On Thinking

I. A forgotten fundamental question

In the history of philosophy, there is a question that has been asked for more than two thousand years yet has never truly been answered.

This question is not "what is the world"—that is ontology; not "what can we know"—that is epistemology; nor "how should people live"—that is ethics. This question is more fundamental and more hidden: what, in itself, is thinking?

Plato asked what we can know, and his answer was "the Forms," but he never asked: what is the thing that "knows"? Descartes said "I think, therefore I am"—he used "thinking" to prove "being," but he never asked: what, in itself, is "thinking"? Kant asked "how are synthetic a priori judgments possible," and he gave the answer of "a priori forms," but he never asked: where do these "a priori forms" come from? What is thinking itself?

Throughout the entire history of Western philosophy, people have used thinking to know the world, yet few have ever taken thinking itself as the object of cognition. Thinking has been used as a "tool" but never examined as an "object." This is a startling blank.

More than two thousand years have passed. We now have physics, chemistry, biology; relativity, quantum mechanics, gene editing. Our knowledge of the universe has expanded from the Earth to ten billion light-years away; our knowledge of matter has gone from molecules deep down below the quark. But where does our knowledge of "thinking itself" stand? We still cannot say clearly: what is thinking? How does it operate? Where does it come from? Where is it going?

This book exists to fill this blank.

II. The core weapon: the fundamental distinction between reflection and reaction

The core discovery of this book can be summed up in one sentence: thinking is reflection; consciousness is reaction.

The chopsticks thrust at the eye

Imagine someone thrusts a pair of chopsticks at your eye.

Your eye will see the chopsticks, see them coming closer and closer, see their shape, direction, and speed. This process is thinking reflecting: the eye receives light, and the brain forms the information "chopsticks are coming at my eye."

At the same time, your eyelid closes instinctively and your head dodges. This action is consciousness reacting: the body perceives danger and makes a protective reaction.

Do you see it? The eye reflects information; the eyelid reacts to protect. They happen simultaneously, yet are completely different.

This example is powerful because it has anatomical evidence: the lens and retina inside the eye—the parts responsible for "seeing"—have no pain receptors. They can receive light and transmit images, but they do not feel pain. This is the visual pathway, belonging to the "reflection" system. The eyelid is densely covered with pain nerve endings, and the skin and muscles around the eyes are equally sensitive. So when danger approaches, they hurt, they close, they dodge. This is the reflex arc, belonging to the "reaction" system. The same event, the same body part, yet there are two completely different neural circuits.

Two systems

From this, the book proposes a revolutionary theory: the human brain contains two different sets of neural networks.

The first: the survival-seeking system. Connected to the body's senses, it receives pleasure and pain signals and is responsible for life-care concerns such as preservation, care, and esteem. It has pain sensation because it must protect the body. This is the physiological basis of "consciousness," what the ancients called the "heart."

The second: the truth-seeking system. Relatively independent, it is mainly responsible for recognition, judgment, and confirming right and wrong. It has no pain sensation because it only needs to see facts clearly. This is the physiological basis of "thinking," the abode of the "Mind's Controller."

Thinking does not hurt, because its neural network is designed specifically for "cognition," not for "feeling." When you "think about" a painful matter, what "hurts" is not thinking itself, but the bodily reaction triggered after thinking passes the information to the survival-seeking system. Thinking merely supplies the material; it is the heart that hurts.

This is why some people can remain calm amid immense pain—they have learned to separate the truth-seeking system from the survival-seeking system, letting thinking continue to work while temporarily not letting the body react. This is not suppression; it is separation.

III. The origin and essence of thinking

From consciousness of matter-in-itself to rational consciousness

Where does thinking come from? This book offers a continuous evolutionary chain from matter to life.

Level one: consciousness of matter-in-itself. Any material system has an inherent tendency to maintain its own stability. Atoms seek stable electron shells, molecules seek stable chemical bonds, celestial bodies seek stable orbits. This is not "consciousness"; it is "the precursor of consciousness."

Level two: bodily-sensation consciousness. Once life appears, matter for the first time "senses." Hunger is uncomfortable, thirst makes one want water, cold makes one shiver, and a hand touching fire withdraws at once. These feelings do not require you to think them through first; the body has already made the decision for you.

Level three: emotional consciousness. When the brain evolves to the point of storing memories and predicting the future, emotion appears. You were once scalded by fire, and the next time you see fire you grow tense; you were once held in a gentle embrace, and when you see that person again your heart softens. Emotion is the reaction produced when past bodily-sensation experiences are preserved by memory and reawakened in similar situations.

Level four: rational consciousness. Humans have language, symbols, abstract thinking, and the capacity for reflection. People do not merely live; they ask: "Why do I live?" People do not merely feel pain; they ask: "Why do I hurt? Does this pain have meaning?"

The essence of thinking: the internalization of sensory feelings in the brain

The most central thesis of this book is: the essence of thinking is the internalization of sensory feelings in the brain. There is a simulated gathering of the senses in the brain, which has turned into an observer, an experiencer.

What is the evidence? The seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling in the brain correspond to the objective sensory organs. When you "see" a tree in your mind, what is activated is the same visual cortex region as when you actually see a tree—only at lower intensity, without real-time input from the eyes. When you "hear" a song in your mind, what is activated is the same auditory cortex region as when you actually hear the song.

We have no other form of thinking material, and cannot have any. However wild and fanciful the imagination, it cannot go beyond the four kinds of material: "image, sound, taste, feeling." You can imagine a flying fish—but the fish is still the "image" of a fish, and flying is still the "feeling" of movement. You have not created a new sensory material.

IV. The eight dimensions of thinking

Thinking is not a linear, one-dimensional process but a three-dimensional activity that can switch among multiple dimensions. This book delineates eight dimensions of thinking.

The first dimension: sensory reflection. The immediate appearance of things. Seeing a mountain as a mountain, seeing water as water. This is the most basic dimension, coming from the direct input of the senses.

The second dimension: the dimension of time. The process of development of things. Past, present, future. If you view a person through the dimension of time, you cannot say "a human is an upright-walking animal"—for a newborn infant is not.

The third dimension: the dimension of essence. The laws behind phenomena. Seeing the essence through the phenomena. If a company's performance declines, looking only at the performance figures lets you cope only temporarily; only by looking deeply at strategy, organization, and business processes can you truly solve the problem.

The fourth dimension: the dimension of standpoint. The perspective of others or the collective. Thinking from another's position. When a subway is built, residents care about convenience, merchants care about foot traffic, and the government cares about traffic conditions—different standpoints see different things.

The fifth dimension: the dimension of utility. Interests and emotions. What benefit does it bring me? Hospitals need profit while patients need treatment—the same matter appears good (a source of income) to the hospital and bad (spending money and suffering) to the patient.

The sixth dimension: the dimension of reason. Methods and efficiency. What is the most effective way? A man steals to give his son a birthday gift: from the emotional view, fatherly love is great; from the view of rational law, this is a crime and must be punished.

The seventh dimension: the dimension of innovation. Breakthrough and creation. Jump outside the frame, avoid clichés, dare to doubt, break fixed thinking, and discover new possibilities.

The eighth dimension: the dimension of the cosmos. The perspective of the unity of Heaven and humanity. Standing in the universe, looking at the Earth. From the cosmic perspective, personal gains and losses—those worries, setbacks, rights and wrongs, life and death—all appear insignificant.

The depth of thinking lies not in which dimension you stand on, but in whether you can move freely through all dimensions.

V. The Mind's Controller: the core of spiritual freedom

This book proposes a key concept: the Mind's Controller. It is not some specific brain region but a "meta-level" within the truth-seeking system—one that can observe the operation of the truth-seeking system itself and regulate the direction and intensity of its processing.

The Mind's Controller has five functions. Awareness: seeing which "I" is speaking and which "I" is in charge. Understanding: understanding the demands of each "I" and why they think that way. Choice: actively deciding, when necessary, which "I" should be in charge. Switching: freely shifting among different dimensions, not being trapped by any one "I." Supervision: maintaining awareness during execution and adjusting in time.

Most people are not aware that thinking can be controlled, so they are often carried along by it: pulled by bodily-sensation consciousness, swept up by emotional consciousness, boxed in by fixed thinking, unable to free themselves. When you are angry, you "are" angry—you are swallowed by the emotion, with no observer "watching yourself be angry." When you think, you "are" thinking—you are occupied by the problem, with no observer "watching yourself think." This is "ignorance"—you do not know what you are doing, because the "you" that knows is not there.

Example: a failed entrepreneur. A person whose business fails has no food and no shelter. His thinking is pulled along by negative emotions—his head is full of failure, debt, contempt, fear; all his thinking leans toward malignant consciousness, producing sorrow, even thoughts of suicide. If he had a Mind's Controller, he could "jump out" and look at the problem: think from another's standpoint—everyone who succeeded suffered before, some even more miserably than him; jump to the temporal dimension—today's me is not tomorrow's me, today's bitterness will become tomorrow's sweetness; jump to the cosmic perspective—over hundreds of millions of years of evolution with countless joys and sorrows, partings and reunions, what are one's own setbacks?

The awakening of the Mind's Controller is the movement from the passive state of "being carried along by thinking" to the free state of "actively choosing how to think."

VI. The life cycle of thinking: from subject to objectification and back to subject

The original state of thinking is "living thinking," attached to a particular subject—"I." The features of living thinking: it flows—thoughts follow one after another, like a river that never stops; it is present—existing only in this moment; it is interwoven with consciousness—carrying the subject's emotions, intentions, and desires of private good.

Living thinking can be transformed into symbols through objectification: writing, images, products, and so on. The significance of objectification is to let thinking transcend individual life, achieve social transmission, and accumulate the fruits of civilization. But objectification also has a cost: losing the conscious warmth of the original subject, becoming cold symbols.

Objectified thinking must be "re-activated" by a new subject's consciousness before it can be restored to living thinking. The new subject receives the symbols through the senses, forms "image, sound, taste, feeling" in the brain, and produces a conscious reaction. You read a line; that line evokes "image" and "sound" in your mind; you understand it; you resonate with it or oppose it—this is activation.

The books in a library are not knowledge, only the possibility of knowledge. True knowledge occurs at the moment someone opens a book, reads it in, and resonates with it. The life cycle of thinking is the endless cycle of "living → objectified → dormant → re-activated → living."

VII. The unknown, already present in known theory

This book proposes a startling proposition: all civilizational achievements that humanity might express in writing in the future—whether scientific discoveries ten thousand years from now, economic theories a thousand years from now, or mathematical formulas not yet born—already exist, in theory, in the colossal library produced by the infinite combination of existing scripts, words, lexical rules, and logical rules through supercomputers.

Einstein's theory of relativity already "existed" in the possibilities of word combinations before Einstein was born. A future genius's mathematical formula already "exists" today in the combinatorial possibilities of mathematical symbols.

These undiscovered truths exist in a quantum superposition state of "both right and not yet proven." They are right because they conform to objective laws and will be confirmed in the future; they are not right because at present there is no way to prove them.

The essence of creation is not "making something from nothing" but "selecting the correct one from infinite possibilities." Einstein did not "create" relativity; he "discovered" it—finding, from the infinite possibilities of word combinations, the formulation that conforms to objective laws.

This does not dissolve human exploration; it repositions it: we are not creators "inventing from nothing," but discoverers "selecting the best from what exists." This positioning is neither arrogant nor self-abasing.

VIII. Thinking and civilization: rising in a spiral

The spiral of thinking and civilization can be summarized as: environment → stimulus (bitterness and sweetness, good and evil) → conscious reaction → thinking reflection → accumulation of knowledge → objectification of civilization → new environment → new stimulus...

Bitterness and evil are the "pushing" forces; sweetness and good are the "pulling" forces. The desires of private good are the fundamental driving force. Language, writing, and division of labor are the three accelerators of the expansion of thinking.

The essence of civilization is the objectified accumulation of thinking. It is not the accumulation of "things" but the accumulation of "thinking." What every generation leaves behind is not only material wealth but ways of thinking.

Your thinking today stands on the shoulders of your predecessors. You can think further than the ancients, not because you are smarter, but because you can "borrow" their thinking. This is the meaning of civilization: letting every generation start from where its predecessors ended, rather than from zero.

IX. The place of this book in the system of thought

On Thinking is a core work in the "thinking and consciousness theory" module of Hua Guoping's system of thought, the key work leading from "what is a human being" to "what is thinking." The core questions it answers are: what is thinking itself, what is the relationship between thinking and consciousness, how thinking operates, and how thinking becomes free.

Its relationship with the other works in the system: The Pinnacle Concept establishes the origin—what a human being is; On the Desires of Private Good unfolds it—what people concretely want; On the Evolution of Consciousness provides the theoretical foundation of consciousness—where consciousness comes from and where it goes; On Thinking provides the theoretical foundation of thinking—what thinking is and how to use it; On Judgment provides the theoretical framework of ways of judging—how people judge; The Mind's Controller is the application of thinking and consciousness theory at the level of individual destiny—answering "why you always live the way you don't want to live"; On Resolving Suffering answers how to be released from pain; The Awakening of Value applies the thinking framework to personal value creation; Why the World Can Unite and The Community of Shared Human Happiness extend individual awakening to the destiny of humanity.

If The Pinnacle Concept is the "root" of the system, then On Thinking and On the Evolution of Consciousness are the system's two "main trunks"—the latter answers "where consciousness comes from," the former answers "what thinking is and how to use it." Together the two books constitute a complete framework for understanding the human spiritual world.

X. The final answer

Thinking is a mirror; consciousness is a ripple. The mirror itself has no emotion, but the ripple tells us—something has dropped into it.

"Si" (to think) is retrieving material; "kao" (to examine) is processing material. The Chinese language has been saying this all along; we just never heard it. Thinking does not hurt; it is the heart that hurts—because the truth-seeking system has no pain sensation; only the survival-seeking system does.

True spiritual freedom is being able both to go deep into thinking and to jump out of thinking at any moment. You are not one person thinking: your thinking connects the past and the future. You are both a product of civilization and a creator of civilization.