Thinking

I just figured out what thinking is.

The id, the intuitive ‘analog’ decision making process, uses inherited and learned rules to make instant decisions based on instantly processed sensory information.

The ego checks that the sensory conditions coming in match those under which the rules can be used.

Where required the ego transfers the decision making to the slower offline super ego. This ‘digital’ computer does the thinking.

And the reason it is offline and slow is because what we are doing is modeling (or simulating) a number of future scenarios in order to make decisions. This takes a lot of  processing power. We select the best scenario in order to make our decisions. We probably just keep modeling until we get a satisfactory answer.

Initially thinking must have developed as an emergency adjunct to the instinctive id. Over time we seem to have co-opted this part of our brain and we are well on the way to super-ego dominance.

And we have had to sculpt the world itself to allow us this luxury. For example we are engineering risk out of our lives because we know we are suppressing the id so much that our lives would be endangered if we did not.