The idea that neuroscience might enable thoughts to be read and intentions revealed is perhaps the most threatening of all to civil liberties.
Nagel's view of thought/intelligence, phenomenologically conceived as a force of nature, seems to me an enabling view tacitly backing research into plant sense-making as parallel, perhaps equivalent, to neurologically enabled intelligence.
Associations crowd out rational thought, enabling the "doing without thinking" characteristic of habits.
Ubiquitous posters displaying his photograph feature the slogan "Big Brother is watching you"; hidden devices in every room enable his Thought Police to monitor the activities of all citizens.
The role of language as a vehicle of thought enables human thinking to be as complex and varied as it is.
If it only takes a second to score a goal physically, the mental process begins several seconds earlier, great forwards set apart by their supernatural knack of sensing where and when an opening is about to develop, something in their mind alerting them to several different scenarios and their clarity of thought enabling them to pick the right one.
The ability to draw new conclusions from known facts and hypotheses is central to human thought, enabling syllogistic reasoning, problem solving, causal reasoning, and analogical inference.
These signals are then translated into desired intentions, enabling anything from thought-to-text to moving objects.
It seems clear, from studies, and lots of personal testimony, that well-structured mindfulness training elicits benefits for many - cultivating attention and curiosity, enabling greater regulation of thought and emotion, and nurturing action more in tune with values and intention, rather than unconscious automatic habits.
