it's all stimulus, you only experience the information that your brain receives. thought is your brain recreating a stimulus within itself, emotion isn't a stimulus, it's a short term modification to the way neural connections operate. why does thought exist? that is a good question. why would the brain want to communicate with itself? well, if it couldn't you'd be a very simple creature, only responding to the current environment, this isn't helpful for let's say, object permanence. but how does object permanence work? well, if memory is involved, then it is either always involved (meaning random parts of memory come to you, obviously false) or it is called from. if you use memory, you have to retrieve a peice of information from memory, to then produce within the brain via the known methods of communication (sight, sound, smell, ect), but how on earth do you know when to retrieve from mmemory? thought. well, a certain type of it. the idea is that the brain is like a heart, it beats in operations, after the end of each beat, it feeds the result of that beat back into itself via the forms of communication. this is how object permanace would work: cycle 1: eyes see chicken go behind tree, stored in memory, operation inputed to brain, cycle 2: stimuli is the fact that something was just stored in memory, retrieve, this memory leads to human to want to go behind tree also, operation inputed to brain. cycle 3: stimuli is cycle 2, stimuli also seeing chicken, this leads to memory not being retrieved, operation inputed to brain and so on. however, do we need to retrieve from memory? why don't we just store the fact that the chicken is behind the tree, just in case but then instead of retrieving from memory we just input this information each time? for example: cycle 1: see chicken go behind tree, stored in memory, operation inputted into brain, cycle 2: stimuli is cycle 1 which is "I saw chicken go behind tree and I stored in memory", now we know that the chicken is...