Language is for both. Every concept is tied to a label that is a word. We identify pieces of reality by their common attributes while omitting their specific measurements, and attach these identifications to a label which is a word. It is a unique ability that we have as humans, which no other animal shares. It is essential for rational thought. Communication may have been an evolutionary forcing function on our ability to conceive generally (rather than simply perceive), but communication is still downstream from having concepts to communicate.
Take a detailed look at an abstract painting and you might form thousands of unlabeled concepts per second; examine life in a microscope; listen to complex instrumental music; taste spicy/tingly XiAn noodles; smell a forest in the fall after the rain: there is a ton of thought involved in common human function without the need or ability of using language. A serialized version of language is too slow to capture parallel complex ideas that can race through your brain in an emergency and save your life. Learning how to use words is useful but there are not enough combinations of words in the world for the richness of thought you can experience in a single morning, in a single breath. We have way too many smell receptors in our genome and way too few words formed for the smell combinations we experience daily. We can recollect experiences, or we can visualize generate experiences in our mind; I dont see a reason we would label every internal or external experience and we certainly dont have to forget or not imagine all the parts we havent labeled yet.
"It is a unique ability that we have as humans, which no other animal shares."
Dogs at least can learn that, too. Probably also cats. Using buttons to express themselves has proven that. Hell, even our dog, who never figured out the buttons, understood that "bed" meant "soft thing next to human's bed", not "the particular bed I usually sleep in".
Humans are merely a lot better at communicating this, having a more complex speech apparatus.
Something to keep in mind is that according to Wikipedia, Helen Keller met Anne Sullivan, her caretaker and the person who introduced her to language, at around 7, which is probably around the age many people with normal language acquisition would start to have the kinds of changes in cognition that Keller attributes to learning language.
Jerry Fodor, who advocated an internal mental language, was seen as an old crank when I studied Linguistics in late 90s; I just looked him up and, god, he died recently in 2017. Here’s a New Yorker article from that time: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/jerry-fodors-en....
Complaint not targeted at you personally but - why does thought have to take place in language at all? I sometimes reason using physical or kinesthetic metaphors that would be impossible to capture perfectly in language.
and why does thought have to have one form? I think in both language and visual representations and i switch between them depending on the task and i even pipe the input from one representation into the other representation.
This is related but not really the same thing. The Language of Thought may or may not be closely related to human language. (Some animals may also have concepts and compositional mental representations.)
I didn't read the SEP article, but is the language of thought hypothesis perhaps already verified by our ability to do some sort of logic on neural network embeddings? E.g. queen-royal=woman.
Fundamentally LoT is a hypothesis about human (and possibly animal) cognition, not a hypothesis about what artificial neural network models can or can't do. But you can see Fodor and Pylyshyn's thoughts on 'connectionist' models (as they were known at the time) in this extensive article from 1988: https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/pro... The discussion on p. 14 is particularly relevant.
Makes sense -- I don't think in language but shapes and graphs and blobs and other things I can't even describe with words. The words are vehicles for my thoughts but they are not my thoughts. So communication is sort of like a serialization process where thoughts in my head, however I represent them, are packaged into language; sent over a medium; received as language through eyes or ears or touch; and then unpacked into thoughts in the receivers head, however they represent them.
Somehow, when I say Pow-el street instead of Pow-ul street, everyone feigns ignorance, even though they completely know what I’m talking about. Doesn’t seem like language as a communication tool works well, when it is I used as a way to establish superiority.
I agree, especially regarding accents. Something becomes really clear if you move to different areas with even a slight accent change: the dynamics shift to "your accent is bad and ours is better."
There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them.
A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common and important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly and the label catches on.
We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concept is accorded such importance in every language. Some common words in other languages without direct translation in English:
* 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.
* น้ำใจ (Nam-jai) (Thai): Literally "water from the heart". Being very nice and helpful without expecting anything back.
* 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business.
This is perhaps another line of evidence to support the thesis of the article.
Make no mistake though: Language is extremely useful for some types of thoughts, especially more abstract ones. Not everyone, however, uses it as their primary tool for thinking.
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The above also helps explain some limitations of LLMs, such as their inadequate spatial intelligence. Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) start to address these issues by using much more granular data than language alone.
The mandarin guangxi encompasses a whole lot more than just your network. That would be considered a very bastardised translation, losing all the extra meanings such as good luck created by having that network, possibilities to fortune, a kind of karma, and more.
> all the extra meanings such as good luck created by having that network, possibilities to fortune, a kind of karma, and more.
In your 20s you might think of your network as people who you went to college with. In your 40s your network takes on a meaning much closer to what you have described. I don’t yet know what happens in your 60s.
Karma aside, "having connections"/being "well-connected" is pretty much the equivalent in English. It's not bastardised at all; terms don't need to have the exact same cultural implications to be basically equivalent.
In English your family and friends are absolutely part of your network. If I needed a job and someone told me they'd reach out to everyone in their network until they found me one, I'd be very confused if they'd failed without ever speaking to their friends and family about it. "Your network" is definitely related to/aimed at economic productivity and personal productivity, but it is not composed only of people you've met at work.
Charity is closer to ใจบุญ (jai-bun) than น้ำใจ (nam-jai).
A mixture of "act of kindness" and "good will" would be a more fitting translation, but the interesting part here is that "sportmanship" is also considered an act of น้ำใจ (น้ำใจนักกีฬา nam-jai nak-kee-la or literally. sportman's nam-jai).
We also have a word เสียน้ำใจ (sia-nam-jai) for when our nam-jai ended up as a waste, or for when the other party is being ungrateful for the kindness that's being given, and also เลี้ยงน้ำใจ (leang-nam-jai) for when you're doing/accepting nam-jai for the sake of not making the other party sia-nam-jai.
In the King James Bible you have lovingkindness but I guess that might be a mistranslation of the Hebrew checed which literally means "covenant loyalty." But I feel like lovingkindness even if it was originally mistranslated has the same connotation as nam-jai.
I really don't think it's all that different, sorry. The difference is that there is a more direct and established way of talking about these things in China, because it has such a long history of bureaucracy and everyone got used to these dnyamics over thousands of years, but even in places like Sweden you can have guanxi. It boils down to doing something for a member of your ingroup strictly because he's in your ingroup.
I mean even the word 关系 and "network" have the same etymology. 系 = threads of silk arranged in a pattern.
The Mandarin word literally means "relationships" and the concept is well established in English. When you describe somebody as "connected", that's what you're saying.
It's an incredibly poor example of an "untranslatable" phrase.
The first and only time I've ever felt like I really know Chinese was when I came across the phrase '洋汽扑鼻' in "Fortress Besieged" by Qian Zhongshu. It literally means 'the breath of the sea assaults the nostrils". It's a joke on how fashionable and in demand everything Western was in China in the 1920s. For me it's just laugh-out-loud-for-10-minutes funny. I've tried to explain it to literal dozens of my friends and now I know not to even try.
> * 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.
i don't speak Thai or Mandarin, so I can't speak to the other 2, but this one is a pun (combining tsundeoku, pile up, and dokusho, book reading) that survived in the language due to its catchiness.
A bit like "hangry" (hungry + angry) in English.
I have a hard time interpreting the existence of those words as an indication that Japanese culture really values not reading the books you buy, or English speaking culture is irritated due to hunger more so than other cultures.
They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.
there are no good examples. The basic premise in Linguistics these days seems tl be that all languages are potentially equally expressive. Trade-offs in one domain (grammar, lexicon, phonology etc.) afford advantages in another. Which means, there is no need to refer to Japanese at all.
You could equally refer to some slur in a lower register to then claim that this doesn't exist in your language and how it can't be translated either. So when Joe Biden said "SoB" on tape once, that was code switching; likewise, when Trump says anything it's all made up and coded and means something entirely different. However, these are bad examples if your target is a monolingual Japanese, obv.
> They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.
My take: they became instant memes and experience wide adoption because they capture a concept without another name - and that makes it not just easy to talk about, but also to think about in the first place (counter to article's thesis?).
However, Tsundoku hasn't caught on, at least not in English, except as a vain example of language fun facts. If there was a need, it would be borrowed eventually, perhaps as a semantic loan (calque). We call it hording already. Japanese simply adds a work related to reading. I don't read Japanese but I can recognize the "speech" radical at least.
> There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them.
If those concepts would exist you wouldn’t be able to explain them using words, no matter how complex the phrase may be. Taking a phrase and expecting it to have a single word replace is unrealistic. You can’t just asign a word to every possible sentence/phrase. Having a direct translation means you don’t necessarily need that word in your language.
One might argue that the limit of our language is the limit of our ability to think.
How did Michelangelo create his masterpieces? Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language.
I suspect the same happens in many other fields. Even in an abstract field like mathematics, intuition often forms in the mind before verbal description or articulation.
I don't get your point on Michelangelo. We can very easily describe the process if we could see it. We just can't cause he's dead and he was not big on YouTube, even then we can explain a lot from evidence.
Its much more complex to explain why we classify them as masterpieces than how he made it.
I believe that intuition is often not enough to have a concrete thought. It’s more of a feeling, you can’t reach conclusions based on intuition, you also need reason.
In the context of the original article in which this whole discussion takes place, I assume we are talking about verbal, natural language. Specifying every little detail would make my comments sound like legalese.
To my understanding, this is not a type of natural language the paper discusses:
N10 G21 ; Set units to millimeters
N20 G17 ; Select XY plane
N30 G90 ; Absolute positioning
N40 G00 Z5.0 ; Raise Z axis to 5.0 mm
> Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language.
Possibly. Even if this was just emulating the thought process that happened non-verbally, it would still work. I imagine that's a big part of why language seems so critical an invention: because it can be used as emulator of otherwise non-verbal thought processes.
That said, in case of Michelangelo, describing the "algorithm" is not sufficient, because just as important are the external factors. Art reacts to the medium and situation, so there's a lot of randomness into any specific work. It's kind of like with Stable Diffusion - we could get the prompt just right to generate something like a picture someone else generated, but there's only one seed that will result in identical output, and that little number is something we can't easily reverse.
>How did Michelangelo create his masterpieces? Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language.
I'm not sure what you mean. He probably started with something "Ok, I need to create a statue", then "Who should I pick, I guess it should be someone Biblical, let's pick David because they like him in Florence", then "Ok, he was a healthy and muscular young man, and I have enough material for a 5 meter high statue", then "let's start with sculpting a general outline and then focus on head and neck shapes" (...) and finally "looks good, but the nose should be a bit smaller". I can almost imagine the whole thought process (except I know nothing about sculpting, but I'm not terrible at some other art forms).
There's nothing that is inherently non-verbal in this process. And all of these decisions can be described algorithmically and numerically (even though humans doing art usually compare their results to a reference images instead of doing 3d math in their head).
Here is the key part of my argument: in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David, (implying) in the exact same style as the masterpiece, without seeing or touching the artifact itself (because that would not be just verbal language anymore).
Isn't that what CNC machines do? Or even 3D modeling software, which then gets 3D printed? Is that not creating things, potentially as complicated as David, using language? I know CNC machines use G-Code.
I think the only limiting factor we have on that is we don't yet have a robot that can chisel marble to create a carbon copy of such sculptures, but we can otherwise do it with other materials.
I doubt Michelangelo could write such a spec, but he could make David. The ability to communicate is not the same thing as the ability to do, they are separate, as people who can write such a spec probably can't make it by themselves either.
In the context of the original article in which this whole discussion takes place, I assume we are talking about verbal, natural language. Specifying every little detail would make my comments sound like legalese.
To my understanding, this is not a type of natural language the paper discusses:
N10 G21 ; Set units to millimeters
N20 G17 ; Select XY plane
N30 G90 ; Absolute positioning
N40 G00 Z5.0 ; Raise Z axis to 5.0 mm
I don't expect a human could recreate David with that, no. But you also included robot in your post, and a robot can use that language to recreate David. If you hadn't specified robot, then sure.
Consider Chinese 成语 (Chengyu) [1] or Japanese 四字熟語 (Yo Ji Juku Go) [2]:
- 指桑骂槐 (Zhi Sang Ma Huai) - Pulling the shoots to make the rice grow = helicoptering
- 拔苗助长 (Ba Miao Zhu Zhang) - Point at the mulberry tree to curse the locust tree = deflective criticism
These condense a whole story with moral lesson in them, and they facilitate recall of that concept. The trick is omission of everything but 4 characters from the whole story. Sometimes they're just an enumeration:
- 柴米油盐 （Chai Mi You Yan) Firewood, Rice, Oil, Salt = essential things for everyday life
- 都道府県 (To Dou Fu Ken) all 4 types of Jap. prefecture = everywhere
I think brevity is key for words that aim at aiding thinking. All languages allow composition; consider "Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher". But only if the word is short, can you quickly cast your thought into its form (as if speaking) and proceed to compose it with the next thought. You do this until your individual mental capacity runs out.
It's also very important that others know the concept.
I find myself often refer to "that scene in Wolf of Wallstreet where Belfort _really safely_ drives his Lamborghini home"[3] to express "power is nothing without control". I wish there was a briefer word for it yet.
So you're effectively saying that Chinese is compressed Tamarian? Like, instead of writing "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" you'd put their initials together, so you're saying the Chinese-equivalent of "DJT" and the listener instantly knows the story, and therefore the message, it refers to?
There's a subclass of 成语 the sense of which you can't even guess at unless you know the story:
- 塞翁失马 (Sai Weng Shi Ma) - Old man loses horse; a 5-fold story of riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches = life is unpredictable
- 自相矛盾 (Zi Xiang Mao Dun) - Resemble spear and shield = unstoppable force meets indestructible object
The latter is so common that 矛盾 (Mao Dun) is the dictionary entry for "contradiction" in Chinese and Japanese.
Because 矛盾 is so common, the story 自相矛盾 (=etymology) gets taught only later to native speakers. Similarly, consider the surprising etymology of word "rob", deriving from "robe" [1].
Consider also:
- "Seven at One Blow" [2] = bamboozle
This proverb everyone knows, yet nobody uses it. It only cumbersomely embeds in a sentence; "bamboozle" is briefer.
But 成语 do easily embed in Chinese or any phrase does in Tamarian.
"Seven at One Blow" is certainly not a proverb that everyone knows in English; it's the name of the fairytale in English, but not something that people use to mean "bamboozle".
It's simply the case that Chinese relies far more on literary/historical allusions (chengyu) than English does. We might talk about someone's "Achilles heel" or a "Trojan horse", but these literary/historical allusions are simply nowhere near as common as chengyu in Chinese.
Chengyu are very common in Chinese, more common than analogous English phrases, but the entirety of Chinese isn't composed of chengyu. I haven't seen much Star Trek so I read the wiki description and watched a couple of clips + explainer YouTube videos to understand what you're talking about. From what I understand, Tamarian seems to be a language that is entirely chengyu/成语.
You are missing that to drive one-self home is a metaphor, possibly a visual metaphor in this case, for DIY self-service in the private domain, as it were.
These are fascinating. Anyone know a book our other source for a list of such Chinese shorthand figures of speech and the tales/aphorisms behind them about human nature? Kinda like “sour grapes” in English, or Aesop’s fables.
The book I have at hand is called "成语故事 Geschichten von chinesischen Sprichwörtern". It's parallel German and Chinese.
ISBN 978-7-119-06018-7
Published by CBT China Book Trading GmbH www.cbt-chinabook.de
Interesting examples. For me, a predominantly linguistic thinker, it's actually those concepts having words that make it possible for me to really think about them on their own.
So "buying books and never reading them", yes, it's a phenomenon that happens and one could presumably talk about it, but it's hard to even think of in the first place - it's a complex set of ideas joined together in a specific way. Tsundoku, however, is a concept. A single word. A token. A point in the latent space. Something I feel existing independently in my mind, as a node that I can feel emotions about, that grows attachments. That's much easier to access, and thus much more common to talk about.
Nam-jai, I already have an English word for this in my mind, "pay
-it-forward". Yeah, it's one semantic unit in my mind. Funny enough, I'm ESL and I don't know a word in my native language for this (Polish); the concept exists in my head literally as "pay it forward", and brings up associations with some broken down car story, and Jesus for some reason.
Guanxi - in English, isn't that a "social network"? That's another good example of a concept I find much easier to think about once it's pinned down with a name.
And I can definitely think about buying books without reading them. Firstly, coincidentally I thought about this in the morning, but I didn't need a word, but it was still linguistic. I just thought the whole sentence.
I can think of that too. But it's not the same. A crude analogy would be to working memory. "Buying books without reading them, as a phenomenon" takes half a dozen or more slots in memory. "Tsundoku" is one slot.
I find language to be worse for abstract thought. Abstract thought to me is shapes and transformations. I then have to put words to them, "Imagine there is a ball here and another ball here and..."
I can imagine things transformating in space much faster than thinking it in words.
False dichotomy. Of course language is for communication like in all other animals, but where would man be without the invention of the language of mathematics? Probably not in the space and nuclear age. So the linguistic tools can push the boundaries of human cognition.
I think this is largely correct, but may miss some higher-order concepts related to language and the structure of one’s complex thoughts.
To me they appear to go hand-in-hand, similar to the way a backend’s logic may inadvertently be structured to support an API. Another metaphor may be Conway’s Law, where the way one is forced to communicate, may in turn shape the way they structure their (brain) processes.
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that speakers of different languages seem to “think” more similarly than not. For instance, native speakers of non-English Germanic languages appear to think more similarly compared to those native speakers of Romance languages, and vice-versa.
Obviously I’m using English as a middle-man, and am likely projecting on what their internal thoughts actually are, but the pathways they take to express an idea or a solution is oftentimes more similar than not within the same base language background.
Now is language necessary for complex thought? Absolutely not. We’ve seen evidence from many different life forms that show complex problem-solving, pattern matching, and novel tool use that all seem to happen without having a seemingly complex language background (i.e. Zipf’s Law).
Language is the medium through which raw perspective refined itself.
Language birthed social games and the sense of self.
Yes, language evolved for communication.
But without communication, thought would still be stuck in the land of instinct, never forged by the tribal dances of love, art, deceit, debate and organization.
We don't have better tooling to transfer information between humans though. We have language, and we have art. It seems that art transcends humans in some ways: happy / sad music seems to affect animals, and we've seen animals contemplating things. Without language, we can't really create a mapping to what that means though. We simply don't have a better way to compress multiple concepts into few bits of information we can pass around.
Interestingly, removing language as a tool for communication is a cool thought experiment. I imagine one could use maths, or music, as a way of expressing thoughts and ideas. Would that process of condensing information not be language-making though?
I often work with animals who show signs of thought: presented with a novel situation, they pause, reflect, and select the prudent option.
I sometimes work with people who show no signs of thought: external stimuli are perceived, converted into a stream of language, and conveyed, with no apparent effort at audience-based compression (selection of an appropriate message from a wide variety of potential messages), or even compression in general (selection of a short message...).
Storage I have no idea. (for that matter, I have little idea how we store non-linguistic thoughts)
Communication is primarily via posture, secondarily via sound. No "grammar" is involved, intensification is via intensification of signal, not addition of symbols. (that said, much human-animal communication is by means of arbitrary symbols, just that each symbol is serving as a sign because combinations of symbols and even their ordering doesn't really matter)
Animals certainly get order: they'll easily learn sequences of actions, but if you're getting different behaviour from AB than BA, I currently believe that's because the animal has learnt, and is perceiving, those as two different gestalts.
Imperative and Vocative are the basic cases. (and to what extent the latter belongs to the former I can't really say: when the stock greets in the morning, are they saying "good morning, 0823", as we'd like to believe, or are they really saying "Hey, you, thumb-monkey, feed us!"?)
Interrogative exists, but barely: "where is everyone?" "fren?" (or, if wondering about more* than friendship: "gotta light?")
An example of linear use of order in equines: a young equid has what my wife calls "filly rights" and generally gets to do what it wants. As it gets either older, or too obnoxious, though, the other members of the herd will start to socialise it. This usually occurs via an ascending scale of pressure, from the subtle (eye contact - "are you sure that's an acceptable behaviour?") through the clear (coming up alongside — "all right, what's all this then?") to behaviours reserved for outlaws (full-power kick with both hinds — "what we've got here is failure to communicate").
[the biggest problem I see novice humans have is they attempt to bargain with animals; offer-consideration-acceptance is, for me, far too human-abstract a framework. That's not to say you can't come to consensus on a modus vivendi, but you're not going to get there through a contract approach, calibrated to the capabilities of two-legged mammals.]
My stock all know index finger up is a non-linguistic way humans ask "are you sure?" (and their name may be a linguistic escalation), but I have no clue if they understand it as a sign of potential aggression (being generally produced as a sharp movement), or as a symbol of potential displeasure?
Cattle (both mobs and individuals) can be steered by use of their fight-or-flight in response to posture. You don't directly tell them "go left" ("haw" for a carriage horse) or "go right" ("gee" for a carriage horse) but instead either confirm the pressure (if they're already pointed the right direction) or change the pressure (reduce-intensify if you wish them to flip towards you, intensify-reduce if you wish them to flip away from you) to get them going in the desired direction.
[as you all can tell, feudalism (or IR) is basically what you get when you think politics should be entirely based on this level of communication; however even in democracies use of the bovine principle to manufacture consensus in an electorate occurs, for my sensitivities, way too often]
If anyone can think of experiments that would clarify some of these situations, I'm all ears!
* I understand these days you all mediate all your flirting via text, which seems like a very difficult thing to calibrate; in my day we had analogue signals that (to me alone?) are much easier to dial up or down:
We laugh just a little too loud
Stand just a little too close
We stare just a little too long
WTF are kids doing these days? "we put just a little too many 'e's in our heeeeys?"
Thanks for the very thoughtful and well explained answer. If you have pointers on further reading on the subject in all ears.
I'm curious if you feel like human behaviors are derived from these sets of behaviors. You mapped all the examples of their behaviors to phrases, to give a general vibe. Is your view that we have simply compressed and made these more nuanced and composite? Or did we invent something completely different and operate within that framework which isn't a more sophisticated version?
The quantitative difference in planning and execution (they plan a few seconds in advance; we manage decades and attempt centuries) leads to a qualitative difference in range of behaviours.
We have "full" language, which I believe is a qualitative difference: we use symbols digitally; instead of expressing displeasure on an analog scale via summing signals, we can concatenate symbols to be "very" or "mildly" displeased.
(consider binary vs unary representations) Also, we treat vocal communication, not as bags of signs, but in terms of trees/graphs.
Eg, we can play language games like the following: First point to note is the character of the source. There are several choices on this: the true source (who really got it out?) and the ostensible source (whose name is signed to it?); also, the first-use source (who used it the first time?) and the second-use source (who claims merely to be using it as a quotation?). Take the statement: "Harry said to me, he said, 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' Mind you, I don't pretend to believe Harry, but that's what he said, all right." What are the possible true sources for the statement of fact or libel concerning Al's unnamed wife? What are the alternatives on ostensible sources? First use? Second use? The common sense needed to analyze this statement is of the same order as the process involved in analyzing the statement: "Reliable sources in Paris state that the visit of the American labor delegation has produced sensational repercussions in Moscow, and that Moscow, upon the basis of the American attitude, is determined to press for unification of the entire German labor movement."
To me most communication between I and "me" occurs in symbol arrangements, not sound and language.
This can be annoying: when my wife asks me what I'm thinking about, if I'm thinking about something relatively linguistic (an HN comment, say), it's easy to tell her. Otherwise, I need a fair amount of time and effort to make the consecutive interpretation (and forget about simultaneous!).
Further evidence that my thought is not especially language-mediated: my wife and I share a little over three languages in common; however translating into any of these is about as difficult as any other, suggesting that the original thought is equally "far away" from all of them.
Most of my thinking is not in language, though I do sometimes talk to myself in my head. If someone asks me what I'm thinking or feeling, it sometimes takes great effort to translate it into words; and when I do attempt to express it I often feel the words are pretty inadequate. Like encoding a high-res image into a few pixels, or music into a few notes. Super interesting topic indeed.
Thinking is more than just communication; it involves reasoning, problem-solving, etc., according to the paper. You can definitely think without using language, such as while driving, flying, or even playing sports. A subcategory of thinking probably requires language, one that will be used to communicate with others, like addressing an issue at work or even writing a comment here.
The crux of their argument is that the language faculty and other faculties (math/logic/abstract, theory of mind/social reasoning, spatial/temporal imagination, and other cognitive abilities) all evolved in parallel, so the most plausible explanation is that language is mostly independent of all those other faculties which are activated in distinct neural network areas of the human brain, based on brain scan studies in the last 20 years.
I imagine a counterargument (or complication) to that is that such parallel evolution would require the neural networks to independently evolve certain breakthroughs multiple times before reaching the Homo sapiens stage. For example, language is recursive and yet human mathematical reasoning is recursive, but these use two different brain areas (according to the paper). So in their figure of two different brain regions for language processing versus math/code thinking, both regions had to somehow evolve the "wetware" for recursive computation. How did natural evolution manage that in general?
If language is no longer part of thought, then sure, breaking down... thought... into many different mechanisms also makes sense (quite a bit of sense actually).
From there, you ask: "What is the fundamental aspect underlying each of these different faculties?"
The authors say their opponents want a singular fundamental aspect, supposedly because of parsimony or Occam's razor (but this is the authors' framing). It's not clear to me who's account is more likely.
Actual human natural language isn’t recursive in any meaningful sense. Formal grammar - an (often futile) attempt to describe the structure of natural languages - is generally expressed using a formal mathematical system which features recursion.
Actual human natural language is meaningfully recursive, because any grade school student understands the recursive properties of certain toy sentence examples in that they could "go on forever" as a set of arbitrarily larger complex sentences.
The commonality of mathematical grammars (as mathematical objects in their own right) and natural language is that both have computational properties such as recursive structure - or ambiguity, which was discussed in the paper.
You're confusing the object language (human natural language) and the meta-language (formal grammars - ala Chomsky).
Formal grammar theory relies on recursive formulae to define what is a a language (formally set of sentences), natural language itself does not use/require recursion as understood in the same way. Some natural languages support grammatical features like sub-clauses but that's only "recursive" in the sense that attempts to describe such features (using formal language grammars) use recursion when in fact and in practice nesting sub-clauses do not "go on forever".
An analogy with computer programming languages - programming languages exist that do NOT support recursion (pre-Algol) but nonetheless require recursion to define their formal grammar. For example, a programming language can support limitless nested lexical scoping (loosely analogous to sub-clauses in natural language) WITHOUT supporting recursion (which requires a stack and managing frames).
For some programming languages (functional for example), recursion is such a key feature that it's inconceivable that the language could be useful without it.
This is not the case for natural languages. Most of the people I interact with daily have English as a second language and rarely or never use sub-clauses (which are not recursive but are often used to claim that language is recursive) so from practical experience, I know that English as a communication tool looses very little expressive power when users do not use sub-clauses.
I'd definitely say all language use must rely on recursion, you're just highlighting our tendency to halt the pronunciation of it early at arbitrary points due to linguistic norms. Like, AFAIU this was Chomsky's whole impetus, and I really don't think anyone has answered better than he: how can a finite system compute linguistic meaning in finite time, otherwise? I'd guess the "natural language" answer would be along the lines of "it just comes naturally who knows", in which case I'm staying I'm on my side of the battle lines ;)
Either way, I think you'd win a Nobel for proving that complex recursive processes aren't going on inside the head of someone speaking in natural language. We can discuss the likely situation all day, but directly measuring this in the moment seems well beyond our technical capabilities
I think Chomsky is a linguist really more famous and respected among non-linguists than actual experts in the field. I don't think modern linguistics - particularly applied linguistics for example in the area of language acquisition - references Chomsky.
His theories are unfalsifiable and un-empirical and thus, for me, unscientific. This discussion is typical. Chomsky's definition of "recursion" - like that of a "language organ" - has become completely plastic. In his initial work, it was deeply tied to the same notion in formal grammar theory but is constantly redefined and evolving as the initial notion becomes more and more dubious. The "human language is unique in that it is _recursive_" theory has no practical application and has provided no path for advancement in the field of language pedagogy for example.
Watch me chew up a bunch of karma dismissing Chomsky's theories of language. It's what often happens with comments that question his theories of language - I don't know why it's seemingly impossible to just admire his politics without feeling the need to vigorously defend his 60 or 70-year-old theories of language which have long been abandoned in the field.
It would genuinely shock me if Chomsky wasn't the most cited author for works published today even if you exclude works that are dismissive of him.
The reason the specifics of Chomsky's proposals are changing is that it isn't a solved problem and he and others are continuing to try to advance the understanding by revising proposals in light of better arguments, simpler explanation and (contrary to what you say, see [1] which lists some examples) experimental evidence. In Chomsky's most recent book he himself quotes Wheeler: "Surely someday, we can believe, we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say to each other, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind so long!’". I think people have a hard time understanding this because it is one of the few nascent sciences and therefore no one has figured out the fundamental theories.
And if some specific proposal like X-bar theory is falsified or supplanted by something else that doesn't falsify the core ideas of universal grammar or the minimalist program. You say that it isn't possible to provide evidence that these are false but Moro for example conducted experiments comparing hierarchical and linear language processing that potentially would have provided reasonable evidence against language being hierarchical had they shown linear languages were processed similarly (instead they support it).
The reason you should be downvoted is that you made a bunch of evidence free assertions; You could have said "Neil Bohr's work has been completely falsified and is of dubious value" with the same amount of supporting argument.
Well he calls that whole field “not real linguistics” basically, so I think it makes sense that they wouldn’t accept his theories! Whatever you call the two things, I feel like
1. “what are the neural structures and programs that produce language” and
2. “what languages have humans used to communicate in specific historical contexts, and how do these practices relate to each other?”
…are both worthwhile questions, and they obviously inform each other. But don’t you see where he’s coming from by calling the former “the biological study of language production” and the latter “the anthropological study of language usage”?
I’m interested to see you usually loose points! That brings me joy as a (non-academic, self-employed) chomskian, even tho it’s obviously infuriating people are still downvoting based on differences of opinion in 2024. My view is the opposite of yours: almost every corner of the internet has dismissed Chomsky as unempirical and also disproven by recent cross-cultural studies (??) and LLMs, from Hinton to the Stanford Phil page on linguistics to the Wiki and Britannica articles. I frequently see anti-Chomsky papers on HN and in my lit reviews from the connectionist/positivist camp in general, but that’s obviously a terribly biased survey. Perhaps we all have confirmation bias to see our “team” as the underdogs…
In terms of debating specifics (no pressure to respond, your outlook is very valid):
He’s still being cited a lot (160K in 2023 compared to recent peak of 210K in 2017), but of course that could all be refutations and/or non-linguists. Ultimately I absolutely agree that applied linguistics has far more practitioners in the US (the “west”?) today, but I don’t think that’s necessarily any kind of refutation of the merits of theoretical work.
I’m currently engaged in implementing general ideas of Chomsky’s into a cognitive model for AI, and I definitely think it’s a more productive theory than you’re giving it credit for. For one, the two basic observations “basically all linguistic inference is done by procedurally merging symbols and signs” and “what separates humans from animals is the ability to introspectively index and merge symbols and signs effectively” are essential pillars of my whole paradigm — without them I wouldn’t event know where to start! I think it’s much better than some competing “grand narratives” for human sciences like Behaviorism or Postmodern Relativism, but of course it’s far from perfect and surely has discouraged some valuable work over the years. I agree that it isn’t empirical, but only because it’s a guiding idea/standpoint/perspective and not what Chomsky would call a “scientifically defined term”. UG/nativism/minimalism gradually loose or gain parsimony in relation to our body of evidence over time, but they’re not consistent or specific enough to be fundamentally proven or disproven anytime soon IMO
Clauses within clauses are not "recursive", no more than "let x = 1 in (let y = 2 in (let z = 3 in x + y + z)" represents recursion in some hypothetical programming language.
Programming languages and human languages existed before people felt the need to define them using formal grammars. Yes most formal grammars use recursion but that's a property of the system you are trying to use to describe (meta) the structure of the object language - not part of the object language itself.
Try to use Haskell without recursion, it's effectively useless. But using an Algol derived language (Java, C, C++, etc.) without recursion is fine and hardly restricts the power of the language at all. Try to use English (or any other indo-European language - I've no knowledge of others) without sub-clauses and it remains a very powerful and useful communication tool.
> Clauses within clauses are not "recursive", no more than "let x = 1 in (let y = 2 in (let z = 3 in x + y + z)" represents recursion in some hypothetical programming language.
But that is an example of a recursive context free grammar. The parser needs to use a stack or be defined recursively to parse things like that.
Agreed: if you're willing to be as limited with composing in english as you would be with programming in C, lack of recursion is not an issue.
(there's a bit of a parallel, in that XVII english writers, not having readers as pressed for time as our current variant, make far more use of nested sub-clauses than we tend to; similarly, CPL, not having been as pressed for space as either BCPL or C, made far more use of nested sub-expressions than its successor languages)
You are saying that text on a (finite) page is not recursive (because recursion is a computation, not the output of that computation). But we are interested in the computations that the language faculty performs not the output.
>> Some natural languages support grammatical features like sub-clauses but that's only "recursive" in the sense that attempts to describe such features (using formal language grammars) use recursion when in fact and in practice nesting sub-clauses do not "go on forever".
Well, I don't share this insistence that natural language is somehow special or privileged. Natural language has a tree structure and nobody need to learn about formal grammars to comprehend that. A schoolchild understands this much, without having to understand recursion in a rigorous way.
Furthermore, as I mentioned before, formal grammars are artificial languages in their own right. The key thing is that the only way a human being can understand these languages (e.g., still at the level of syntax, independent of recursive computations like in functional programming which you did mention) is through some kind of recursive reasoning about their grammar.
And to keep the discussion at the forest instead of the trees, it is weird that human cognition comprehends these tree structures, recursive structures, or fractal structures, relatively naturally and intuitively. If I had said fractal would you have argued that natural languages don't exhibit fractal properties? We are talking bird's-eye level view of things here.
I also believe in the Church-Turing thesis plus the Chomsky hierarchy of computable languages (the idea that languages are models of computation, and that some language classes contain other classes in a hierarchy of what is computable -- see for instance the formal class of Recursive Languages), meaning that natural languages are not based on magical computations exceeding the power of universal computation; furthermore, as another subcommenter (see both users bbor and foobarqux) put it differently to you but if you are committed to a position that natural human language can only be approximated by artificial languages defined by formal grammars then you can never have a humanly intelligible account of the computational features of actual human language. It would be like arguing a laptop is not "meaningfully" like a Turing machine because a laptop has finite number of atoms as is thus really technically a finite state machine -- it's throwing the emergent/abstract baby out with the empirical bathwater.
Language is a major component of thought. Every programmer knows the unreasonable effectiveness of rubber duck debugging whereby one can solve logical problems more effectively by talking aloud.
If language were merely a tool for communicating thoughts rather than an integral part of thinking, then talking aloud wouldn’t help. But since raising the volume of one’s internal monologue does improve reasoning, this shows that the internal monologue is part of the thinking process - not a passive reflection of thought that is happening “elsewhere”.
Yes, of course you can engage in complex thought without language. There is verbal and non-verbal reasoning. A chess player thinks spatially in terms of how the knight moves, not just verbally, though verbal reasoning does help in chess somewhat.
Reminds me of the the quote from Albert Einstein:
"I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards."
Language is a higher level abstraction for the brain. Sort of like a higher level programming language vs assembly or binary.
Agree, think about it as scribbles we make on the scratch pad when thinking through a challenging math question. It mostly serve as input to our ongoing thinking process, rather than persistence of thoughts.
In contrast to Noam Chomsky who was pushing the idea that language was developed primarily for thought [0].
I don't know how much weight should be given to this paper but, if true, directly contradicts Chomsky. Here is one quote from Chomsky:
"""
... One general assumption about language, almost a dogma in philosophy ... [and] linguistics ... is that language is primarily a means of communication ... probably that's totally false. It seems language ... is designed as a mode of creating and interpreting thought.
"""
In my opinion, I find Chomsky to get mired in certain quagmires around intelligence and computation, especially in regards to AI, where he's somehow managed to rationalize an absurd stance. I remember watching a video with Chomsky claiming that language's primary purpose was not communication and thinking it was potentially plausible but highly unlikely. I'd be curious to see if people think this paper, and maybe any other research, refute this position.
Perhaps an artificial dichotomy between thought and communication is itself false. After all, is thinking not in some sense remembered experience (ie. the past self) communicating with the present (ie. future self)?
To be fair to Chomsky, the historical context is that he was pushing against a particular dogma of his time. So later on Chomsky evolved his own position and came up with i-language/e-language for internal vs external language and so forth. And a few years ago he was recommending a new cognitive science textbook where the first chapter begins with Claude Shannon's communication/information theory.
Interesting. Do you have a link to some of his statements to that effect?
I have a lot of respect for Chomsky but sometimes it does seem he's lazy in giving a well balanced argument for the things he advocates for. The above clip I shared is him stating unequivocally that standard dogma is wrong. Now you're telling me he's walked back his position and arguing for something more nuanced.
Probably because you are only listening to soundbites. Try reading something detailed he has recently written on the subject like "Why Only Us".
The arguments for language as not-for-communication are 1. language's hierarchical structure is inefficient for linear communication 2. language seems to have appeared suddenly (probably due to a sudden mutation) and had no time to evolve and initially no one to communicate with 3. most use of language seems to be internal/thinking not communication.
These are all better arguments than those in the paper.
I haven't read much written text by Chomsky but, in my defense, I've listened to a lot more video and audio of his talks than mere "soundbytes". I stand by my statement about his talks.
3. Arguing with a biologist about the evidence for language being for thought (and a little bit at the end about how hierarchical structure is inefficient): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzzuPMA8s7k&t=307s
I'm definitely mostly without inner voice but I can drop down to it if I want to.
I also have this with reading. normally it seems it skips the internal voice and goes straight from image to thought. but once I start verbalising it, it's hard to stop doing it.
Language is a tool for manipulation. Sure it is used for communication with people considered “equals”. But primarily people use it to get what they want from people they can outmaneuver and/or manipulate verbally and legally (both are an extension of language).
Language’s roots are in trade and survival. Therefore manipulation of others for the speakers benefit has ALWAYS been the primary purpose.
Language's roots are in survival, as in being able to talk to others of your tribe. I'm sure manipulation has always been part of language, but it's a tool for communication foremost. "Og, watch out for that sabretooth tiger!" is hardly manipulation.
I feel sorry for you that you consider manipulation to be so central.
Most of the time we are communicating (internal monologue) with ourselves which I’m sure shapes our thoughts. I’d guess a large percentage of that is through a language.
In fact languages codify a community’s culture, values, a way of life all of which go way beyond communication.
Imo the internal monologue is often about summarizing or sorting out something, while I’ve already figured it out non-verbally. Like a verbal confirmation. Though sometimes the internal monologue is about processing something and figuring stuff out.
> Though sometimes the internal monologue is about processing something and figuring stuff out
Indeed. And my non-expert assertion was that our brain doesn't compartmentalise between communication and thought processing. Our thoughts are getting shaped even as we are verbalising something. IMO it's a continuous stream of chatter of jumbled up things a part of which gets used to create/shape our thoughts.
Agreed. I used to think (haha) that I was thinking the thoughts I as thought them verbally, but as of late, I've come to realise that I've already had the thought as a sort of a series of perceptual flashes or traces, and when I think I'm thinking, I'm merely verbalising what I've already internally "perceived".
It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that:
- People experience their thoughts very differently
- We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking).
It seems like there's a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language.
That sounds absolutely nuts to me, but I've heard people say the exact same in reverse. Even more fringe is that there's a sizable number of people who when thinking about words (i.e. remembering names) visualize their words as text. What!? I can't imagine that anymore than I can imagine how a jellyfish feels?
I definitely have an inner monologue im some situations, reading is a good example. I can speed read in which case I don't really have a perception of the sounds, but if I'm closely reasing something then I do have a sense of the sounds if words as I'm reading.
The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for them!)
Linguistic thinker: I reach conclusions by feel, pretty much jumping to them, and then sniffing out the "warp trail" from that jump and putting that into words. It doesn't feel like inventing post facto rationalizations, but rather retracing the reasoning that happened in the background. And I do need to do that step - the conclusion doesn't seem "stable" unless I trace it back like this.
Words are also based on the same intuition, you just verbalize it and restrict yourself to what you have words for instead of all concepts and thoughts.
For example I do math entirely without any words in my process, and I easily got a master in math that way, barely had to study. No problem, you just translate it at the end. Limiting myself to words just makes it harder to think freely.
That just sounds so different to how I solve math problems. I was naturally good at maths, but it was always from monologue kind of bruteforcing different solutions until one of them seemed to work. I guess it might be a reason also why I find LLMs really exciting since I feel like if I can do it, LLM should be able to do it. I don't feel like I am doing anything special.
I always had problem with trusting my intuition or gut so I was worse in a lot of other real life things however. But math seemed abstract and solvable by words and brute force.
I wish things just magically came to me, but I think I always have to go through things with my inner monologue.
Like if I was to do multiplication in my head e.g. with same numbers, for example 62 x 62. I would have to go through it as a monologue.
I first remind myself of the strategy to do it, which is first I will do 60 x 60. Then it is 3600, then I add 2 x 60, 3720, and then there is 2 x 62 left, but I have to keep reminding myself occasionally what the last numbers were, that initial multiplication was 62 x 62, then I got 3720, and now I have to add 124... okay lets go 3820, 24 left, now 3844. Of course it is easier to remember as I am typing this, but in my head I have to keep reminding myself. And now I am not sure if I did a mistake so I go verify that on the calculator.
> I first remind myself of the strategy to do it, which is first I will do 60 x 60. Then it is 3600, then I add 2 x 60, 3720, and then there is 2 x 62 left, but I have to keep reminding myself occasionally what the last numbers were, that initial multiplication was 62 x 62, then I got 3720, and now I have to add 124... okay lets go 3820, 24 left, now 3844. Of course it is easier to remember as I am typing this, but in my head I have to keep reminding myself. And now I am not sure if I did a mistake so I go verify that on the calculator.
I do multiplication in my head similarly, just strip out the words, the numbers just flickers through and operations happens by themselves and I'm done in a second or two when I'm not rusty. Now that I'm rusty I do it more like (60x60=3600, 2x2=4, 60x2=120, 3600 + 4 + 120 + 120 = 3844), without doing any words, I just did that in my head right now and I am 100% sure not a single word, just the steps, I do sometimes verbalize the numbers so what I wrote in those parentheses is the most verbal my process for mathing that out gets.
Edit: Looking at that, I think it might be easier for someone to correct your thinking if you think in words, but thinking without words is way faster and way more creative since it removes the restriction of only thinking about concepts you have words for.
Edit2: I think your verbalization there is a ritual for the concepts to get to you. For me all I need to do is see 62x62 and imagine I want to solve it and all those thoughts flow to me automatically, basically a shortcut instead of having a large verbal ritual to piece together the concepts. I never did math verbally the way it is taught, so I am not sure how people think that way, to me this was always automatically this way.
If you can or ever were able to do this in 2 seconds that is unimaginable to me. Not in a doubting way, I just have no idea how I could do it in 2 seconds. It would take me 20 to 30s and at least. But most people wouldn't even try to multiply this top of their head.
Also this multiplying of two digit numbers I was never taught, I just came to a strategy that I explained with my thoughts. And I used to do these for fun as a kid. But I would only get faster than that if it was something I had memorized, but not numbers from scratch. And I had to constantly try to repeat numbers in my head that I had stored for addition down the road.
What is usually tougher top of my head and especially if I am tired at all, is something like 68 x 68. Then here first I have to decide whether I go from 60 x 60 or 70 x 70. Since it's that close to 70, I think 70 is more likely be easier. So I think okay 4900 - that's from memory right. Then I start to think what I have to take off from 4900 and what is 68 x 68 lacking compared to 70 x 70. So I will think that if I add 2 x 68, it will make it 68 x 70 and then I have 2 x 70 missing. So I need to deduct 140 and 136. So now at this point, this is much easier done in writing but here I frequently have to repeat numbers or redo some steps because I am not certain or I forget. But otherwise 4900 - 140, this comes easily instantly 4760 - maybe that's how it is for you with 62 x 62. And then now I take 100 off, it's 4660, and further 36 it would be 4624. Right now testing this in my head it took more than a minute because I wasn't sure whether I could just use the logic that I was thinking out of the box and I'm quite tired.
What if you were to have to do something more difficult e.g. 3 digits multiplication or 4?
I got to 4624 in 8 seconds on that now, and I haven't done significant amounts of mental math in over a decade. The 60x8 etc took a couple of seconds each but other than that it just happens automatically. A decade ago each of those would take a fraction of a second and it takes about the same time to calculate as to write it, I tend to calculate the numbers left to right instead of right to left as you are taught since you write it left to right, also more useful when calculating approximations since I just do what I normally do but stop earlier.
> Not in a doubting way, I just have no idea how I could do it in 2 seconds
Words are just slow. I never did math with words, so arithmetics is fast, and so is all the other things you learn in a math degree. I think word based processing in math is a big reason people have such a tough time with it, it really makes it much harder to think, like you are bogged down in a fog instead of up and free and agile with clear sight of everything.
Maybe it was easier for people to get past this stage when calculators were less prevalent. Calculators lets people get away with keeping their arduous word based math instead of just internalizing the concepts.
> What if you were to have to do something more difficult e.g. 3 digits multiplication or 4?
When on tests I write down some intermediate values. I am not a human calculator, I am just fast at math reasoning and being relatively fast at arithmetic's comes for free from that.
I did some physics tests without a calculator, you can approximate all those special functions using regular math logic you learn in high school. I did still ace the test, it isn't that hard once you have internalized it all.
I read the words and then imagine them until I internalize them. I tend to space out a lot when I do that, so I don't really listen during lessons but I tend to learn most things during the lesson that way.
Makes me really bad at following instructions though, since unlike math or physics you shouldn't internalize them instead you should just execute the words and that is really annoying, my brain really doesn't want to think in words. so try to translate everything...
Anyway, I think internalizing things might be harder or impossible if you haven't already done so with all the previous steps. If all your thinking and knowledge is word based then it is hard to break that, and vice versa, I can't think about math in terms of words really. I can slowly translate some things to words but I can't really drive thought with the words.
I used to do math olympiads in high school and the concepts I saw there were always something I hadn't seen before. I always used inner monologue to figure out solutions though. I had never practiced much for math olympiads, I performed relatively well for my area, not good enough to make it to international levels though.
I can't follow verbal instructions as well though, I couldn't listen to the teacher etc. But I think it's because my inner monologue takes all the focus so I just follow my inner monologue which is probably completely another topic than what the lesson is about. I can't really focus away from my inner monologue. When I try, then I would just have philosophical meta discussion about my inner monologue. But also this meant that I couldn't actually learn the subjects as well during the class. I either had to learn from my free time or not at all.
Also have to watch films with subtitles, because audio language I have troubles focusing on.
I think all I have is my inner monologue, no good visual imagery, or other types of "thinking". I think makes me really poor at navigation as well. I never remember how to get somewhere. And also in general for anything 3d, like 3d games I will perform bad at, awareness wise.
Might sound weird but does the look of the operator matter? Say × vs x vs • vs *, I would assume it doesn't but I'm curious if there's a visual change, for lack of a better term.
No, I translate that to the same concept in my head and then I do it.
Edit: Thinking more about it, in my head the numbers are numbers, but the operators are invisible, not sure what to call it but I don't think of the multiplication operator as anything tangible, I just know it is a multiplication of the two numbers.
> That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion?
Are you thinking that using words during thinking helps with reaching conclusions and knowing why you reached the conclusion?
For me it's just there, the thoughts, the facts, the logic, the sequence, the connections, etc. Expressing all of that in words happens afterward (if it happens).
I don't even know how to think without words. I thought thinking literally means using words in sequence to problem solve. At least I used to think so. If someone says they are going to think about something I have always thought that they were going to focus on their inner monologue of sequence of words.
> The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me
So, as a person who definitely has an inner monologue, I absolutely agree. It's not like I'm literally sounding out words in my mind all the time. The vast majority of things I do I do without explicit use of language.
I think my understanding (mostly coming from Chomsky and in disagreement when OP) is that language is a mechanism for thinking that is mostly not accessible through conscious introspection.
> mostly coming from Chomsky and in disagreement when OP
Is Chomsky's idea that language is not necessarily the same as spoken language, it is an alternate brain mechanism that provides structure to thought as opposed to being the wild west of fluid/analog non-discrete/non-symbolic type of information processing?
The idea would be that language first evolved as a mechanism for thought and only later became used for communication. Spoken language would still be connected to the underlying mechanism though.
> The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me
While I seem to be a fast reader relative to people I know, I very much feel my reading speed is limited by sounding the words in my mind, so I agree - it's near-unbearably slow.
It seems obvious to me that thinking critically about what you read or hear takes effort and time. I wouldn't call it unbearable, though, because the alternative is polluting your mind with unvetted notions.
My conscious thoughts are verbalized in my head, and it is somewhat slow, but I also have a sense of intuition, which is very fast, though works best in silence. I can pull things from intuition into conscious thought, but explaining why I feel something is the same slower process.
So thinking about something isn't a one speed operation, but being able to communicate those thoughts is.
I think almost exclusively through inner monologue, and I find I can't speed read at all. If I'm not vocalizing I'm not thinking, so when I try to not vocalize in order to speed read I don't retain anything. It's like my brain is incapable of processing the words if they aren't being vocalized.
Not OP but I also don't think with an internal monologue most of the time. For me it's often more like mentally manipulating abstract shapes or quantities and trying to make them fit together. When I'm writing software I'm literally thinking about pointers and bytes etc, not thinking about the words "pointer" and "byte". This is highlighted by the fact that after intense programming sessions I have dreamed about code, like I am computer memory and I'm being allocated by a memory manager or something.
Sometimes I do explicitly think with an internal monologue, though. Like if I'm debugging something I'll sometimes narrate what the program is doing in words. Also if I'm trying to figure out how some event happened I'll try to tell a story in my mind. It helps then as it forces me to serialise things.
When I read there is sometimes an internal monologue. When I write, there isn't. I don't talk like this. I think it's quite clear sometimes when people write with an internal monologue as their text reads like speech (which can be a good or bad thing, depending on its purpose).
I don't have an internal monologue at all (I am able to speak to myself in my head if I want to, but I seldom have a reason to). When I read, the information just gets uploaded to my brain. I don't vocalize words in any way, silently or otherwise. I don't read one word at a time either. When I read something quickly I can "feel" that my understanding of the material is lagging "the cursor", sometimes by even a paragraph at a time.
I read much faster when I can focus on reading instead of vocalizing; in this case I am no longer internally vocalizing the text. If I do vocalize what I read it goes a lot slower, but then it helps me to synthesize conplex concepts in a text.
Thanks for your comment. It just occurred to me that I have an inner voice narrating the text when I am reading in English.
This does not happen when I read in my first two languages.
This explains why I read slower when I read in English.
Reading your comment, I don't subvocalize at all. In order to get through my college degree, I taught myself speed reading. Now, I just naturally do it. My eye flicks to the middle of every 5-10 word chunk and flies though the text. If you did speech synthesis at that speed, it'd be a incomprehensible chipmunk. So I don't subvocalize at all. It'd be way too slow. To suppress subvocalization I used to hum (in my mind) instead, but I don't need to anymore. If something is hard to understand I will slow way down, then the subvocalization might kick in. When typing, I do subvocalize everything, since I can't write that fast.
I think this post/paper was more about your personal thought process rather than reading though. I very rarely have any internal monologue. In fact, the rare times I do have one are usually very awkward social situations where I wanted to say something but don't. Otherwise never. My whole life has been that way. An internal monologue sounds like a nightmare to be honest. Constant talking that nobody else can hear? No thank you.
> We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
Not a universal law. I don’t think I work in the same way as other people at all, as I cannot see what is obvious to others, and they cannot see what is obvious to me.
I don’t think, per se, the information and the integrated results of information are just there. People call it “intuition” but it isn’t some magical sixth sense, it’s just not using one’s language centre for compute, which is what many seem to do.
The moment I start consciously considering something, it all usually goes to hell - so a large part of how I operate is preventing myself from lapsing into “conscious thought”, and instead to keep whatever it is just below the surface until it’s cooked.
I infuriated teachers throughout my childhood by apparently paying zero attention but then inexplicably having the correct answer to whatever was posed to me, and have never quite related to other people, as it usually feels like I’m trying to bridge an immense gap of comprehension - not, to be clear, that I think other people are stupid - just more like I am running fundamentally different software, and everything has to go through an extensive translation and abstraction layer to make sense to others.
If I speak my thoughts directly, then they often emerge as allegory, as it’s the only way I can try to encapsulate the otherwise rather inchoate froth of connection which leads to a result. Sometimes others understand the allegory, but more often than not, they do not, as the symbols mean something else to them.
So yeah. I don’t think my mind works like most other people I encounter. The only other person I know who I think operates in the same way is my sibling, and people who have observed our conversations find them downright bizarre. They sound like beat poetry half the time, as with five well chosen words presenting the correct allegory we can transmit deep meaning to one another.
I don't automatically do what you describe, but I've had good experiences with it: "preventing myself from lapsing into conscious thought". Especially in how I experience ADHD, if I just wait for my subconscious to cook up something for me, it's a good trick for seeing past the weeds to what is actually relevant today, here and now.
I can totally relate. In my case I feel deeply connected to Poincare writings about unconscious processing. It’s not that I have sudden eureka moments, but I observed that if I try to consciously search for an answer, I just won’t find it, like I need to soak on information and do something else to actually get the result after a while.
This feels to me very similar to my experience - I tend to joke that in order to express a thought to others I have to translate it into words first; and in doing so I also flatten the thought.
And before it, the time of having a raw thought in my brain it just feels like… something, it’s not sound, not light, but “a thing” which I know means the item or concept I am thinking of. And the process of thinking is kind of these “semantic things” bouncing off each other - which usually happens much faster than I can translate it into words.
When solving a problem, I usually tinker with it for a while and then let my “big subconscious coprocessor” deal with it for a while, and more often than not if not a solution but the clear idea of direction and reasoning emerges the next time I look for it.
At the same time I tend to make a fair bit of puns based purely on spelling alone - feels a bit magical to have all the omonyms kind of flash in the head all at once, and then make-pretend pick the wrong one for fun.
That’s pretty similar, from the sound of it. The flattening analogy fits - it’s like trying to describe a multidimensional sculpture using only three letter words.
As to the big processor - I definitely do the same if no answer is immediately forthcoming - send it to the boys upstairs and wait for an answer, which usually comes while I’m in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely.
Puns, to an extent, although more often than not I just go off up and down an etymological tree, as the semantics behind so many words and concepts reveal further layers of interconnection and peculiar shreds of history. Physics is my play park, where I enjoy posing and chewing on gnarly problems, which often result in “inadequate data, please try again later”. Didn’t make me popular as an undergraduate as I asked all sorts of awkward questions about presuppositions and usually ended with a professor waving their arms and telling me to just accept it as so. “Dark matter” was what made me finally spit on the ground and decide to not pursue academia, as it’s just so blatantly wrong, and it hurts to see so many accept it as a hard done and dusted solution to something that is anything but solved - because our presuppositions are almost certainly wrong. Piles upon piles of monkeys supposing that they are the centre of the universe, with the perfect sensorium to know it.
Anyway. Like I say, I find it hard to see eye to eye with a majority of people, and I know I don’t make it any easier for myself.
I'm in the 'visualising the words as text' category, and I've always thought I have a bad memory compared to other friends, though I can recall every little detail of large software projects that I've been in.
During exams, where I had to cram lots of theory in a small amount of time, I recall trying to 'access' the slides via how they looked like in my mind and trying to somehow read the stored image, because that's for me easier to remember than the actual text when I'm not doing any deep understanding, but just memorization :/ I hated these kinds of exams, what's the point of repeating 500+ slides out of 14 weeks of courses word by word ?
Open book exams + internet + tricky questions were the best.
Often times i can actively feel how laggy my brain is in wrapping the thoughts in language. Before i even have the words ready, my thinking is already way ahead at the next thought. Not sure if that's just ADHD. I like to think secretly it's because i am not too dumb and actually a quick thinker. On the other hand, my analytical thinking is not that good.
While i enjoy the process of thinking about things alone for hours, when presented with problems like in school or sometimes even today when someone gives me a riddle, i can also very strongly feel that i am not "thinking" actively. I am just thinking that i should think and often seem to make myself appear as if i was thinking – and that's it. It feels a lot like "fake it till you make it". Often times i have ideas other people call "brilliant" as well, or i seem to have s lot of refreshing takes on things according to others (stated to hide my weirdly self-conscious arrogance), it's not that i actively pursue it. I sometimes feel like i am standing on the piazza, waiting for this beautiful thought to walk past me. Too scared to talk to it, because she would realize i am too dumb to understand her and a con-artist anyway... but then, every once in a while this beautiful thought turns around and takes over my brain.
I'm clearly not in your exact case, but having idea before the words to express it happen to me too (less the more i grow old tbh, when i was in my early twenties it was almost everytime, nowadays it is a bit more limited to subjects i know deeply). It usually end up with my tongue tied and having to take a deep breath and reformulate everything since the beginning with a better exposition plan.
One thing that help is improv theater and pen and paper role play game, because you don't only have to thin about your idea, but how you are going to deliver it, and this is true in professional settings too. Doing that slow down my thought just enough to be clear. Hopefully this advice works for you too
I recognize this "thinking the thoughts twice", and sometimes feel that the "fast" thoughts have to wait for the slow ones (language wrapping) to catch up. Then I try to skip the second phase and let the fast ones roam at full speed, expecting brilliancy. Never succeeded yet, but not giving up.
Do your Human Design profile and see how much it fits.
Our society expects everyone to be a Generator (in HD terms) - all people who are not then feel like they're totally weird. In reality, they're just wired differently, and have other strengths and weaknesses.
Humanity is like a big puzzle piece.
As someone who never was into astrology, Human Design was a shock.
I didn't want to even consider that idea at all, but as I got my design read by someone I never met, and it matched 95% of what I already knew about myself, I had to admit that it just fits. And so it is for most people - it fits.
Whereas astrology always was a lame 50/50 "could be true or not true" kind of thing. HD is different.
For example I have open head centers - in HD this means I take in thoughts from others and get carried away with them; I also have an easy time to still my mind and have no inner dialogue.
And in my life I had already observed if I am talking to someone who is genuinely really excited about something, I get excited about it too - to the point where I am joining their project or decide to buy a book etc - but when they leave and it wears off I am thinking... "wait... why was that so exciting again?"... Now I know how to watch it, and how to distinguish their emotions and thoughts from mine, very useful skill.
> Do your Human Design profile and see how much it fits.
How would one do that? Is there a website for it, or something? I tried looking it up and it purportedly uses date and place of birth, but those hardly have anything to do with me, so I don't see how that calculation could be any more useful than, say, a star sign.
The concepts seem interesting for sure, just not sure how to find what applies to me.
>it purportedly uses date and place of birth, but those hardly have anything to do with me
While astrology is bogus, you'd be surprised how much "date and place of birth" has to do with you.
There are statistics and studies showing higher than chance similar behavior/tendecies in people born in the same months (for things like depression, health outcomes, etc). Could have to do with exposure to sunlight during early days or whatever.
And for place of birth, of course normally (if you're not in some mix-and-match country like the US, or if your parents don't immigrate immediately) this affects inherited genetic constitution, and of course culture, access to resources, diet, and many other factors.
Makes sense to me. But my date and place of birth don't define me, they only correlate me with others. Astrology's just a particularly bogus way of not doing that, but anything that would try to derive anything about me from just my date and place of birth, without any actual data to correlate with my answers, isn't really worth my time.
i.e. you'd need to know "people born around this date in this place tend to have whatever human design" in order to provide me actual predictions based on only date and place of birth, but no such data has ever been collected.
>Astrology's just a particularly bogus way of not doing that, but anything that would try to derive anything about me from just my date and place of birth, without any actual data to correlate with my answers, isn't really worth my time.
Well, it depends on the degree which we require it to define you. In a looser degree, it would define most people quite a lot.
Put another way your "place of birth" alone, would be a huge information point towards predicting lots of things about someone vs someone from another place of birth, given they're different enough (say, India vs Italy, not Spain vs Portugal or Germany vs Austria).
If betting and money was involved about e.g. income, wealth level, studies or not, food preferences, religion, politics, morals, and so on, knowing the place of birth would be a great boon (all other information being equally shared). Repeated many times with different people, you'd be correct way more.
>i.e. you'd need to know "people born around this date in this place tend to have whatever human design" in order to provide me actual predictions based on only date and place of birth, but no such data has ever been collected.
If we were to bet on whether a person is black or white, freckled or not, has epicanthic fold or not, etc, I don't need no special "data collected" to know what people born in Lagos vs Dublin would look like for example. It's common knowledge.
And in some cases where this changes over time, the data of birth would also come in handy. E.g. in the tendency of a random London citizen to have say South Asian features in 2024 vs 1950.
> If we were to bet on whether a person is black or white, freckled or not, has epicanthic fold or not, etc, I don't need no special "data collected" to know what people born in Lagos vs Dublin would look like for example.
Yes you do. In order to make an educated guess, you'd have to know, given where they were born, whether that place is more likely to produce certain traits or not. You could then use that information to make your guess about how likely they are to possess those certain traits, having been born there. But without any information on how likely those traits actually are for people born there, knowing where they were born grants you nothing.
> It's common knowledge.
It's not common knowledge what my Human Design type would be given only when and where I was born. That's the whole point I'm trying to make. Astrology or not, the entire idea of giving me an answer solely based on when and where I was born, will always be bogus.
Now, if they had an actual dataset of the Human Design types of people from all around the world, and wanted to correlate me with that, then maybe I'd be inclined to give it a try, just out of curiosity.
But I'm not even the slightest bit curious about bogus astrology (or any other types of divination). I'd be glad to take a personality test, for example, because they ask actually relevant questions. Just not this.
> And in some cases where this changes over time, the data of birth would also come in handy. E.g. in the tendency of a random London citizen to have say South Asian features in 2024 vs 1950.
I'm not arguing against correlating this with other data. The entire point is that one needs to correlate it with other data in order for my answer to be at all useful, and what I have a problem with is that correlation is not being done. The alignment of the planets alone is not going to reveal my personality type, and not even when combined with my location.
An interesting test would be to correlate birth date results with people from the southern hemisphere. "Western civilization" is very north biased IMHO.
Human Design seems like unscientific babbling to me. First of all the connection to astrology should already be a huge red flag and it mixes random stuff and magically we come up with four personality types (then later a fifth one is "discovered"). Shockingly these can be arranged into exactly twelve profiles.
It may be surprising to you but as someone who is well read in mentalism I can fairly confidently tell you that a 95% match is not hard to fabricate in readings. Admittedly is the area of mentalism I don't perform but I have read plenty of theory. Your HD reading was probably based on Barnum statements/cold reading. If you're interested to learn more about this I'd suggest "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading" by Ian Rowland. For a more fun exercise, get a reading at a medieval fair or from some "medium" (please don't pay a lot) and compare it to your HD reading.
I had never heard of Human Design until now. It looks like absolutely maddening junk to me. To each their own but nonsense pulp like that is just about the exact opposite of what draws me to hn, and avoid almost all other forms of social media.
Full disclosure: I loathe astrology, to a disproportionate and somewhat irrational extent.
Thanks for the book rec though. As a "fan" of James Randi, that seems interesting.
Funny all the criticism LLMs get for hallucinations/conflabulations as if humans aren't often worse offenders at this very behavior unintentionally or intentionally.
I think you're not mad, but rather demonstrate a learned behavior to a very common situation any person finds themself in. IE they don't know or aren't sure if they don't know and any case don't want to appear as if they don't know certainly so they put in the least amount of effort to obscure ascertaition with some fancy distracting magicians hoodwink.
I think getting answers to nuanced/frontier or non-frontier problems can involve different sets of brain processes and behaviors. For already solved problems with knowledge thats pervasive throughout society, the solution is simply observation and copying, OR recollection and re-execute from memory.
For other problems one can figure out through reasoning and extrapolation.
For other problems no amount of armchair reasoning and theorizing will figure out (frontier problems not yet solved by any humans or at least humans accessible ) it, and they will need to do some trial and error exploration within reality on the path to solving a problem. Thinking in language, recalling by search and retrieval isn't going to find a solution to the problem at hand in these situations, but humans will try and jam the square peg into the circular hole especially if thats easier to do (and it is) than expending a lot more trial and error energy to do reality based experiements instead of pure clean easy brain processes of keyword/descriptor search and retrieval.
Search and retrieval with or without words is a very quick and easy brain process, perhaps anything you do that solely involve those brain processes you perform excellently at. Not all problems solely rely on these process such as analyzing new unsolved puzzles put on your doorstep. Perhaps there's a habitual behavior where you're trying to over-rely on the quick processes and doing the magicians trick to obscure the lack of actual solution with the hopes of retaining social standing. Instead of slowing things down attempting the slow bog down of actually finding the problem while communicating as such OR making use of human language for its actual purpose and networking for someone who has already solved the problem and deferring to their authority.
But all and all humans collectively are driven to collect (no, hoard greedily) solutions to problems at or not at the frontier and incorporate/encode those into their brain in a way that the solutions can be searched and retrieved in an efficient reflex like manner that's conducive to your ADHD speed.
I suck at language but am good at analytical stuff and because of that I'm not going to put any more effort into reducing this lengthy TLDR literature rambling into a concise conducive to reading snippet. My apologies to those that don't skip over this and trudge through this Thesis length reading.
> I sometimes feel like i am standing on the piazza, waiting for this beautiful thought to walk past me. Too scared to talk to it, because she would realize i am too dumb to understand her and a con-artist anyway... but then, every once in a while this beautiful thought turns around and takes over my brain. But maybe, i am truly just mad.
I have a huge quote "Notes" from all the books i've read. This is the first time a quote has made it into the notes that has come from a random comment on the internet. I think i'll carry this quote in the back of my minds eye for the rest of my life.
Oh, well, if i had known this, i would have checked the typos and the grammar. Didn't even think people would comment on my weird ramblings. So:
Sorry for bad english quote now in you mind forever!
But seriously, thank you for taking the initiative & time to comment & letting me know this. Weirdly, it means a lot to me. And actually touched me. Which sounds even weirder, but it's true. That someone liked & resonated with this, even when in such a bad form...
Anyway, I really appreciate it & you. I try to leave out no chance to say something positive or let people know they had a positive impact on me, even if it's just such a small thing. Probably because i wish people would let me know more often, as confirmation that all my efforts aren't for nothing.
But your comment is actually the only confirmation of me leaving just the slightest trace... you've helped this lonely, broken soul. A lot.
Please keep this in the back of your minds eye as well, when carrying the words there.
Interesting test. I apparently am about as high as you can likely get a percentile score to go for the number of questions here on inner voice and representational manipulation, and as low as possible on mind's eye and orthographic representation
The inner voice and mind's eye don't surprise me, I'm among the more hyperlexic people I know and seem to have total aphantasia, but I didn't realize (though I guess it seems like an obvious possibility in retrospect) that there were people who processed words as text in their head - I guess the survey itself said that surprised them too.
I also didn't consider that there could be a large degree of variability in representational manipulation, and assume that this kind of inevitably leads to some pretty hard to bridge inferential gaps when speaking across that divide. Honestly maybe I'm misunderstanding what's meant by that, because the other extreme sounds to me like there are some people who just can't do metacognition which sounds insane. I'm guessing however that this is similar to an experience I had with a (now ex-)lover who was shocked when I mentioned I don't have visualization, and asked "So you're telling me you have no imagination at all?", which like, I wouldn't say is true? My imagination can be prosaic, narrative, auditory, abstract, olfactory, emotional, or kinematic, just not visual. I kind of assume that's similar to what I'm doing here, like whatever "manipulating representations" means here is a useful capability by which to do metacognition but not the thing itself... but it seemed like their questions pertained to a lot of different kinds of manipulation of abstractions or mental models, so I can't really figure out how you'd examine your thoughts per se without that ability. Maybe there's someone more knowledgeable about this field here that could help me understand the distinction?
How does one even get high inner voice score there? I dialogue in my head all the time and answered “sa” to most of the inner voice questions, but fell on the far left side on that graph. Feels like other questions subtract from it silently. Instead I got high score in object rotation which I can do easily but it isn’t my main mode of thinking. I usually think abstractions and/or speak myself into convincing they are good enough.
I probably failed due to this agree/disagree test laziness. You never know what they meant by things like “I often enjoy X”. What does strongly disagree mean here? Never? I don’t enjoy? What if I don’t enjoy it, but do often? Why not ask it directly like “I X: never sometimes often” or “I relate to X: hare it … love it”. Even then it’s unclear what “sometimes” means. Once in a year, in a month, in a day? This indirection and vagueness adds so much noise to the result.
I guess all this tells how I think more than the test itself.
Weird, based on the wording of the questions and the categories they presented I kind of just assumed that each question only pertained to one of them. If they're doing something more complex I didn't notice it. But maybe they have some baked in assumptions that some of these modalities are like, mildly anticorrelated? That's the thing that kinda irked me about psychology when I was studying it more seriously. The epistemic integrity of psychological research reads to me as basically castles built on sand, where people get excited about results that seem super weakly supported based on reading the paper, which is often itself laden with a ton of assumptions that don't seem justified, but people who cite them just take the conclusions the authors drew as established, build their own studies with those assumptions baked in, ad nauseum. I was not shocked at all when the replication crisis hit this field as hard as it did, and since the issue is often in the way the hypotheses are operationalized in the first place, there are inherently going to be tons of flawed studies that are hard to even detect through the heuristic of replicability.
As far as the Likert scale nonsense, I am right there with you, all these psychological instruments are pretty poorly framed from my perspective, and while there's some discourse deep in academia about the rigor of various experimental methodologies even in the most broken of social sciences, in practice they don't seem to care much because it's publish or perish baby!
It really doesn't seem like most sciences are quite this broken, though some are clearly trying. Obviously there are people in psychology trying to do good rigorous science, it seems like institutional pressures are not working to support them, and certainly won't amplify rigor over making bold claims that get a lot of press
Like, all this to say that it's definitely worth taking these things with a massive grain of salt, but if you do that, it can still be pretty interesting.
>Interesting test. I apparently am about as high as you can likely get a percentile score to go for the number of questions here on inner voice and representational manipulation, and as low as possible on mind's eye and orthographic representation
Interesting, it's the same for me. I'm 94th and 98th percentile on the first two, but 2nd and 25th percentile for the other two. Since we're both on a (primarily) science and tech oriented website, I wonder if there's any correlation between ones occupation/hobbies/skills and their method of thinking.
Also, I'm surprised to hear that I'm an extreme outlier when it comes to the mind's eye. When I think about it, even recalling the face of my partner (who I see daily, including this morning) is not easy and comes out very fuzzy. But I have no problems with imagining complex geometry, maps, navigation, etc.
Pretty close to me too. 98th percentile for Internal Verbalization, 88th percentile for Visual Imagery, average for all the others.
I'm constantly talking to myself in my head as if I'm talking to a duplicate of myself. Asking questions, providing answers, having full back and forward conversations (especially with programming). There are certainly days though where, if you have a lot going on, you can start to burn yourself out with conversation (since every single action of the day comes with a conversation). Even if it's just "Oh I should make a coffee. Did I have a coffee yet? No, I think you had one this morning. What about if I made one anyway. Yeah I think that would be fine. Oh do I need to boil water? I suppose I should check if the water is hot. Yep looks like I do have to boil some". and after a while you just get sick of talking to yourself. But you can't switch it off and it drives you a bit batty sometimes.
I asked my wife once if she constantly narrates her own day, she said absolutely no. She said she only really has an internal monologue when reading things from text. And she writes down a lot of stuff on text. But other than that, she answered confused by my question "...nothing? I guess? Quiet?"
That test was indeed interesting.
But, one thing it didn't mention was audiation. Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording. This is very useful when performing as I can pretty much play along to this internal track. Some people appear not to be able to do this at all.
> Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording
Same, happening to me right now, happens automatically almost every morning when I wake up, which kind of gives me my own "soundtrack of the day" and enjoy the ride.
Sometimes the song is stuck in repeat though and the only way to kick it out of loop is to actually listen to it.
An interesting bit is that this internal jukebox is actually playing faster than real time, even though it sounds absolutely correct and natural in my mind and definitely not as if it was a 1.2~1.5x play rate that would give this funny "Benny Hill effect"; so when I perform the song at the time scale that I hear it it is clearly too fast (higher BPM) to outside observers or when compared to an original recording.
It's as if my experience of mind-time is skewed vs real time so I've developed a bunch of coping strategies like padding (e.g making every beat having a "late by ~x" feeling), forceful downclocking (some sort of detached zen mode where I let go of the internal clock, which gives a very surreal feeling of perceiving the world), or active continuous ratio compensating (sort of like the world is going at 0.8x compared to my reference clock so remapping makes it sort of bullet-timesque)
Socially it's all very disconnecting and exhausting.
Curiously, I have this but I lack the musical education/experience/talent(?) to really use it. I can make up and "hear" music with multiple instruments and stuff, but I'm utterly useless at writing it down. Even just reproducing part of a melody on a keyboard is a frustratingly time consuming chore. :-(
I know what you mean.
What I found very helpful in getting music out of my head via an instrument was a lot of very tedious scale practice, and similar exercises. This appears to get my fingers habituated such that I may often hear a (simple) line on the radio then immediately pick up an instrument and play it.
I wonder if it would help if I wrote a little program that plays short note sequences and then asks me to recreate the sequence (possibly modulo transposition).
You're thinking of ear training software. Lots of those out there.
Your ear (the ability to recognize intervals, scales, chords, chord progressions, rhythms etc) is one of (if not the) your biggest asset as a musician. And it's the only way to get the music out of your head, so cultivate it. Practice practice practice! Don't have to do more than a couple of minutes per day to see some results.
Ear training is something all creative musicians have to do. Many who are self-taught simply do it through picking up other people's tunes by ear (= transcribing), working it out on their instrument, starting with easy stuff and over time learning to "decipher" more difficult pieces. Dedicated ear training can really boost this process.
I have the internal audio. I wish I could just hook up an audio interface to my brain for that sometimes as it would be so convenient for making new music.
In theory I could translate it to a DAW (but I'm not that great at transcribing music...it's possible, kinda, but slow), but I can't easily repeat the music in my head (not what I make up at least, proper released songs tend to be easier to repeat), so it would be difficult to recreate it enough to be worth the effort.
Anecdote: I once tried to suppress my internal monologue. I found thinking elaborate thoughts and checking them for soundness was a lot harder. Might just be not being used to it.
These days I mostly use words but there are many concepts that don't have a short number of words corresponding to them, which makes recalling them much harder for me.
I was surprised to learn the other day from HN that not only some people, but some commenters here, consider the notion of "not opening one's mouth to start a sentence before knowing how it's going to end" an impracticable ideal.
Hmmm, I don't think I know exactly what words I want so say when opening my mouth, but I usually do know exactly what point I want to express. Also, after having expressed my point I stop making noises. Some people seem to really need to say something, but then just go on meandering without giving any indication that they actually have any point to make.
The experience of thought differs from brain to brain. For example, autistics generally experience thought differently from neurotypicals.
This happens, in part, because autistics have a different distribution of synaptic connections, which are shorter on average than is neurotypical. This typically results in an experience of disorganized thought, where multiple different parts of the brain contain independent thought, because there aren't enough connections directly between them to enforce synchronization. There are enough localized connections to allow general thoughts to happen and be operated on, but they are exactly that; localized.
Detail-oriented thinking is another well-known side effect of this, because each individual detail can easily be fit somewhere without being lost in the "big picture". Autistics are usually who you'll find sweating details that most people wouldn't necessarily care about, but they're also who you'll find sometimes getting lost in those details rather than sticking to a single clear vision. Neurotypicals, on the other paw, can miss those details if the picture as a whole looks okay to them, but they also usually won't get stuck on them in the process of executing their vision.
Note that every person is different, whether autistic or non-autistic, so there are autistics who are good at thinking in terms of the big picture and neurotypicals who are good at considering every detail. The fact that the physical mode of thinking differs doesn't necessarily mean that another can't be emulated - it just means that even if two people appear to be doing or thinking the same thing, the way it's actually implemented "in hardware" (meatware?) can differ greatly depending on neurotype, even from autistic to autistic and neurotypical to neurotypical, as the brain has no single switch between fully autistic and fully neurotypical.
I've been informed that the author of the article doesn't generally do good work, but I've personally reviewed the article and believe it to still be sufficiently accurate. Additionally, this particular description of autistic disorganized thought is what originally tipped me off to the fact that the way I think is different from others. If you're not autistic and/or it doesn't describe you, please know that it perfectly describes me, which should be enough to understand how exactly the experience of thought can differ from brain to brain.
Also, psychedelics can significantly change one's mode of thinking. I use them recreationally from time to time. Somehow, they give me better executive function than my ADHD meds do.
I score low in all categories. I wonder if that means I'm just not very aware of how I think while I'm not doing it. I think a lot though. A little bit too much
I wonder if the quiz is missing questions / scoring around thought awareness.
This reminds me of this old Feynman video where he talks about how people use different methods in their heads when counting, seems relevant: https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y?t=135
Love it! I use something similar to remember long numbers. If a code or a pin has let's say 8 digits, I'm unable to remember it the normal way. So I remember the first digit in the inner voice, and the other 4 digits as a picture of the digits.
+ Rudolph Flesh, The Art Of Clear Thinking (1951). He has visualizations in there how people concepualize the months in a year as an ellipsis, and so on.
Same here. I had a conversation with friends who said, language influences thinking.
I said, no, I have thoughts, and I communicate them with language but the thoughts are not language.
Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless.
To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!
So yes, we learn how our minds can work completely differently from one another.
The study of Human Design takes this to the next level - this strange science states that humans can be classified in 5 different general types which operate totally different from one another - it has taught me a lot about other people.
My base assumption that everyone is more or less like me - turned out to be completely off.
> Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless.
> To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!
I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking". Are you by any chance neurotypical, or close to neurotypicality? My impression is that neurotypical brains have a higher degree of synchronization than autistic brains, which would make suppressing thought easier.
I'm autistic, and I don't just have thoughts; they have themselves. Thoughts just spontaneously come into existence, and just think on their own. I can think about them myself, but only by picking up existing thoughts. Thoughts come into existence whether I intend them to or not, so it is not possible for me to suppress them.
On one paw, the fact that thoughts seemingly think about themselves allows me to fit a lot of logic in my head at once without getting overwhelmed. But on the other, being unable to control which thoughts are in my head can be really infuriating.
> I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking".
I am doubtful that anyone can truly stop thinking. But people can have more or less awareness of their thoughts, and they can be having thoughts that they don’t consider to be thoughts. For example, if you notice that your shirt is wet, that is a thought even if you don’t “think” anything about it.
I haven’t personally tried one, but I believe the purpose of a sensory deprivation tank is to create an environment where your thoughts are unavoidable.
> But people can have more or less awareness of their thoughts, and they can be having thoughts that they don’t consider to be thoughts.
Yes, that is my experience. If I try not to have thoughts, then what happens is not that thoughts stop happening, it's that I stop noticing them until they're more fully developed. This "not noticing" results in a relative lack of remarks upon those thoughts, but the thoughts themselves are not made of or depending on language. They just are things. Technically, they are "derived meaning".
When on psychedelics I can have thoughts that not only don't depend on language, but don't have language. It's not possible to describe them because they represent indescribable things. It's possible to feel them and interact with them in a way that seems to makes sense to me, but it's not possible to communicate them. If I try, they can actually result in words being generated, but those words sound like a bad phone autocomplete - stuff like "can have a haves and take a three sixteenth quarters" (real excerpt from a past trip).
(My guess is that my brain has some sort of internal format that real-world concepts are translated into in order to be operated on. That's the "meaning" that gets derived. I wonder if psychedelics allow me to create or perceive meanings that no real-world concept would ever actually translate into, and therefore don't have any way to communicate as a real-world concept.)
> I am doubtful that anyone can truly stop thinking.
This statement is a perfect example of benrutter's point:
> - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
Don't be so sure that nobody has thoughts that can truly stop, even just for a short time.
> - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
I wouldn't say that. What I would rather say is that everyone starts with the expectation that they share thought with others.
There is overwhelming empirical evidence that people can tell when others think like them. Not everybody treats this indicator the same way. Some are fascinated when others think differently. Some get uncomfortable when they can't tell what another is thinking or feeling.
I'm sure not everyone understands why there can be others that don't think like them. To a simple mind, it might just seem like there's something wrong with them or that they have unaligned goals/interests; you actually can see that assumption from certain neurotypicals. (I don't know if it's truly specific to neurotypicals.)
However, it is possible not to believe, even secretly, that everyone experiences thought the same; I certainly don't. I try my best to understand exactly how thought can differ between each person, of course, but in the process of doing that research, it does become abundantly clear just how much I don't know, and just how differently others think than how I do.
I'm not convinced it's a fact we all think as differently as implied. Try and get a room full of people to even agree what "internal dialogue" means or whether you actually hear a voice when you recall it.
Can you express your internal monologue in words? If not then it is clearly not an internal monologue. I can't express mine in words, hence I am certain it isn't an internal monologue.
Similarly I doubt others would say they have an internal monologue if they couldn't express it in words. Hence I am fairly certain that they think in a different way, or at least they think they do.
The question about visualising three dimensional objects is fascinating to me. Because my answer has changed radically in the last five or so years, and I'm not a young person!
I used to consider myself 3D-impaired -- unable to maintain and rotate a 3D image in my head, which also made 3D software frustrating. (I also have, it turns out, some binocular vision issues and some other mild cognition weirdness).
But a few years back I started on a hobby project, and I started to assemble my own DIY kit (because the commercial stuff is too expensive). To do that I had a lot of mental puzzles to try to solve.
Then I decided the best way forward was a 3D printer so I tried to find 3D tools that would work for me on even a basic level -- OpenSCAD, CadQuery, FreeCAD etc.; as many different ways to approach the problem as would shed light on ways to think about it.
I'm no longer really an OpenSCAD person but once my first successful models came out of my printer, my brain was changed forever, and now I visualise mechanisms in my head.
(One of the most powerful things I have learned about how to imagine any man-made, real world object, is to imagine the tools making it.)
As someone with Aphantasia, this is fascinating to me. There have been other aphantasics who report gaining the ability to visualize after mental exercises, and what you’re describing sounds somewhat similar. No luck for me yet, but I’m really interested in the idea that I could actually learn these skills…
This is such an interesting topic. I believe I also have aphantasia and I find that communicating about the topic is rather challenging as the right vocabulary doesn't seem to exist (or I'm ignorant of it).
I have no "mind's eye" and can't produce an image in my head. But confusingly, I am quite good at the mental 3D manipulation. I can spin the cow in my head and describe its orientation, but I don't actually see the cow, I just know it. I suppose my brain just has a different way of approaching this problem than visually.
This is where the language is tough. I'm not visualizing or imagining as those words describe the act of using a mental image. I'm perceiving the cow? It is hard to communicate.
> I find that communicating about the topic is rather challenging as the right vocabulary doesn't seem to exist (or I'm ignorant of it).
Right. This is enormously challenging in itself. And I think because nobody talks about it, it's possible, or maybe the default, to assume that you're simply broken in an obvious, universal way, and not that there might be variation or even routes to change your outcomes with metacognition or thought experiments.
What often comes up is stuff like "oh I thought 'the mind's eye' was just a figure of speech, I had no idea people meant it in a meaningful sense"
You're deriving the cow. You don't see the cow, but you know things logically about the cow, and you can describe it just as well as would someone who does see it. But you are not, and don't need to be, actually seeing the cow.
The weird thing obviously is that next to nobody with a mind's eye is actually seeing the cow.
A tiny tiny fraction of people talk about their mind's eye being part of their visual field, to the point that they can sort of functionally see -- hallucinate -- an imaginary object on a table like AR.
Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described.
Most children can sort of whimsically play the imaginary-drinking tea game, imagining the shape of the teacups, imagining spilling tea or milk, but the mental images might not have attributes like colour or weight until they are specifically assigned to the visualisation. Like: what colour are the teacups? They don't have colour until you pick one, and then they do. Is it a heavy cup? It's not, but I do have a saucer. The more you add to the visualisation, the less translucent/ghostly/formless/conceptual it is.
The fascinating thing about broad aphantasia is that it appears to be way beyond even that; it's like things only happen conceptually, yet they still happen. Like the sibling comment from andrewflnr perceptively said: as if it's a conceptual blind-sight.
And when you consider our evolutionary pathway, perhaps it actually is the same phenomenon: a part of the brain successfully doing part of the task, without the support of the visualiser.
> Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described.
But this is different from the kids tea party. I can easily pretend to hold a teacup without closing my eyes and visualizing a teacup, I don't think one has anything to do with the other.
If you ask someone to actually imagine seeing a teacup but what they're imagining doesn't have a colour or size, _what are they imagining_?
If I cover your eyes and put a teacup on your open palm so you can't see the colour or feel the size, _what are you holding_?
I'm imagining a teacup - made of china, decorated in some way, capable of holding a few mouthfulls of ~75C thin liquid, smaller than a big mug, larger than a shot glass, with a handle sizes for the tip of one finger, delicate, ceremonial; concept space constrained to broadly teacup-ish area. But not a specific teacup unless it becomes important whether it's a plainer heavy duty cafe teacup or a grandma's Royal Jubilee promotional teacup.
I've watched something about an autistic person with a photographic memory who said they had trouble with the concept of "a church" because in their mind they could only picture specific churches and they all looked different. I've seen anecdotes of people with perfect pitch saying that if a tune was transposed to a different octave or played in a different key or interpretation, everyone else says it is "the same tune" but to them it has different notes so it's a different tune.
I don't know if it's weird; generalising a category from specific examples is saves memory space over remembering every individual teacup we've ever seen, so going the other way starting with a general concept of a teacup and only specifying as and when needed seems to make sense.
> If I cover your eyes and put a teacup on your open palm so you can't see the colour or feel the size, _what are you holding_?
I obviously failed to communicate what I was saying.
If you give me a teacup and tell me to imagine I can see it, I have to know what it looks like before I can form that image.
This is all just a failure of communication because to me, part of the definition of having an image of something in your mind is that you know what it looks like.
Since knowing the colours and shapes are required to form an image, if you don't have those, you don't have an image.
Imagining a teacup is possible without imagining you can see a teacup.
My point is this: if I tell you to close your eyes and form the image of a teacup in your mind, images certainly have colour and shape, so either your image does too, or you don't have an image. It's really just down to a differing definition of image.
If you ask me to imagine seeing a maze with hundreds of turns, rather than saying I have a nonspecific image, I'll say I'm having trouble forming a concrete image.
If you ask people to imagine a teacup, some will imagine seeing one, others will imagine holding one, others will have no images or feelings in their mind.
I'm pretty sure, like others are, a lot of this is just down to ambiguous or poorly specifies language.
> My point is this: if I tell you to close your eyes and form the image of a teacup in your mind, images certainly have colour and shape, so either your image does too, or you don't have an image. It's really just down to a differing definition of image.
Not really. I mean, I have some aphantasia-type aspects with faces. But my mind's eye is quite amenable to the semi-lucid mental image of a cup that doesn't have colour until I ask myself what colour it has, doesn't have fine shape details until I consider them.
After all, not all of our eye even sees in colour! Part of our visual apparatus only provides black and white imagery to our brain. So there's plenty of colourless imagery within our cognition.
I obviously failed to communicate my point, I'll try one last time.
If I ask you to imagine you can see something, and you haven't decided on basic details like what it looks like, this is exactly equivalent in my mind to me saying "imagine a number" and you not being able to tell me any digits of the number - you didn't really do what I asked.
We can go through and tediously define every word we're using but hopefully the above paragraph will allow you to tell where our definitions differ.
> "imagine a number" and you not being able to tell me any digits of the number - you didn't really do what I asked.
I don't really feel like that's true. If you asked me to choose a specific number, sure. But if the task really were just to imagine the concept of a number, unbound to anything, it wouldn't be a specific number until it needed to be.
Similarly, when thinking of a cup, unless I'm explicitly trying to imagine a specific cup, as close to reality as possible, it is merely a cup. Not a red cup, or one with a tiny annoying handle that I can only fit one finger into.
There are two questions there. Select the properties of a randomly chosen cup, and relay them to me. At which point i'd feel like im making it up as you ask for specific properties. Or just picture a cup, squashing, stretching, rotating. I think very much that these mental images are deeply baked into the ways we interact with the world (and are not literally seeing so much as attention to details of idealized concepts). It can't be a coincidence my mental image having transformations applied to it effortlessly is because of my work with 3d modelling and robotics.
If my mind wanders into those things, I could imagine the cup morphing between those scenarios, unreality forming into reality. Seeing with the minds eye is not seeing, in a literal sense.
I believe that there is a sense in which if we were forced to actually see the real world as it is, every detail of everything all at once, as a camera sees it, it would be far too much (consider things like optical illusions, human blind-spots in the visual field). Hence all sorts of mental shortcuts are taken where below the concious layer things are stiched together to make a false sense of cohesiveness out of a distinctly disconnected and incoherent stream of input data. Every sense even has varying time-lag, to the point the brain predicts nerve signals before they come in, hence phantom limb pain etc. It ends up that so little of you is actually the concious mind you.
Objects in the minds eye are similarly abstract objects. You cannot see every detail unless you decide upon what you choose to see. An apple, in my mind, has the blotchy, slightly coarse texture on the outside most apples have. But is it a red apple or a green apple? It's somewhere between the two. The digits of my number are a blur approximating all digits, the digits I expect to see, until I look closely. Similar to how the room in your peripheral vision is still the same. Probably.
On the other end of the spectrum, Nikola Tesla's visualisations were so strong that as a child he would vividly hallucinate objects when their names were spoken to him.
A while back, I did an experiment: drawing a typing keyboard. It's something I see and use every day, so it should be easy, right?
Well, I was able to, but it didn't come from first principles or even visualizing it. It came from imagining myself at a keyboard and "simulating" typing. In my mind's body, I would type a sentence, which enabled me to extract the location of the keys, which I could then translate into part of the visual sketch on paper. The initial sketch came out with key sizes and shapes heavily distorted, but all of them spatially located in the correct relative horizontal ordering, and a second sketch made it possible to regularize them.
Not sure what it means, but it was an interesting exercise.
I have a form of aphantasia, but with that lack of visuals I also have a rich internal sense of touch. Like you, I can create and manipulate 3d objects in my mind; I really feel them down to texture and temperature (and I must say, that cow has textures I didn't want to feel, thanks for nothing) Most of my dreams are like this too -- I know where everything is, but I don't see it.
But my aphantasia isn't complete. Sometimes when I think of a person I get a dim image of their face for about a tenth of a second. And very rarely, I do see things in dreams.
OK so -- on this score. I have, I believe, a kind of partial aphantasia. Though maybe it's normal and people just don't really see the distinction?
I used to think -- until maybe ten years ago -- that I could not imagine the faces of friends and loved ones.
That is, if I try to visualise a person's face, I get an incomplete glimpse in my mind that dissolves away within an instant.
(People in my dreams do not really have detailed faces, if I can ever really look at their faces at all; it's like I don't make eye contact. Though they are not face-less horrors.)
This has been distressing, particularly when my mum died.
But then I discovered two really interesting things:
1) I can sometimes imagine a "still" face if I visualise a photograph of that person (maybe only slightly more if I took it)
2) I can bring someone's face to mind much more successfully if I associate it with an emotion or an action, and once I've done that, as long as I keep them in motion I can visualise a lot more for longer.
A quarter of a century after she died, if I want to remember my mum, it's a real challenge. She hated being in photos so there aren't many. But it's possible to start by imagining her angry (sorry mum) or the annoyed look on her face when she was trying to solve a puzzle game on the computer. Then I might be able to keep her face in my mind for long enough.
My dad passed away a couple of years back and for this loss I was ready; I have some photos, but more importantly I had spent the previous years learning his face experiencing different emotions. My favourite route to imagining my Dad's face is to imagine a situation where he might show puzzled, half-smiling amusement or fascination when presented with something he didn't understand or didn't work quite the way he expected. I will be able to recall his face in motion, just as my face starts to leak around the eye sockets :-/
So on the one hand: even now I can't visualise still faces at all! I struggle to describe faces of people I don't really know well. As soon as a face is still, it goes.
On the other hand, I have taught myself a visualisation process that can conjure up meaningful animated recollections that are filled with emotion. I have to do it deliberately, but it's lovely to do.
One final quirk: despite all this, I appear to potentially be a super-recogniser. I can't visualise a still face, but I do not "forget a face"; I can tell you with eerie accuracy whether I've seen someone before and where. And I do rather well with the "which of these faces did you see in this clip" type test, and very well at the tests like "which of these faces is this face from another angle".
This is all extremely interesting. I also struggle to remember faces, and most of my are tied to emotions, sounds, smells, sensations, etc. When I recall something/someone, I don't see it/them, I just "know" + feel.
And I find myself very easily fooled by subtle changes in a person's appearance. If someone gets a major haircut or changes their hair color, they might as well be a different person to my brain, initially.
> If someone gets a major haircut or changes their hair color, they might as well be a different person to my brain, initially.
That is true aphantasia.
I don't have this aspect of the problem -- indeed, I often have the weird super-recogniser problem of correctly identifying that I have seen someone unknown to me before, and where. I might be able to even describe the clothes they were wearing that last time or something they were holding or doing.
But I would struggle to describe their face to someone else.
It might be that what I am describing falls short of aphantasia (though my difficulties recalling motionless faces do suggest it).
I sometimes wonder if what it actually is, is a kind of fundamentally unexplored thought or experience.
There's a bunch of other examples.
Like... I can't _really_ tell my left from my right on an instinctive level, though I believe this to be inherited because I have relatives who can't.
Ask me directions in a hurry and I'll get them wrong even when I am sure they are right. I don't really have a "left" and a "right"; I have two sides that don't feel that different.
So I also can't really use mirrors well.
I have surprisingly quick and accurate reflexes for catching falling things but I can't catch a ball thrown to me.
The question about all of these things is: are they just things I have never found the right way to deliberately work through into a conscious process? Are they things I can't do now because I didn't learn when my brain was fresh?
This is very interesting, when I was a kid I didn’t think with words but with “abstract” ideas. When I realized every other kid used language for thinking I tried to do it myself and not only I was able to do it, but it never stopped after that. Now I probably think 90% with language, but I’ve been trying to practice other forms of thought recently.
One of the most challenging things I find in life is explaining to a non-programmer how I visualise code. Because I don't really know how I do it; it is simultaneously grammatical and architectural, and a lot of the processes that guide me are really emotional or almost visceral. Code sometimes does not feel right.
I am, apparently, someone well on the linguistic side of the spectrum, yet I too was somewhat taken aback by this statement from the abstract: "Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking" [my emphasis].
My own thinking on this has been to consider the origins of language. In a community of hominins on the verge of developing a language, would they not need, as a prerequisite, some non-linguistic ability to consciously grasp that at least some of the vocalizations of their peers represented feelings that they recognized in themselves? But that, by itself, would not be enough for them to develop a language; in addition, I feel, it would take both a desire to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others (motivated in part, I would guess, by recognizing that it would be useful to do so) and the recognition that this might be accomplished through artificial sounds and/or gestures with arbitrarily-allocated yet specific meanings. I feel that there's a bootstrap problem in regarding language as primarily a means of thinking that was found to be useful in communicating.
Like you (and, apparently, the survey compilers) I am surprised to learn that a sizable minority of people report frequently visualizing words as text. On reflection, however, that sounds somewhat like a form of synesthesia, and I occasionally get enough of a hint of that to put it just barely in range of my personal experience - but then, I don't regard people whose experiences differ markedly from mine as wierdos.
This somewhat related to universals and how they are view from Platonic idealism and Aristotelian realism. With language we capture a symbolic representation of the ideal form, the red apple, or do we just imagine the last particular apple we saw. Or maybe if you're really modern you imagine the molecular structure and photonic reflective spectrum.
>It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that:
- People experience their thoughts very differently
- We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
Well, the first is not exactly right. People might experience thoughts differently, but not that widely so. It's not like "anything goes", more like there are a few cases, and people fall into one or the other (e.g. some can have aphantasia).
And the second, while right, is hardly "mind melting". Why would people assume otherwise, since the only immediate empirically seen thinking they have access to is their own?
(Especially since different modes of thinking is not exactly "anything goes" as we said, so the second-hand examples of thinking they have, e.g. people describing or mimicking thinking and inner monologues in movies and books, match how the majority thinks)
For me it was mindblowing the fact that before my brain tumor surgery I had something like a conscience voice and a richer internal dialogue. After that the voice dissapeared and my train of thought is more logic focused instead of instrospection focused, not sure why.
I just did that quiz and the question about the sound of a trumpet getting louder made me notice that my imaginings of talking and instruments actually activate my vocal chords and neck muscles a bit; and imagining a trumpet is more like imagining someone make an imitation trumpet sound.
Also was hoping that quiz would ask about other senses; how easily people can choose to imagine tastes and smells, e.g. on their agree/disagree scales:
1. You can easily imagine the smell of freshly baked bread.
2. You can easily call to mind the taste of peanut butter.
3. You are melting chocolate and somebody suggests adding basil, you can vividly imagine how that would taste before trying it.
4. When remembering an event that happened to you, there is a strong smell memory included.
5. You can imagine feeling the weight and texture of a brick in your hands.
Look at how different we are from each other. Then consider that humans actually have less genetic variance than most mammal species. Now imagine meeting actual aliens whether from space or from our own AI efforts.
This test really threw me for a loop because it didn’t cover my main mode of thought. For me, I can consciously use my internal voice or visualize things, but if I am not actively trying to, they never happen. Typically, the results of my thoughts simply enter my conscious mind, and what brought them about is opaque to me.
I think to a large extent this is because people define "internal monologue" differently, so let me just clarify:
a. There is a voice inside your head, and your consciousness is not the one talking: schizophrenia.
b. There is a voice inside your head, it's you doing the talking i.e. you're doing everything but moving your lips and producing sound - the words are literally being narrated in your mind: internal monologue.
c. No language is being "spoken" inside your head. If you're not talking, you're not forming sentences at all: apparently some people have this experience.
My experience is b, but it is possible for me to also think without having to narrate everything (a bit of c). If anyone has a different internal experience, please reply.
> It seems like there's a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language.
They must listen to a large amount of verbose drivel telling them how to weave their way through a crowd, or how to rotate a suitcase to fit it into a trunk.
This is a big part of why I think LLMs can lead to AGI: humans clearly exist who can think equally well despite having some major gears in their brain going in different directions from each other. If you told me that there was a human who could only think by speaking and who experienced their entire reality and cognition in a textual form, occasionally augmented by flashes of visual or auditory data, I would not be willing to comfortably put an upper limit on their IQ despite all that. I'd just say "yeah, I guess? Weirder things have happened."
It's difficult to say what thought is, but LLMs also solve more problems more correctly if you allow them to feed back through themselves multiple times (ask them to show their working) apparently for the obvious reason that it allows more computation to happen. I hypothesize that different people build different recurrence circuits, by chance. Some go through the audio cortex, some through the visual. Helen Keller described herself as driven solely by emotions, like a beast, before she had any kind of language: https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/1jyo53/hellen_kel...
> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking).
I always had thought this is the case too. Thinking isn't linguistic but it can be helpful as a tool while thinking, especially while thinking about communication.
It also seems obvious to me that language is a tool for communication rather than thought, although sometimes it also includes communication to yourself (in future).
In some cases, I can visualize words as text too, especially if thinking about written communication.
Let's do a mental experiment: Put 2 year old Einstein on a remote island, all alone, and come back 30 years later. Assume he survives. Will he impress you with his insights?
They say we don't use language for thought, but language informs our strategies and choices, and collective experience is essential for progress. We only add small increments of insight from our own experiences to the pool, but the experience captured in language is greater than any one of us.
And more interestingly, LLMs trained on this data show amazing capabilities that go beyond mere reproduction. LLMs gain everything Einstein lost in this experiment, what is the language part and what is the pure insight part? Looks to me humans are like LLMs on feet, and with a full social complement surrounding them.
I know your answer is supposed to be no, but I think there's a good chance the answer would be yes. There's a seemingly endless amount that can be learned about basically anything. And surviving for 30 years on an isolated island is going to involve developing a wide range of skills and masteries ranging from healthcare, seasonal prediction, animal habits, hunting, medicine, shelter construction, and much more.
It'd be akin to chatting with an isolated tribesman - that alone would already be fascinating and endlessly informative. These are people who can walk into the woods naked, and walk out weeks later fed, clothed, and sheltered. And now also add in this individual happening to be a several sigma outlier in learning capacity, creativity, and so on. It'd be an absolutely fascinating discussion!
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadDogs at least can learn that, too. Probably also cats. Using buttons to express themselves has proven that. Hell, even our dog, who never figured out the buttons, understood that "bed" meant "soft thing next to human's bed", not "the particular bed I usually sleep in".
Humans are merely a lot better at communicating this, having a more complex speech apparatus.
Jerry Fodor, who advocated an internal mental language, was seen as an old crank when I studied Linguistics in late 90s; I just looked him up and, god, he died recently in 2017. Here’s a New Yorker article from that time: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/jerry-fodors-en....
A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common and important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly and the label catches on.
We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concept is accorded such importance in every language. Some common words in other languages without direct translation in English:
* 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.
* น้ำใจ (Nam-jai) (Thai): Literally "water from the heart". Being very nice and helpful without expecting anything back.
* 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business.
This is perhaps another line of evidence to support the thesis of the article.
Make no mistake though: Language is extremely useful for some types of thoughts, especially more abstract ones. Not everyone, however, uses it as their primary tool for thinking.
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The above also helps explain some limitations of LLMs, such as their inadequate spatial intelligence. Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) start to address these issues by using much more granular data than language alone.
I do think in American English at least there is a phrase for this: Your Network. You even used it to explain the word :)
Usually the first association to “your/the network” is social. You have to specify if you mean the technical version with computers.
In your 20s you might think of your network as people who you went to college with. In your 40s your network takes on a meaning much closer to what you have described. I don’t yet know what happens in your 60s.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/network : “To get a job in today's economy, it is important to have a strong network.”
"Charity"
https://chatgpt.com/share/e/987705c8-fcb7-4af3-a8bd-9d7dc228...
Perhaps I should specify: "charity", as used in "faith, hope, and..."
(although I generally prefer "charity" as in the computer language)
They are probably closer in meaning than the most common definition of 'charity' though.
A mixture of "act of kindness" and "good will" would be a more fitting translation, but the interesting part here is that "sportmanship" is also considered an act of น้ำใจ (น้ำใจนักกีฬา nam-jai nak-kee-la or literally. sportman's nam-jai).
We also have a word เสียน้ำใจ (sia-nam-jai) for when our nam-jai ended up as a waste, or for when the other party is being ungrateful for the kindness that's being given, and also เลี้ยงน้ำใจ (leang-nam-jai) for when you're doing/accepting nam-jai for the sake of not making the other party sia-nam-jai.
In-depth explanation by Orlando Yang: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chinese-guanxi-vs-western-soc...
Easier-to-read one by GPT-4o: https://chatgpt.com/share/e/b2a76479-2950-4aad-ad8e-97e775be...
I mean even the word 关系 and "network" have the same etymology. 系 = threads of silk arranged in a pattern.
It's an incredibly poor example of an "untranslatable" phrase.
i don't speak Thai or Mandarin, so I can't speak to the other 2, but this one is a pun (combining tsundeoku, pile up, and dokusho, book reading) that survived in the language due to its catchiness.
A bit like "hangry" (hungry + angry) in English.
I have a hard time interpreting the existence of those words as an indication that Japanese culture really values not reading the books you buy, or English speaking culture is irritated due to hunger more so than other cultures.
They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.
Along the lines of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning#Old_English_and_other_... , english could contain "book-dragon".
"wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection."
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi)
You could equally refer to some slur in a lower register to then claim that this doesn't exist in your language and how it can't be translated either. So when Joe Biden said "SoB" on tape once, that was code switching; likewise, when Trump says anything it's all made up and coded and means something entirely different. However, these are bad examples if your target is a monolingual Japanese, obv.
My take: they became instant memes and experience wide adoption because they capture a concept without another name - and that makes it not just easy to talk about, but also to think about in the first place (counter to article's thesis?).
If those concepts would exist you wouldn’t be able to explain them using words, no matter how complex the phrase may be. Taking a phrase and expecting it to have a single word replace is unrealistic. You can’t just asign a word to every possible sentence/phrase. Having a direct translation means you don’t necessarily need that word in your language.
One might argue that the limit of our language is the limit of our ability to think.
I suspect the same happens in many other fields. Even in an abstract field like mathematics, intuition often forms in the mind before verbal description or articulation.
Its much more complex to explain why we classify them as masterpieces than how he made it.
Maybe I don't understand why you couldn't use verbal language to instruct a CNC machine?
To my understanding, this is not a type of natural language the paper discusses:
Possibly. Even if this was just emulating the thought process that happened non-verbally, it would still work. I imagine that's a big part of why language seems so critical an invention: because it can be used as emulator of otherwise non-verbal thought processes.
That said, in case of Michelangelo, describing the "algorithm" is not sufficient, because just as important are the external factors. Art reacts to the medium and situation, so there's a lot of randomness into any specific work. It's kind of like with Stable Diffusion - we could get the prompt just right to generate something like a picture someone else generated, but there's only one seed that will result in identical output, and that little number is something we can't easily reverse.
I'm not sure what you mean. He probably started with something "Ok, I need to create a statue", then "Who should I pick, I guess it should be someone Biblical, let's pick David because they like him in Florence", then "Ok, he was a healthy and muscular young man, and I have enough material for a 5 meter high statue", then "let's start with sculpting a general outline and then focus on head and neck shapes" (...) and finally "looks good, but the nose should be a bit smaller". I can almost imagine the whole thought process (except I know nothing about sculpting, but I'm not terrible at some other art forms).
There's nothing that is inherently non-verbal in this process. And all of these decisions can be described algorithmically and numerically (even though humans doing art usually compare their results to a reference images instead of doing 3d math in their head).
I think the only limiting factor we have on that is we don't yet have a robot that can chisel marble to create a carbon copy of such sculptures, but we can otherwise do it with other materials.
To my understanding, this is not a type of natural language the paper discusses:
Consider Chinese 成语 (Chengyu) [1] or Japanese 四字熟語 (Yo Ji Juku Go) [2]: - 指桑骂槐 (Zhi Sang Ma Huai) - Pulling the shoots to make the rice grow = helicoptering - 拔苗助长 (Ba Miao Zhu Zhang) - Point at the mulberry tree to curse the locust tree = deflective criticism
These condense a whole story with moral lesson in them, and they facilitate recall of that concept. The trick is omission of everything but 4 characters from the whole story. Sometimes they're just an enumeration:
- 柴米油盐 （Chai Mi You Yan) Firewood, Rice, Oil, Salt = essential things for everyday life - 都道府県 (To Dou Fu Ken) all 4 types of Jap. prefecture = everywhere
I think brevity is key for words that aim at aiding thinking. All languages allow composition; consider "Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher". But only if the word is short, can you quickly cast your thought into its form (as if speaking) and proceed to compose it with the next thought. You do this until your individual mental capacity runs out.
It's also very important that others know the concept. I find myself often refer to "that scene in Wolf of Wallstreet where Belfort _really safely_ drives his Lamborghini home"[3] to express "power is nothing without control". I wish there was a briefer word for it yet.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojijukugo 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1huYsSOYlVo
in a different vein, "Tony and Manny, at the pool" might refer to:
[at least in "Antonio Montana's Journey to the West" (1983)]There's a subclass of 成语 the sense of which you can't even guess at unless you know the story:
- 塞翁失马 (Sai Weng Shi Ma) - Old man loses horse; a 5-fold story of riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches = life is unpredictable
- 自相矛盾 (Zi Xiang Mao Dun) - Resemble spear and shield = unstoppable force meets indestructible object
The latter is so common that 矛盾 (Mao Dun) is the dictionary entry for "contradiction" in Chinese and Japanese.
Because 矛盾 is so common, the story 自相矛盾 (=etymology) gets taught only later to native speakers. Similarly, consider the surprising etymology of word "rob", deriving from "robe" [1].
Consider also: - "Seven at One Blow" [2] = bamboozle
This proverb everyone knows, yet nobody uses it. It only cumbersomely embeds in a sentence; "bamboozle" is briefer. But 成语 do easily embed in Chinese or any phrase does in Tamarian.
1: https://www.etymonline.com/word/robe 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Little_Tailor
It's simply the case that Chinese relies far more on literary/historical allusions (chengyu) than English does. We might talk about someone's "Achilles heel" or a "Trojan horse", but these literary/historical allusions are simply nowhere near as common as chengyu in Chinese.
So "buying books and never reading them", yes, it's a phenomenon that happens and one could presumably talk about it, but it's hard to even think of in the first place - it's a complex set of ideas joined together in a specific way. Tsundoku, however, is a concept. A single word. A token. A point in the latent space. Something I feel existing independently in my mind, as a node that I can feel emotions about, that grows attachments. That's much easier to access, and thus much more common to talk about.
Nam-jai, I already have an English word for this in my mind, "pay -it-forward". Yeah, it's one semantic unit in my mind. Funny enough, I'm ESL and I don't know a word in my native language for this (Polish); the concept exists in my head literally as "pay it forward", and brings up associations with some broken down car story, and Jesus for some reason.
Guanxi - in English, isn't that a "social network"? That's another good example of a concept I find much easier to think about once it's pinned down with a name.
I can imagine things transformating in space much faster than thinking it in words.
It's also like a burrito.
Also not engineers - devs.
To me they appear to go hand-in-hand, similar to the way a backend’s logic may inadvertently be structured to support an API. Another metaphor may be Conway’s Law, where the way one is forced to communicate, may in turn shape the way they structure their (brain) processes.
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that speakers of different languages seem to “think” more similarly than not. For instance, native speakers of non-English Germanic languages appear to think more similarly compared to those native speakers of Romance languages, and vice-versa.
Obviously I’m using English as a middle-man, and am likely projecting on what their internal thoughts actually are, but the pathways they take to express an idea or a solution is oftentimes more similar than not within the same base language background.
Now is language necessary for complex thought? Absolutely not. We’ve seen evidence from many different life forms that show complex problem-solving, pattern matching, and novel tool use that all seem to happen without having a seemingly complex language background (i.e. Zipf’s Law).
Language birthed social games and the sense of self.
Yes, language evolved for communication.
But without communication, thought would still be stuck in the land of instinct, never forged by the tribal dances of love, art, deceit, debate and organization.
Interestingly, removing language as a tool for communication is a cool thought experiment. I imagine one could use maths, or music, as a way of expressing thoughts and ideas. Would that process of condensing information not be language-making though?
I sometimes work with people who show no signs of thought: external stimuli are perceived, converted into a stream of language, and conveyed, with no apparent effort at audience-based compression (selection of an appropriate message from a wide variety of potential messages), or even compression in general (selection of a short message...).
Communication is primarily via posture, secondarily via sound. No "grammar" is involved, intensification is via intensification of signal, not addition of symbols. (that said, much human-animal communication is by means of arbitrary symbols, just that each symbol is serving as a sign because combinations of symbols and even their ordering doesn't really matter)
Animals certainly get order: they'll easily learn sequences of actions, but if you're getting different behaviour from AB than BA, I currently believe that's because the animal has learnt, and is perceiving, those as two different gestalts.
Imperative and Vocative are the basic cases. (and to what extent the latter belongs to the former I can't really say: when the stock greets in the morning, are they saying "good morning, 0823", as we'd like to believe, or are they really saying "Hey, you, thumb-monkey, feed us!"?)
Interrogative exists, but barely: "where is everyone?" "fren?" (or, if wondering about more* than friendship: "gotta light?")
An example of linear use of order in equines: a young equid has what my wife calls "filly rights" and generally gets to do what it wants. As it gets either older, or too obnoxious, though, the other members of the herd will start to socialise it. This usually occurs via an ascending scale of pressure, from the subtle (eye contact - "are you sure that's an acceptable behaviour?") through the clear (coming up alongside — "all right, what's all this then?") to behaviours reserved for outlaws (full-power kick with both hinds — "what we've got here is failure to communicate").
[the biggest problem I see novice humans have is they attempt to bargain with animals; offer-consideration-acceptance is, for me, far too human-abstract a framework. That's not to say you can't come to consensus on a modus vivendi, but you're not going to get there through a contract approach, calibrated to the capabilities of two-legged mammals.]
My stock all know index finger up is a non-linguistic way humans ask "are you sure?" (and their name may be a linguistic escalation), but I have no clue if they understand it as a sign of potential aggression (being generally produced as a sharp movement), or as a symbol of potential displeasure?
Cattle (both mobs and individuals) can be steered by use of their fight-or-flight in response to posture. You don't directly tell them "go left" ("haw" for a carriage horse) or "go right" ("gee" for a carriage horse) but instead either confirm the pressure (if they're already pointed the right direction) or change the pressure (reduce-intensify if you wish them to flip towards you, intensify-reduce if you wish them to flip away from you) to get them going in the desired direction.
[as you all can tell, feudalism (or IR) is basically what you get when you think politics should be entirely based on this level of communication; however even in democracies use of the bovine principle to manufacture consensus in an electorate occurs, for my sensitivities, way too often]
If anyone can think of experiments that would clarify some of these situations, I'm all ears!
* I understand these days you all mediate all your flirting via text, which seems like a very difficult thing to calibrate; in my day we had analogue signals that (to me alone?) are much easier to dial up or down:
WTF are kids doing these days? "we put just a little too many 'e's in our heeeeys?"Efficiently, probably. There was an article about chickadees' memories, recently:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/29/birds-create...
Although I haven't read the original article.
>> "Hey, you, thumb-monkey, feed us!"
Well, they do stick around because we can open tin cans...
I'm curious if you feel like human behaviors are derived from these sets of behaviors. You mapped all the examples of their behaviors to phrases, to give a general vibe. Is your view that we have simply compressed and made these more nuanced and composite? Or did we invent something completely different and operate within that framework which isn't a more sophisticated version?
We have "full" language, which I believe is a qualitative difference: we use symbols digitally; instead of expressing displeasure on an analog scale via summing signals, we can concatenate symbols to be "very" or "mildly" displeased. (consider binary vs unary representations) Also, we treat vocal communication, not as bags of signs, but in terms of trees/graphs.
Eg, we can play language games like the following: First point to note is the character of the source. There are several choices on this: the true source (who really got it out?) and the ostensible source (whose name is signed to it?); also, the first-use source (who used it the first time?) and the second-use source (who claims merely to be using it as a quotation?). Take the statement: "Harry said to me, he said, 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' Mind you, I don't pretend to believe Harry, but that's what he said, all right." What are the possible true sources for the statement of fact or libel concerning Al's unnamed wife? What are the alternatives on ostensible sources? First use? Second use? The common sense needed to analyze this statement is of the same order as the process involved in analyzing the statement: "Reliable sources in Paris state that the visit of the American labor delegation has produced sensational repercussions in Moscow, and that Moscow, upon the basis of the American attitude, is determined to press for unification of the entire German labor movement."
To me thinking is primary tool of communication between I and “me” and it’s entirely based on sound and language.
Can you think without using language?
When you have song playing in your head, how is that different from your thoughts?
Isn’t talking out loud just act of thinking, the output being connected to mouth?
Have you ever tried to repeat mantra in your thought, slow down until coming to full stop? What remains when thinking stops?
Have you noticed that thinking is like breathing, in a way that it’s happening automatically and you can also take over?
Have you noticed that thinking consciously is linked with breath and being aware of space?
Fascinating topic!
This can be annoying: when my wife asks me what I'm thinking about, if I'm thinking about something relatively linguistic (an HN comment, say), it's easy to tell her. Otherwise, I need a fair amount of time and effort to make the consecutive interpretation (and forget about simultaneous!).
Further evidence that my thought is not especially language-mediated: my wife and I share a little over three languages in common; however translating into any of these is about as difficult as any other, suggesting that the original thought is equally "far away" from all of them.
I imagine a counterargument (or complication) to that is that such parallel evolution would require the neural networks to independently evolve certain breakthroughs multiple times before reaching the Homo sapiens stage. For example, language is recursive and yet human mathematical reasoning is recursive, but these use two different brain areas (according to the paper). So in their figure of two different brain regions for language processing versus math/code thinking, both regions had to somehow evolve the "wetware" for recursive computation. How did natural evolution manage that in general?
From there, you ask: "What is the fundamental aspect underlying each of these different faculties?"
The commonality of mathematical grammars (as mathematical objects in their own right) and natural language is that both have computational properties such as recursive structure - or ambiguity, which was discussed in the paper.
Formal grammar theory relies on recursive formulae to define what is a a language (formally set of sentences), natural language itself does not use/require recursion as understood in the same way. Some natural languages support grammatical features like sub-clauses but that's only "recursive" in the sense that attempts to describe such features (using formal language grammars) use recursion when in fact and in practice nesting sub-clauses do not "go on forever".
An analogy with computer programming languages - programming languages exist that do NOT support recursion (pre-Algol) but nonetheless require recursion to define their formal grammar. For example, a programming language can support limitless nested lexical scoping (loosely analogous to sub-clauses in natural language) WITHOUT supporting recursion (which requires a stack and managing frames).
For some programming languages (functional for example), recursion is such a key feature that it's inconceivable that the language could be useful without it.
This is not the case for natural languages. Most of the people I interact with daily have English as a second language and rarely or never use sub-clauses (which are not recursive but are often used to claim that language is recursive) so from practical experience, I know that English as a communication tool looses very little expressive power when users do not use sub-clauses.
Either way, I think you'd win a Nobel for proving that complex recursive processes aren't going on inside the head of someone speaking in natural language. We can discuss the likely situation all day, but directly measuring this in the moment seems well beyond our technical capabilities
His theories are unfalsifiable and un-empirical and thus, for me, unscientific. This discussion is typical. Chomsky's definition of "recursion" - like that of a "language organ" - has become completely plastic. In his initial work, it was deeply tied to the same notion in formal grammar theory but is constantly redefined and evolving as the initial notion becomes more and more dubious. The "human language is unique in that it is _recursive_" theory has no practical application and has provided no path for advancement in the field of language pedagogy for example.
Watch me chew up a bunch of karma dismissing Chomsky's theories of language. It's what often happens with comments that question his theories of language - I don't know why it's seemingly impossible to just admire his politics without feeling the need to vigorously defend his 60 or 70-year-old theories of language which have long been abandoned in the field.
The reason the specifics of Chomsky's proposals are changing is that it isn't a solved problem and he and others are continuing to try to advance the understanding by revising proposals in light of better arguments, simpler explanation and (contrary to what you say, see [1] which lists some examples) experimental evidence. In Chomsky's most recent book he himself quotes Wheeler: "Surely someday, we can believe, we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say to each other, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind so long!’". I think people have a hard time understanding this because it is one of the few nascent sciences and therefore no one has figured out the fundamental theories.
And if some specific proposal like X-bar theory is falsified or supplanted by something else that doesn't falsify the core ideas of universal grammar or the minimalist program. You say that it isn't possible to provide evidence that these are false but Moro for example conducted experiments comparing hierarchical and linear language processing that potentially would have provided reasonable evidence against language being hierarchical had they shown linear languages were processed similarly (instead they support it).
The reason you should be downvoted is that you made a bunch of evidence free assertions; You could have said "Neil Bohr's work has been completely falsified and is of dubious value" with the same amount of supporting argument.
[1] https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007363
1. “what are the neural structures and programs that produce language” and
2. “what languages have humans used to communicate in specific historical contexts, and how do these practices relate to each other?”
…are both worthwhile questions, and they obviously inform each other. But don’t you see where he’s coming from by calling the former “the biological study of language production” and the latter “the anthropological study of language usage”?
I’m interested to see you usually loose points! That brings me joy as a (non-academic, self-employed) chomskian, even tho it’s obviously infuriating people are still downvoting based on differences of opinion in 2024. My view is the opposite of yours: almost every corner of the internet has dismissed Chomsky as unempirical and also disproven by recent cross-cultural studies (??) and LLMs, from Hinton to the Stanford Phil page on linguistics to the Wiki and Britannica articles. I frequently see anti-Chomsky papers on HN and in my lit reviews from the connectionist/positivist camp in general, but that’s obviously a terribly biased survey. Perhaps we all have confirmation bias to see our “team” as the underdogs…
In terms of debating specifics (no pressure to respond, your outlook is very valid):
He’s still being cited a lot (160K in 2023 compared to recent peak of 210K in 2017), but of course that could all be refutations and/or non-linguists. Ultimately I absolutely agree that applied linguistics has far more practitioners in the US (the “west”?) today, but I don’t think that’s necessarily any kind of refutation of the merits of theoretical work.
I’m currently engaged in implementing general ideas of Chomsky’s into a cognitive model for AI, and I definitely think it’s a more productive theory than you’re giving it credit for. For one, the two basic observations “basically all linguistic inference is done by procedurally merging symbols and signs” and “what separates humans from animals is the ability to introspectively index and merge symbols and signs effectively” are essential pillars of my whole paradigm — without them I wouldn’t event know where to start! I think it’s much better than some competing “grand narratives” for human sciences like Behaviorism or Postmodern Relativism, but of course it’s far from perfect and surely has discouraged some valuable work over the years. I agree that it isn’t empirical, but only because it’s a guiding idea/standpoint/perspective and not what Chomsky would call a “scientifically defined term”. UG/nativism/minimalism gradually loose or gain parsimony in relation to our body of evidence over time, but they’re not consistent or specific enough to be fundamentally proven or disproven anytime soon IMO
"How else? Anyone? Gotcha!" followed by silence is not a propositional logic, it's a comedy cliche.
Very little for that subset you wish to communicate, maybe.
In some literary traditions, not only are clauses nested within clauses at the sentence level, but whole narratives are nested within others.
(hmm, are there any in-the-wild examples of recursive tmesis? if so, that'd be just fan-far-fucking-out-tastic)
Programming languages and human languages existed before people felt the need to define them using formal grammars. Yes most formal grammars use recursion but that's a property of the system you are trying to use to describe (meta) the structure of the object language - not part of the object language itself.
Try to use Haskell without recursion, it's effectively useless. But using an Algol derived language (Java, C, C++, etc.) without recursion is fine and hardly restricts the power of the language at all. Try to use English (or any other indo-European language - I've no knowledge of others) without sub-clauses and it remains a very powerful and useful communication tool.
But that is an example of a recursive context free grammar. The parser needs to use a stack or be defined recursively to parse things like that.
(there's a bit of a parallel, in that XVII english writers, not having readers as pressed for time as our current variant, make far more use of nested sub-clauses than we tend to; similarly, CPL, not having been as pressed for space as either BCPL or C, made far more use of nested sub-expressions than its successor languages)
Recursion doesn't have to go on forever.
Furthermore, as I mentioned before, formal grammars are artificial languages in their own right. The key thing is that the only way a human being can understand these languages (e.g., still at the level of syntax, independent of recursive computations like in functional programming which you did mention) is through some kind of recursive reasoning about their grammar.
And to keep the discussion at the forest instead of the trees, it is weird that human cognition comprehends these tree structures, recursive structures, or fractal structures, relatively naturally and intuitively. If I had said fractal would you have argued that natural languages don't exhibit fractal properties? We are talking bird's-eye level view of things here.
I also believe in the Church-Turing thesis plus the Chomsky hierarchy of computable languages (the idea that languages are models of computation, and that some language classes contain other classes in a hierarchy of what is computable -- see for instance the formal class of Recursive Languages), meaning that natural languages are not based on magical computations exceeding the power of universal computation; furthermore, as another subcommenter (see both users bbor and foobarqux) put it differently to you but if you are committed to a position that natural human language can only be approximated by artificial languages defined by formal grammars then you can never have a humanly intelligible account of the computational features of actual human language. It would be like arguing a laptop is not "meaningfully" like a Turing machine because a laptop has finite number of atoms as is thus really technically a finite state machine -- it's throwing the emergent/abstract baby out with the empirical bathwater.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursively_enumerable_languag...
If language were merely a tool for communicating thoughts rather than an integral part of thinking, then talking aloud wouldn’t help. But since raising the volume of one’s internal monologue does improve reasoning, this shows that the internal monologue is part of the thinking process - not a passive reflection of thought that is happening “elsewhere”.
Yes, of course you can engage in complex thought without language. There is verbal and non-verbal reasoning. A chess player thinks spatially in terms of how the knight moves, not just verbally, though verbal reasoning does help in chess somewhat.
That'd be worse then the currently linked PDF, which includes everything.
Language is a higher level abstraction for the brain. Sort of like a higher level programming language vs assembly or binary.
Sometimes people ask me if I think in English or my native language. I'm tempted to say "mostly not".
BTW, loose speculation: Maybe being bilingual does "free" the brain from word thinking.
I don't know how much weight should be given to this paper but, if true, directly contradicts Chomsky. Here is one quote from Chomsky:
""" ... One general assumption about language, almost a dogma in philosophy ... [and] linguistics ... is that language is primarily a means of communication ... probably that's totally false. It seems language ... is designed as a mode of creating and interpreting thought. """
In my opinion, I find Chomsky to get mired in certain quagmires around intelligence and computation, especially in regards to AI, where he's somehow managed to rationalize an absurd stance. I remember watching a video with Chomsky claiming that language's primary purpose was not communication and thinking it was potentially plausible but highly unlikely. I'd be curious to see if people think this paper, and maybe any other research, refute this position.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEmpRtj34xg
I have a lot of respect for Chomsky but sometimes it does seem he's lazy in giving a well balanced argument for the things he advocates for. The above clip I shared is him stating unequivocally that standard dogma is wrong. Now you're telling me he's walked back his position and arguing for something more nuanced.
The arguments for language as not-for-communication are 1. language's hierarchical structure is inefficient for linear communication 2. language seems to have appeared suddenly (probably due to a sudden mutation) and had no time to evolve and initially no one to communicate with 3. most use of language seems to be internal/thinking not communication.
These are all better arguments than those in the paper.
I haven't read much written text by Chomsky but, in my defense, I've listened to a lot more video and audio of his talks than mere "soundbytes". I stand by my statement about his talks.
He talks about this ideas constantly so I don't know if these are the best examples but:
1. About evidence for how language for communication is inefficient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyXqXfg-Dq4&t=3354s
2. About the sudden appearance of language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTGoYXx0Kew&t=1557s
3. Arguing with a biologist about the evidence for language being for thought (and a little bit at the end about how hierarchical structure is inefficient): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzzuPMA8s7k&t=307s
I also have this with reading. normally it seems it skips the internal voice and goes straight from image to thought. but once I start verbalising it, it's hard to stop doing it.
Language’s roots are in trade and survival. Therefore manipulation of others for the speakers benefit has ALWAYS been the primary purpose.
I feel sorry for you that you consider manipulation to be so central.
In fact languages codify a community’s culture, values, a way of life all of which go way beyond communication.
Indeed. And my non-expert assertion was that our brain doesn't compartmentalise between communication and thought processing. Our thoughts are getting shaped even as we are verbalising something. IMO it's a continuous stream of chatter of jumbled up things a part of which gets used to create/shape our thoughts.
RIP art and poetry.
- People experience their thoughts very differently
- We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking).
It seems like there's a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language.
That sounds absolutely nuts to me, but I've heard people say the exact same in reverse. Even more fringe is that there's a sizable number of people who when thinking about words (i.e. remembering names) visualize their words as text. What!? I can't imagine that anymore than I can imagine how a jellyfish feels?
The University of Wisconsin did a cool study that comes with a fun quiz you can do to see just how much of a wierdo you truly are: https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...
For example, does evolution have any pressure to produce those who think linguistically, vs healthy hair and skin?
I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue at all?
The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for them!)
That sounds like intuition to me
For example I do math entirely without any words in my process, and I easily got a master in math that way, barely had to study. No problem, you just translate it at the end. Limiting myself to words just makes it harder to think freely.
I always had problem with trusting my intuition or gut so I was worse in a lot of other real life things however. But math seemed abstract and solvable by words and brute force.
I wish things just magically came to me, but I think I always have to go through things with my inner monologue.
Like if I was to do multiplication in my head e.g. with same numbers, for example 62 x 62. I would have to go through it as a monologue.
I first remind myself of the strategy to do it, which is first I will do 60 x 60. Then it is 3600, then I add 2 x 60, 3720, and then there is 2 x 62 left, but I have to keep reminding myself occasionally what the last numbers were, that initial multiplication was 62 x 62, then I got 3720, and now I have to add 124... okay lets go 3820, 24 left, now 3844. Of course it is easier to remember as I am typing this, but in my head I have to keep reminding myself. And now I am not sure if I did a mistake so I go verify that on the calculator.
I do multiplication in my head similarly, just strip out the words, the numbers just flickers through and operations happens by themselves and I'm done in a second or two when I'm not rusty. Now that I'm rusty I do it more like (60x60=3600, 2x2=4, 60x2=120, 3600 + 4 + 120 + 120 = 3844), without doing any words, I just did that in my head right now and I am 100% sure not a single word, just the steps, I do sometimes verbalize the numbers so what I wrote in those parentheses is the most verbal my process for mathing that out gets.
Edit: Looking at that, I think it might be easier for someone to correct your thinking if you think in words, but thinking without words is way faster and way more creative since it removes the restriction of only thinking about concepts you have words for.
Edit2: I think your verbalization there is a ritual for the concepts to get to you. For me all I need to do is see 62x62 and imagine I want to solve it and all those thoughts flow to me automatically, basically a shortcut instead of having a large verbal ritual to piece together the concepts. I never did math verbally the way it is taught, so I am not sure how people think that way, to me this was always automatically this way.
Also this multiplying of two digit numbers I was never taught, I just came to a strategy that I explained with my thoughts. And I used to do these for fun as a kid. But I would only get faster than that if it was something I had memorized, but not numbers from scratch. And I had to constantly try to repeat numbers in my head that I had stored for addition down the road.
What is usually tougher top of my head and especially if I am tired at all, is something like 68 x 68. Then here first I have to decide whether I go from 60 x 60 or 70 x 70. Since it's that close to 70, I think 70 is more likely be easier. So I think okay 4900 - that's from memory right. Then I start to think what I have to take off from 4900 and what is 68 x 68 lacking compared to 70 x 70. So I will think that if I add 2 x 68, it will make it 68 x 70 and then I have 2 x 70 missing. So I need to deduct 140 and 136. So now at this point, this is much easier done in writing but here I frequently have to repeat numbers or redo some steps because I am not certain or I forget. But otherwise 4900 - 140, this comes easily instantly 4760 - maybe that's how it is for you with 62 x 62. And then now I take 100 off, it's 4660, and further 36 it would be 4624. Right now testing this in my head it took more than a minute because I wasn't sure whether I could just use the logic that I was thinking out of the box and I'm quite tired.
What if you were to have to do something more difficult e.g. 3 digits multiplication or 4?
I got to 4624 in 8 seconds on that now, and I haven't done significant amounts of mental math in over a decade. The 60x8 etc took a couple of seconds each but other than that it just happens automatically. A decade ago each of those would take a fraction of a second and it takes about the same time to calculate as to write it, I tend to calculate the numbers left to right instead of right to left as you are taught since you write it left to right, also more useful when calculating approximations since I just do what I normally do but stop earlier.
> Not in a doubting way, I just have no idea how I could do it in 2 seconds
Words are just slow. I never did math with words, so arithmetics is fast, and so is all the other things you learn in a math degree. I think word based processing in math is a big reason people have such a tough time with it, it really makes it much harder to think, like you are bogged down in a fog instead of up and free and agile with clear sight of everything.
Maybe it was easier for people to get past this stage when calculators were less prevalent. Calculators lets people get away with keeping their arduous word based math instead of just internalizing the concepts.
> What if you were to have to do something more difficult e.g. 3 digits multiplication or 4?
When on tests I write down some intermediate values. I am not a human calculator, I am just fast at math reasoning and being relatively fast at arithmetic's comes for free from that.
I did some physics tests without a calculator, you can approximate all those special functions using regular math logic you learn in high school. I did still ace the test, it isn't that hard once you have internalized it all.
Makes me really bad at following instructions though, since unlike math or physics you shouldn't internalize them instead you should just execute the words and that is really annoying, my brain really doesn't want to think in words. so try to translate everything...
Anyway, I think internalizing things might be harder or impossible if you haven't already done so with all the previous steps. If all your thinking and knowledge is word based then it is hard to break that, and vice versa, I can't think about math in terms of words really. I can slowly translate some things to words but I can't really drive thought with the words.
I can't follow verbal instructions as well though, I couldn't listen to the teacher etc. But I think it's because my inner monologue takes all the focus so I just follow my inner monologue which is probably completely another topic than what the lesson is about. I can't really focus away from my inner monologue. When I try, then I would just have philosophical meta discussion about my inner monologue. But also this meant that I couldn't actually learn the subjects as well during the class. I either had to learn from my free time or not at all.
Also have to watch films with subtitles, because audio language I have troubles focusing on.
I think all I have is my inner monologue, no good visual imagery, or other types of "thinking". I think makes me really poor at navigation as well. I never remember how to get somewhere. And also in general for anything 3d, like 3d games I will perform bad at, awareness wise.
Edit: Thinking more about it, in my head the numbers are numbers, but the operators are invisible, not sure what to call it but I don't think of the multiplication operator as anything tangible, I just know it is a multiplication of the two numbers.
Are you thinking that using words during thinking helps with reaching conclusions and knowing why you reached the conclusion?
For me it's just there, the thoughts, the facts, the logic, the sequence, the connections, etc. Expressing all of that in words happens afterward (if it happens).
So, as a person who definitely has an inner monologue, I absolutely agree. It's not like I'm literally sounding out words in my mind all the time. The vast majority of things I do I do without explicit use of language.
I think my understanding (mostly coming from Chomsky and in disagreement when OP) is that language is a mechanism for thinking that is mostly not accessible through conscious introspection.
Is Chomsky's idea that language is not necessarily the same as spoken language, it is an alternate brain mechanism that provides structure to thought as opposed to being the wild west of fluid/analog non-discrete/non-symbolic type of information processing?
While I seem to be a fast reader relative to people I know, I very much feel my reading speed is limited by sounding the words in my mind, so I agree - it's near-unbearably slow.
So thinking about something isn't a one speed operation, but being able to communicate those thoughts is.
Sometimes I do explicitly think with an internal monologue, though. Like if I'm debugging something I'll sometimes narrate what the program is doing in words. Also if I'm trying to figure out how some event happened I'll try to tell a story in my mind. It helps then as it forces me to serialise things.
When I read there is sometimes an internal monologue. When I write, there isn't. I don't talk like this. I think it's quite clear sometimes when people write with an internal monologue as their text reads like speech (which can be a good or bad thing, depending on its purpose).
This explains why I read slower when I read in English.
Reading your comment, I don't subvocalize at all. In order to get through my college degree, I taught myself speed reading. Now, I just naturally do it. My eye flicks to the middle of every 5-10 word chunk and flies though the text. If you did speech synthesis at that speed, it'd be a incomprehensible chipmunk. So I don't subvocalize at all. It'd be way too slow. To suppress subvocalization I used to hum (in my mind) instead, but I don't need to anymore. If something is hard to understand I will slow way down, then the subvocalization might kick in. When typing, I do subvocalize everything, since I can't write that fast.
I think this post/paper was more about your personal thought process rather than reading though. I very rarely have any internal monologue. In fact, the rare times I do have one are usually very awkward social situations where I wanted to say something but don't. Otherwise never. My whole life has been that way. An internal monologue sounds like a nightmare to be honest. Constant talking that nobody else can hear? No thank you.
Not a universal law. I don’t think I work in the same way as other people at all, as I cannot see what is obvious to others, and they cannot see what is obvious to me.
I don’t think, per se, the information and the integrated results of information are just there. People call it “intuition” but it isn’t some magical sixth sense, it’s just not using one’s language centre for compute, which is what many seem to do.
The moment I start consciously considering something, it all usually goes to hell - so a large part of how I operate is preventing myself from lapsing into “conscious thought”, and instead to keep whatever it is just below the surface until it’s cooked.
I infuriated teachers throughout my childhood by apparently paying zero attention but then inexplicably having the correct answer to whatever was posed to me, and have never quite related to other people, as it usually feels like I’m trying to bridge an immense gap of comprehension - not, to be clear, that I think other people are stupid - just more like I am running fundamentally different software, and everything has to go through an extensive translation and abstraction layer to make sense to others.
If I speak my thoughts directly, then they often emerge as allegory, as it’s the only way I can try to encapsulate the otherwise rather inchoate froth of connection which leads to a result. Sometimes others understand the allegory, but more often than not, they do not, as the symbols mean something else to them.
So yeah. I don’t think my mind works like most other people I encounter. The only other person I know who I think operates in the same way is my sibling, and people who have observed our conversations find them downright bizarre. They sound like beat poetry half the time, as with five well chosen words presenting the correct allegory we can transmit deep meaning to one another.
And before it, the time of having a raw thought in my brain it just feels like… something, it’s not sound, not light, but “a thing” which I know means the item or concept I am thinking of. And the process of thinking is kind of these “semantic things” bouncing off each other - which usually happens much faster than I can translate it into words.
When solving a problem, I usually tinker with it for a while and then let my “big subconscious coprocessor” deal with it for a while, and more often than not if not a solution but the clear idea of direction and reasoning emerges the next time I look for it.
At the same time I tend to make a fair bit of puns based purely on spelling alone - feels a bit magical to have all the omonyms kind of flash in the head all at once, and then make-pretend pick the wrong one for fun.
Is this anywhere similar ?
As to the big processor - I definitely do the same if no answer is immediately forthcoming - send it to the boys upstairs and wait for an answer, which usually comes while I’m in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely.
Puns, to an extent, although more often than not I just go off up and down an etymological tree, as the semantics behind so many words and concepts reveal further layers of interconnection and peculiar shreds of history. Physics is my play park, where I enjoy posing and chewing on gnarly problems, which often result in “inadequate data, please try again later”. Didn’t make me popular as an undergraduate as I asked all sorts of awkward questions about presuppositions and usually ended with a professor waving their arms and telling me to just accept it as so. “Dark matter” was what made me finally spit on the ground and decide to not pursue academia, as it’s just so blatantly wrong, and it hurts to see so many accept it as a hard done and dusted solution to something that is anything but solved - because our presuppositions are almost certainly wrong. Piles upon piles of monkeys supposing that they are the centre of the universe, with the perfect sensorium to know it.
Anyway. Like I say, I find it hard to see eye to eye with a majority of people, and I know I don’t make it any easier for myself.
During exams, where I had to cram lots of theory in a small amount of time, I recall trying to 'access' the slides via how they looked like in my mind and trying to somehow read the stored image, because that's for me easier to remember than the actual text when I'm not doing any deep understanding, but just memorization :/ I hated these kinds of exams, what's the point of repeating 500+ slides out of 14 weeks of courses word by word ?
Open book exams + internet + tricky questions were the best.
For me, language is primarily a tool for thought and only secondarily a tool for communication.
While i enjoy the process of thinking about things alone for hours, when presented with problems like in school or sometimes even today when someone gives me a riddle, i can also very strongly feel that i am not "thinking" actively. I am just thinking that i should think and often seem to make myself appear as if i was thinking – and that's it. It feels a lot like "fake it till you make it". Often times i have ideas other people call "brilliant" as well, or i seem to have s lot of refreshing takes on things according to others (stated to hide my weirdly self-conscious arrogance), it's not that i actively pursue it. I sometimes feel like i am standing on the piazza, waiting for this beautiful thought to walk past me. Too scared to talk to it, because she would realize i am too dumb to understand her and a con-artist anyway... but then, every once in a while this beautiful thought turns around and takes over my brain.
But maybe, i am truly just mad.
One thing that help is improv theater and pen and paper role play game, because you don't only have to thin about your idea, but how you are going to deliver it, and this is true in professional settings too. Doing that slow down my thought just enough to be clear. Hopefully this advice works for you too
[edit] You aren't mad
Our society expects everyone to be a Generator (in HD terms) - all people who are not then feel like they're totally weird. In reality, they're just wired differently, and have other strengths and weaknesses.
Humanity is like a big puzzle piece.
As someone who never was into astrology, Human Design was a shock.
I didn't want to even consider that idea at all, but as I got my design read by someone I never met, and it matched 95% of what I already knew about myself, I had to admit that it just fits. And so it is for most people - it fits.
Whereas astrology always was a lame 50/50 "could be true or not true" kind of thing. HD is different.
For example I have open head centers - in HD this means I take in thoughts from others and get carried away with them; I also have an easy time to still my mind and have no inner dialogue. And in my life I had already observed if I am talking to someone who is genuinely really excited about something, I get excited about it too - to the point where I am joining their project or decide to buy a book etc - but when they leave and it wears off I am thinking... "wait... why was that so exciting again?"... Now I know how to watch it, and how to distinguish their emotions and thoughts from mine, very useful skill.
How would one do that? Is there a website for it, or something? I tried looking it up and it purportedly uses date and place of birth, but those hardly have anything to do with me, so I don't see how that calculation could be any more useful than, say, a star sign.
The concepts seem interesting for sure, just not sure how to find what applies to me.
While astrology is bogus, you'd be surprised how much "date and place of birth" has to do with you.
There are statistics and studies showing higher than chance similar behavior/tendecies in people born in the same months (for things like depression, health outcomes, etc). Could have to do with exposure to sunlight during early days or whatever.
And for place of birth, of course normally (if you're not in some mix-and-match country like the US, or if your parents don't immigrate immediately) this affects inherited genetic constitution, and of course culture, access to resources, diet, and many other factors.
i.e. you'd need to know "people born around this date in this place tend to have whatever human design" in order to provide me actual predictions based on only date and place of birth, but no such data has ever been collected.
Well, it depends on the degree which we require it to define you. In a looser degree, it would define most people quite a lot.
Put another way your "place of birth" alone, would be a huge information point towards predicting lots of things about someone vs someone from another place of birth, given they're different enough (say, India vs Italy, not Spain vs Portugal or Germany vs Austria).
If betting and money was involved about e.g. income, wealth level, studies or not, food preferences, religion, politics, morals, and so on, knowing the place of birth would be a great boon (all other information being equally shared). Repeated many times with different people, you'd be correct way more.
>i.e. you'd need to know "people born around this date in this place tend to have whatever human design" in order to provide me actual predictions based on only date and place of birth, but no such data has ever been collected.
If we were to bet on whether a person is black or white, freckled or not, has epicanthic fold or not, etc, I don't need no special "data collected" to know what people born in Lagos vs Dublin would look like for example. It's common knowledge.
And in some cases where this changes over time, the data of birth would also come in handy. E.g. in the tendency of a random London citizen to have say South Asian features in 2024 vs 1950.
> If we were to bet on whether a person is black or white, freckled or not, has epicanthic fold or not, etc, I don't need no special "data collected" to know what people born in Lagos vs Dublin would look like for example.
Yes you do. In order to make an educated guess, you'd have to know, given where they were born, whether that place is more likely to produce certain traits or not. You could then use that information to make your guess about how likely they are to possess those certain traits, having been born there. But without any information on how likely those traits actually are for people born there, knowing where they were born grants you nothing.
> It's common knowledge.
It's not common knowledge what my Human Design type would be given only when and where I was born. That's the whole point I'm trying to make. Astrology or not, the entire idea of giving me an answer solely based on when and where I was born, will always be bogus.
Now, if they had an actual dataset of the Human Design types of people from all around the world, and wanted to correlate me with that, then maybe I'd be inclined to give it a try, just out of curiosity.
But I'm not even the slightest bit curious about bogus astrology (or any other types of divination). I'd be glad to take a personality test, for example, because they ask actually relevant questions. Just not this.
> And in some cases where this changes over time, the data of birth would also come in handy. E.g. in the tendency of a random London citizen to have say South Asian features in 2024 vs 1950.
I'm not arguing against correlating this with other data. The entire point is that one needs to correlate it with other data in order for my answer to be at all useful, and what I have a problem with is that correlation is not being done. The alignment of the planets alone is not going to reveal my personality type, and not even when combined with my location.
It may be surprising to you but as someone who is well read in mentalism I can fairly confidently tell you that a 95% match is not hard to fabricate in readings. Admittedly is the area of mentalism I don't perform but I have read plenty of theory. Your HD reading was probably based on Barnum statements/cold reading. If you're interested to learn more about this I'd suggest "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading" by Ian Rowland. For a more fun exercise, get a reading at a medieval fair or from some "medium" (please don't pay a lot) and compare it to your HD reading.
Full disclosure: I loathe astrology, to a disproportionate and somewhat irrational extent.
Thanks for the book rec though. As a "fan" of James Randi, that seems interesting.
I think you're not mad, but rather demonstrate a learned behavior to a very common situation any person finds themself in. IE they don't know or aren't sure if they don't know and any case don't want to appear as if they don't know certainly so they put in the least amount of effort to obscure ascertaition with some fancy distracting magicians hoodwink.
I think getting answers to nuanced/frontier or non-frontier problems can involve different sets of brain processes and behaviors. For already solved problems with knowledge thats pervasive throughout society, the solution is simply observation and copying, OR recollection and re-execute from memory.
For other problems one can figure out through reasoning and extrapolation.
For other problems no amount of armchair reasoning and theorizing will figure out (frontier problems not yet solved by any humans or at least humans accessible ) it, and they will need to do some trial and error exploration within reality on the path to solving a problem. Thinking in language, recalling by search and retrieval isn't going to find a solution to the problem at hand in these situations, but humans will try and jam the square peg into the circular hole especially if thats easier to do (and it is) than expending a lot more trial and error energy to do reality based experiements instead of pure clean easy brain processes of keyword/descriptor search and retrieval.
Search and retrieval with or without words is a very quick and easy brain process, perhaps anything you do that solely involve those brain processes you perform excellently at. Not all problems solely rely on these process such as analyzing new unsolved puzzles put on your doorstep. Perhaps there's a habitual behavior where you're trying to over-rely on the quick processes and doing the magicians trick to obscure the lack of actual solution with the hopes of retaining social standing. Instead of slowing things down attempting the slow bog down of actually finding the problem while communicating as such OR making use of human language for its actual purpose and networking for someone who has already solved the problem and deferring to their authority.
But all and all humans collectively are driven to collect (no, hoard greedily) solutions to problems at or not at the frontier and incorporate/encode those into their brain in a way that the solutions can be searched and retrieved in an efficient reflex like manner that's conducive to your ADHD speed.
I suck at language but am good at analytical stuff and because of that I'm not going to put any more effort into reducing this lengthy TLDR literature rambling into a concise conducive to reading snippet. My apologies to those that don't skip over this and trudge through this Thesis length reading.
I have a huge quote "Notes" from all the books i've read. This is the first time a quote has made it into the notes that has come from a random comment on the internet. I think i'll carry this quote in the back of my minds eye for the rest of my life.
But seriously, thank you for taking the initiative & time to comment & letting me know this. Weirdly, it means a lot to me. And actually touched me. Which sounds even weirder, but it's true. That someone liked & resonated with this, even when in such a bad form...
Anyway, I really appreciate it & you. I try to leave out no chance to say something positive or let people know they had a positive impact on me, even if it's just such a small thing. Probably because i wish people would let me know more often, as confirmation that all my efforts aren't for nothing. But your comment is actually the only confirmation of me leaving just the slightest trace... you've helped this lonely, broken soul. A lot.
Please keep this in the back of your minds eye as well, when carrying the words there.
The inner voice and mind's eye don't surprise me, I'm among the more hyperlexic people I know and seem to have total aphantasia, but I didn't realize (though I guess it seems like an obvious possibility in retrospect) that there were people who processed words as text in their head - I guess the survey itself said that surprised them too.
I also didn't consider that there could be a large degree of variability in representational manipulation, and assume that this kind of inevitably leads to some pretty hard to bridge inferential gaps when speaking across that divide. Honestly maybe I'm misunderstanding what's meant by that, because the other extreme sounds to me like there are some people who just can't do metacognition which sounds insane. I'm guessing however that this is similar to an experience I had with a (now ex-)lover who was shocked when I mentioned I don't have visualization, and asked "So you're telling me you have no imagination at all?", which like, I wouldn't say is true? My imagination can be prosaic, narrative, auditory, abstract, olfactory, emotional, or kinematic, just not visual. I kind of assume that's similar to what I'm doing here, like whatever "manipulating representations" means here is a useful capability by which to do metacognition but not the thing itself... but it seemed like their questions pertained to a lot of different kinds of manipulation of abstractions or mental models, so I can't really figure out how you'd examine your thoughts per se without that ability. Maybe there's someone more knowledgeable about this field here that could help me understand the distinction?
I probably failed due to this agree/disagree test laziness. You never know what they meant by things like “I often enjoy X”. What does strongly disagree mean here? Never? I don’t enjoy? What if I don’t enjoy it, but do often? Why not ask it directly like “I X: never sometimes often” or “I relate to X: hare it … love it”. Even then it’s unclear what “sometimes” means. Once in a year, in a month, in a day? This indirection and vagueness adds so much noise to the result.
I guess all this tells how I think more than the test itself.
As far as the Likert scale nonsense, I am right there with you, all these psychological instruments are pretty poorly framed from my perspective, and while there's some discourse deep in academia about the rigor of various experimental methodologies even in the most broken of social sciences, in practice they don't seem to care much because it's publish or perish baby!
It really doesn't seem like most sciences are quite this broken, though some are clearly trying. Obviously there are people in psychology trying to do good rigorous science, it seems like institutional pressures are not working to support them, and certainly won't amplify rigor over making bold claims that get a lot of press
Like, all this to say that it's definitely worth taking these things with a massive grain of salt, but if you do that, it can still be pretty interesting.
Interesting, it's the same for me. I'm 94th and 98th percentile on the first two, but 2nd and 25th percentile for the other two. Since we're both on a (primarily) science and tech oriented website, I wonder if there's any correlation between ones occupation/hobbies/skills and their method of thinking.
Also, I'm surprised to hear that I'm an extreme outlier when it comes to the mind's eye. When I think about it, even recalling the face of my partner (who I see daily, including this morning) is not easy and comes out very fuzzy. But I have no problems with imagining complex geometry, maps, navigation, etc.
I'm constantly talking to myself in my head as if I'm talking to a duplicate of myself. Asking questions, providing answers, having full back and forward conversations (especially with programming). There are certainly days though where, if you have a lot going on, you can start to burn yourself out with conversation (since every single action of the day comes with a conversation). Even if it's just "Oh I should make a coffee. Did I have a coffee yet? No, I think you had one this morning. What about if I made one anyway. Yeah I think that would be fine. Oh do I need to boil water? I suppose I should check if the water is hot. Yep looks like I do have to boil some". and after a while you just get sick of talking to yourself. But you can't switch it off and it drives you a bit batty sometimes.
I asked my wife once if she constantly narrates her own day, she said absolutely no. She said she only really has an internal monologue when reading things from text. And she writes down a lot of stuff on text. But other than that, she answered confused by my question "...nothing? I guess? Quiet?"
Brains are interesting!
Same, happening to me right now, happens automatically almost every morning when I wake up, which kind of gives me my own "soundtrack of the day" and enjoy the ride.
Sometimes the song is stuck in repeat though and the only way to kick it out of loop is to actually listen to it.
An interesting bit is that this internal jukebox is actually playing faster than real time, even though it sounds absolutely correct and natural in my mind and definitely not as if it was a 1.2~1.5x play rate that would give this funny "Benny Hill effect"; so when I perform the song at the time scale that I hear it it is clearly too fast (higher BPM) to outside observers or when compared to an original recording.
It's as if my experience of mind-time is skewed vs real time so I've developed a bunch of coping strategies like padding (e.g making every beat having a "late by ~x" feeling), forceful downclocking (some sort of detached zen mode where I let go of the internal clock, which gives a very surreal feeling of perceiving the world), or active continuous ratio compensating (sort of like the world is going at 0.8x compared to my reference clock so remapping makes it sort of bullet-timesque)
Socially it's all very disconnecting and exhausting.
I wonder if it would help if I wrote a little program that plays short note sequences and then asks me to recreate the sequence (possibly modulo transposition).
Your ear (the ability to recognize intervals, scales, chords, chord progressions, rhythms etc) is one of (if not the) your biggest asset as a musician. And it's the only way to get the music out of your head, so cultivate it. Practice practice practice! Don't have to do more than a couple of minutes per day to see some results.
Ear training is something all creative musicians have to do. Many who are self-taught simply do it through picking up other people's tunes by ear (= transcribing), working it out on their instrument, starting with easy stuff and over time learning to "decipher" more difficult pieces. Dedicated ear training can really boost this process.
In theory I could translate it to a DAW (but I'm not that great at transcribing music...it's possible, kinda, but slow), but I can't easily repeat the music in my head (not what I make up at least, proper released songs tend to be easier to repeat), so it would be difficult to recreate it enough to be worth the effort.
These days I mostly use words but there are many concepts that don't have a short number of words corresponding to them, which makes recalling them much harder for me.
I was surprised to learn the other day from HN that not only some people, but some commenters here, consider the notion of "not opening one's mouth to start a sentence before knowing how it's going to end" an impracticable ideal.
what does this mean?
The experience of thought differs from brain to brain. For example, autistics generally experience thought differently from neurotypicals.
This happens, in part, because autistics have a different distribution of synaptic connections, which are shorter on average than is neurotypical. This typically results in an experience of disorganized thought, where multiple different parts of the brain contain independent thought, because there aren't enough connections directly between them to enforce synchronization. There are enough localized connections to allow general thoughts to happen and be operated on, but they are exactly that; localized.
Detail-oriented thinking is another well-known side effect of this, because each individual detail can easily be fit somewhere without being lost in the "big picture". Autistics are usually who you'll find sweating details that most people wouldn't necessarily care about, but they're also who you'll find sometimes getting lost in those details rather than sticking to a single clear vision. Neurotypicals, on the other paw, can miss those details if the picture as a whole looks okay to them, but they also usually won't get stuck on them in the process of executing their vision.
Note that every person is different, whether autistic or non-autistic, so there are autistics who are good at thinking in terms of the big picture and neurotypicals who are good at considering every detail. The fact that the physical mode of thinking differs doesn't necessarily mean that another can't be emulated - it just means that even if two people appear to be doing or thinking the same thing, the way it's actually implemented "in hardware" (meatware?) can differ greatly depending on neurotype, even from autistic to autistic and neurotypical to neurotypical, as the brain has no single switch between fully autistic and fully neurotypical.
Some of the statements in this comment are based on my personal experience as an autistic, some are based on anecdotes from others, and some are based on this article: https://embrace-autism.com/autism-and-disorganized-thoughts/
I've been informed that the author of the article doesn't generally do good work, but I've personally reviewed the article and believe it to still be sufficiently accurate. Additionally, this particular description of autistic disorganized thought is what originally tipped me off to the fact that the way I think is different from others. If you're not autistic and/or it doesn't describe you, please know that it perfectly describes me, which should be enough to understand how exactly the experience of thought can differ from brain to brain.
Also, psychedelics can significantly change one's mode of thinking. I use them recreationally from time to time. Somehow, they give me better executive function than my ADHD meds do.
I wonder if the quiz is missing questions / scoring around thought awareness.
I said, no, I have thoughts, and I communicate them with language but the thoughts are not language.
Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless.
To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!
So yes, we learn how our minds can work completely differently from one another.
The study of Human Design takes this to the next level - this strange science states that humans can be classified in 5 different general types which operate totally different from one another - it has taught me a lot about other people.
My base assumption that everyone is more or less like me - turned out to be completely off.
> To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!
I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking". Are you by any chance neurotypical, or close to neurotypicality? My impression is that neurotypical brains have a higher degree of synchronization than autistic brains, which would make suppressing thought easier.
I'm autistic, and I don't just have thoughts; they have themselves. Thoughts just spontaneously come into existence, and just think on their own. I can think about them myself, but only by picking up existing thoughts. Thoughts come into existence whether I intend them to or not, so it is not possible for me to suppress them.
On one paw, the fact that thoughts seemingly think about themselves allows me to fit a lot of logic in my head at once without getting overwhelmed. But on the other, being unable to control which thoughts are in my head can be really infuriating.
I am doubtful that anyone can truly stop thinking. But people can have more or less awareness of their thoughts, and they can be having thoughts that they don’t consider to be thoughts. For example, if you notice that your shirt is wet, that is a thought even if you don’t “think” anything about it.
I haven’t personally tried one, but I believe the purpose of a sensory deprivation tank is to create an environment where your thoughts are unavoidable.
Yes, that is my experience. If I try not to have thoughts, then what happens is not that thoughts stop happening, it's that I stop noticing them until they're more fully developed. This "not noticing" results in a relative lack of remarks upon those thoughts, but the thoughts themselves are not made of or depending on language. They just are things. Technically, they are "derived meaning".
When on psychedelics I can have thoughts that not only don't depend on language, but don't have language. It's not possible to describe them because they represent indescribable things. It's possible to feel them and interact with them in a way that seems to makes sense to me, but it's not possible to communicate them. If I try, they can actually result in words being generated, but those words sound like a bad phone autocomplete - stuff like "can have a haves and take a three sixteenth quarters" (real excerpt from a past trip).
(My guess is that my brain has some sort of internal format that real-world concepts are translated into in order to be operated on. That's the "meaning" that gets derived. I wonder if psychedelics allow me to create or perceive meanings that no real-world concept would ever actually translate into, and therefore don't have any way to communicate as a real-world concept.)
> I am doubtful that anyone can truly stop thinking.
This statement is a perfect example of benrutter's point:
> - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
Don't be so sure that nobody has thoughts that can truly stop, even just for a short time.
I'm the same way, my thoughts happen first, are completed and sitting in working memory with my awareness of the thought/result/whatever it is.
If I have an internal monologue, which isn't always, it's after the fact and more about re-stating the thought that already happened.
I wouldn't say that. What I would rather say is that everyone starts with the expectation that they share thought with others.
There is overwhelming empirical evidence that people can tell when others think like them. Not everybody treats this indicator the same way. Some are fascinated when others think differently. Some get uncomfortable when they can't tell what another is thinking or feeling.
I'm sure not everyone understands why there can be others that don't think like them. To a simple mind, it might just seem like there's something wrong with them or that they have unaligned goals/interests; you actually can see that assumption from certain neurotypicals. (I don't know if it's truly specific to neurotypicals.)
However, it is possible not to believe, even secretly, that everyone experiences thought the same; I certainly don't. I try my best to understand exactly how thought can differ between each person, of course, but in the process of doing that research, it does become abundantly clear just how much I don't know, and just how differently others think than how I do.
Similarly I doubt others would say they have an internal monologue if they couldn't express it in words. Hence I am fairly certain that they think in a different way, or at least they think they do.
I used to consider myself 3D-impaired -- unable to maintain and rotate a 3D image in my head, which also made 3D software frustrating. (I also have, it turns out, some binocular vision issues and some other mild cognition weirdness).
But a few years back I started on a hobby project, and I started to assemble my own DIY kit (because the commercial stuff is too expensive). To do that I had a lot of mental puzzles to try to solve.
Then I decided the best way forward was a 3D printer so I tried to find 3D tools that would work for me on even a basic level -- OpenSCAD, CadQuery, FreeCAD etc.; as many different ways to approach the problem as would shed light on ways to think about it.
I'm no longer really an OpenSCAD person but once my first successful models came out of my printer, my brain was changed forever, and now I visualise mechanisms in my head.
(One of the most powerful things I have learned about how to imagine any man-made, real world object, is to imagine the tools making it.)
I have no "mind's eye" and can't produce an image in my head. But confusingly, I am quite good at the mental 3D manipulation. I can spin the cow in my head and describe its orientation, but I don't actually see the cow, I just know it. I suppose my brain just has a different way of approaching this problem than visually.
This is where the language is tough. I'm not visualizing or imagining as those words describe the act of using a mental image. I'm perceiving the cow? It is hard to communicate.
Right. This is enormously challenging in itself. And I think because nobody talks about it, it's possible, or maybe the default, to assume that you're simply broken in an obvious, universal way, and not that there might be variation or even routes to change your outcomes with metacognition or thought experiments.
What often comes up is stuff like "oh I thought 'the mind's eye' was just a figure of speech, I had no idea people meant it in a meaningful sense"
A tiny tiny fraction of people talk about their mind's eye being part of their visual field, to the point that they can sort of functionally see -- hallucinate -- an imaginary object on a table like AR.
Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described.
Most children can sort of whimsically play the imaginary-drinking tea game, imagining the shape of the teacups, imagining spilling tea or milk, but the mental images might not have attributes like colour or weight until they are specifically assigned to the visualisation. Like: what colour are the teacups? They don't have colour until you pick one, and then they do. Is it a heavy cup? It's not, but I do have a saucer. The more you add to the visualisation, the less translucent/ghostly/formless/conceptual it is.
The fascinating thing about broad aphantasia is that it appears to be way beyond even that; it's like things only happen conceptually, yet they still happen. Like the sibling comment from andrewflnr perceptively said: as if it's a conceptual blind-sight.
And when you consider our evolutionary pathway, perhaps it actually is the same phenomenon: a part of the brain successfully doing part of the task, without the support of the visualiser.
But this is different from the kids tea party. I can easily pretend to hold a teacup without closing my eyes and visualizing a teacup, I don't think one has anything to do with the other.
If you ask someone to actually imagine seeing a teacup but what they're imagining doesn't have a colour or size, _what are they imagining_?
I'm imagining a teacup - made of china, decorated in some way, capable of holding a few mouthfulls of ~75C thin liquid, smaller than a big mug, larger than a shot glass, with a handle sizes for the tip of one finger, delicate, ceremonial; concept space constrained to broadly teacup-ish area. But not a specific teacup unless it becomes important whether it's a plainer heavy duty cafe teacup or a grandma's Royal Jubilee promotional teacup.
Right, isn't that weird though! :-)
I don't know if it's weird; generalising a category from specific examples is saves memory space over remembering every individual teacup we've ever seen, so going the other way starting with a general concept of a teacup and only specifying as and when needed seems to make sense.
I obviously failed to communicate what I was saying.
If you give me a teacup and tell me to imagine I can see it, I have to know what it looks like before I can form that image.
This is all just a failure of communication because to me, part of the definition of having an image of something in your mind is that you know what it looks like.
Since knowing the colours and shapes are required to form an image, if you don't have those, you don't have an image.
Imagining a teacup is possible without imagining you can see a teacup.
The pure, abstract essence of teacup, to them.
I suppose I assume it does have size and shape (it's functionally an imaginary cup, after all, and not another imaginary object).
Maybe to someone who has only ever seen blue teacups, it's inherently blue?
For me, if I start that exercise it's not even white; its colour is undefined until I interrogate the idea it should have colour.
Or until whichever hilarious infant I am having an imaginary tea party with tells me what colour it is, of course.
If you ask me to imagine seeing a maze with hundreds of turns, rather than saying I have a nonspecific image, I'll say I'm having trouble forming a concrete image.
If you ask people to imagine a teacup, some will imagine seeing one, others will imagine holding one, others will have no images or feelings in their mind.
I'm pretty sure, like others are, a lot of this is just down to ambiguous or poorly specifies language.
Not really. I mean, I have some aphantasia-type aspects with faces. But my mind's eye is quite amenable to the semi-lucid mental image of a cup that doesn't have colour until I ask myself what colour it has, doesn't have fine shape details until I consider them.
After all, not all of our eye even sees in colour! Part of our visual apparatus only provides black and white imagery to our brain. So there's plenty of colourless imagery within our cognition.
If I ask you to imagine you can see something, and you haven't decided on basic details like what it looks like, this is exactly equivalent in my mind to me saying "imagine a number" and you not being able to tell me any digits of the number - you didn't really do what I asked.
We can go through and tediously define every word we're using but hopefully the above paragraph will allow you to tell where our definitions differ.
I don't really feel like that's true. If you asked me to choose a specific number, sure. But if the task really were just to imagine the concept of a number, unbound to anything, it wouldn't be a specific number until it needed to be.
Similarly, when thinking of a cup, unless I'm explicitly trying to imagine a specific cup, as close to reality as possible, it is merely a cup. Not a red cup, or one with a tiny annoying handle that I can only fit one finger into.
There are two questions there. Select the properties of a randomly chosen cup, and relay them to me. At which point i'd feel like im making it up as you ask for specific properties. Or just picture a cup, squashing, stretching, rotating. I think very much that these mental images are deeply baked into the ways we interact with the world (and are not literally seeing so much as attention to details of idealized concepts). It can't be a coincidence my mental image having transformations applied to it effortlessly is because of my work with 3d modelling and robotics.
If my mind wanders into those things, I could imagine the cup morphing between those scenarios, unreality forming into reality. Seeing with the minds eye is not seeing, in a literal sense.
I believe that there is a sense in which if we were forced to actually see the real world as it is, every detail of everything all at once, as a camera sees it, it would be far too much (consider things like optical illusions, human blind-spots in the visual field). Hence all sorts of mental shortcuts are taken where below the concious layer things are stiched together to make a false sense of cohesiveness out of a distinctly disconnected and incoherent stream of input data. Every sense even has varying time-lag, to the point the brain predicts nerve signals before they come in, hence phantom limb pain etc. It ends up that so little of you is actually the concious mind you.
Objects in the minds eye are similarly abstract objects. You cannot see every detail unless you decide upon what you choose to see. An apple, in my mind, has the blotchy, slightly coarse texture on the outside most apples have. But is it a red apple or a green apple? It's somewhere between the two. The digits of my number are a blur approximating all digits, the digits I expect to see, until I look closely. Similar to how the room in your peripheral vision is still the same. Probably.
Well, I was able to, but it didn't come from first principles or even visualizing it. It came from imagining myself at a keyboard and "simulating" typing. In my mind's body, I would type a sentence, which enabled me to extract the location of the keys, which I could then translate into part of the visual sketch on paper. The initial sketch came out with key sizes and shapes heavily distorted, but all of them spatially located in the correct relative horizontal ordering, and a second sketch made it possible to regularize them.
Not sure what it means, but it was an interesting exercise.
But my aphantasia isn't complete. Sometimes when I think of a person I get a dim image of their face for about a tenth of a second. And very rarely, I do see things in dreams.
I used to think -- until maybe ten years ago -- that I could not imagine the faces of friends and loved ones.
That is, if I try to visualise a person's face, I get an incomplete glimpse in my mind that dissolves away within an instant.
(People in my dreams do not really have detailed faces, if I can ever really look at their faces at all; it's like I don't make eye contact. Though they are not face-less horrors.)
This has been distressing, particularly when my mum died.
But then I discovered two really interesting things:
1) I can sometimes imagine a "still" face if I visualise a photograph of that person (maybe only slightly more if I took it)
2) I can bring someone's face to mind much more successfully if I associate it with an emotion or an action, and once I've done that, as long as I keep them in motion I can visualise a lot more for longer.
A quarter of a century after she died, if I want to remember my mum, it's a real challenge. She hated being in photos so there aren't many. But it's possible to start by imagining her angry (sorry mum) or the annoyed look on her face when she was trying to solve a puzzle game on the computer. Then I might be able to keep her face in my mind for long enough.
My dad passed away a couple of years back and for this loss I was ready; I have some photos, but more importantly I had spent the previous years learning his face experiencing different emotions. My favourite route to imagining my Dad's face is to imagine a situation where he might show puzzled, half-smiling amusement or fascination when presented with something he didn't understand or didn't work quite the way he expected. I will be able to recall his face in motion, just as my face starts to leak around the eye sockets :-/
So on the one hand: even now I can't visualise still faces at all! I struggle to describe faces of people I don't really know well. As soon as a face is still, it goes.
On the other hand, I have taught myself a visualisation process that can conjure up meaningful animated recollections that are filled with emotion. I have to do it deliberately, but it's lovely to do.
One final quirk: despite all this, I appear to potentially be a super-recogniser. I can't visualise a still face, but I do not "forget a face"; I can tell you with eerie accuracy whether I've seen someone before and where. And I do rather well with the "which of these faces did you see in this clip" type test, and very well at the tests like "which of these faces is this face from another angle".
And I find myself very easily fooled by subtle changes in a person's appearance. If someone gets a major haircut or changes their hair color, they might as well be a different person to my brain, initially.
That is true aphantasia.
I don't have this aspect of the problem -- indeed, I often have the weird super-recogniser problem of correctly identifying that I have seen someone unknown to me before, and where. I might be able to even describe the clothes they were wearing that last time or something they were holding or doing.
But I would struggle to describe their face to someone else.
I sometimes wonder if what it actually is, is a kind of fundamentally unexplored thought or experience.
There's a bunch of other examples.
Like... I can't _really_ tell my left from my right on an instinctive level, though I believe this to be inherited because I have relatives who can't.
Ask me directions in a hurry and I'll get them wrong even when I am sure they are right. I don't really have a "left" and a "right"; I have two sides that don't feel that different.
So I also can't really use mirrors well.
I have surprisingly quick and accurate reflexes for catching falling things but I can't catch a ball thrown to me.
The question about all of these things is: are they just things I have never found the right way to deliberately work through into a conscious process? Are they things I can't do now because I didn't learn when my brain was fresh?
My own thinking on this has been to consider the origins of language. In a community of hominins on the verge of developing a language, would they not need, as a prerequisite, some non-linguistic ability to consciously grasp that at least some of the vocalizations of their peers represented feelings that they recognized in themselves? But that, by itself, would not be enough for them to develop a language; in addition, I feel, it would take both a desire to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others (motivated in part, I would guess, by recognizing that it would be useful to do so) and the recognition that this might be accomplished through artificial sounds and/or gestures with arbitrarily-allocated yet specific meanings. I feel that there's a bootstrap problem in regarding language as primarily a means of thinking that was found to be useful in communicating.
Like you (and, apparently, the survey compilers) I am surprised to learn that a sizable minority of people report frequently visualizing words as text. On reflection, however, that sounds somewhat like a form of synesthesia, and I occasionally get enough of a hint of that to put it just barely in range of my personal experience - but then, I don't regard people whose experiences differ markedly from mine as wierdos.
I suppose chose your own adventure.
Well, the first is not exactly right. People might experience thoughts differently, but not that widely so. It's not like "anything goes", more like there are a few cases, and people fall into one or the other (e.g. some can have aphantasia).
And the second, while right, is hardly "mind melting". Why would people assume otherwise, since the only immediate empirically seen thinking they have access to is their own?
(Especially since different modes of thinking is not exactly "anything goes" as we said, so the second-hand examples of thinking they have, e.g. people describing or mimicking thinking and inner monologues in movies and books, match how the majority thinks)
I don't see how we could possibly know this.
Also was hoping that quiz would ask about other senses; how easily people can choose to imagine tastes and smells, e.g. on their agree/disagree scales:
1. You can easily imagine the smell of freshly baked bread.
2. You can easily call to mind the taste of peanut butter.
3. You are melting chocolate and somebody suggests adding basil, you can vividly imagine how that would taste before trying it.
4. When remembering an event that happened to you, there is a strong smell memory included.
5. You can imagine feeling the weight and texture of a brick in your hands.
a. There is a voice inside your head, and your consciousness is not the one talking: schizophrenia.
b. There is a voice inside your head, it's you doing the talking i.e. you're doing everything but moving your lips and producing sound - the words are literally being narrated in your mind: internal monologue.
c. No language is being "spoken" inside your head. If you're not talking, you're not forming sentences at all: apparently some people have this experience.
My experience is b, but it is possible for me to also think without having to narrate everything (a bit of c). If anyone has a different internal experience, please reply.
They must listen to a large amount of verbose drivel telling them how to weave their way through a crowd, or how to rotate a suitcase to fit it into a trunk.
I always had thought this is the case too. Thinking isn't linguistic but it can be helpful as a tool while thinking, especially while thinking about communication.
It also seems obvious to me that language is a tool for communication rather than thought, although sometimes it also includes communication to yourself (in future).
In some cases, I can visualize words as text too, especially if thinking about written communication.
The quiz does not work.
They say we don't use language for thought, but language informs our strategies and choices, and collective experience is essential for progress. We only add small increments of insight from our own experiences to the pool, but the experience captured in language is greater than any one of us.
And more interestingly, LLMs trained on this data show amazing capabilities that go beyond mere reproduction. LLMs gain everything Einstein lost in this experiment, what is the language part and what is the pure insight part? Looks to me humans are like LLMs on feet, and with a full social complement surrounding them.
It'd be akin to chatting with an isolated tribesman - that alone would already be fascinating and endlessly informative. These are people who can walk into the woods naked, and walk out weeks later fed, clothed, and sheltered. And now also add in this individual happening to be a several sigma outlier in learning capacity, creativity, and so on. It'd be an absolutely fascinating discussion!