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During a shrooms trip one sapphire blue sky day in Fall at university, I lost all access to my language faculty. It felt like an invisible hand was erasing my e

During a shrooms trip one sapphire blue sky day in Fall at university, I lost all access to my language faculty. It felt like an invisible hand was erasing my entire lexicon in huge swaths at a time until there were no more words left in my head. One moment I had thoughts. The next moment, after the last word blinked out of existence, I had only feelings. The clouds covered the sun, and a gust of wind passed over me, and I was cold, and I could only experience the sensation of discomfort. Then the sun emerged, and I was basked with warmth, and I experienced happiness that brought a smile to my face and a feeling of safety. For about two hours I existed in this language-less state. Without words I wasn't able to think. There was no internal dialogue. I couldn't reason about things, or think about the past or future. There were no words there to attach to the objects around me let alone abstract concepts. Then, as quickly as my language had been erased, it returned again in patches. Once it was all back I was able to reflect on this experience using my words. I have always wondered if this is what it is like to be a baby.

alfiedotwtf 4y ago
For someone who's experienced loss of language, I have to say that your writing style is very vivid and poetic. I could only wish to have even half your diction
jvanderbot 4y ago
At this point, because of a long history of meditation and other factors you'd recognize, I'm absolutely certain that there is nothing to our consciousness other than a narrative machine that creates who we are using words. This is why I believe were so close to AGI, just looking in the 'wrong' direction. We think AGI should have more than just a self-centered narrative, because we think we do.
- crotho 4y ago
  As the person said, they still had qualia while without the ability to form a narrative, and another person has said it was hard to remember, because narratives act as a mnemonic. Having experienced ego-death myself, I can confirm that I still have a memory of the experience, but that it is more of disjointed impressions (hard to maintain memory of the chronology, which a narrative might be able to cement). But I was still conscious and experiencing things; that is precisely the weird part. You may have a point in some way (not specifically narrative alone, though): It is true that certain anesthetics don't even render us unconscious, but just make us forget what we were perceiving while having our CNS motor functions paralyzed... and maybe deep sleep is similar--while paralyzed maybe we forget our senses moment by moment. But ego death from psychedelics is not the same thing: it doesn't completely erase your ability to recall impressions and images. Either way none of this explains how qualia can arise other than it helps to remember things for us to have a sense of chronology/persistence of experience, and so I doubt a machine that can come up with a narrative of what it is sensing would magically have qualia (we would have no way of knowing, even if it claimed it did--all we could know is that WE are consciously observing an apparently conscious thing). I sometimes think that persistence of experience is an illusion maintained by memory. That every time we lose consciousness then regain it, "it" is simply a new instance that is a clone of the old instance with the illusion it is the same person due to memories and being in the same body. Like "the prestige" the man drowns each night and experiences death, but the clone has the illusion that it has been alive up until the point it was created. In this case I see consciousness and qualia as a temporary instance/shape of neurons activating in unison that is suddenly conscious, but can lose residency, and when it re-forms has the illusion "it" is the same thing and maintains an identity. Considering it takes many depths of artificial neurons to simulate a single human neuron, and the speed at which learning can regress is so slow now, I think we are a very very long way from having such an instance of consciousness appear in an active neural network. Such a network would need to be so analog that it would be effectively the same thing as actual grey matter, and you may as well just have a baby. At least with a baby you would have a true sense of the responsibility you have in creating such an instance (or persistent series of instances that creates an identity).
  - bcbrown 4y ago
    > I sometimes think that persistence of experience is an illusion maintained by memory. That every time we lose consciousness then regain it, "it" is simply a new instance that is a clone of the old instance with the illusion it is the same person due to memories and being in the same body. That makes me think about a saying I've heard about how memory isn't read-only, it's always read-write, and you write back the modified version of what you read. We're constantly changing our past to be more more like what wished it was, and you can see an example of that process in another of my replies in this thread.
    - crotho 4y ago
- bcbrown 4y ago
  > a narrative machine that creates who we are using words. That's a really interesting thought that I'll have to spend some more time with. It makes me think of an experiment I heard about[0] with people who had lobotomies. The split brain leads to one side having verbal facilities, and each side having one eyeball sensory perception. They showed the non-verbal eyeball a sign that said something like "stand up", and most patients did. When then asked why they stood up, they had unrelated answers, like "my legs were stiff". So the idea that we just create narratives as post-hoc explanations of our actions is pretty compelling. [0] I really wish I could find the reference to the experiment, but my google-fu is failing me and I don't recall where I read about it.
  - Phemist 4y ago
    Sounds like one (of the many) experiments Sperry & Gazzaniga did on split brain patients.
sowbug 4y ago
500 micrograms LSD. Experienced "personality regression." I lost my ability to process and generate language. I had only emotional responses to noises that I heard. Some of those noises were human voices, but they sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons: just a wah-wah-wah-wah trumpet-like sound that was more a placeholder for the speech than anything like real speech. The emotions that the sounds caused were basic and strong: a longing to be closer to a voice whose timbre I recognized, pure joy at hearing the rhythm of a song that I knew. Once my language facilities came back, I could remember only the "shape" of the experience, but none of its contents. I remember feeling the emotions, but I don't have the usual internal voice that narrates them. I knew there were sounds, but I can't describe them well, except in terms of my emotional response to them.
bavila 4y ago
I had an interestingly similar experience. As the shrooms were starting to hit, I recall my internal monologue was racing with thoughts, as if that part of my mind was desperately struggling to hold on to the reins of consciousness. Then suddenly... silence. My thoughts were completely stilled as my mind entered into a wordless state, and the sounds of the world around me became incredibly overwhelming. I didn't last long (I can't give an exact time frame, but it certainly was not anywhere close to two hours), but during that time, I developed a strong sense of empathy of what it must be like to be an intelligent yet wordless animal like a dog or a cat. It was a humbling experience, to say the least.
colechristensen 4y ago
Huh, most of my thinking isn’t language, and that which is is mostly something of a bad habit, like a voiceover narrator trying to recreate thoughts that already happened (And is quite hard to pull attention away from) This occasionally leads to communication difficulties in translation into language.
- hoseja 4y ago
  Yeah, I too get an abstract concept fully formed in my head and then have to unravel it slowly and describe it in words. Are you bilingual perchance?
ryanSrich 4y ago
This is very interesting for me because I have almost the inverse experience of this. When I was a child I was diagnosed with migraine induced absent seizures. I think it was mostly a "we don't really know what this is, but here's a diagnosis so you can stop bothering us". I mostly grew out of it, but a few times per year I'll have an episode. What will happen is that suddenly and out of the blue I'll completely lose any sense of reality. I'll have words, but that's almost it. I have no sense of self. If it happens when I'm doing something, like walking around the grocery store, I can still identify where I am, and what's going on, but there's no real sense of me doing it. It almost feels as if I'm in a video game and I'm "above" myself. My consciousness completely disassociates from my body. When I was a kid it would scare the absolute shit out of me and I'd panic. Several times I would run away from where I was, thinking I was going to die (it's really hard to explain the sense of not having a self, but it's incredibly frightening). As I've gotten older I've been able to deal with them as they subside within 60-120 seconds.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  Can I quote this story in an anecdotal context in a book I’m writing about Why We Play? Sorry for such a short, bizarre reply. Your comment and GP are fantastic accounts, and I genuinely appreciate you both for sharing these experiences. Let me know if you have questions, but certainly no need to reply otherwise. Cheers :)
  - ryanSrich 4y ago
    Sure thing!
    - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      Thank you!
- RealityVoid 4y ago
  Are you allowed to drive? Because it seems it would be really dangerous to have one of these while operating a vehicle.
acchow 4y ago
During total ego death (from quite a significant amount of shrooms) where I have totally forgotten who I am, where I physically was, that I am human, or where I came from, I thought to myself “do I exist?” shortly followed by “wow! I still have language! I must exist!” Shrooms are wild.
- hnfong 4y ago
  That's a literal retelling of Descartes' "cogito ergo sum".
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
What's odd and sorta frightening is that some people lack the capability to have an internal dialogue. They apparently think in symbols and visual elements.
- Konohamaru 4y ago
  I don't have an internal dialogue. I think in symbols and visual elements. Sometimes a realization hits but it's never in the form of words or a sentence, but rather like entering a new state of consciousness. Language is more like a tool than an innate part of me.
- vikaveri 4y ago
  It's not that I'm incapable of having internal dialogue, it's just that it is putting in words others could understand a thought, or series of thoughts that happened in fraction of a time it takes to form a single sentence. The result of the thought process isn't something expressed in words, it's internalized knowledge, conclusion or decision
  - stackbutterflow 4y ago
    But maybe some people do lack the capability to have an internal dialogue. Why do you feel singled out?
    - vikaveri 4y ago
      I don't feel singled out, I feel inclined to think that most people do have internal dialogue, but for some it's after the fact, it's not part of the thought process
- Akronymus 4y ago
  And others, like me, lack the ability to visualize or recreate music/sounds outside of our own voice in our mind.
- hnbad 4y ago
  You think that's odd and frightening? I find it a lot more odd and frightening that y'all constantly hear voices in your heads and think that's normal. Jokes aside, yeah, I have no internal dialogue, I at best have an internal monologue if I'm specifically trying to express something in language (e.g. to write it down like now). I wouldn't say I think in "symbols and visual elements" as I also have aphantasia, which means y'all literally seeing pictures (or even being able to place imagined objects in your perception of the physical space around you) in your head feels equally weird to me as the voices. I find it hard to imagine my future selves ("Where do you see yourself ten years from now?" is hard to answer for me because I literally can't) and feel detached from my past selves (memories are somewhat abstract because of my aphantasia), but I've read that this may be related to my autism. I can anticipate changes/events but it's more like seeing a cartoon sketch than directly interpolating the present and the predicted outcome. My thinking is definitely spatial though. If I work on anything that requires focus, I sense concepts I work on persisting outside my "peripheral vision" much like you'd perceive a faint directional noise. I also have terrible memory when it comes to names and dates or mathematical formulas (or chemicals for that matter). I find it easier to memorize processes (if they have a logical flow), which is probably how I ended up in programming. Oh, and I am terrible at perceiving things like hunger or needing to pee until it's urgent, but that again seems to be an autism (or ADHD) thing.
fsckboy 4y ago
> I lost all access to my language faculty...One moment I had thoughts. The next moment, after the last word blinked out of existence, I had only feelings. It's a common belief, but a myth, that you need language to think. You can tell you don't, like when you can't remember a word but you know what you are trying to say, or when can't remember someone's name but you remember everything about them. Deaf children (certainly before modern times), they know how to think no problem, but they don't have language.

alfiedotwtf 4y ago

For someone who's experienced loss of language, I have to say that your writing style is very vivid and poetic. I could only wish to have even half your diction

jvanderbot 4y ago

At this point, because of a long history of meditation and other factors you'd recognize, I'm absolutely certain that there is nothing to our consciousness other than a narrative machine that creates who we are using words. This is why I believe were so close to AGI, just looking in the 'wrong' direction. We think AGI should have more than just a self-centered narrative, because we think we do.

crotho 4y ago
As the person said, they still had qualia while without the ability to form a narrative, and another person has said it was hard to remember, because narratives act as a mnemonic. Having experienced ego-death myself, I can confirm that I still have a memory of the experience, but that it is more of disjointed impressions (hard to maintain memory of the chronology, which a narrative might be able to cement). But I was still conscious and experiencing things; that is precisely the weird part. You may have a point in some way (not specifically narrative alone, though): It is true that certain anesthetics don't even render us unconscious, but just make us forget what we were perceiving while having our CNS motor functions paralyzed... and maybe deep sleep is similar--while paralyzed maybe we forget our senses moment by moment. But ego death from psychedelics is not the same thing: it doesn't completely erase your ability to recall impressions and images. Either way none of this explains how qualia can arise other than it helps to remember things for us to have a sense of chronology/persistence of experience, and so I doubt a machine that can come up with a narrative of what it is sensing would magically have qualia (we would have no way of knowing, even if it claimed it did--all we could know is that WE are consciously observing an apparently conscious thing). I sometimes think that persistence of experience is an illusion maintained by memory. That every time we lose consciousness then regain it, "it" is simply a new instance that is a clone of the old instance with the illusion it is the same person due to memories and being in the same body. Like "the prestige" the man drowns each night and experiences death, but the clone has the illusion that it has been alive up until the point it was created. In this case I see consciousness and qualia as a temporary instance/shape of neurons activating in unison that is suddenly conscious, but can lose residency, and when it re-forms has the illusion "it" is the same thing and maintains an identity. Considering it takes many depths of artificial neurons to simulate a single human neuron, and the speed at which learning can regress is so slow now, I think we are a very very long way from having such an instance of consciousness appear in an active neural network. Such a network would need to be so analog that it would be effectively the same thing as actual grey matter, and you may as well just have a baby. At least with a baby you would have a true sense of the responsibility you have in creating such an instance (or persistent series of instances that creates an identity).
- bcbrown 4y ago
  > I sometimes think that persistence of experience is an illusion maintained by memory. That every time we lose consciousness then regain it, "it" is simply a new instance that is a clone of the old instance with the illusion it is the same person due to memories and being in the same body. That makes me think about a saying I've heard about how memory isn't read-only, it's always read-write, and you write back the modified version of what you read. We're constantly changing our past to be more more like what wished it was, and you can see an example of that process in another of my replies in this thread.
  - crotho 4y ago
bcbrown 4y ago
> a narrative machine that creates who we are using words. That's a really interesting thought that I'll have to spend some more time with. It makes me think of an experiment I heard about[0] with people who had lobotomies. The split brain leads to one side having verbal facilities, and each side having one eyeball sensory perception. They showed the non-verbal eyeball a sign that said something like "stand up", and most patients did. When then asked why they stood up, they had unrelated answers, like "my legs were stiff". So the idea that we just create narratives as post-hoc explanations of our actions is pretty compelling. [0] I really wish I could find the reference to the experiment, but my google-fu is failing me and I don't recall where I read about it.
- Phemist 4y ago
  Sounds like one (of the many) experiments Sperry & Gazzaniga did on split brain patients.

sowbug 4y ago

500 micrograms LSD. Experienced "personality regression." I lost my ability to process and generate language. I had only emotional responses to noises that I heard. Some of those noises were human voices, but they sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons: just a wah-wah-wah-wah trumpet-like sound that was more a placeholder for the speech than anything like real speech. The emotions that the sounds caused were basic and strong: a longing to be closer to a voice whose timbre I recognized, pure joy at hearing the rhythm of a song that I knew. Once my language facilities came back, I could remember only the "shape" of the experience, but none of its contents. I remember feeling the emotions, but I don't have the usual internal voice that narrates them. I knew there were sounds, but I can't describe them well, except in terms of my emotional response to them.

bavila 4y ago

I had an interestingly similar experience. As the shrooms were starting to hit, I recall my internal monologue was racing with thoughts, as if that part of my mind was desperately struggling to hold on to the reins of consciousness. Then suddenly... silence. My thoughts were completely stilled as my mind entered into a wordless state, and the sounds of the world around me became incredibly overwhelming. I didn't last long (I can't give an exact time frame, but it certainly was not anywhere close to two hours), but during that time, I developed a strong sense of empathy of what it must be like to be an intelligent yet wordless animal like a dog or a cat. It was a humbling experience, to say the least.

colechristensen 4y ago

Huh, most of my thinking isn’t language, and that which is is mostly something of a bad habit, like a voiceover narrator trying to recreate thoughts that already happened (And is quite hard to pull attention away from) This occasionally leads to communication difficulties in translation into language.

hoseja 4y ago
Yeah, I too get an abstract concept fully formed in my head and then have to unravel it slowly and describe it in words. Are you bilingual perchance?

ryanSrich 4y ago

This is very interesting for me because I have almost the inverse experience of this. When I was a child I was diagnosed with migraine induced absent seizures. I think it was mostly a "we don't really know what this is, but here's a diagnosis so you can stop bothering us". I mostly grew out of it, but a few times per year I'll have an episode. What will happen is that suddenly and out of the blue I'll completely lose any sense of reality. I'll have words, but that's almost it. I have no sense of self. If it happens when I'm doing something, like walking around the grocery store, I can still identify where I am, and what's going on, but there's no real sense of me doing it. It almost feels as if I'm in a video game and I'm "above" myself. My consciousness completely disassociates from my body. When I was a kid it would scare the absolute shit out of me and I'd panic. Several times I would run away from where I was, thinking I was going to die (it's really hard to explain the sense of not having a self, but it's incredibly frightening). As I've gotten older I've been able to deal with them as they subside within 60-120 seconds.

DiggyJohnson 4y ago
Can I quote this story in an anecdotal context in a book I’m writing about Why We Play? Sorry for such a short, bizarre reply. Your comment and GP are fantastic accounts, and I genuinely appreciate you both for sharing these experiences. Let me know if you have questions, but certainly no need to reply otherwise. Cheers :)
- ryanSrich 4y ago
  Sure thing!
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Thank you!
RealityVoid 4y ago
Are you allowed to drive? Because it seems it would be really dangerous to have one of these while operating a vehicle.

acchow 4y ago

During total ego death (from quite a significant amount of shrooms) where I have totally forgotten who I am, where I physically was, that I am human, or where I came from, I thought to myself “do I exist?” shortly followed by “wow! I still have language! I must exist!” Shrooms are wild.

hnfong 4y ago
That's a literal retelling of Descartes' "cogito ergo sum".

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

What's odd and sorta frightening is that some people lack the capability to have an internal dialogue. They apparently think in symbols and visual elements.

Konohamaru 4y ago
I don't have an internal dialogue. I think in symbols and visual elements. Sometimes a realization hits but it's never in the form of words or a sentence, but rather like entering a new state of consciousness. Language is more like a tool than an innate part of me.
vikaveri 4y ago
It's not that I'm incapable of having internal dialogue, it's just that it is putting in words others could understand a thought, or series of thoughts that happened in fraction of a time it takes to form a single sentence. The result of the thought process isn't something expressed in words, it's internalized knowledge, conclusion or decision
- stackbutterflow 4y ago
  But maybe some people do lack the capability to have an internal dialogue. Why do you feel singled out?
  - vikaveri 4y ago
    I don't feel singled out, I feel inclined to think that most people do have internal dialogue, but for some it's after the fact, it's not part of the thought process
Akronymus 4y ago
And others, like me, lack the ability to visualize or recreate music/sounds outside of our own voice in our mind.
hnbad 4y ago
You think that's odd and frightening? I find it a lot more odd and frightening that y'all constantly hear voices in your heads and think that's normal. Jokes aside, yeah, I have no internal dialogue, I at best have an internal monologue if I'm specifically trying to express something in language (e.g. to write it down like now). I wouldn't say I think in "symbols and visual elements" as I also have aphantasia, which means y'all literally seeing pictures (or even being able to place imagined objects in your perception of the physical space around you) in your head feels equally weird to me as the voices. I find it hard to imagine my future selves ("Where do you see yourself ten years from now?" is hard to answer for me because I literally can't) and feel detached from my past selves (memories are somewhat abstract because of my aphantasia), but I've read that this may be related to my autism. I can anticipate changes/events but it's more like seeing a cartoon sketch than directly interpolating the present and the predicted outcome. My thinking is definitely spatial though. If I work on anything that requires focus, I sense concepts I work on persisting outside my "peripheral vision" much like you'd perceive a faint directional noise. I also have terrible memory when it comes to names and dates or mathematical formulas (or chemicals for that matter). I find it easier to memorize processes (if they have a logical flow), which is probably how I ended up in programming. Oh, and I am terrible at perceiving things like hunger or needing to pee until it's urgent, but that again seems to be an autism (or ADHD) thing.

fsckboy 4y ago

> I lost all access to my language faculty...One moment I had thoughts. The next moment, after the last word blinked out of existence, I had only feelings. It's a common belief, but a myth, that you need language to think. You can tell you don't, like when you can't remember a word but you know what you are trying to say, or when can't remember someone's name but you remember everything about them. Deaf children (certainly before modern times), they know how to think no problem, but they don't have language.