Kevin Kelly Quote on Thinking and Evolution

Tunneling through randomness
"Some students of the human mind make a strong argument that thinking is a type of evolution of ideas within the brain. According to this argument, all created things are evolved. As I write these words, I have to agree. I began this book not with a sentence formed in my mind but with an arbitrarily chosen phrase, "I am." Then in unconsciously rapid succession I evaluated a headful of possible next words. I picked one that seemed esthetically fit, "sealed." After "I am sealed," I went on to the next word, choosing from among 100,000s of possible ones. Each selected word bred the choices for the next until I had evolved almost a sentence of words. Toward the end of the sentence my choices were constrained somewhat by the words I had already chosen at the beginning, so learning helped the breeding go more quickly."

Exactly.

"What will the next words be that I write in this chapter? In a real sense I don't know. There are probably billions of possibilities of what they might be, even taking into account the restriction that they must logically follow from the last sentence. Did you guess this sentence as the next one? I didn't either. But that's the sentence I found at the end of the sentence."

You can't know exactly what you are going to think next in your head, because if you did you would have already thought it. But you still think; the thoughts make sense and you know that you made them yourself.