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> and computation you can describe in words and communicate to other brains But we think in words. Thinking and speaking come from the same place, and when we

by unabst 10y ago

> and computation you can describe in words and communicate to other brains But we think in words. Thinking and speaking come from the same place, and when we are thinking, most of it is us talking to ourselves. It's our inner dialog. It's "communicating to other brains", where "other" is "our". The only difference really is who it's directed to, whether we've voiced it or wrote it down, and whether we self-censored some of it in the process.

Jtsummers 10y ago
> But we think in words. Not everyone does this. > The only difference really is who it's directed to, whether we've voiced it or wrote it down, and whether we self-censored some of it in the process. That last part is the part that's key to computational thinking. What has been elided from your thoughts (expressed as an inner monologue, communicated via writing or voice to others)? Computational thinking requires you to be able to provide sufficient detail that a "computer" can repeat the process that you have performed, and potentially enough logical information that it can handle exceptional cases and situations. For a sufficiently advanced computer (read: intelligent and educated human), "Solve the equation for X" may be sufficient. For a program in C, you'll have to provide more detail. For a Mathematica program, it's about the same as communicating it to a human (depending on their level of education and the qualities of the equation, Mathematica may require more or less detail).
- unabst 10y ago
  > Not everyone does this. Yes, you do need to be literate. But if you are, and you think, what do you hear? And what did you just write, if not your thoughts? Except directed to me/HN after confirmed with yourself? I would not use the term computational thinking for what you are describing, and I wouldn't consider natural languages and programming languages and mathematics all "languages of thought" either. Mathematics is formal. Programming languages are Turing Complete instruction sets with abstraction and other language features. Natural language is something entirely different. The only thing they all have in common is that they are expressed with symbols. > Computational thinking requires you to be able to provide... That part is just computation. I would not consider being able to duplicate instructions in C as a computational thinking goal. I would consider duplicating the instruments we have that back our thought processes in C that would generate thought processes within a machine as "computational thinking" or just "thinking" or "artificial intelligence". A computer solving a problem we can solve is not artificial intelligence. It's just intelligence copied. I will admit though that we may be using some terms to mean slightly different things.
  - imagist 10y ago
    > > Not everyone does this. > Yes, you do need to be literate. At some level, I suppose. But there's a lot of thought that occurs without words, and the conversion into words when I'm writing or speaking happens so late in the process that is indistinguishable from the act of writing or speaking. > But if you are, and you think, what do you hear? If I hear anything at all, it's more like music than words. But usually, what I see in my mind's eye is more relevant than what I hear. It actually took me a very long time to figure out that when people say "internal monologue" they aren't speaking metaphorically. It's not something I've ever experienced. > And what did you just write, if not your thoughts? It's more of a description of the relevant parts of my thoughts than my actual thoughts. Words feel like a crappy copy of thoughts to me.
    - ooqr 10y ago
      When one speaks of visual thinking, one does not mean literal pictures either though, right? For me, when tackling a programming problem for example, I may see a data structure or some piece of architecture as a graph, without really seeing the pictorial representation of that graph that I'd draw on a paper. There's no scaling or positional geometry to speak of; merely connections. Was just wondering if this is similar to what others mean.
      - imagist 10y ago
        Yeah, that's representative of my experience. It feels visual, but not exactly in the same way as drawing to communicate--I just "know" what the parts mean instead of them being shaped in some meaningful way.
  - imagist 10y ago
    > > Not everyone does this. > Yes, you do need to be literate. At some level, I suppose. But there's a lot of thought that occurs without words, and the conversion into words when I'm writing or speaking happens so late in the process that is indistinguishable from the act of writing or speaking. > But if you are, and you think, what do you hear? If I hear anything at all, it's more like music than words. But usually, what I see in my mind's eye is more relevant than what I hear. It actually took me a very long time to figure out that when people say "internal monologue" they aren't speaking metaphorically. It's not something I've ever experienced. > And what did you just write, if not your thoughts? It's more of a description of the relevant parts of my thoughts than my actual thoughts. Words feel like a crappy copy of thoughts to me.
ThrustVectoring 10y ago
We use words to describe our thoughts. This is different than "thinking in words" in subtle, yet important ways. There are ways of "just knowing", much like you "just know" that three times four is twelve, or where to put your hand to catch a thrown ball. Probably the most salient example is Eugene Gendlin's "focusing". You can likely also access many of these through various meditation disciplines. There may also be a lot of personal variation in things. I know that I am very much not on the "verbal thinking" side of brain design space - to the point where thinking of things to say distracted my visual processing and made me practically incapable of doing eye contact in conversations.
- unabst 10y ago
  Yes, to be more precise, the expression would be "we articulate our thoughts with words". Words are not equal to our thoughts, but they are the product, and the interface, and used to represent, and treated as if they are it. So we share our thoughts with words, not with "focusing" or "knowing". And we do this even with ourselves. Notes to self are in words. We may start with something else, but to be able to express whatever that "was" or "is" is where words come in. But why words are important here is also because we are talking about computation. To reason, we need something to hold on to and reason with. We need to be able to move things around and then feed back into our minds or minds of others. This is the computation. And computation is done with abstractions. Words are all abstractions. And abstractions are constructed from experience. And that is how they all connect, and why words, even though they may just be words, can be asserted as true or not true. But the truth value of a statement can only be known by computation. Truth is the result of computation which requires abstraction. We could make the distinction between intentional computation and computation done under the hood. Our brain does a lot of prep work before we even see anything. But for the most part, when we say "thinking" it is safe to say we are referring to the deliberate kind (or maybe not, and that is where we aren't quite meeting eye to eye). The deliberate kind will conclude with words to be shared and be computable.
  - ThrustVectoring 10y ago
    Aside: from the sorts of internal experiences you seem to pay attention to, I'd be extraordinarily surprised if you enjoy or are any good at dancing. >Notes to self are in words. I've planned things without ever using words, even to myself. I've done things with only nonverbal thought driving my behavior. I have specific non-verbal handles for these thoughts, although obviously they are hard to communicate verbally. You don't need to be able to express them if you're capable of, you know, just doing it. >To reason, we need something to hold on to and reason with. You can do this with visualizations, as well as other abstract non-verbal structures. I can rotate shapes in my head, or non-verbally figure out a mathematical proof and then go back and fill in the verbal steps.

by unabst 10y ago

Jtsummers 10y ago

> But we think in words. Not everyone does this. > The only difference really is who it's directed to, whether we've voiced it or wrote it down, and whether we self-censored some of it in the process. That last part is the part that's key to computational thinking. What has been elided from your thoughts (expressed as an inner monologue, communicated via writing or voice to others)? Computational thinking requires you to be able to provide sufficient detail that a "computer" can repeat the process that you have performed, and potentially enough logical information that it can handle exceptional cases and situations. For a sufficiently advanced computer (read: intelligent and educated human), "Solve the equation for X" may be sufficient. For a program in C, you'll have to provide more detail. For a Mathematica program, it's about the same as communicating it to a human (depending on their level of education and the qualities of the equation, Mathematica may require more or less detail).

unabst 10y ago
> Not everyone does this. Yes, you do need to be literate. But if you are, and you think, what do you hear? And what did you just write, if not your thoughts? Except directed to me/HN after confirmed with yourself? I would not use the term computational thinking for what you are describing, and I wouldn't consider natural languages and programming languages and mathematics all "languages of thought" either. Mathematics is formal. Programming languages are Turing Complete instruction sets with abstraction and other language features. Natural language is something entirely different. The only thing they all have in common is that they are expressed with symbols. > Computational thinking requires you to be able to provide... That part is just computation. I would not consider being able to duplicate instructions in C as a computational thinking goal. I would consider duplicating the instruments we have that back our thought processes in C that would generate thought processes within a machine as "computational thinking" or just "thinking" or "artificial intelligence". A computer solving a problem we can solve is not artificial intelligence. It's just intelligence copied. I will admit though that we may be using some terms to mean slightly different things.
- imagist 10y ago
  > > Not everyone does this. > Yes, you do need to be literate. At some level, I suppose. But there's a lot of thought that occurs without words, and the conversion into words when I'm writing or speaking happens so late in the process that is indistinguishable from the act of writing or speaking. > But if you are, and you think, what do you hear? If I hear anything at all, it's more like music than words. But usually, what I see in my mind's eye is more relevant than what I hear. It actually took me a very long time to figure out that when people say "internal monologue" they aren't speaking metaphorically. It's not something I've ever experienced. > And what did you just write, if not your thoughts? It's more of a description of the relevant parts of my thoughts than my actual thoughts. Words feel like a crappy copy of thoughts to me.
  - ooqr 10y ago
    When one speaks of visual thinking, one does not mean literal pictures either though, right? For me, when tackling a programming problem for example, I may see a data structure or some piece of architecture as a graph, without really seeing the pictorial representation of that graph that I'd draw on a paper. There's no scaling or positional geometry to speak of; merely connections. Was just wondering if this is similar to what others mean.
    - imagist 10y ago
      Yeah, that's representative of my experience. It feels visual, but not exactly in the same way as drawing to communicate--I just "know" what the parts mean instead of them being shaped in some meaningful way.
- imagist 10y ago
  > > Not everyone does this. > Yes, you do need to be literate. At some level, I suppose. But there's a lot of thought that occurs without words, and the conversion into words when I'm writing or speaking happens so late in the process that is indistinguishable from the act of writing or speaking. > But if you are, and you think, what do you hear? If I hear anything at all, it's more like music than words. But usually, what I see in my mind's eye is more relevant than what I hear. It actually took me a very long time to figure out that when people say "internal monologue" they aren't speaking metaphorically. It's not something I've ever experienced. > And what did you just write, if not your thoughts? It's more of a description of the relevant parts of my thoughts than my actual thoughts. Words feel like a crappy copy of thoughts to me.

ThrustVectoring 10y ago

We use words to describe our thoughts. This is different than "thinking in words" in subtle, yet important ways. There are ways of "just knowing", much like you "just know" that three times four is twelve, or where to put your hand to catch a thrown ball. Probably the most salient example is Eugene Gendlin's "focusing". You can likely also access many of these through various meditation disciplines. There may also be a lot of personal variation in things. I know that I am very much not on the "verbal thinking" side of brain design space - to the point where thinking of things to say distracted my visual processing and made me practically incapable of doing eye contact in conversations.

unabst 10y ago
Yes, to be more precise, the expression would be "we articulate our thoughts with words". Words are not equal to our thoughts, but they are the product, and the interface, and used to represent, and treated as if they are it. So we share our thoughts with words, not with "focusing" or "knowing". And we do this even with ourselves. Notes to self are in words. We may start with something else, but to be able to express whatever that "was" or "is" is where words come in. But why words are important here is also because we are talking about computation. To reason, we need something to hold on to and reason with. We need to be able to move things around and then feed back into our minds or minds of others. This is the computation. And computation is done with abstractions. Words are all abstractions. And abstractions are constructed from experience. And that is how they all connect, and why words, even though they may just be words, can be asserted as true or not true. But the truth value of a statement can only be known by computation. Truth is the result of computation which requires abstraction. We could make the distinction between intentional computation and computation done under the hood. Our brain does a lot of prep work before we even see anything. But for the most part, when we say "thinking" it is safe to say we are referring to the deliberate kind (or maybe not, and that is where we aren't quite meeting eye to eye). The deliberate kind will conclude with words to be shared and be computable.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  Aside: from the sorts of internal experiences you seem to pay attention to, I'd be extraordinarily surprised if you enjoy or are any good at dancing. >Notes to self are in words. I've planned things without ever using words, even to myself. I've done things with only nonverbal thought driving my behavior. I have specific non-verbal handles for these thoughts, although obviously they are hard to communicate verbally. You don't need to be able to express them if you're capable of, you know, just doing it. >To reason, we need something to hold on to and reason with. You can do this with visualizations, as well as other abstract non-verbal structures. I can rotate shapes in my head, or non-verbally figure out a mathematical proof and then go back and fill in the verbal steps.