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Are there people who actually believe that they think "in language"? I know that it's a trope I see in television and other fiction, but I also see the one ther

Are there people who actually believe that they think "in language"? I know that it's a trope I see in television and other fiction, but I also see the one there concussions can lead to hours of unconsciousness that resolves itself without neurosurgery.

two_in_one 3y ago
I have inner dialog. Does this qualify as "think in language"?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  No. That's not your "thought". It's just a little subroutine that evolved so you could rehearse dialogue with other humans... unclever people have it go a little haywire, and they mistake it for their actual thoughts. The hilarious part is that some even end up believing it makes them superior.
  - sublinear 3y ago
    > rehearse dialogue with other humans I'm going to make an even bolder claim and say that there's no such thing as a thought completely independent of dialogue with other humans.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      Touch grass and you may think of your personal relation with grass.
  - haswell 3y ago
    > It's just a little subroutine that evolved so you could rehearse dialogue with other humans That’s an interesting claim to make. What are you basing this on? Framing this as a subroutine also seems a bit of a limited view on our dialogue generation abilities. I can assure you that my internal dialogue rarely stops (meditation is an exception), and most often isn’t worried about talking with other people.
  - two_in_one 3y ago
    hmm.. that 'rehearsing' isn't thinking? I know people who thing about every word, the phrase and re-phrase, select the best sounding. Do you think they still don't think in language? They even write their thoughts down and sell as a books.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      No. It's not thinking in any meaningful way. It's practice for when you're in front of that person and getting ready to talk for real. But for those who have no control over it, it just goes apeshit. I've heard self-reported cases of people doing the same but with historical or even fictional people. They try to use it for everything... as if that simulated person they're "talking to" will somehow be capable of solving a problem they themselves aren't capable of. I think I was in grade school when I realized all the rest of you were lunatics. Took a little while longer to understand the nature of the cognitive flaw. > Do you think they still don't think in language? Yes. Because if that's how you "think", then you're not thinking at all. Which means you're also incapable of understanding how thought works. You're asserting that I'm wrong, offering no evidence or even a plausible alternative theory. It's just another one of those absurd "truths" that dumb people assume is true and no one ever calls them on it. I've explained that it is but one mental faculty, I've explained the evolutionary origin of it, and to top it all off, I've explained why you mistake the output of this singular mental faculty to be"thought". I would hope that you'd be able to work through on first principles why I must be correct. You've just said thought is impossible without human (spoken, maybe signed) language, when there is clear counter-evidence in the world that everyone is aware of that contradicts your asinine theory. I would hope that. Except that it's futile.
      - fumblywumbly 3y ago
        [flagged]
      - temporallobe 3y ago
        You come across like someone from r/iamverysmart. Take a step back and understand that nobody can really “know” for certain what thought actually is, because it’s exactly like trying to understand consciousness, which is the biggest mystery of all.
  - anothernewdude 3y ago
    You're making a lot of baseless claims here. Care to base some of them?
- JieJie 3y ago
  Rather than argue with you, I'll agree with you. As I am a writer, I not only think in language, but I act in language. I would add a link to a conversation with neuroscientist Anil Seth about the nature of consciousness, and a quote from that, which posits maybe this isn't an either/or situation. There is much diversity in what constitutes "thought", even in humans. "You know, some people might see colors differently. Other people might have more vivid mental imagery. We might experience the flow of time to be different from one person to another. Our expectations, our tendency to see faces in clouds, let’s say, that might differ from one person to another too. And very little is known about this hidden landscape of inner diversity." https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-nature-of-consciousness-20230531/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-nature-of-conscio...
temporallobe 3y ago
There is a term for this: “inner monologue”, though not everyone experiences it. I am a native English speaker and have always had an English inner monologue, but many years ago when I lived in another country and started to lean the language to the point where I was fluent, I actually started to have an inner monologue in that language! And when I returned to the US, it took me quite some time to return to a fully English inner monologue.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> Are there people who actually believe that they think "in language"? Yes, there are people who believe that thought is language (and not just inner dialogue as you mention in this thread). That without ideas formed in language as a precursor they wouldn't be able to think about those ideas, and that they do this thinking through the internal manipulation of other words. I'm not quite sure what it's about as I'm not one of them, but they exist.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  Are they p-zombies? Superficially, they seem to be able to behave as if they were human. Sort of.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    > Are they p-zombies? No. They still have conscious awareness. I think this is more a matter of conscious identification (or lack thereof) with various modes of thought.
- l3x4ur1n 3y ago
  How do you think then? I have two modes: 1. Conscious thinking with words, when I am actively trying to think about something, when I'm trying to solve a problem. 2. And unconscious thinking where I don't actively think about the problem and do something else, but after a while I come to some conclusion. But when I am trying to actively think of something I know no other way than to think in words. I am not a visual thinker (I'm kind of aphantasic, when you ask me to think about a horse, only an idea pops up in my head without any specific image and I have to try really hard and describe the horse with words to make some kind of misty parts of the horse).
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    Back in the day when I was thinking about this I kind of thought of myself as pre-visual. I'm sure I have multiple modes of thought though, and I'm also sure this is true of pretty much everyone. I've had way too many instances of not being able to find a word to express an idea, or not remembering the specific words people expressed but just what I think was the gist of what they said (whether or not I interpreted them correctly) to think of myself as a verbal thinker. When it comes to word production sometimes they just come, at other times it takes me time, and I can go into a state where they just flow, but in that state my conscious is checked out of the process. It has the experience of an autonomic process almost. I do have an inner monologue though (frequently caught up with OCD counting, or at the moment Taylor Swift's Anti-Hero song as well as speaking the words I am writing as I am writing them). > only an idea pops up in my head without any specific image and I have to try really hard and describe the horse with words to make some kind of misty parts of the horse Is this idea the words which describe the horse, or a pre-visual/pre-verbal idea of a horse?
anothernewdude 3y ago
You mean people think in some sort of embedded signal in their brains that they then turn into language? That's a crazy idea. I wonder if these machine learning bozos will ever think to use something like that rather than just copying language.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  > You mean people think in some sort of embedded signal in their brains that they then turn into language? T What would be the point of turning it into language internally? When you get up out of your chair, are you thinking "Mecha Robot Legs activate!" or something? The trouble here is that until I just now said that, you thought your counter-argument sounded intelligent. Enough so that you doubled down on it and were sarcastic about it.
  - BasedAnon 3y ago
    >What would be the point of turning it into language internally? Shorter pathway from thinking to writing or speaking. I don't have an inner monologue, and I do feel cognitive load in trying to express my thoughts that I don't think people with an inner monologue experience. I can 'see' something in my mind, but I need to actively search for words that correspond to that, since transferring an image or a 'concept graph' is impossible to do via speech and difficult to do with pencil and paper.
chromoblob 3y ago
In my opinion, whether or not any signal is "in a language" is not a physical fact, but a matter of definition.
jakeinspace 3y ago
Like most people, I have something I call an inner voice. I can "hear" ideas in a monologue or sometimes dialogue conversation in my head, such as the words I’m typing now or when preparing to speak. I don’t believe I’d be able to think abstractly to nearly the degree I am capable of if I wasn’t granted the gift of language by my society, but it is an interesting thought. I’m sure there are mountains of development psychology and linguistic anthropology research on this question. Perhaps we have lost certain abstract reasoning or perception powers that our prehistoric ancestors took for granted, due to language.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  This probably isn't obvious to you... but the only ideas you can ever hear that way are the ideas you've already heard elsewhere. That's why "rubber duck programming" seems so cool to some dweebs. It's not that they receive any true insight to it. But it helps them go back over all the other rules that they've learned elsewhere. Likely, it works better for some people than others, because those people have learned more rules. But they'll never discover another new one, or be inspired by some epiphany that way. Hell, I'm pretty sure all of this is implicated in the Flynn Effect. There are a bunch of other implications more disturbing still...

two_in_one 3y ago

I have inner dialog. Does this qualify as "think in language"?

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
No. That's not your "thought". It's just a little subroutine that evolved so you could rehearse dialogue with other humans... unclever people have it go a little haywire, and they mistake it for their actual thoughts. The hilarious part is that some even end up believing it makes them superior.
- sublinear 3y ago
  > rehearse dialogue with other humans I'm going to make an even bolder claim and say that there's no such thing as a thought completely independent of dialogue with other humans.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    Touch grass and you may think of your personal relation with grass.
- haswell 3y ago
  > It's just a little subroutine that evolved so you could rehearse dialogue with other humans That’s an interesting claim to make. What are you basing this on? Framing this as a subroutine also seems a bit of a limited view on our dialogue generation abilities. I can assure you that my internal dialogue rarely stops (meditation is an exception), and most often isn’t worried about talking with other people.
- two_in_one 3y ago
  hmm.. that 'rehearsing' isn't thinking? I know people who thing about every word, the phrase and re-phrase, select the best sounding. Do you think they still don't think in language? They even write their thoughts down and sell as a books.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    No. It's not thinking in any meaningful way. It's practice for when you're in front of that person and getting ready to talk for real. But for those who have no control over it, it just goes apeshit. I've heard self-reported cases of people doing the same but with historical or even fictional people. They try to use it for everything... as if that simulated person they're "talking to" will somehow be capable of solving a problem they themselves aren't capable of. I think I was in grade school when I realized all the rest of you were lunatics. Took a little while longer to understand the nature of the cognitive flaw. > Do you think they still don't think in language? Yes. Because if that's how you "think", then you're not thinking at all. Which means you're also incapable of understanding how thought works. You're asserting that I'm wrong, offering no evidence or even a plausible alternative theory. It's just another one of those absurd "truths" that dumb people assume is true and no one ever calls them on it. I've explained that it is but one mental faculty, I've explained the evolutionary origin of it, and to top it all off, I've explained why you mistake the output of this singular mental faculty to be"thought". I would hope that you'd be able to work through on first principles why I must be correct. You've just said thought is impossible without human (spoken, maybe signed) language, when there is clear counter-evidence in the world that everyone is aware of that contradicts your asinine theory. I would hope that. Except that it's futile.
    - fumblywumbly 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - temporallobe 3y ago
      You come across like someone from r/iamverysmart. Take a step back and understand that nobody can really “know” for certain what thought actually is, because it’s exactly like trying to understand consciousness, which is the biggest mystery of all.
- anothernewdude 3y ago
  You're making a lot of baseless claims here. Care to base some of them?
JieJie 3y ago
Rather than argue with you, I'll agree with you. As I am a writer, I not only think in language, but I act in language. I would add a link to a conversation with neuroscientist Anil Seth about the nature of consciousness, and a quote from that, which posits maybe this isn't an either/or situation. There is much diversity in what constitutes "thought", even in humans. "You know, some people might see colors differently. Other people might have more vivid mental imagery. We might experience the flow of time to be different from one person to another. Our expectations, our tendency to see faces in clouds, let’s say, that might differ from one person to another too. And very little is known about this hidden landscape of inner diversity." https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-nature-of-consciousness-20230531/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-nature-of-conscio...

temporallobe 3y ago

There is a term for this: “inner monologue”, though not everyone experiences it. I am a native English speaker and have always had an English inner monologue, but many years ago when I lived in another country and started to lean the language to the point where I was fluent, I actually started to have an inner monologue in that language! And when I returned to the US, it took me quite some time to return to a fully English inner monologue.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago

> Are there people who actually believe that they think "in language"? Yes, there are people who believe that thought is language (and not just inner dialogue as you mention in this thread). That without ideas formed in language as a precursor they wouldn't be able to think about those ideas, and that they do this thinking through the internal manipulation of other words. I'm not quite sure what it's about as I'm not one of them, but they exist.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Are they p-zombies? Superficially, they seem to be able to behave as if they were human. Sort of.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > Are they p-zombies? No. They still have conscious awareness. I think this is more a matter of conscious identification (or lack thereof) with various modes of thought.
l3x4ur1n 3y ago
How do you think then? I have two modes: 1. Conscious thinking with words, when I am actively trying to think about something, when I'm trying to solve a problem. 2. And unconscious thinking where I don't actively think about the problem and do something else, but after a while I come to some conclusion. But when I am trying to actively think of something I know no other way than to think in words. I am not a visual thinker (I'm kind of aphantasic, when you ask me to think about a horse, only an idea pops up in my head without any specific image and I have to try really hard and describe the horse with words to make some kind of misty parts of the horse).
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  Back in the day when I was thinking about this I kind of thought of myself as pre-visual. I'm sure I have multiple modes of thought though, and I'm also sure this is true of pretty much everyone. I've had way too many instances of not being able to find a word to express an idea, or not remembering the specific words people expressed but just what I think was the gist of what they said (whether or not I interpreted them correctly) to think of myself as a verbal thinker. When it comes to word production sometimes they just come, at other times it takes me time, and I can go into a state where they just flow, but in that state my conscious is checked out of the process. It has the experience of an autonomic process almost. I do have an inner monologue though (frequently caught up with OCD counting, or at the moment Taylor Swift's Anti-Hero song as well as speaking the words I am writing as I am writing them). > only an idea pops up in my head without any specific image and I have to try really hard and describe the horse with words to make some kind of misty parts of the horse Is this idea the words which describe the horse, or a pre-visual/pre-verbal idea of a horse?

anothernewdude 3y ago

You mean people think in some sort of embedded signal in their brains that they then turn into language? That's a crazy idea. I wonder if these machine learning bozos will ever think to use something like that rather than just copying language.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
> You mean people think in some sort of embedded signal in their brains that they then turn into language? T What would be the point of turning it into language internally? When you get up out of your chair, are you thinking "Mecha Robot Legs activate!" or something? The trouble here is that until I just now said that, you thought your counter-argument sounded intelligent. Enough so that you doubled down on it and were sarcastic about it.
- BasedAnon 3y ago
  >What would be the point of turning it into language internally? Shorter pathway from thinking to writing or speaking. I don't have an inner monologue, and I do feel cognitive load in trying to express my thoughts that I don't think people with an inner monologue experience. I can 'see' something in my mind, but I need to actively search for words that correspond to that, since transferring an image or a 'concept graph' is impossible to do via speech and difficult to do with pencil and paper.

chromoblob 3y ago

In my opinion, whether or not any signal is "in a language" is not a physical fact, but a matter of definition.

jakeinspace 3y ago

Like most people, I have something I call an inner voice. I can "hear" ideas in a monologue or sometimes dialogue conversation in my head, such as the words I’m typing now or when preparing to speak. I don’t believe I’d be able to think abstractly to nearly the degree I am capable of if I wasn’t granted the gift of language by my society, but it is an interesting thought. I’m sure there are mountains of development psychology and linguistic anthropology research on this question. Perhaps we have lost certain abstract reasoning or perception powers that our prehistoric ancestors took for granted, due to language.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
This probably isn't obvious to you... but the only ideas you can ever hear that way are the ideas you've already heard elsewhere. That's why "rubber duck programming" seems so cool to some dweebs. It's not that they receive any true insight to it. But it helps them go back over all the other rules that they've learned elsewhere. Likely, it works better for some people than others, because those people have learned more rules. But they'll never discover another new one, or be inspired by some epiphany that way. Hell, I'm pretty sure all of this is implicated in the Flynn Effect. There are a bunch of other implications more disturbing still...