How Abstract Thought Becomes Conscious
This is a paid subscriber post - if you’d like to access content like this, please sign up!
How Abstract Thought Becomes Conscious
Ideomotor control, conscious experience, and the role of metaphor in conceptual thinking
One persistent thorny problem is the relationship between clear, qualitative conscious contents such as percepts, feelings, and images versus nonqualitative conscious events such as concepts, beliefs, expectations, and intentions, which surely can compete for limited capacity, but which are not experienced with qualities like warmth, color, taste, and smell.
Human beings have a great tendency to concretize abstract ideas: to think in terms of metaphors that can be visualized, or to reduce an abstract class of events to a concrete prototype. It may be no accident that mathematics and physics really have two separate symbol systems: an algebraic code and a geometric one. The two are mathematically equivalent, but not psychologically, because people can use their visual imagination with geometric figures but not with algebraic formulas.
We do not have to resort to science for examples. All of us clearly represent the meaning of a sentence in an abstract form. To illustrate this, try to recall word-for-word the sentence before this one. (No looking!) Most readers will not be able to do this, but they will be able to recall a paraphrase of the sentence, that is to say, a semantic equivalent, with different words, different syntax, and even different sensory qualities than the original sentence; but the paraphrase will preserve the abstract meaning of the original.
The evidence is very good that educated adults rapidly convert words and sentences into a semantic code that is quite abstract and impossible to experience qualitatively. The question we must face here is, of course: How do we then manipulate the abstract semantic code through consciousness?...
Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
© 2026 Bernard Baars
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104