What is Thought?

1. Thinking is the interplay between emptiness and non-emptiness.

If one's mind is full, one does not think.

Thinkers are between worlds, transitioning in some way from emptiness to non-emptiness.

A classic example would be the optimization problem. Trying to figure out the optimum combination that most satisfies the criteria.

Perhaps when we are thinking, we are training those neural networks too.
Neural networks training other neural networks.

Just what Google's doing too.

2. When it gets complicated enough, consciousness emerges. When side-effects cannot fail to cause other effects, which cause those side-effects themselves, until the entity cannot find the origin.

But that's cliched.

When the entity cannot detect the origin, consciousness no longer exists. So consciousness is the fleeting moments of achieving this state of wholeness.

3. What is the link between thinking and consciousness?

They are analogous in that both are fleeting moments between emptiness to fullness. In thinking this is from no solution to finding a solution. In consciousness, it is going from the change of a piece of data not being able to cause itself, to being able to cause itself, the process in which its components come together.

Both are about fulfilment, a journey to a certain end.

But technically, what does it mean? How are they related in the mind?

Is all thinking conscious?

This is like asking "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still exist?". Yes. We know for certain that some of the energy must be converted to sound. In the same way, we can know that thinking occurs anytime we are alive.

4.

Thinking: Training a network, trying things randomly specifically to reach a specific goal. It is triggered by some other process.

Consciousness: Involuntary, natural process which naturally occurs in the mind if all the pieces are available.