Are you a meta thinker? A meta-meta thinker? or a meta(meta(.....N thinker?

[Derek]

I'm not sure if I hit some kind of threshold recently or what, but I've experienced, recently, certain startling improvements in how my mind works. I constantly think about how I think, no matter what it is I'm thinking about, even thinking about thinking. Thus, I think I am a recursive "meta thinker," never assuming I actually know, on any level, how I think. I believe that some people out there are "intuitive" meta thinkers, others are "conscious" meta thinkers, and some are both. I believe I was lucky enough to be both, but I think for a long time I was primarily an intuitive meta thinker.  This sort of thought is what really leads to success personally and otherwise, I think. Thoughts?

[Bob]

Yes.

I think.

[goldentone]

Maybe you could provide an example of your meta-thoughts.
I'm all for meta, Derek, but you don't want to constantly be in such an intensive thinking state.  You don't want to lose balance.   

[pianowolfi]

I'd consider myself to be a conscious meta-thinker. Thinking about thinking is a basis for me to which I'm often returning.
All our perceptions are incomplete, as they dont contain their concepts yet, when we perceive them. In thinking about thinking it's different: perception and concept are one and the same.

"When we are contemplating thinking itself, two things coincide which otherwise must always appear apart, namely, concept and percept. If we fail to see this, we shall be unable to regard the concepts which we have elaborated with respect to percepts as anything but shadowy copies of these percepts, and we shall take the percepts as presenting to us the true reality. We shall, further, build up for ourselves a metaphysical world after the pattern of the perceived world; we shall call this a world of atoms, a world of will, a world of unconscious spirit, or whatever, each according to his own kind of mental imagery." (Rudolf Steiner: The Philosophy of Freedom)

This meta-thinking was always fascinating to me

[pianowolfi]

Also René Descartes' approach "I think, therefore I am" was always fascinating to me. But in most cases I don't talk a lot about this stuff because people mostly don't really want to hear about it and would soon tell me that I "think too much" and stuff like that.

[ted]

I am inclined to agree with Douglas Hofstadter ("I am a Strange Loop", a book I enjoyed very much) in that the brain's ability to form tangled hierarchies, analogies, Godelian mappings, self referencing loops and so on, really does lie at the core of what we call consciousness. All this meta stuff is actually going on anyway, continuously a billion times a second within our skulls at hardware level. Trouble is, we cannot possibly describe it using our habituated, chunked perceptions and labels, without which the feeling of existence as we know it wouldn't operate.

Rather than try to explain Hofstadter's eloquent and fully plausible ideas, I strongly recommend the above book, provided you can keep yourself out of the giggle factory while thinking about it.