Graph of Thought

chainA phrase that has been really bothering me since I was a teenager is “Chain of Thought” or “Train of Thought” – it even has its own wiki page! As I have recently realized that one use of blogs are meant to be a personal ranting space, so let me do that.

A chain is a lot like a vector, so when I hear the phrase “Chain of Thought”, I see a thinker/brain jumping from link to link, much like an iterator, and most of the links are identical. I don’t think like that, and I’m sure most people don’t either.

When I try to visualize thinking, the picture that comes to my mind is that of a set of stacks, with thoughts popping out of some and being pushed into others.

At other times, thoughts remind me of a tree, with the brain traversing it, sometimes depth first, and sometimes breadth first, but more often, thought looks to me like a graph, with the brain hopping from node to node however the hell it pleases.

A tree is a graph, and a vector is a tree, so why do we have to chain our thoughts by making them look like they follow a linear pattern? They are seldom that linear! Ok, a “Graph of Thought” sounds modern, but trees have been around for much longer than chains!

To me, analogies and models are dangerous oversimplifications. Whenever we use a model to represent something, the thing that is being represented loses a certain part of its being. By sticking to a chain model, we are simplifying our thought process, and perhaps, becoming just a little bit more stupid in the process. I say, let us kill the phrase “Chain of Thought” and climb one teeny weeny step higher on the ladder of evolution.

After this post, I will take the nested brackets that I love (and I do love them (honestly (yes, this is a forced example))) as deep as I want to, without bothering about grammar.

Grammar needs a redesign.

5 Comments

  1. cache says:

    Well if you take “A train of thought” as a path in the graph of thought that you’ve just mentioned then it makes some sense. If you’re talking to someone about how you got to a conclusion on a topic you would probably get rid of irrelevant nodes and paths. Kind of makes this something like a shortest path. 🙂

  2. Sohaib Athar says:

    You have a point there, but we normally don’t follow the shortest paths when ‘traveling’ from one thought to another. Also, trains don’t make 180 degree turns without a change in speed, they travel on near-planes on predefined paths. Neurons may look like railway lines to some, but they are not, and thought don’t need shunting either.
    Some analogies, I understand, but I just can’t seem to LINK the concept of a chain/train with the concept of thought, and this bothered me a lot (until I put it out of my mind by writing about it here) 😀
    Thanks for visiting btw.

  3. cache says:

    Heres a strange thing:

    http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=train

    Seems here that the phrase “train of thought” was coined before people used the word “train” in the railway sense. So even though we think of “train of thought” as a railway train having something to do with thought it might actually have started off with a different meaning.

    PS: I like your blog for its originality. Its not often that you see a Pakistani blog with something other than “look what I found” posts.

  4. Sohaib Athar says:

    Yes, the train in the railway sense was adapted from a train of carriages, PULLED by horses. In this context too, though, we don’t pull a bunch of thoughts.
    I am beginning to see why telling Adam the names of things is an important incident in our religious books.

    Thanks again, I do keep a list of links that I find interesting, and dump the ones that are not covered by anyone after a few days, but regurgitating links makes no sense to me either, unless you add some more value to the original page/post/thought.

  5. Xiaoqian Lim says:

    I actually came across your blog trying to research the origin of the phrase “train of thought” for a Rhetoric paper that I’m working on. My goal is actually what you had mentioned — that the simplistic phrase “train of thought” conceals certain aspects of thought. I really enjoyed reading your blog, it was very insightful!