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This is a common experience for writers, the sense of sentences appearing or almost completing themselves...it just occurred to me that reminds me of something
by lordleft 2y ago
This is a common experience for writers, the sense of sentences appearing or almost completing themselves...it just occurred to me that reminds me of something that is asserted by Julian Jaynes in his controversial "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." He claims that prior to the Bronze Age, human beings did not recognize their thoughts as belonging or originating with themselves; instead, they perceived thoughts as emanating externally, from Gods. I have no idea if there are merits to Jaynes theory, but it's fun to consider if the writer's inner voice, this sense of automaticity while writing, might recruit the same mechanisms of which Jaynes is speaking.
- aradox66 2y agoWhere else could language really come from besides appearing more or less spontaneously in the mind? All thought is like this. Is there a level of consciousness prior to language that willfully assembles the next word out of more subtle mind stuff? There would be an infinite regress here.
- siavosh 2y agoI agree. In different traditions, it's this realization that there is no separate assembler of thoughts/words (to your point, the problem of who is the assembler of the assembler?) that is a key insight.
- mocha_nate 2y agoExactly. In order to say a thought *wasn’t spontaneous* would mean that you thought something BEFORE you thought it.
- siavosh 2y agoYou could even go further -- all actions are spontaneous...life is spontaneous.
- MonkeyClub 2y agoInterestingly, it was this line of thinking that once upon a time led to the rejection of the idea of free will: a thought is caused by another, and that by another yet, and so on, so there is no free thought or deliberation. From that perspective, it was mentioned in this Russell Ackoff talk that recently emerged on HN: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yGN5DBpW93g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yGN5DBpW93g
- lmm 2y ago> Is there a level of consciousness prior to language that willfully assembles the next word out of more subtle mind stuff? There would be an infinite regress here. What? No, it's not infinite. Thoughts are more fundamental than language, you can absolutely have a thought and then struggle to express it in language (indeed this is a pretty common experience). For an experienced writer or speaker the translation from thought to language may be so smooth as to almost disappear (to the point they may not even be conscious of it), but it's still happening.
- aradox66 2y agoOk great! So where does the pre-language thought come from? Does that one spontaneously appear, or is it too assembled from even more subtle mind stuff by a conscious agent? Once in possession of a pre-language thought, how does a conscious agent craft it into language? Does it open an internal dictionary and find the best fit? Are the dictionary entries appearing spontaneously or are they too conjured agentically somehow? You can't keep going asserting a conscious, agentic process at every level. At some point you have to concede that what is available to a conscious agent is being offered by totally unconscious, "spontaneous" processes
- lmm 2y agoThoughts appear spontaneously (at least some of the time) as far as one's consciousness is concerned, sure. But language and sentences don't. That's all I'm claiming.