...i am afraid, this will take us away from the object of this thread.

1) Think, a verb, means use of the mind. What for? to examine, observe, to form opinions, conclusions etc.

Thinking... in the conventional sense, means 'the hard use of mind'.

It is a natural process. It is used to reason, evaluate, to learn, know, be aware etc.

Whereas, thought is the power of thinking or process of thinking.

It is deeper in the sense that it works on a semblance of intelligence.

Here we can understand that thought is a mechanism to think. Which means to know or to be aware.

Limited to this rather than th epower of reasoning, calculating etc. This is the basic function of thought or thoughts.

Further, we should understand something about cognition. 'To know', should not be confused with the popular use of the term knowledge. the basic thought or power to think or process of thinking meachnism has nothing to do with the term 'knowledge' in the present intellectual or middleclass conventional sense, if you get what i mean.

Here, therfore, it is better to use the term 'aware'. So what is thought? Thought is the mechanism to be aware.

Now, how do one be aware, unless one is not conscious. Hence, consciousness is important for awareness.

now let us turn our focus to housby's child who was painstakingly kept alive till the age of 18 even though he is bereft of any senses.

The fact that all of its vital organs are functioning leads us to the fact that the body and body organs are in conscious state of existence, which in other words mean living.

The fact that the body organs are functioning makes the child a living being...

the body organs are functioning makes the child a living being...(not the mind or 'thinking' part) and therfore it is conscious.

Once conscious, it means it is aware of itself. The unconscious state is still a living state.

Perhaps, you may argue, in the line that the brain cannot 'think', due to the theory that knowldge comes ONLY because of sensory-perception, needs careful examination of facts and a neat study of the brain. Even if the brain is dead, the body is living. this should be borne in mind.

In this exercise however, brain is not given to be dead.

But even if the brain is dead, impulses acting through stimuli or environmental triggers amply demonstrates that living bodies are indeed aware of the surroundings and of itself.

Living bodies are not machine who are not aware of itslef.

Therefore, your notion of 'think' in your question will take you into a wrong approach.

In this case the child does not 'think' as you think thinking is all about.

Here the child is aware of itslef, and is conscious.

Therefore, thought (the unconventional one) exists in the form of neural messages, impluses and that communication between cells takes place as long as it is kept 'alive'.

We come to know about this scientifically also.

But i would appeal to common sense and logic to deduce the facts about life.

If you can reach this point along with me, than from here on our journey of thoughts become simpler and easier.

The tree feels, but whether it has feelings (the conventional sense and meaning of the word) is an open question.

In human cognition, the brain processes data to know and be aware.

Cognition does not involve emotions. Perhaps emotions and emotional thoughts are related with sensory -perceptions.

The tree and the housby's child is well aware of itself and responds to external stimulus,...

environment and the ability to 'struggle' for life or survive is an important concept in evolutionary biology.

here, one needs to know the subtle way in which our brain/mind and body works, especially cognition. It is frontal science, and i do not claim more knowledge on this front.

Now to your last question. It is said that cytoplasm, and there is another constituent of the cell (alleles ? not sure) that are 'known' to collect information.

How does the information is processed, collated, deciphered, discerned selected and signalled to other constituents to trigger an action or make a reaction is a question of deep biology.

If the pitcher plant is not conscious or does not 'feel' how does one think that it can evolve a mechanism of the insect trap and than trap it ingenously and later consume it too.

Does not your pet dog think about you and protect your house too?

But if you ask the mecahnism of its 'thinking', than no one can say with certainty, it can be speculated and deduced.

You need to join a school.

I am not so generous to give answers to all your foolish questions which are frankly without much 'thought'.

Do some reading in life sciences...

google up all those keywords, put 2 and 2 together and see what you get.

Hope to see you seen in your intelligent avatar.

QuinticNon,
These were exactly the questions I was going to post.
Jackofalltrades,
If the child has no sense perception at all, how can it know what food is? It is being fed from some kind of drip, directly into the blood stream, and has absolutely no knowledge of the world "outside". It can have no knowledge of that world. If you think it can have such knowledge please explain where this knowledge comes from. If self-awareness is possible please explain how this comes about without anything to measure against (i.e. that which is not part of us). Try to put yourself in the position of the senseless child/person. If we remove all religious/mystical arguments from the equation (as these are merely acts of "faith") what excatly are we left with? A human being with no senses is, mentally, in the world of "nothing" because that person has nothing whatsoever to measure itself against. How can it have? If you have no sight how can you even begin to understand the concept of colour? "Colour" to such a person is a meaningless term. Try to imagine having no senses. This is difficult enough due to the fact that we have all had them. Imagine the shear impossibility of coming to terms with matter and existence if you had never had any sense perception? There are arguments for a priori knowledge, knowledge that requires no experience, but outside of religious or mystical argument nothing seems to hold up. Try to think of anything that does not require experience in order to know it. Even those who would introduce "God" and suchlike into the argument in order to explain things from a non-materialistic point of view would be hard pressed to explain how we get knowledge of God and/or religon without the information given to us from sense-perception. Try to explain anything at all without refering to experience. If anyone reading this can come up with even one concept that does not require experience I will gladly bow out of the argument.
I know this has gone off thread a little but my original argument about the measurement of particles and the difficulty (impossibility) of proving their existence has brought us to this point.

So you say the aforementioned child would come up with its own intuitive version of 'cogito, ergo sum' in your sophisticated possibly panpsychist way. This seems, a priori, to be a fair enough theory.

Are you therefore stating that although we can never know anything about matter in the 'conventional sense of knowledge', we could know the workings of an atom if we were indeed to be an atom, Perhaps due to the panpsychism of the universe?

Have we reached a dead-end down this epistemological avenue?

I have shown the linkage between Consciousness, Awareness and Thought.

but please no rhetorics.

I think we live in a material world, I think it is possible that we don't, I think I am typing on this computer, I think you may be wrong, or that I may be wrong.

With no brain there is no thought or self-awareness.

with a complete lack of any stimuli to that brain does that brain have any function at all?

A body has a built-in ability to survive but it has no knowledge of why it has to survive because it has no reason to believe it exists.

An innate ability to keep alive is not awareness, it is simply a survival instinct that does not have anything to do with awareness,knowledge or any other kind of rational thought.

...obsessed with knowledge...that I am because I really do believe that that is all we have.

Call it knowledge, experience, perception or the ability to measure...

I think that anything outside of experience is, at the very least, open to speculation.

If sub-atomic particles are "not there" (quantum physicists view not mine) then how can we be?

Remember, I am not taking a stance on this, I am simply stating that we have every reason to doubt.

some kind of knowledge that we mere mortals do not have.

Consider this: there is no... no... no... then all we are left with is that which we absolutely know.

How then do we know we exist?

...the brain, which is the source of all knowledge.

Empirical knowledge provides no proof of existence, it simply suggests that that is the case.

Matter has its own mind.

Therefor supporting the mysticism of ancient myth and folklore with tales of whispering streams, talking trees, and burning bushes that give instructions to birth a violent nation.

But what you have now suggested may perhaps is also being suggested by Quantum Physicists, as a way of advertisements.

We should be wise to the wisdom of others.

Am I making sense...

I dont think Newton experienced the formula for gravity, or Einstein the equations of general relativity, I dont think Planck experienced the quanta and I do not think anyone experienced imaginary numbers.

I do not deny that experience raises questions but the answers come from intuition, reason and imagination not from sense perception.

Sense perception (experience) is found throughout nature but the rational and imaginative power of man is unique and the source of most of our "knowledge".

The point particle theory of matter and the fixed independent theory of space time are not true at the extremes of the small or the very large.

They are at best conceptual approximations to the "truth" about "matter".

The people who actually made these discoveries had much much humility about their meaning and their interpretation.

Im sure when we get to the real truth , it will be quite simple. Its strange but my imagination tries to simplify the QM world. Music has the ability to design shapes and compose images. I can imagine pure energy vibrating at different frequencies making patterns that describe the physical world. The elements are different instruments playing their songs to give us this symphony of life.