set upon my life
> Appealing to higher entities (God, Jesus, etc...)
> Curse removal
> Spiritual healers
> Creating counter thoughts or trying to say "no" to the thoughts
> Blocking the thoughts
> Telling the thoughts (or their origin) to stop or leave

>How do I stop thinking in words
The solution to this problem would be very valuable.

Have you niggers ever heard of image streaming?

What font is that in the picture?

try mindfulness or cbt?

try the website mindfulpalouse.com ? or search it in google? cbt is difficult coz usually need a therapist etc etc so hard but this website you can do by yourself.

also, look up act? dont have to do it but the idea of acceptance might be useful

I have almost all of these symptoms, what should I do about it?

It means that you may have had childhood (or even adult) trauma. I am trying to figure out a way to fix the problems. You can help by also trying to find resolutions to the problems.

I just want to be left alone. Why am I crying.

Perhaps your higher self, your soul, or your subconscious knows the truth about some traumatic event. You can try to do memory regressions or similar things to reconnect with the memories. Apparently doing that can help you heal emotionally, and with other things. I myself have tried it but have only found mild success with reconnecting with memories from when I was kidnapped.

You can't remember things, whereas when I start thinking about those things, I emotionally shut down. Viewing traumatic memories is like being on the other side of a one-way mirror, all the emotion is safely contained on the other side, but I don't think I've actually processed it. So long as the door stays closed, I'm safe.

As far as I am aware, you do remember them but some part of your mind has locked them away. It is possible for some specific event or scenario to trigger the memories. Apparently reconnecting with the memory will help to undo the negative and unwanted behavior patterns that the traumatic event caused.

Im going to figure out how we think so we can predict exactly what we think. What is the halting problem.

The purpose is more to be able to control our thoughts rather than merely predicting them.

I'll think about it user. The prospect of sorting myself out is frightening, and I'm not sure I want to do it.

It is impossible to control anything about yourself. Nothing is free will. Nothing. You may think or feelasif you have some kind of control over yourself, but never forget this is simply impossible. And I say that because of the conclusion (C) arrived at from two simple premises (P).
P1: The source of your consciousness, your decisions, etc, is your brain.
P2: You do not have control over your brain.
C: You do not have control over your "decisions" and your consciousness.
This is perfectly logical and the only reason why anyone would disagree with it is for purely emotional reasons. It is the truth.

Even if you assume for a second that free will is true, you still have to keep in mind that your consciousness is nothing but bollocks. Absolutely everything you do is decided by your subconsciousness. Anything that you believe in, anything you do, any habit, everything, it's all done by the subconsciousness. You may consciously attempt to justify some of your actions, and you will fiercely believe in these attempts at justifying anything, but ultimately everything steers from your subconscious. There are scientific experiments on that. People who cut the membrane separating left and right brain hemispheres as a treatment to epilepsy spawn literally two different consciousness. If you ask to the left ear of one of these people why you are wearing a red shirt, he will answer because I like red. If you ask the same thing but on the other ear, he will answer something different like because it's the first one I found. It's crazy but it's true. Everything you're saying just suggests you are a literal brainlet, your brain is small, underdeveloped, no barrier between conscious and subconscious. That's why your subconsciousness tells your consciousness you (conscious you) could have some control over it. It's a common trait of people with low functioning autism and other kinds of mental retardation. I'm sorry OP.

And you don't have free will anyway.

Bear with me hear, but this is what I've come to understand. Our brains are, essentially, giant super computers with varying abilities, personalities, etc based on chemicals and electrical impulses. When you start thinking of memories and thoughts as data, things start to become clearer. For example, our thoughts and memories can actually be changed based on outward stimuli. In layman's terms of binary or code, a 1 becomes a 0, a 0 becomes a 1, a variable is changed. Now onto thoughts as words. I don't think we actually think in terms of language, thats just how we interpret things. Our thoughts are more conceptual and have a bit of electrical data to them that can be measured in brainwave, which in turn are a form of EM wave produced by our brain. We think in data, data that can be changed and rewritten based on outward stimuli and chemical changes.

The symptoms are roughly categorized as the following:

1) depression of conceptual thinking
2) related to depression, lowered activity in the brain
3) disassociation and anxiety
4) depression, PTSD, lower level of consciousness
5) primitive forms of the schizophrenic's "being watched", "being judged", "persecutory delusion"
6) "persecutory delusion"

These are interrelated and all stem from the same problems:

1) Lack of honesty with yourself, others
2) Drug abuse
3) Deficiencies in diet
4) No God, no submitting to a higher power
5) Unresolved trauma

What causes the problem? Physical matter. But the physical matter has higher level interpretations which can affect the lower levels.

The most common is lack of self-knowledge - an inability to objectively, honestly and non-judgementally reflect on one's feelings. Not an unwillingness - an inability. The depression compounds the delusion by reducing activity. Because one is depressed, one seeks out delusions and short-term methods of relief, leading to more suffering.

At the core of this problem is a lack of honesty - or rather, ability for honesty. Honesty is a ladder. Only when you are honest about the basics can you begin to become honest about more complicated things - things you couldn't be honest about because you didn't have the primitive truths in the first place to build off of. This is why Buddha said the only evil is delusion, and why Jesus said the truth will set you free. They weren't gods, but they knew the human mind.

But the truth to yourself is not enough. You must be honest with another. You must confess to somebody you know and somebody who will help you. Only then can you recalibrate. This recalibration can only occur when you know somebody else knows your inner mind, and they know you know they know, and they forgive and accept you anyways.

My symptoms were similar to yours for about five years. That is how I got past it. Honesty, a god and friendship.

>No God, no submitting to a higher power
Is this the new religious shittery? "Not believing in God makes you retarded"?

You must submit to a higher power, it doesn't have to be something from the bible, though many people manifest their connection to a greater consciousness through their biblical religious beliefs.

Whenever I read someone giving advice, I read "you"s as "I"s, and I read the imperative tense as the past tense. I can see you are speaking for yourself.
A "higher power", you say. Rain, thunder, hail. I have already accepted that I am submitted to all existing things, because I do not have any power at all. And yet this is the ultimate source of my suffering.

image or feeling prompted daydreaming
you have to zone out deep enough so that your conscious thoughts aren't propping up the flow of your mind

anxiety seems to be some sort of looping of that top level thinking (in words)

>creating counter thoughts or blocking the thoughts
you have to acknowlege they are your thoughts, and smash them with rejection because you don't want them anymore

you aren't some passive entity filtering your thoughts - you are actively creating them, so you need to stymy their creation (as they as forming you will feel them at the same time as you think them) ride up to the origin of that thought (the emotion) and interrupt it

cog behaviour is all about this