i know i'm not a philosopher either but i generally do just have to sit down and have arguments with myself. i suppose there is a bit of a dialogue going on, it's nothing fancy.
unbidden thoughts entering your head are all very nice but it seems like other contributors i just have to tune in the radio, listen and wait for thoughts on a specific subject to enter my head, see what i think, and ping pong back and forth about things.
not knowing what to think about certain things certainly seems a workable system. as i get older i certainly lose sight of some of the certainties i clung to when i was younger.
how i respond to visual art is not to put my reactions and appreciations around a verbal framework, i tend to float on into nothingness or get swirly broad coloured thoughts of colours that i don't know popping up, i rarely assess anything at the moment of viewing by reference to something else. actually the colours thing is a lie, personally, i seem to go into a trance sometimes.
a friend told me about thinking of something in reference to colours, one particular piece of music that made her think in pastels, and i know that it's very common to do that, the colours thing (i can't even remember what it's called!), but her actual description was the most eloquent and careful i suppose i'd ever heard. that was quite nice.
sorry i know this is not very deep or anything compared to some of the board but Luka you asked.
i suppose some visual art does just empty my head of all other thoughts and also extinguishes the oxygen i would normally use to start critically evaluating what i see before me, because visual art for me if i get it or like it or whatever seems to be my version of a religious experience, so whether i use gallery trips as an easy form of meditation or something, i don't know, a lazy way to epiphany maybe. there's one particular Bridget Riley swirl at a local gallery and i couldn't tell you what happens to my thoughts, when i view it. i do love that painting to the point of madness (to paraphrase John Peel on some alt.country or something album).
i went into a trance once the first time i saw a vast Rothko canvas, an orangey one, and i stayed there for what seemed like forty five minutes tracing my eyes over the surface, looking at things. i know he thought his stuff was all religious (and not very fashionable these days, i know, i suppose).
i assume there are philosophical and pyschological explanations for this and there's lots of different terms and such for all your various thought processes and whatnot so i'm sorry if i sound a bit ignorant!
sometimes you think like a playwright i suppose, quite concrete and rooted in the here and now, and at other times more like a fractured poet or florid novelist, and at other times you jump between different times and spaces, i guess.
that's one thing it feels like, anyway.