What came first: Thought or Motion?

 What came first, the chicken or the egg?  Age old philosophical questions have puzzled the inquisitive minds of many no matter how silly they may seem.  I remember back to an experience I had at my friend Mohammed’s house back in 2017.  I was standing in his kitchen, drinking a beer as I began a conversation with his friend’s husband.  The conversation began superficially, but soon the conversation began to take a philosophical turn.  Mohammed told me my new acquaintance was a member of MENSA, a society of highly intelligent individuals with high IQ’s.  And so began the conversation about what came first: thought or motion.  

We both raised the philosophical question, does something have to think in order to move?  It’s an interesting question to say the least.  From a religious sense, it is said in the Abrahamic religions that God thought, therefore created everything,  essentially willing everything into existence.  Again in Hinduism, existence is said to be pure consciousness, that thought shapes the world around us. In the past I had another acquaintance say he thinks the universe had to begin with a thought in order to come into existence.  In a sense, our thoughts shape reality, governing what we think, how we feel,what we say, and what we see, but what position do they play in the realm of thought vs. motion?  After thinking about that for a while, I decided to do some research to discover how modern science thinks about the issue.  

In voluntary motions, like drinking a glass of water or changing the channel on the television, we inherently believe that we think first, then act or move second.  This concept was studied by a man by the name of Benjamin Libet.  In his experiments with test subjects, he set up a clock with a fast moving dot.  The task was to press a button or flex their wrist when they felt the urge to do so.  Immediately after moving, they reported the dot’s position at the moment they first became aware of the wish or intention to move.  Attached to their scalp during the process was an EEG that recorded the brain’s electrical activity in the motor cortex.  In his findings, he discovered that there was a slow build up of electrical activity in the motor regions of the brain starting 550 milliseconds before the movement.  Participants reported that they felt the urge to move at about 200ms before the movement.  These findings show that the brain’s motor preparation started before the person became consciously aware of the decision to move.  These findings prove that the brain begins to fire unconsciously, and consciousness seems to come after the fact.  These findings can be seen as flawed, the patients can’t possibly know exactly when they are aware that they felt the urge to move?  Later experiments using fMRI and machine learning classifiers detected patterns of neural activity seconds before people say they made the conscious decision.  

Modern science says the brain fires, then processes information before we as humans become consciously aware of the decisions or actions we make.  As we explore this matter even further and branch outside the realm of human existence, we still see motion taking precedence over thought.  Early single celled organisms could move towards light and nutrients well before anything like thought existed.  In the cosmos, the universe was in motion well before living systems, once again proving that motion came first.  So why do people say that thought, self-awareness, and consciousness supersedes everything.

This leads me back to the conversation I had with an acquaintance that night in 2017.  He argued that motion comes before thought as well.  He said that elementary particles must be in motion before information processing, or thought could be made.  From a quantum level perspective, particles interact with one another through fields in vector directions by way of motion, thus further driving home the point: motion came before thought.