The alternative scenario, in which the causal chain might be interrupted by a single thought, for instance of enlightenment, is no less puzzling: such an interruption could bring about sudden enlightenment.
More to the point, Abhidharma philosophers were pressed to counter the possibility that latent dispositions could persist in an unexplained way in the mental stream so that even skillful thoughts, for instance of generosity or loving-kindness, could not be free of them.
I've long thought, for instance, that the paintings of Seurat suggest a distinctively urban sense of distance, a middle ground of tension between nearness and inaccessibility that's particular to walking in the city — and that a similar sense of distance is seen in the cinema with the rise of location shooting, and eventually became a commonplace.
Leibniz depicts the production of our thoughts, for instance, as involving emanative causation: "it is very evident that created substances depend upon God, who preserves them and who even produces them continually by a kind of emanation, just as we produce our thoughts" (Discourse on Metaphysics §14 GP iv, 439/AG 439/AG
If you practice leaving a woman alone in your thoughts (for instance, by practicing thinking of the woman's overprotective father, as monks are taught to do), then when you see a woman you'll reject her in your thoughts.
They have a huge inventory of instances, but their capacity for thought isn't so different from that of the tic-tac-toe machine in the science museum.
It has been forcefully argued that Horkheimer misconstrued the thought of the classical pragmatists; see, for instance, Joas 1993 (especially chapters 3 and 4).
In a couple of instances, maybe.
A catalog of instances is given.
1) Pessimistic thoughts: For instance, judging myself too harshly.
