It's not. They don't realize it, they're merely referring to stopping your internal monologue. There are dozens of other mental processes going on in any given waking moment. Even actual top shelf cognition is going on, it just occurs in a "language of thought".
They certainly have realized that. It's one of the first things you notice doing awareness meditation; thoughts appear from nowhere even if you didn't try to think them.
This isn't a joke? Like, that actually happens to people? I thought it was just to exaggerate how poorly the minds of dumb people work.
1. Most people (including Buddhists) think that their internal monologue comprises their thoughts, in majority or even in total.
2. Can't conceive of the possibility of a thought existing other than expressed in their spoken language
3. Find it difficult or impossible to suppress their inner monologue.
4. When successful at suppressing it believe that their thoughts have ceased.
5. Are apparently unaware of the paradox that belief entails... if they are no longer thinking, how is the decision made to initiate thinking once more? That's a conscious decision, or else successful Buddhists would turn into vegetables and die of starvation in their little meditation pose.
This isn't a matter of speculation anymore. We can see inside the brain, non-invasively, while these things occur. Any mystical element is an artifact of people poorly defining words, or being completely ignorant of how a brain must operate in principle. You're all very confused.
It doesn't need to be, and isn't, a conscious decision.
> Most people (including Buddhists) think that their internal monologue comprises their thoughts
And they don't think this, in fact they think the opposite.
You seem to be offended I used the expression "from nowhere" instead of "from your unconscious" or something.
However, we can imagine images, shapes and sounds, indescribable in words, and even higher there are abstract ideas that can't be expressed with images or sounds, let along with words.
The "thoughts from without" may appear for a multitude of reasons, because our minds aren't isolated systems. The source may be some sensory input that triggered a memory, and I wouldn't even reject the possibility, that brains can react to background electromagnetic noise and form thoughts based on it.
First, not everyone even has an inner monologue. Just like many people can’t close their eyes and see things while others can, many people don’t think in words.
Second, you absolutely can suspend your thoughts. I do regularly. In fact the entire point of Buddhist meditation is to practice the act of suspending observable thoughts entirely in a controlled environment to carry the practice over into every day life. I like you didn’t think it was possible until after several years of practice I could. With that I lost my anxiety and depression, and found a way to be generally happy. I still think, but it’s in service towards a goal. Otherwise I let myself simply live. In so, I have a happy marriage and a successful career. Much more so than before.
I don’t feel compelled to convince you I’m not lying or otherwise deluded if you choose to not believe me.
Now, how do you choose to begin thinking again? The fact is you’re always thinking when you are conscious and aware, but it’s happening in an aspect of your mind you can’t perceive directly. While I’m not thinking I still make decisions and take actions and initiate things, even carry on conversations and form intentions. But they aren’t thoughts that are articulating in my mind like we typically think of as thinking. I usually drop into thinking when I need to analyze something rationally or methodically plan, particularly if it has to be verbalized or written in some way, or recorded on a schedule or something. How do I begin that? I can’t observe the process and isolate it as that’s just the way things are. I’m definitely aware of my intentions, but I’m not thinking about them or articulating some thoughts in my mind. They just flow naturally from the present. When my mind needs to think, it does. Because, my thinking facilities in my mind are merely a tool of my mind - the crucial insight is that we are not our tools.
I don’t think any of this is mystical in the least. I think people who think their thoughts are really important are the mystical thinkers. We are meat brains, and our thinking facility is a late evolutionary feature that we’ve become ensnared in much to our own suffering as it distracts us from our more natural states of being because they’re so seductive in its constructs. I think Buddhism in its most raw form is almost entirely devoid of mystical thinking and most mysticism associated with it is an accretion of animistic and ancestor worship indigenous societies where it developed.
But to my understanding the idea of nothingness being some objective in Buddhism isn’t the case - but it’s often described as such because that state of pure awareness without encumbering thought and attachment in many ways to an unpracticed person feels like nothingness. After all, the awareness is silent, even if it is where all thought and feeling spring from.
Finally, awareness isn’t that moment you snap back to thought. You’re always aware. We just tend to be primarily aware of our thoughts and emotions. We walk around in a haze of the past and future and fiction as the world ticks by around us, and we tend to live in what isn’t rather than what is. You don’t disappear in the sense that you cease to be as an individual mind, you are always yourself - that’s a tautology. What you lose is the sense of some identity that’s separate from what you ARE in this very moment. You aren’t a programmer, you aren’t a Democrat, you aren’t a XYZ. You are what you are, and what that is changes constantly, so can’t be singularly defined or held onto as some consistent thing over time with labels and structure. You just simply are.
"You don’t disappear in the sense that you cease to be as an individual mind, you are always yourself - that’s a tautology. What you lose is the sense of some identity that’s separate from what you ARE in this very moment."
This assumes that there's any concept of "you" that exists independent of your thoughts whatsoever. I think you're right that some Buddhist thinkers believe in this kind of essential awareness underlying conscious thought that you're describing, but others would say there is literally nothing underneath. "The self is an illusion", "all is emptiness", etc. If you believe in those ideas, then you have no awareness independent of conscious thought because there is no you independent of conscious thought.
The self as an illusion though refers to the concept that we as we exist now is ever changing and can’t be kept as some identity as that identity is necessarily not who you actually are. Our memories are not real - just shadows of an experience, and our aspirations are fiction. That does not however mean you don’t exist. You do exist, and as you move beyond the basics of mindfulness and releasing of attachments our role in a broader human experience becomes crucial - loving kindness (metta), and other aspects, are what are suppose to fill that void left by detaching from self and what isn’t. You move from being obsessed with self to becoming a force of goodness in the world by virtue of your existence. This couldn’t possibly be the case if the goal were nothingness and that’s it. This is where karma and other concepts come into play.
This is simple to experience for yourself since it'd mean we stop being aware when listening so intently thoughts stop. Obviously we don't cease to be aware at such times.
You've also misunderstood what is meant by nothingness ("no thingness").
If that's how it works, then the "soul" is more like an emergent phenomenon created by the interplay between the various layers of conscious thought and the base layer of nothingness when it's all turned off. That architecture wouldn't necessarily be so difficult to replicate in AI systems.