Do 'you' make your thoughts or do they come ready formed?

The “I” is itself only a thought. The brain makes thoughts. It’s not “I”.

I just do what the voices tell me.

I just do whatever the media tells me.

In today’s USA we are programmed, by the alleged news media, to accept the position that our (alleged) government forces upon us. I prefer to make my own analysis and reach my own conclusions.

they come already formed, then i change them around and make them my own ;)

Can you be a little more specific? I don’t really understand your question.

I think what you’re sort of saying is, do you consciously shape your own thoughts, or do ideas just randomly pop into your head?

When I’m not concentrating on anything, my thoughts are usually just sort of a random swirl of half-formed ideas. It’s usually more moods, sounds, memories and ideas that just lead into one another. Very stream-of-consciousness. If I’m actively thinking, I concentrate on just one topic and shape this material into complete thoughts that I might write or say. But they don’t just come from my unconscious that way.

My thoughts are like puzzles. They’re there and encompass that which they pertain to, at least in my psyche if you will, but when comes the time to present them beyond my comprehension I have of them in my own head, they need to be put together.
I often wonder if, by said process, I end up changing their entire senses, or merely adapting them to human language or other forms of communication.

Of course that’s not to say that my thoughts are so complex that they require down toning, chances are, they just don’t make any sense to begin with. XD

I think, all thoughts are manifested from the sub-conscious-the great and powerful OZ. What is OZ, I will let you answer that.
And that is and has always been a challenge for me- to transform or retrain the sub-conscious, or retrain the dog that buries his bones and forgets where he puts them.

@Harp ”The “I” is itself only a thought.” If this is so, then who is the thinker of the thought that is the “I”?

Why must there be a “thinker”? When you feel a breeze, you don’t assume there must be a “blower”.The “I” is an invention, the main character in the story the brain concocts to account for experience.

Do “you” make your heart beat? That’s not the common way of looking at it. It feels like you are irrelevant to the process; there’s no apparent need to involve an “I’ in explaining it because it seems to happen all by itself . But the beat, of course, originates in the action of the neurons of a nervous system.

Do “you” make your respiratory system breathe? This question is harder to answer, because sometimes it seems like “I” take a breath, and sometimes it seems like “I” have nothing to do with it.

And yet we always come to the conclusion that “I” am doing the thinking even though this too is nothing but the action of neurons. The difference seems to be the feeling of will that accompanies some experiences, but not others. Some actions seem to come from a controlling “I”. But research indicates that these actions begin in the brain well before there is any awareness of making a decision. The decision is made without you. The “I”, the “thinker”, just gets pasted on later in the process.

This is all very contrary to the way experience is conceived, but that’s because the thought of “I” is fundamental to the brain’s process of building a conscious representation of a world. Data must be presented to a computer in the form of 1s and 0s even though the whole of reality can’t begin to be reduced to 1s and 0s. You could never explain to a computer that the 1s and 0s are just expedient ways of representing reality, but not reality itself. Likewise, the brain has trouble dealing with the fact that “I” is just such an expedient, without independent existence.

@Harp So, we are “brains”....?

No, we’re not. Let’s clarify what we’re talking about here:

The “I” that the brain generates is, in effect, a theory. It’s an attempt to explain certain features of conscious experience. For instance, conscious experience seems to always include awareness of a body. That body seems to respond to thought and seems to generate sensory stimuli. From this and many other features of experience, the brain formulates the theory that there is an entity who is the recipient of experience. This has been called the homunculus or “little man”, because it seems like there’s a little person who’s monitoring the input of the senses and controlling the body. This little nugget of “I”-ness seems to own the body since the body is always in its awareness, but the body, and even the brain, aren’t exactly the same as this “I”, since losing parts of the body or brain doesn’t seem to dispel the “I”.

This is the “I” that is a thought/idea/theory. It can’t be found anywhere. It just seems like it must exist, so we operate on the assumption that it does. It can be compared to time. As real as time seems, and as indispensable as it appears to be to understanding the world, many physicists admit that time may be nothing more than a trick the brain uses to organize conscious experience and may not exist outside of brains. Yet both time and “I” appear necessary when thinking about experience.

We’re lousy at distinguishing these organizational tricks of the brain from actual properties of the universe because without those organizational tricks perception becomes impossible. They form the warp of the fabric of our reality. Without them, our representation of reality falls apart.