I view ‘thoughts’ as not having very much to do with action in general. They’re just like… incidental post-hoc things.
I spend the whole of every working day thinking, and all this thought drives the things that I do at work. For example, the task currently (or before I took a break to read LW) in front of me is to make the API to a piece of functionality in the software I’m developing as simple as it can possibly be, while not making the implementation go through contortions to make it that simple. The actions this has given rise to so far have been to write a page of notes on possible APIs and a mockup of a procedure implementing one of them.
A lot of what I do when I’m not “at work” is the same sort of thing. What I have just written was produced by thinking. So thoughts as “incidental post-hoc things” does not describe anything that I call thoughts.
My inferential distance from yours is also high.
I spend the whole of every working day thinking, and all this thought drives the things that I do at work. For example, the task currently (or before I took a break to read LW) in front of me is to make the API to a piece of functionality in the software I’m developing as simple as it can possibly be, while not making the implementation go through contortions to make it that simple. The actions this has given rise to so far have been to write a page of notes on possible APIs and a mockup of a procedure implementing one of them.
A lot of what I do when I’m not “at work” is the same sort of thing. What I have just written was produced by thinking. So thoughts as “incidental post-hoc things” does not describe anything that I call thoughts.