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From: vu0208@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu ()
Subject: Re: how many distinct thoughts can a person have?
Message-ID: <1991Jun25.031941.20713@newserve.cc.binghamton.edu>
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References: <1991Jun19.033316.18773@athena.mit.edu>
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Date: Tue, 25 Jun 1991 03:19:41 GMT

In article <1991Jun19.033316.18773@athena.mit.edu> mlevin@jade.tufts.edu writes:
>   I was just reading Z. Pylyshin's "Computation and Cognition", and
>at one point, he states something like: "the number of distinct human
>thoughts is uncountable." Does anyone have any arguments for or
>against the idea that the number of possible distinct human thoughts
>(or mental states) is uncountably infinite? Note I do not mean
>"astronomicallly large" - I mean infinite (and perhaps uncountably so)
>in the strict mathematical sense. It seems plausible to me; does
>anyone have a good argument either way?
>
>Mike Levin

If not infinite then multiple thoughts DO occur concurrently in a
human brain!!

1) I remember reading somewhere about a poet who could
write with both left and right hands, and at times he was writing two
different poems simultaneously!

2) A personal experience: I have had many times NESTED-DREAMS! That
is, Dream in a dream at most to 3 levels. At each level I have
communicated from the nth-level to (n-1)th level of the nested-dreams.

-------

This is purely my theory:

Human brain may be strongly-processing one thought (on which it is
concentrating) but in the back-ground lots of thoughts are being
processed (weakly) (here I use strong and weak thoughts to define the
degree if concentration). Now once the current thought-process is
completed or require more information then one/or more  of the
back-ground process-thoughts share/send the information to/from the
strong-thought. And this thinking process goes on until fewer thoghts
are left (resulting in a conclusion or action) or all the thoughts are
connected together to reach some new discovery/invention by the brain.