4 ms·
Ask HN: What is the nature of deafblind people's and animals' thoughts?
Before you accuse me of not googling, I freely admit that I am lazily information mining here!
Onto the questions.
When I think, I am simulating speaking to myself - I run over the words and sentences in my head and my internal experience is as if I hear the words pronounced. I am assuming that this is the case with most of us.
In contrast to this, what kind of thinking experience do people who have never associated any "utterances" (lip movement, hand signals, sounds) with ideas have?
A related question: Assume that animals can think, because they clearly seem to. What would be their thoughts like? Clearly they can't be talking to themselves as we do. Could they be using a lot of pronouns ("I could do that to that which will cause it to do that and that and then I can catch and eat it").
My basic motivation is to try to find a meaningful continuity between animals and ourselves in terms of intelligence. Biologically there are a lot of similarities, but it seems that intelligence-wise, there is a marked discontinuity between humans and other living organisms. What is it that causes this?
This is mainly for fun speculative thinking on a Saturday morning. I also think there's a need for succinct insights about thinking and consciousness to coagulate in various places on the net so that it may someday be useful to someone.
- Mz 17y agoNot all people think the way you do. I've spent a lot of time learning about the different ways different people think and learn in order to effectively cope with the needs of my sons. My oldest son thinks in pictures (like Temple Grandin, who wrote the book 'Thinking in Pictures'). He's been very interesting to raise and live with. He sometimes makes mistakes similar to a non-native speaker because anything he thinks has to be translated into English before he can express it and anything he hears has to be translated into pictures for him to understand it. I have learned to speak in a very imagery-rich manner because it is a more effective means to communicate with him. It turns out to be a fairly powerful means to communicate with most people. EDIT: He's not deaf-blind but he does have serious eyesight issues and auditory processing problems.
- tokenadult 17y agoAgreed with the first reply. People with normal sensory function have different habitual thinking styles. Noticing those differences in thinking styles is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my work as a mathematics teacher. What I like to do as a teacher is help my pupils discover that they can learn new thinking styles and, as I put it, put new tools in their toolboxes. My wife, perhaps because of her east Asian education, has quite a diverse set of thinking styles. I've learned some from her, and I hope our kids are learning our whole repertoire of thinking styles from each of us. We do notice among our four children some differences in habitual approach. But most people can learn new ways of thinking, if they are exposed to those.
- Mz 17y agoOT: Funny meeting you here. Not that I have any reason to believe you know of me, but I think I know of you from your website. (At least it seems that way since the name in the email address, location and other details match up.)
- 1diggnews 17y agoMz - the imagery-rich manner of some peoples thinking style does not preclude utterance as the main mode of thought; for example dyslexic people seem to have serious issues with "abstract" terms, such as "the", versus nouns/verbs and thus many say they are "visual thinkers": but verb/noun utterance could go a long way. You should ask your son if he has an "utterance style" while he thinks, and let us know. Arun2009 - when you simulate speaking you should have utterance, one imagines, how about if you are thinking about something else. Code. Math. etc. I expect that most thought is on several levels - emotional, "intuition" (e.g. nonconcsious thought processes), and then image/verbal(utterance) or other notation. For me I have lots of "low level" emotional/intuitive feelings/thoughts and then more precise focused notational thought (e.g. manipulation of symbols like pictures, words, etc.). For my deepest thoughts I need to explicitly work with notation on paper, in code, in drawing. I imagine animals are on the emotional/intuitive level as well as images and other sense representations, at least based on interactions with animals and on self reflection (e.g. "deep" response to smells, sounds). On self reflection I think most of my "thinking" is pretty low level and sense based, with a thin veneer of notational symbolic thinking on top. Most of the "wow" stuff is low level, that is likely why it is wow, and since I assume this is what we share with animals the "wow" part of life seems to be shared.