Thinking is occurring

I was thinking while shopping on Friday evening, to the extent that I walked away from the cashier without paying - who came out after me as I wandered absent-mindedly across the parking lot sipping on a chocolate steri-stumpi (with the unfortunate effect of breaking my train of thought). My thoughts were continuing from when Jerith mentioned some weeks ago a problem with Descarte's "I think therefore I am": that it should really be "Thinking is occurring, therefore something is". If reality is furthermore what it appears to be (not a simulation/deception), then the thinking is occuring within the head of the creature through which which sensory input is entering those thoughts. The creature in which these thoughts occur prior to being written down, is here being indicated by the first-person personal pronoun, "I". This gets around what "I" means, but leaves open the question of what it means to think. Descarte's statement relates to self-awareness: the phenomenon of thoughts acknowledging that thinking is occurring. Douglas Hofstatder, in "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", considers self (or self-awareness) to be a "strange loop", a vaguely-defined phenomenon where something recurses infinitely by self-reference yet ends up where it was, along the lines of the Penrose stairs, the ever-increasing scale of notes, or Godel's first incompleteness theorem (where a number-theoretical statement G, encoded as a number, asserts G's own un-provability by means of number theory). The word "self", though, is nothing special, simply referring (like "I") to this instance of a human being having the thought as opposed to some other instance. It has been said that when we have precise definition of what it means to think, we will also be able to develop a computer that thinks - and is perhaps aware of it. As for whether computers think already, Dijkstra compared it to asking whether submarines swim: the computation of a machine learning algorithm and the deliberation in human biology are qualitatively different. Computation in humans is almost entirely below the level of thought, occurring in neurons and brain regions that the resulting thoughts are entirely unaware of. Thoughts can also do computation, if inefficiently - just consider the vast amount of computation behind even a simple thought, and then the amount of conscious thought required to simulate even a simple artificial neuron. Human thought also appears tightly linked with the human capacity for language (another favourite topic of Hofstatder's). To me, language is the most striking distinction between humans and other higher animals, the facility that grants us an almost unlimited ability to manipulate and communicate abstractions and symbols (although imperfectly: there are many cognitive biases). Other animals are probably mostly limited to the space of images and concrete objects - what would remain if you managed to purge words and symbols from your thoughts? Those were the handful of thoughts in my head last Friday evening. (Note: I searched on terms to link to Wikipedia after the fact - should I rather be leave them out? That way people could search on whatever they want, and it doesn't look like I got everything off the wiki.)