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Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

benrutter
93 replies
11h44m

It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that:

- People experience their thoughts very differently

- We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.

I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking).

It seems like there's a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language.

That sounds absolutely nuts to me, but I've heard people say the exact same in reverse. Even more fringe is that there's a sizable number of people who when thinking about words (i.e. remembering names) visualize their words as text. What!? I can't imagine that anymore than I can imagine how a jellyfish feels?

The University of Wisconsin did a cool study that comes with a fun quiz you can do to see just how much of a wierdo you truly are: https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...

leto_ii
18 replies
11h13m

I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking

I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue at all?

benrutter
13 replies
11h6m

I definitely have an inner monologue im some situations, reading is a good example. I can speed read in which case I don't really have a perception of the sounds, but if I'm closely reasing something then I do have a sense of the sounds if words as I'm reading.

The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for them!)

mewpmewp2
6 replies
11h2m

That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion?

TeMPOraL
4 replies
10h1m

Linguistic thinker: I reach conclusions by feel, pretty much jumping to them, and then sniffing out the "warp trail" from that jump and putting that into words. It doesn't feel like inventing post facto rationalizations, but rather retracing the reasoning that happened in the background. And I do need to do that step - the conclusion doesn't seem "stable" unless I trace it back like this.

grugagag
3 replies
5h53m

I reach conclusions by feel

That sounds like intuition to me

Jensson
2 replies
4h26m

Words are also based on the same intuition, you just verbalize it and restrict yourself to what you have words for instead of all concepts and thoughts.

For example I do math entirely without any words in my process, and I easily got a master in math that way, barely had to study. No problem, you just translate it at the end. Limiting myself to words just makes it harder to think freely.

mewpmewp2
1 replies
3h15m

That just sounds so different to how I solve math problems. I was naturally good at maths, but it was always from monologue kind of bruteforcing different solutions until one of them seemed to work. I guess it might be a reason also why I find LLMs really exciting since I feel like if I can do it, LLM should be able to do it. I don't feel like I am doing anything special.

I always had problem with trusting my intuition or gut so I was worse in a lot of other real life things however. But math seemed abstract and solvable by words and brute force.

I wish things just magically came to me, but I think I always have to go through things with my inner monologue.

Like if I was to do multiplication in my head e.g. with same numbers, for example 62 x 62. I would have to go through it as a monologue.

I first remind myself of the strategy to do it, which is first I will do 60 x 60. Then it is 3600, then I add 2 x 60, 3720, and then there is 2 x 62 left, but I have to keep reminding myself occasionally what the last numbers were, that initial multiplication was 62 x 62, then I got 3720, and now I have to add 124... okay lets go 3820, 24 left, now 3844. Of course it is easier to remember as I am typing this, but in my head I have to keep reminding myself. And now I am not sure if I did a mistake so I go verify that on the calculator.

Jensson
0 replies
2h57m

I first remind myself of the strategy to do it, which is first I will do 60 x 60. Then it is 3600, then I add 2 x 60, 3720, and then there is 2 x 62 left, but I have to keep reminding myself occasionally what the last numbers were, that initial multiplication was 62 x 62, then I got 3720, and now I have to add 124... okay lets go 3820, 24 left, now 3844. Of course it is easier to remember as I am typing this, but in my head I have to keep reminding myself. And now I am not sure if I did a mistake so I go verify that on the calculator.

I do multiplication in my head similarly, just strip out the words, the numbers just flickers through and operations happens by themselves and I'm done in a second or two when I'm not rusty. Now that I'm rusty I do it more like (60x60=3600, 2x2=4, 60x2=120, 3600 + 4 + 120 + 120 = 3844), without doing any words, I just did that in my head right now and I am 100% sure not a single word, just the steps, I do sometimes verbalize the numbers so what I wrote in those parentheses is the most verbal my process for mathing that out gets.

Edit: Looking at that, I think it might be easier for someone to correct your thinking if you think in words, but thinking without words is way faster and way more creative since it removes the restriction of only thinking about concepts you have words for.

Edit2: I think your verbalization there is a ritual for the concepts to get to you. For me all I need to do is see 62x62 and imagine I want to solve it and all those thoughts flow to me automatically, basically a shortcut instead of having a large verbal ritual to piece together the concepts. I never did math verbally the way it is taught, so I am not sure how people think that way, to me this was always automatically this way.

RaftPeople
0 replies
2h18m

That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion?

Are you thinking that using words during thinking helps with reaching conclusions and knowing why you reached the conclusion?

For me it's just there, the thoughts, the facts, the logic, the sequence, the connections, etc. Expressing all of that in words happens afterward (if it happens).

leto_ii
1 replies
10h41m

The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me

So, as a person who definitely has an inner monologue, I absolutely agree. It's not like I'm literally sounding out words in my mind all the time. The vast majority of things I do I do without explicit use of language.

I think my understanding (mostly coming from Chomsky and in disagreement when OP) is that language is a mechanism for thinking that is mostly not accessible through conscious introspection.

RaftPeople
0 replies
2h25m

mostly coming from Chomsky and in disagreement when OP

Is Chomsky's idea that language is not necessarily the same as spoken language, it is an alternate brain mechanism that provides structure to thought as opposed to being the wild west of fluid/analog non-discrete/non-symbolic type of information processing?

importantbrian
0 replies
48m

I think almost exclusively through inner monologue, and I find I can't speed read at all. If I'm not vocalizing I'm not thinking, so when I try to not vocalize in order to speed read I don't retain anything. It's like my brain is incapable of processing the words if they aren't being vocalized.

bhk
0 replies
2h12m

It seems obvious to me that thinking critically about what you read or hear takes effort and time. I wouldn't call it unbearable, though, because the alternative is polluting your mind with unvetted notions.

TeMPOraL
0 replies
10h20m

The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me

While I seem to be a fast reader relative to people I know, I very much feel my reading speed is limited by sounding the words in my mind, so I agree - it's near-unbearably slow.

SamPatt
0 replies
1h56m

My conscious thoughts are verbalized in my head, and it is somewhat slow, but I also have a sense of intuition, which is very fast, though works best in silence. I can pull things from intuition into conscious thought, but explaining why I feel something is the same slower process.

So thinking about something isn't a one speed operation, but being able to communicate those thoughts is.

globular-toast
0 replies
10h35m

Not OP but I also don't think with an internal monologue most of the time. For me it's often more like mentally manipulating abstract shapes or quantities and trying to make them fit together. When I'm writing software I'm literally thinking about pointers and bytes etc, not thinking about the words "pointer" and "byte". This is highlighted by the fact that after intense programming sessions I have dreamed about code, like I am computer memory and I'm being allocated by a memory manager or something.

Sometimes I do explicitly think with an internal monologue, though. Like if I'm debugging something I'll sometimes narrate what the program is doing in words. Also if I'm trying to figure out how some event happened I'll try to tell a story in my mind. It helps then as it forces me to serialise things.

When I read there is sometimes an internal monologue. When I write, there isn't. I don't talk like this. I think it's quite clear sometimes when people write with an internal monologue as their text reads like speech (which can be a good or bad thing, depending on its purpose).

davedx
0 replies
9h20m

I read much faster when I can focus on reading instead of vocalizing; in this case I am no longer internally vocalizing the text. If I do vocalize what I read it goes a lot slower, but then it helps me to synthesize conplex concepts in a text.

Aspos
0 replies
4h35m

Thanks for your comment. It just occurred to me that I have an inner voice narrating the text when I am reading in English. This does not happen when I read in my first two languages.

This explains why I read slower when I read in English.

4ad
0 replies
10h21m

I don't have an internal monologue at all (I am able to speak to myself in my head if I want to, but I seldom have a reason to). When I read, the information just gets uploaded to my brain. I don't vocalize words in any way, silently or otherwise. I don't read one word at a time either. When I read something quickly I can "feel" that my understanding of the material is lagging "the cursor", sometimes by even a paragraph at a time.

endofreach
13 replies
10h33m

Often times i can actively feel how laggy my brain is in wrapping the thoughts in language. Before i even have the words ready, my thinking is already way ahead at the next thought. Not sure if that's just ADHD. I like to think secretly it's because i am not too dumb and actually a quick thinker. On the other hand, my analytical thinking is not that good.

While i enjoy the process of thinking about things alone for hours, when presented with problems like in school or sometimes even today when someone gives me a riddle, i can also very strongly feel that i am not "thinking" actively. I am just thinking that i should think and often seem to make myself appear as if i was thinking – and that's it. It feels a lot like "fake it till you make it". Often times i have ideas other people call "brilliant" as well, or i seem to have s lot of refreshing takes on things according to others (stated to hide my weirdly self-conscious arrogance), it's not that i actively pursue it. I sometimes feel like i am standing on the piazza, waiting for this beautiful thought to walk past me. Too scared to talk to it, because she would realize i am too dumb to understand her and a con-artist anyway... but then, every once in a while this beautiful thought turns around and takes over my brain.

But maybe, i am truly just mad.

nikster
9 replies
7h20m

Do your Human Design profile and see how much it fits.

Our society expects everyone to be a Generator (in HD terms) - all people who are not then feel like they're totally weird. In reality, they're just wired differently, and have other strengths and weaknesses.

Humanity is like a big puzzle piece.

As someone who never was into astrology, Human Design was a shock.

I didn't want to even consider that idea at all, but as I got my design read by someone I never met, and it matched 95% of what I already knew about myself, I had to admit that it just fits. And so it is for most people - it fits.

Whereas astrology always was a lame 50/50 "could be true or not true" kind of thing. HD is different.

For example I have open head centers - in HD this means I take in thoughts from others and get carried away with them; I also have an easy time to still my mind and have no inner dialogue. And in my life I had already observed if I am talking to someone who is genuinely really excited about something, I get excited about it too - to the point where I am joining their project or decide to buy a book etc - but when they leave and it wears off I am thinking... "wait... why was that so exciting again?"... Now I know how to watch it, and how to distinguish their emotions and thoughts from mine, very useful skill.

LoganDark
6 replies
6h48m

Do your Human Design profile and see how much it fits.

How would one do that? Is there a website for it, or something? I tried looking it up and it purportedly uses date and place of birth, but those hardly have anything to do with me, so I don't see how that calculation could be any more useful than, say, a star sign.

The concepts seem interesting for sure, just not sure how to find what applies to me.

coldtea
5 replies
4h33m

it purportedly uses date and place of birth, but those hardly have anything to do with me

While astrology is bogus, you'd be surprised how much "date and place of birth" has to do with you.

There are statistics and studies showing higher than chance similar behavior/tendecies in people born in the same months (for things like depression, health outcomes, etc). Could have to do with exposure to sunlight during early days or whatever.

And for place of birth, of course normally (if you're not in some mix-and-match country like the US, or if your parents don't immigrate immediately) this affects inherited genetic constitution, and of course culture, access to resources, diet, and many other factors.

LoganDark
2 replies
3h42m

Makes sense to me. But my date and place of birth don't define me, they only correlate me with others. Astrology's just a particularly bogus way of not doing that, but anything that would try to derive anything about me from just my date and place of birth, without any actual data to correlate with my answers, isn't really worth my time.

i.e. you'd need to know "people born around this date in this place tend to have whatever human design" in order to provide me actual predictions based on only date and place of birth, but no such data has ever been collected.

coldtea
1 replies
2h45m

Astrology's just a particularly bogus way of not doing that, but anything that would try to derive anything about me from just my date and place of birth, without any actual data to correlate with my answers, isn't really worth my time.

Well, it depends on the degree which we require it to define you. In a looser degree, it would define most people quite a lot.

Put another way your "place of birth" alone, would be a huge information point towards predicting lots of things about someone vs someone from another place of birth, given they're different enough (say, India vs Italy, not Spain vs Portugal or Germany vs Austria).

If betting and money was involved about e.g. income, wealth level, studies or not, food preferences, religion, politics, morals, and so on, knowing the place of birth would be a great boon (all other information being equally shared). Repeated many times with different people, you'd be correct way more.

i.e. you'd need to know "people born around this date in this place tend to have whatever human design" in order to provide me actual predictions based on only date and place of birth, but no such data has ever been collected.

If we were to bet on whether a person is black or white, freckled or not, has epicanthic fold or not, etc, I don't need no special "data collected" to know what people born in Lagos vs Dublin would look like for example. It's common knowledge.

And in some cases where this changes over time, the data of birth would also come in handy. E.g. in the tendency of a random London citizen to have say South Asian features in 2024 vs 1950.

LoganDark
0 replies
1h55m

There must be some sort of misunderstanding here.

If we were to bet on whether a person is black or white, freckled or not, has epicanthic fold or not, etc, I don't need no special "data collected" to know what people born in Lagos vs Dublin would look like for example.

Yes you do. In order to make an educated guess, you'd have to know, given where they were born, whether that place is more likely to produce certain traits or not. You could then use that information to make your guess about how likely they are to possess those certain traits, having been born there. But without any information on how likely those traits actually are for people born there, knowing where they were born grants you nothing.

It's common knowledge.

It's not common knowledge what my Human Design type would be given only when and where I was born. That's the whole point I'm trying to make. Astrology or not, the entire idea of giving me an answer solely based on when and where I was born, will always be bogus.

Now, if they had an actual dataset of the Human Design types of people from all around the world, and wanted to correlate me with that, then maybe I'd be inclined to give it a try, just out of curiosity.

But I'm not even the slightest bit curious about bogus astrology (or any other types of divination). I'd be glad to take a personality test, for example, because they ask actually relevant questions. Just not this.

And in some cases where this changes over time, the data of birth would also come in handy. E.g. in the tendency of a random London citizen to have say South Asian features in 2024 vs 1950.

I'm not arguing against correlating this with other data. The entire point is that one needs to correlate it with other data in order for my answer to be at all useful, and what I have a problem with is that correlation is not being done. The alignment of the planets alone is not going to reveal my personality type, and not even when combined with my location.

lebuffon
1 replies
3h27m

An interesting test would be to correlate birth date results with people from the southern hemisphere. "Western civilization" is very north biased IMHO.

Omin
0 replies
1h23m

Human civilization is very north biased. Almost 90% of all people live in the northern hemisphere.

kriro
1 replies
6h40m

Human Design seems like unscientific babbling to me. First of all the connection to astrology should already be a huge red flag and it mixes random stuff and magically we come up with four personality types (then later a fifth one is "discovered"). Shockingly these can be arranged into exactly twelve profiles.

It may be surprising to you but as someone who is well read in mentalism I can fairly confidently tell you that a 95% match is not hard to fabricate in readings. Admittedly is the area of mentalism I don't perform but I have read plenty of theory. Your HD reading was probably based on Barnum statements/cold reading. If you're interested to learn more about this I'd suggest "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading" by Ian Rowland. For a more fun exercise, get a reading at a medieval fair or from some "medium" (please don't pay a lot) and compare it to your HD reading.

jahsome
0 replies
6h12m

I had never heard of Human Design until now. It looks like absolutely maddening junk to me. To each their own but nonsense pulp like that is just about the exact opposite of what draws me to hn, and avoid almost all other forms of social media.

Full disclosure: I loathe astrology, to a disproportionate and somewhat irrational extent.

Thanks for the book rec though. As a "fan" of James Randi, that seems interesting.

ulkis
0 replies
7h29m

I recognize this "thinking the thoughts twice", and sometimes feel that the "fast" thoughts have to wait for the slow ones (language wrapping) to catch up. Then I try to skip the second phase and let the fast ones roam at full speed, expecting brilliancy. Never succeeded yet, but not giving up.

orwin
0 replies
9h27m

I'm clearly not in your exact case, but having idea before the words to express it happen to me too (less the more i grow old tbh, when i was in my early twenties it was almost everytime, nowadays it is a bit more limited to subjects i know deeply). It usually end up with my tongue tied and having to take a deep breath and reformulate everything since the beginning with a better exposition plan.

One thing that help is improv theater and pen and paper role play game, because you don't only have to thin about your idea, but how you are going to deliver it, and this is true in professional settings too. Doing that slow down my thought just enough to be clear. Hopefully this advice works for you too

[edit] You aren't mad

Agentus
0 replies
4h38m

Funny all the criticism LLMs get for hallucinations/conflabulations as if humans aren't often worse offenders at this very behavior unintentionally or intentionally.

I think you're not mad, but rather demonstrate a learned behavior to a very common situation any person finds themself in. IE they don't know or aren't sure if they don't know and any case don't want to appear as if they don't know certainly so they put in the least amount of effort to obscure ascertaition with some fancy distracting magicians hoodwink.

I think getting answers to nuanced/frontier or non-frontier problems can involve different sets of brain processes and behaviors. For already solved problems with knowledge thats pervasive throughout society, the solution is simply observation and copying, OR recollection and re-execute from memory.

For other problems one can figure out through reasoning and extrapolation.

For other problems no amount of armchair reasoning and theorizing will figure out (frontier problems not yet solved by any humans or at least humans accessible ) it, and they will need to do some trial and error exploration within reality on the path to solving a problem. Thinking in language, recalling by search and retrieval isn't going to find a solution to the problem at hand in these situations, but humans will try and jam the square peg into the circular hole especially if thats easier to do (and it is) than expending a lot more trial and error energy to do reality based experiements instead of pure clean easy brain processes of keyword/descriptor search and retrieval.

Search and retrieval with or without words is a very quick and easy brain process, perhaps anything you do that solely involve those brain processes you perform excellently at. Not all problems solely rely on these process such as analyzing new unsolved puzzles put on your doorstep. Perhaps there's a habitual behavior where you're trying to over-rely on the quick processes and doing the magicians trick to obscure the lack of actual solution with the hopes of retaining social standing. Instead of slowing things down attempting the slow bog down of actually finding the problem while communicating as such OR making use of human language for its actual purpose and networking for someone who has already solved the problem and deferring to their authority.

But all and all humans collectively are driven to collect (no, hoard greedily) solutions to problems at or not at the frontier and incorporate/encode those into their brain in a way that the solutions can be searched and retrieved in an efficient reflex like manner that's conducive to your ADHD speed.

I suck at language but am good at analytical stuff and because of that I'm not going to put any more effort into reducing this lengthy TLDR literature rambling into a concise conducive to reading snippet. My apologies to those that don't skip over this and trudge through this Thesis length reading.

ecjhdnc2025
13 replies
5h27m

The question about visualising three dimensional objects is fascinating to me. Because my answer has changed radically in the last five or so years, and I'm not a young person!

I used to consider myself 3D-impaired -- unable to maintain and rotate a 3D image in my head, which also made 3D software frustrating. (I also have, it turns out, some binocular vision issues and some other mild cognition weirdness).

But a few years back I started on a hobby project, and I started to assemble my own DIY kit (because the commercial stuff is too expensive). To do that I had a lot of mental puzzles to try to solve.

Then I decided the best way forward was a 3D printer so I tried to find 3D tools that would work for me on even a basic level -- OpenSCAD, CadQuery, FreeCAD etc.; as many different ways to approach the problem as would shed light on ways to think about it.

I'm no longer really an OpenSCAD person but once my first successful models came out of my printer, my brain was changed forever, and now I visualise mechanisms in my head.

(One of the most powerful things I have learned about how to imagine any man-made, real world object, is to imagine the tools making it.)

haswell
11 replies
5h4m

As someone with Aphantasia, this is fascinating to me. There have been other aphantasics who report gaining the ability to visualize after mental exercises, and what you’re describing sounds somewhat similar. No luck for me yet, but I’m really interested in the idea that I could actually learn these skills…

dinkleberg
8 replies
4h43m

This is such an interesting topic. I believe I also have aphantasia and I find that communicating about the topic is rather challenging as the right vocabulary doesn't seem to exist (or I'm ignorant of it).

I have no "mind's eye" and can't produce an image in my head. But confusingly, I am quite good at the mental 3D manipulation. I can spin the cow in my head and describe its orientation, but I don't actually see the cow, I just know it. I suppose my brain just has a different way of approaching this problem than visually.

This is where the language is tough. I'm not visualizing or imagining as those words describe the act of using a mental image. I'm perceiving the cow? It is hard to communicate.

LoganDark
4 replies
3h45m

You're deriving the cow. You don't see the cow, but you know things logically about the cow, and you can describe it just as well as would someone who does see it. But you are not, and don't need to be, actually seeing the cow.

ecjhdnc2025
2 replies
3h29m

The weird thing obviously is that next to nobody with a mind's eye is actually seeing the cow.

A tiny tiny fraction of people talk about their mind's eye being part of their visual field, to the point that they can sort of functionally see -- hallucinate -- an imaginary object on a table like AR.

Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described.

Most children can sort of whimsically play the imaginary-drinking tea game, imagining the shape of the teacups, imagining spilling tea or milk, but the mental images might not have attributes like colour or weight until they are specifically assigned to the visualisation. Like: what colour are the teacups? They don't have colour until you pick one, and then they do. Is it a heavy cup? It's not, but I do have a saucer. The more you add to the visualisation, the less translucent/ghostly/formless/conceptual it is.

The fascinating thing about broad aphantasia is that it appears to be way beyond even that; it's like things only happen conceptually, yet they still happen. Like the sibling comment from andrewflnr perceptively said: as if it's a conceptual blind-sight.

And when you consider our evolutionary pathway, perhaps it actually is the same phenomenon: a part of the brain successfully doing part of the task, without the support of the visualiser.

kaashif
1 replies
2h50m

Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described.

But this is different from the kids tea party. I can easily pretend to hold a teacup without closing my eyes and visualizing a teacup, I don't think one has anything to do with the other.

If you ask someone to actually imagine seeing a teacup but what they're imagining doesn't have a colour or size, _what are they imagining_?

jodrellblank
0 replies
1h59m

If I cover your eyes and put a teacup on your open palm so you can't see the colour or feel the size, _what are you holding_?

I'm imagining a teacup - made of china, decorated in some way, capable of holding a few mouthfulls of ~75C thin liquid, smaller than a big mug, larger than a shot glass, with a handle sizes for the tip of one finger, delicate, ceremonial; concept space constrained to broadly teacup-ish area. But not a specific teacup unless it becomes important whether it's a plainer heavy duty cafe teacup or a grandma's Royal Jubilee promotional teacup.

scarmig
0 replies
3h11m

A while back, I did an experiment: drawing a typing keyboard. It's something I see and use every day, so it should be easy, right?

Well, I was able to, but it didn't come from first principles or even visualizing it. It came from imagining myself at a keyboard and "simulating" typing. In my mind's body, I would type a sentence, which enabled me to extract the location of the keys, which I could then translate into part of the visual sketch on paper. The initial sketch came out with key sizes and shapes heavily distorted, but all of them spatially located in the correct relative horizontal ordering, and a second sketch made it possible to regularize them.

Not sure what it means, but it was an interesting exercise.

klyrs
0 replies
43m

I have a form of aphantasia, but with that lack of visuals I also have a rich internal sense of touch. Like you, I can create and manipulate 3d objects in my mind; I really feel them down to texture and temperature (and I must say, that cow has textures I didn't want to feel, thanks for nothing) Most of my dreams are like this too -- I know where everything is, but I don't see it.

But my aphantasia isn't complete. Sometimes when I think of a person I get a dim image of their face for about a tenth of a second. And very rarely, I do see things in dreams.

ecjhdnc2025
0 replies
3h52m

I find that communicating about the topic is rather challenging as the right vocabulary doesn't seem to exist (or I'm ignorant of it).

Right. This is enormously challenging in itself. And I think because nobody talks about it, it's possible, or maybe the default, to assume that you're simply broken in an obvious, universal way, and not that there might be variation or even routes to change your outcomes with metacognition or thought experiments.

What often comes up is stuff like "oh I thought 'the mind's eye' was just a figure of speech, I had no idea people meant it in a meaningful sense"

ecjhdnc2025
1 replies
4h18m

OK so -- on this score. I have, I believe, a kind of partial aphantasia. Though maybe it's normal and people just don't really see the distinction?

I used to think -- until maybe ten years ago -- that I could not imagine the faces of friends and loved ones.

That is, if I try to visualise a person's face, I get an incomplete glimpse in my mind that dissolves away within an instant.

(People in my dreams do not really have detailed faces, if I can ever really look at their faces at all; it's like I don't make eye contact. Though they are not face-less horrors.)

This has been distressing, particularly when my mum died.

But then I discovered two really interesting things:

1) I can sometimes imagine a "still" face if I visualise a photograph of that person (maybe only slightly more if I took it)

2) I can bring someone's face to mind much more successfully if I associate it with an emotion or an action, and once I've done that, as long as I keep them in motion I can visualise a lot more for longer.

A quarter of a century after she died, if I want to remember my mum, it's a real challenge. She hated being in photos so there aren't many. But it's possible to start by imagining her angry (sorry mum) or the annoyed look on her face when she was trying to solve a puzzle game on the computer. Then I might be able to keep her face in my mind for long enough.

My dad passed away a couple of years back and for this loss I was ready; I have some photos, but more importantly I had spent the previous years learning his face experiencing different emotions. My favourite route to imagining my Dad's face is to imagine a situation where he might show puzzled, half-smiling amusement or fascination when presented with something he didn't understand or didn't work quite the way he expected. I will be able to recall his face in motion, just as my face starts to leak around the eye sockets :-/

So on the one hand: even now I can't visualise still faces at all! I struggle to describe faces of people I don't really know well. As soon as a face is still, it goes.

On the other hand, I have taught myself a visualisation process that can conjure up meaningful animated recollections that are filled with emotion. I have to do it deliberately, but it's lovely to do.

One final quirk: despite all this, I appear to potentially be a super-recogniser. I can't visualise a still face, but I do not "forget a face"; I can tell you with eerie accuracy whether I've seen someone before and where. And I do rather well with the "which of these faces did you see in this clip" type test, and very well at the tests like "which of these faces is this face from another angle".

haswell
0 replies
2h26m

This is all extremely interesting. I also struggle to remember faces, and most of my are tied to emotions, sounds, smells, sensations, etc. When I recall something/someone, I don't see it/them, I just "know" + feel.

And I find myself very easily fooled by subtle changes in a person's appearance. If someone gets a major haircut or changes their hair color, they might as well be a different person to my brain, initially.

emiliobool
0 replies
3h28m

This is very interesting, when I was a kid I didn’t think with words but with “abstract” ideas. When I realized every other kid used language for thinking I tried to do it myself and not only I was able to do it, but it never stopped after that. Now I probably think 90% with language, but I’ve been trying to practice other forms of thought recently.

nikster
5 replies
7h27m

Same here. I had a conversation with friends who said, language influences thinking.

I said, no, I have thoughts, and I communicate them with language but the thoughts are not language.

Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless.

To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!

So yes, we learn how our minds can work completely differently from one another.

The study of Human Design takes this to the next level - this strange science states that humans can be classified in 5 different general types which operate totally different from one another - it has taught me a lot about other people.

My base assumption that everyone is more or less like me - turned out to be completely off.

LoganDark
2 replies
7h8m

Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless.

To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!

I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking". Are you by any chance neurotypical, or close to neurotypicality? My impression is that neurotypical brains have a higher degree of synchronization than autistic brains, which would make suppressing thought easier.

I'm autistic, and I don't just have thoughts; they have themselves. Thoughts just spontaneously come into existence, and just think on their own. I can think about them myself, but only by picking up existing thoughts. Thoughts come into existence whether I intend them to or not, so it is not possible for me to suppress them.

On one paw, the fact that thoughts seemingly think about themselves allows me to fit a lot of logic in my head at once without getting overwhelmed. But on the other, being unable to control which thoughts are in my head can be really infuriating.

anon373839
1 replies
6h6m

I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking".

I am doubtful that anyone can truly stop thinking. But people can have more or less awareness of their thoughts, and they can be having thoughts that they don’t consider to be thoughts. For example, if you notice that your shirt is wet, that is a thought even if you don’t “think” anything about it.

I haven’t personally tried one, but I believe the purpose of a sensory deprivation tank is to create an environment where your thoughts are unavoidable.

LoganDark
0 replies
5h39m

But people can have more or less awareness of their thoughts, and they can be having thoughts that they don’t consider to be thoughts.

Yes, that is my experience. If I try not to have thoughts, then what happens is not that thoughts stop happening, it's that I stop noticing them until they're more fully developed. This "not noticing" results in a relative lack of remarks upon those thoughts, but the thoughts themselves are not made of or depending on language. They just are things. Technically, they are "derived meaning".

When on psychedelics I can have thoughts that not only don't depend on language, but don't have language. It's not possible to describe them because they represent indescribable things. It's possible to feel them and interact with them in a way that seems to makes sense to me, but it's not possible to communicate them. If I try, they can actually result in words being generated, but those words sound like a bad phone autocomplete - stuff like "can have a haves and take a three sixteenth quarters" (real excerpt from a past trip).

(My guess is that my brain has some sort of internal format that real-world concepts are translated into in order to be operated on. That's the "meaning" that gets derived. I wonder if psychedelics allow me to create or perceive meanings that no real-world concept would ever actually translate into, and therefore don't have any way to communicate as a real-world concept.)

I am doubtful that anyone can truly stop thinking.

This statement is a perfect example of benrutter's point:

- We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.

Don't be so sure that nobody has thoughts that can truly stop, even just for a short time.

RaftPeople
0 replies
2h34m

I said, no, I have thoughts, and I communicate them with language but the thoughts are not language.

I'm the same way, my thoughts happen first, are completed and sitting in working memory with my awareness of the thought/result/whatever it is.

If I have an internal monologue, which isn't always, it's after the fact and more about re-stating the thought that already happened.

PedroBatista
0 replies
5h43m

Is there any solid scientific background for “Human Design” or it’s one more of this pop science feel good horseshit? Because it sounds like it.

madaxe_again
4 replies
10h50m

We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.

Not a universal law. I don’t think I work in the same way as other people at all, as I cannot see what is obvious to others, and they cannot see what is obvious to me.

I don’t think, per se, the information and the integrated results of information are just there. People call it “intuition” but it isn’t some magical sixth sense, it’s just not using one’s language centre for compute, which is what many seem to do.

The moment I start consciously considering something, it all usually goes to hell - so a large part of how I operate is preventing myself from lapsing into “conscious thought”, and instead to keep whatever it is just below the surface until it’s cooked.

I infuriated teachers throughout my childhood by apparently paying zero attention but then inexplicably having the correct answer to whatever was posed to me, and have never quite related to other people, as it usually feels like I’m trying to bridge an immense gap of comprehension - not, to be clear, that I think other people are stupid - just more like I am running fundamentally different software, and everything has to go through an extensive translation and abstraction layer to make sense to others.

If I speak my thoughts directly, then they often emerge as allegory, as it’s the only way I can try to encapsulate the otherwise rather inchoate froth of connection which leads to a result. Sometimes others understand the allegory, but more often than not, they do not, as the symbols mean something else to them.

So yeah. I don’t think my mind works like most other people I encounter. The only other person I know who I think operates in the same way is my sibling, and people who have observed our conversations find them downright bizarre. They sound like beat poetry half the time, as with five well chosen words presenting the correct allegory we can transmit deep meaning to one another.

ay
1 replies
7h26m

This feels to me very similar to my experience - I tend to joke that in order to express a thought to others I have to translate it into words first; and in doing so I also flatten the thought.

And before it, the time of having a raw thought in my brain it just feels like… something, it’s not sound, not light, but “a thing” which I know means the item or concept I am thinking of. And the process of thinking is kind of these “semantic things” bouncing off each other - which usually happens much faster than I can translate it into words.

When solving a problem, I usually tinker with it for a while and then let my “big subconscious coprocessor” deal with it for a while, and more often than not if not a solution but the clear idea of direction and reasoning emerges the next time I look for it.

At the same time I tend to make a fair bit of puns based purely on spelling alone - feels a bit magical to have all the omonyms kind of flash in the head all at once, and then make-pretend pick the wrong one for fun.

Is this anywhere similar ?

madaxe_again
0 replies
6h39m

That’s pretty similar, from the sound of it. The flattening analogy fits - it’s like trying to describe a multidimensional sculpture using only three letter words.

As to the big processor - I definitely do the same if no answer is immediately forthcoming - send it to the boys upstairs and wait for an answer, which usually comes while I’m in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely.

Puns, to an extent, although more often than not I just go off up and down an etymological tree, as the semantics behind so many words and concepts reveal further layers of interconnection and peculiar shreds of history. Physics is my play park, where I enjoy posing and chewing on gnarly problems, which often result in “inadequate data, please try again later”. Didn’t make me popular as an undergraduate as I asked all sorts of awkward questions about presuppositions and usually ended with a professor waving their arms and telling me to just accept it as so. “Dark matter” was what made me finally spit on the ground and decide to not pursue academia, as it’s just so blatantly wrong, and it hurts to see so many accept it as a hard done and dusted solution to something that is anything but solved - because our presuppositions are almost certainly wrong. Piles upon piles of monkeys supposing that they are the centre of the universe, with the perfect sensorium to know it.

Anyway. Like I say, I find it hard to see eye to eye with a majority of people, and I know I don’t make it any easier for myself.

medstrom
0 replies
10h27m

I don't automatically do what you describe, but I've had good experiences with it: "preventing myself from lapsing into conscious thought". Especially in how I experience ADHD, if I just wait for my subconscious to cook up something for me, it's a good trick for seeing past the weeds to what is actually relevant today, here and now.

licebmi__at__
0 replies
8h33m

I can totally relate. In my case I feel deeply connected to Poincare writings about unconscious processing. It’s not that I have sudden eureka moments, but I observed that if I try to consciously search for an answer, I just won’t find it, like I need to soak on information and do something else to actually get the result after a while.

gvurrdon
4 replies
8h56m

That test was indeed interesting. But, one thing it didn't mention was audiation. Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording. This is very useful when performing as I can pretty much play along to this internal track. Some people appear not to be able to do this at all.

_0ffh
1 replies
7h12m

Curiously, I have this but I lack the musical education/experience/talent(?) to really use it. I can make up and "hear" music with multiple instruments and stuff, but I'm utterly useless at writing it down. Even just reproducing part of a melody on a keyboard is a frustratingly time consuming chore. :-(

gvurrdon
0 replies
4h23m

I know what you mean. What I found very helpful in getting music out of my head via an instrument was a lot of very tedious scale practice, and similar exercises. This appears to get my fingers habituated such that I may often hear a (simple) line on the radio then immediately pick up an instrument and play it.

lloeki
0 replies
8h10m

Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording

Same, happening to me right now, happens automatically almost every morning when I wake up, which kind of gives me my own "soundtrack of the day" and enjoy the ride.

Sometimes the song is stuck in repeat though and the only way to kick it out of loop is to actually listen to it.

An interesting bit is that this internal jukebox is actually playing faster than real time, even though it sounds absolutely correct and natural in my mind and definitely not as if it was a 1.2~1.5x play rate that would give this funny "Benny Hill effect"; so when I perform the song at the time scale that I hear it it is clearly too fast (higher BPM) to outside observers or when compared to an original recording.

It's as if my experience of mind-time is skewed vs real time so I've developed a bunch of coping strategies like padding (e.g making every beat having a "late by ~x" feeling), forceful downclocking (some sort of detached zen mode where I let go of the internal clock, which gives a very surreal feeling of perceiving the world), or active continuous ratio compensating (sort of like the world is going at 0.8x compared to my reference clock so remapping makes it sort of bullet-timesque)

Socially it's all very disconnecting and exhausting.

cableshaft
0 replies
4h46m

I have the internal audio. I wish I could just hook up an audio interface to my brain for that sometimes as it would be so convenient for making new music.

In theory I could translate it to a DAW (but I'm not that great at transcribing music...it's possible, kinda, but slow), but I can't easily repeat the music in my head (not what I make up at least, proper released songs tend to be easier to repeat), so it would be difficult to recreate it enough to be worth the effort.

advael
4 replies
10h4m

Interesting test. I apparently am about as high as you can likely get a percentile score to go for the number of questions here on inner voice and representational manipulation, and as low as possible on mind's eye and orthographic representation

The inner voice and mind's eye don't surprise me, I'm among the more hyperlexic people I know and seem to have total aphantasia, but I didn't realize (though I guess it seems like an obvious possibility in retrospect) that there were people who processed words as text in their head - I guess the survey itself said that surprised them too.

I also didn't consider that there could be a large degree of variability in representational manipulation, and assume that this kind of inevitably leads to some pretty hard to bridge inferential gaps when speaking across that divide. Honestly maybe I'm misunderstanding what's meant by that, because the other extreme sounds to me like there are some people who just can't do metacognition which sounds insane. I'm guessing however that this is similar to an experience I had with a (now ex-)lover who was shocked when I mentioned I don't have visualization, and asked "So you're telling me you have no imagination at all?", which like, I wouldn't say is true? My imagination can be prosaic, narrative, auditory, abstract, olfactory, emotional, or kinematic, just not visual. I kind of assume that's similar to what I'm doing here, like whatever "manipulating representations" means here is a useful capability by which to do metacognition but not the thing itself... but it seemed like their questions pertained to a lot of different kinds of manipulation of abstractions or mental models, so I can't really figure out how you'd examine your thoughts per se without that ability. Maybe there's someone more knowledgeable about this field here that could help me understand the distinction?

wruza
1 replies
9h10m

How does one even get high inner voice score there? I dialogue in my head all the time and answered “sa” to most of the inner voice questions, but fell on the far left side on that graph. Feels like other questions subtract from it silently. Instead I got high score in object rotation which I can do easily but it isn’t my main mode of thinking. I usually think abstractions and/or speak myself into convincing they are good enough.

I probably failed due to this agree/disagree test laziness. You never know what they meant by things like “I often enjoy X”. What does strongly disagree mean here? Never? I don’t enjoy? What if I don’t enjoy it, but do often? Why not ask it directly like “I X: never sometimes often” or “I relate to X: hare it … love it”. Even then it’s unclear what “sometimes” means. Once in a year, in a month, in a day? This indirection and vagueness adds so much noise to the result.

I guess all this tells how I think more than the test itself.

advael
0 replies
8h50m

Weird, based on the wording of the questions and the categories they presented I kind of just assumed that each question only pertained to one of them. If they're doing something more complex I didn't notice it. But maybe they have some baked in assumptions that some of these modalities are like, mildly anticorrelated? That's the thing that kinda irked me about psychology when I was studying it more seriously. The epistemic integrity of psychological research reads to me as basically castles built on sand, where people get excited about results that seem super weakly supported based on reading the paper, which is often itself laden with a ton of assumptions that don't seem justified, but people who cite them just take the conclusions the authors drew as established, build their own studies with those assumptions baked in, ad nauseum. I was not shocked at all when the replication crisis hit this field as hard as it did, and since the issue is often in the way the hypotheses are operationalized in the first place, there are inherently going to be tons of flawed studies that are hard to even detect through the heuristic of replicability.

As far as the Likert scale nonsense, I am right there with you, all these psychological instruments are pretty poorly framed from my perspective, and while there's some discourse deep in academia about the rigor of various experimental methodologies even in the most broken of social sciences, in practice they don't seem to care much because it's publish or perish baby!

It really doesn't seem like most sciences are quite this broken, though some are clearly trying. Obviously there are people in psychology trying to do good rigorous science, it seems like institutional pressures are not working to support them, and certainly won't amplify rigor over making bold claims that get a lot of press

Like, all this to say that it's definitely worth taking these things with a massive grain of salt, but if you do that, it can still be pretty interesting.

hifromwork
1 replies
7h18m

Interesting test. I apparently am about as high as you can likely get a percentile score to go for the number of questions here on inner voice and representational manipulation, and as low as possible on mind's eye and orthographic representation

Interesting, it's the same for me. I'm 94th and 98th percentile on the first two, but 2nd and 25th percentile for the other two. Since we're both on a (primarily) science and tech oriented website, I wonder if there's any correlation between ones occupation/hobbies/skills and their method of thinking.

Also, I'm surprised to hear that I'm an extreme outlier when it comes to the mind's eye. When I think about it, even recalling the face of my partner (who I see daily, including this morning) is not easy and comes out very fuzzy. But I have no problems with imagining complex geometry, maps, navigation, etc.

laserDinosaur
0 replies
4h36m

Pretty close to me too. 98th percentile for Internal Verbalization, 88th percentile for Visual Imagery, average for all the others.

I'm constantly talking to myself in my head as if I'm talking to a duplicate of myself. Asking questions, providing answers, having full back and forward conversations (especially with programming). There are certainly days though where, if you have a lot going on, you can start to burn yourself out with conversation (since every single action of the day comes with a conversation). Even if it's just "Oh I should make a coffee. Did I have a coffee yet? No, I think you had one this morning. What about if I made one anyway. Yeah I think that would be fine. Oh do I need to boil water? I suppose I should check if the water is hot. Yep looks like I do have to boil some". and after a while you just get sick of talking to yourself. But you can't switch it off and it drives you a bit batty sometimes.

I asked my wife once if she constantly narrates her own day, she said absolutely no. She said she only really has an internal monologue when reading things from text. And she writes down a lot of stuff on text. But other than that, she answered confused by my question "...nothing? I guess? Quiet?"

Brains are interesting!

xaphod
2 replies
8h15m

This reminds me of this old Feynman video where he talks about how people use different methods in their heads when counting, seems relevant: https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y?t=135

leobg
0 replies
1h20m

+ Rudolph Flesh, The Art Of Clear Thinking (1951). He has visualizations in there how people concepualize the months in a year as an ellipsis, and so on.

kebsup
0 replies
7h50m

Love it! I use something similar to remember long numbers. If a code or a pin has let's say 8 digits, I'm unable to remember it the normal way. So I remember the first digit in the inner voice, and the other 4 digits as a picture of the digits.

raincole
1 replies
11h29m

Are humans just a thin common interface covering our messy implementations underneath?

beacon294
0 replies
8h29m

Or "is language just a thin common interface covering a variety of internal implementations?"

passwordle
1 replies
8h33m

People experience their thoughts very differently

what does this mean?

LoganDark
0 replies
7h22m

what does this mean?

The experience of thought differs from brain to brain. For example, autistics generally experience thought differently from neurotypicals.

This happens, in part, because autistics have a different distribution of synaptic connections, which are shorter on average than is neurotypical. This typically results in an experience of disorganized thought, where multiple different parts of the brain contain independent thought, because there aren't enough connections directly between them to enforce synchronization. There are enough localized connections to allow general thoughts to happen and be operated on, but they are exactly that; localized.

Detail-oriented thinking is another well-known side effect of this, because each individual detail can easily be fit somewhere without being lost in the "big picture". Autistics are usually who you'll find sweating details that most people wouldn't necessarily care about, but they're also who you'll find sometimes getting lost in those details rather than sticking to a single clear vision. Neurotypicals, on the other paw, can miss those details if the picture as a whole looks okay to them, but they also usually won't get stuck on them in the process of executing their vision.

Note that every person is different, whether autistic or non-autistic, so there are autistics who are good at thinking in terms of the big picture and neurotypicals who are good at considering every detail. The fact that the physical mode of thinking differs doesn't necessarily mean that another can't be emulated - it just means that even if two people appear to be doing or thinking the same thing, the way it's actually implemented "in hardware" (meatware?) can differ greatly depending on neurotype, even from autistic to autistic and neurotypical to neurotypical, as the brain has no single switch between fully autistic and fully neurotypical.

Some of the statements in this comment are based on my personal experience as an autistic, some are based on anecdotes from others, and some are based on this article: https://embrace-autism.com/autism-and-disorganized-thoughts/

I've been informed that the author of the article doesn't generally do good work, but I've personally reviewed the article and believe it to still be sufficiently accurate. Additionally, this particular description of autistic disorganized thought is what originally tipped me off to the fact that the way I think is different from others. If you're not autistic and/or it doesn't describe you, please know that it perfectly describes me, which should be enough to understand how exactly the experience of thought can differ from brain to brain.

Also, psychedelics can significantly change one's mode of thinking. I use them recreationally from time to time. Somehow, they give me better executive function than my ADHD meds do.

darby_nine
1 replies
5h48m

I'm not convinced it's a fact we all think as differently as implied. Try and get a room full of people to even agree what "internal dialogue" means or whether you actually hear a voice when you recall it.

Jensson
0 replies
5h28m

Can you express your internal monologue in words? If not then it is clearly not an internal monologue. I can't express mine in words, hence I am certain it isn't an internal monologue.

Similarly I doubt others would say they have an internal monologue if they couldn't express it in words. Hence I am fairly certain that they think in a different way, or at least they think they do.

082349872349872
1 replies
8h52m

just how much of a wierdo

I was surprised to learn the other day from HN that not only some people, but some commenters here, consider the notion of "not opening one's mouth to start a sentence before knowing how it's going to end" an impracticable ideal.

_0ffh
0 replies
7h3m

Hmmm, I don't think I know exactly what words I want so say when opening my mouth, but I usually do know exactly what point I want to express. Also, after having expressed my point I stop making noises. Some people seem to really need to say something, but then just go on meandering without giving any indication that they actually have any point to make.

meehai
0 replies
10h39m

I'm in the 'visualising the words as text' category, and I've always thought I have a bad memory compared to other friends, though I can recall every little detail of large software projects that I've been in.

During exams, where I had to cram lots of theory in a small amount of time, I recall trying to 'access' the slides via how they looked like in my mind and trying to somehow read the stored image, because that's for me easier to remember than the actual text when I'm not doing any deep understanding, but just memorization :/ I hated these kinds of exams, what's the point of repeating 500+ slides out of 14 weeks of courses word by word ?

Open book exams + internet + tricky questions were the best.

mannykannot
0 replies
5h22m

I am, apparently, someone well on the linguistic side of the spectrum, yet I too was somewhat taken aback by this statement from the abstract: "Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking" [my emphasis].

My own thinking on this has been to consider the origins of language. In a community of hominins on the verge of developing a language, would they not need, as a prerequisite, some non-linguistic ability to consciously grasp that at least some of the vocalizations of their peers represented feelings that they recognized in themselves? But that, by itself, would not be enough for them to develop a language; in addition, I feel, it would take both a desire to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others (motivated in part, I would guess, by recognizing that it would be useful to do so) and the recognition that this might be accomplished through artificial sounds and/or gestures with arbitrarily-allocated yet specific meanings. I feel that there's a bootstrap problem in regarding language as primarily a means of thinking that was found to be useful in communicating.

Like you (and, apparently, the survey compilers) I am surprised to learn that a sizable minority of people report frequently visualizing words as text. On reflection, however, that sounds somewhat like a form of synesthesia, and I occasionally get enough of a hint of that to put it just barely in range of my personal experience - but then, I don't regard people whose experiences differ markedly from mine as wierdos.

jodrellblank
0 replies
2h4m

I just did that quiz and the question about the sound of a trumpet getting louder made me notice that my imaginings of talking and instruments actually activate my vocal chords and neck muscles a bit; and imagining a trumpet is more like imagining someone make an imitation trumpet sound.

Also was hoping that quiz would ask about other senses; how easily people can choose to imagine tastes and smells, e.g. on their agree/disagree scales:

1. You can easily imagine the smell of freshly baked bread.

2. You can easily call to mind the taste of peanut butter.

3. You are melting chocolate and somebody suggests adding basil, you can vividly imagine how that would taste before trying it.

4. When remembering an event that happened to you, there is a strong smell memory included.

5. You can imagine feeling the weight and texture of a brick in your hands.

fnord77
0 replies
3h58m

People experience their thoughts very differently

I don't see how we could possibly know this.

concordDance
0 replies
8h55m

Anecdote: I once tried to suppress my internal monologue. I found thinking elaborate thoughts and checking them for soundness was a lot harder. Might just be not being used to it.

These days I mostly use words but there are many concepts that don't have a short number of words corresponding to them, which makes recalling them much harder for me.

coldtea
0 replies
4h40m

It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.

Well, the first is not exactly right. People might experience thoughts differently, but not that widely so. It's not like "anything goes", more like there are a few cases, and people fall into one or the other (e.g. some can have aphantasia).

And the second, while right, is hardly "mind melting". Why would people assume otherwise, since the only immediate empirically seen thinking they have access to is their own?

(Especially since different modes of thinking is not exactly "anything goes" as we said, so the second-hand examples of thinking they have, e.g. people describing or mimicking thinking and inner monologues in movies and books, match how the majority thinks)

bongodongobob
0 replies
8h35m

Can you clap your hands to the syllables of the Happy Birthday song without singing it? That's all an "internal monologue" is.

arnorhs
0 replies
8h19m

I score low in all categories. I wonder if that means I'm just not very aware of how I think while I'm not doing it. I think a lot though. A little bit too much

I wonder if the quiz is missing questions / scoring around thought awareness.

api
0 replies
1h48m

Look at how different we are from each other. Then consider that humans actually have less genetic variance than most mammal species. Now imagine meeting actual aliens whether from space or from our own AI efforts.

ainiriand
0 replies
2h51m

For me it was mindblowing the fact that before my brain tumor surgery I had something like a conscience voice and a richer internal dialogue. After that the voice dissapeared and my train of thought is more logic focused instead of instrospection focused, not sure why.

adrian_b
0 replies
10h36m

I am an example of the opposite.

For me, language is primarily a tool for thought and only secondarily a tool for communication.

_bramses
0 replies
11h39m

Makes you wonder as well if the expressed genetic traits we can’t see are more are less different than the ones we can.

For example, does evolution have any pressure to produce those who think linguistically, vs healthy hair and skin?

LoganDark
0 replies
6h52m

- We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.

I wouldn't say that. What I would rather say is that everyone starts with the expectation that they share thought with others.

There is overwhelming empirical evidence that people can tell when others think like them. Not everybody treats this indicator the same way. Some are fascinated when others think differently. Some get uncomfortable when they can't tell what another is thinking or feeling.

I'm sure not everyone understands why there can be others that don't think like them. To a simple mind, it might just seem like there's something wrong with them or that they have unaligned goals/interests; you actually can see that assumption from certain neurotypicals. (I don't know if it's truly specific to neurotypicals.)

However, it is possible not to believe, even secretly, that everyone experiences thought the same; I certainly don't. I try my best to understand exactly how thought can differ between each person, of course, but in the process of doing that research, it does become abundantly clear just how much I don't know, and just how differently others think than how I do.

Guthur
0 replies
5h5m

This somewhat related to universals and how they are view from Platonic idealism and Aristotelian realism. With language we capture a symbolic representation of the ideal form, the red apple, or do we just imagine the last particular apple we saw. Or maybe if you're really modern you imagine the molecular structure and photonic reflective spectrum.

I suppose chose your own adventure.

nopinsight
45 replies
13h43m

There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them.

A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common and important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly and the label catches on.

We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concept is accorded such importance in every language. Some common words in other languages without direct translation in English:

* 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.

* น้ำใจ (Nam-jai) (Thai): Literally "water from the heart". Being very nice and helpful without expecting anything back.

* 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business.

This is perhaps another line of evidence to support the thesis of the article.

Make no mistake though: Language is extremely useful for some types of thoughts, especially more abstract ones. Not everyone, however, uses it as their primary tool for thinking.

-----

The above also helps explain some limitations of LLMs, such as their inadequate spatial intelligence. Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) start to address these issues by using much more granular data than language alone.

Swizec
15 replies
12h56m

* 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business.

I do think in American English at least there is a phrase for this: Your Network. You even used it to explain the word :)

Usually the first association to “your/the network” is social. You have to specify if you mean the technical version with computers.

082349872349872
5 replies
12h38m

* น้ำใจ (Nam-jai) (Thai): Literally "water from the heart". Being very nice and helpful without expecting anything back.

"Charity"

082349872349872
1 replies
12h14m

That "share" link doesn't.

Perhaps I should specify: "charity", as used in "faith, hope, and..."

(although I generally prefer "charity" as in the computer language)

nopinsight
0 replies
12h3m

Having lived in Thailand, I am confident that 'น้ำใจ' is still a distinct concept from 'charity' in 'faith, hope, and charity'.

They are probably closer in meaning than the most common definition of 'charity' though.

sirn
1 replies
3h56m

Charity is closer to ใจบุญ (jai-bun) than น้ำใจ (nam-jai).

A mixture of "act of kindness" and "good will" would be a more fitting translation, but the interesting part here is that "sportmanship" is also considered an act of น้ำใจ (น้ำใจนักกีฬา nam-jai nak-kee-la or literally. sportman's nam-jai).

We also have a word เสียน้ำใจ (sia-nam-jai) for when our nam-jai ended up as a waste, or for when the other party is being ungrateful for the kindness that's being given, and also เลี้ยงน้ำใจ (leang-nam-jai) for when you're doing/accepting nam-jai for the sake of not making the other party sia-nam-jai.

lukeschlather
0 replies
45m

In the King James Bible you have lovingkindness but I guess that might be a mistranslation of the Hebrew checed which literally means "covenant loyalty." But I feel like lovingkindness even if it was originally mistranslated has the same connotation as nam-jai.

thaumasiotes
2 replies
11h26m

The Mandarin word literally means "relationships" and the concept is well established in English. When you describe somebody as "connected", that's what you're saying.

It's an incredibly poor example of an "untranslatable" phrase.

_as_text
1 replies
10h48m

The first and only time I've ever felt like I really know Chinese was when I came across the phrase '洋汽扑鼻' in "Fortress Besieged" by Qian Zhongshu. It literally means 'the breath of the sea assaults the nostrils". It's a joke on how fashionable and in demand everything Western was in China in the 1920s. For me it's just laugh-out-loud-for-10-minutes funny. I've tried to explain it to literal dozens of my friends and now I know not to even try.

thaumasiotes
0 replies
9h10m

Probably worth noting that while 洋 does literally mean "sea", it also means "foreign".

earth-adventure
2 replies
12h44m

The mandarin guangxi encompasses a whole lot more than just your network. That would be considered a very bastardised translation, losing all the extra meanings such as good luck created by having that network, possibilities to fortune, a kind of karma, and more.

frutiger
0 replies
12h39m

all the extra meanings such as good luck created by having that network, possibilities to fortune, a kind of karma, and more.

In your 20s you might think of your network as people who you went to college with. In your 40s your network takes on a meaning much closer to what you have described. I don’t yet know what happens in your 60s.

creamyhorror
0 replies
1h18m

Karma aside, "having connections"/being "well-connected" is pretty much the equivalent in English. It's not bastardised at all; terms don't need to have the exact same cultural implications to be basically equivalent.

_as_text
0 replies
10h57m

I really don't think it's all that different, sorry. The difference is that there is a more direct and established way of talking about these things in China, because it has such a long history of bureaucracy and everyone got used to these dnyamics over thousands of years, but even in places like Sweden you can have guanxi. It boils down to doing something for a member of your ingroup strictly because he's in your ingroup.

I mean even the word 关系 and "network" have the same etymology. 系 = threads of silk arranged in a pattern.

bumbledraven
0 replies
12h41m

In American English, in the context of people, "network" typically refers to business contacts.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/network : “To get a job in today's economy, it is important to have a strong network.”

etrvic
10 replies
11h43m

There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them.

If those concepts would exist you wouldn’t be able to explain them using words, no matter how complex the phrase may be. Taking a phrase and expecting it to have a single word replace is unrealistic. You can’t just asign a word to every possible sentence/phrase. Having a direct translation means you don’t necessarily need that word in your language.

One might argue that the limit of our language is the limit of our ability to think.

nopinsight
9 replies
11h33m

How did Michelangelo create his masterpieces? Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language.

I suspect the same happens in many other fields. Even in an abstract field like mathematics, intuition often forms in the mind before verbal description or articulation.

hifromwork
3 replies
7h4m

How did Michelangelo create his masterpieces? Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language.

I'm not sure what you mean. He probably started with something "Ok, I need to create a statue", then "Who should I pick, I guess it should be someone Biblical, let's pick David because they like him in Florence", then "Ok, he was a healthy and muscular young man, and I have enough material for a 5 meter high statue", then "let's start with sculpting a general outline and then focus on head and neck shapes" (...) and finally "looks good, but the nose should be a bit smaller". I can almost imagine the whole thought process (except I know nothing about sculpting, but I'm not terrible at some other art forms).

There's nothing that is inherently non-verbal in this process. And all of these decisions can be described algorithmically and numerically (even though humans doing art usually compare their results to a reference images instead of doing 3d math in their head).

nopinsight
2 replies
4h52m

Here is the key part of my argument: in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David, (implying) in the exact same style as the masterpiece, without seeing or touching the artifact itself (because that would not be just verbal language anymore).

cableshaft
1 replies
4h16m

Isn't that what CNC machines do? Or even 3D modeling software, which then gets 3D printed? Is that not creating things, potentially as complicated as David, using language? I know CNC machines use G-Code.

I think the only limiting factor we have on that is we don't yet have a robot that can chisel marble to create a carbon copy of such sculptures, but we can otherwise do it with other materials.

Jensson
0 replies
2h4m

I doubt Michelangelo could write such a spec, but he could make David. The ability to communicate is not the same thing as the ability to do, they are separate, as people who can write such a spec probably can't make it by themselves either.

guax
1 replies
11h10m

I don't get your point on Michelangelo. We can very easily describe the process if we could see it. We just can't cause he's dead and he was not big on YouTube, even then we can explain a lot from evidence.

Its much more complex to explain why we classify them as masterpieces than how he made it.

cellu
0 replies
4h42m

I’d recommend to read the reflective practitioner, by Donald Schön

tick_tock_tick
0 replies
9h33m

Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David?

Maybe I don't understand why you couldn't use verbal language to instruct a CNC machine?

etrvic
0 replies
10h13m

I believe that intuition is often not enough to have a concrete thought. It’s more of a feeling, you can’t reach conclusions based on intuition, you also need reason.

TeMPOraL
0 replies
9h26m

Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language.

Possibly. Even if this was just emulating the thought process that happened non-verbally, it would still work. I imagine that's a big part of why language seems so critical an invention: because it can be used as emulator of otherwise non-verbal thought processes.

That said, in case of Michelangelo, describing the "algorithm" is not sufficient, because just as important are the external factors. Art reacts to the medium and situation, so there's a lot of randomness into any specific work. It's kind of like with Stable Diffusion - we could get the prompt just right to generate something like a picture someone else generated, but there's only one seed that will result in identical output, and that little number is something we can't easily reverse.

gyomu
6 replies
12h9m

* 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.

i don't speak Thai or Mandarin, so I can't speak to the other 2, but this one is a pun (combining tsundeoku, pile up, and dokusho, book reading) that survived in the language due to its catchiness.

A bit like "hangry" (hungry + angry) in English.

I have a hard time interpreting the existence of those words as an indication that Japanese culture really values not reading the books you buy, or English speaking culture is irritated due to hunger more so than other cultures.

They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.

nopinsight
1 replies
11h58m

Perhaps wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) might be a better example?

"wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection."

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi)

posterboy
0 replies
4h47m

there are no good examples. The basic premise in Linguistics these days seems tl be that all languages are potentially equally expressive. Trade-offs in one domain (grammar, lexicon, phonology etc.) afford advantages in another. Which means, there is no need to refer to Japanese at all.

You could equally refer to some slur in a lower register to then claim that this doesn't exist in your language and how it can't be translated either. So when Joe Biden said "SoB" on tape once, that was code switching; likewise, when Trump says anything it's all made up and coded and means something entirely different. However, these are bad examples if your target is a monolingual Japanese, obv.

TeMPOraL
1 replies
11h5m

They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.

My take: they became instant memes and experience wide adoption because they capture a concept without another name - and that makes it not just easy to talk about, but also to think about in the first place (counter to article's thesis?).

posterboy
0 replies
4h57m

However, Tsundoku hasn't caught on, at least not in English, except as a vain example of language fun facts. If there was a need, it would be borrowed eventually, perhaps as a semantic loan (calque). We call it hording already. Japanese simply adds a work related to reading. I don't read Japanese but I can recognize the "speech" radical at least.

laszlojamf
0 replies
8h38m

Book-dragon is a fantastic word. Thank you for that!

dejj
6 replies
11h19m

Brevity is key for words that aid thinking.

Consider Chinese 成语 (Chengyu) [1] or Japanese 四字熟語 (Yo Ji Juku Go) [2]: - 指桑骂槐 (Zhi Sang Ma Huai) - Pulling the shoots to make the rice grow = helicoptering - 拔苗助长 (Ba Miao Zhu Zhang) - Point at the mulberry tree to curse the locust tree = deflective criticism

These condense a whole story with moral lesson in them, and they facilitate recall of that concept. The trick is omission of everything but 4 characters from the whole story. Sometimes they're just an enumeration:

- 柴米油盐 (Chai Mi You Yan) Firewood, Rice, Oil, Salt = essential things for everyday life - 都道府県 (To Dou Fu Ken) all 4 types of Jap. prefecture = everywhere

I think brevity is key for words that aim at aiding thinking. All languages allow composition; consider "Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher". But only if the word is short, can you quickly cast your thought into its form (as if speaking) and proceed to compose it with the next thought. You do this until your individual mental capacity runs out.

It's also very important that others know the concept. I find myself often refer to "that scene in Wolf of Wallstreet where Belfort _really safely_ drives his Lamborghini home"[3] to express "power is nothing without control". I wish there was a briefer word for it yet.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojijukugo 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1huYsSOYlVo

TeMPOraL
3 replies
11h0m

So you're effectively saying that Chinese is compressed Tamarian? Like, instead of writing "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" you'd put their initials together, so you're saying the Chinese-equivalent of "DJT" and the listener instantly knows the story, and therefore the message, it refers to?

dejj
1 replies
6h50m

You recognized it. Tamarian does exactly that.

There's a subclass of 成语 the sense of which you can't even guess at unless you know the story:

- 塞翁失马 (Sai Weng Shi Ma) - Old man loses horse; a 5-fold story of riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches = life is unpredictable

- 自相矛盾 (Zi Xiang Mao Dun) - Resemble spear and shield = unstoppable force meets indestructible object

The latter is so common that 矛盾 (Mao Dun) is the dictionary entry for "contradiction" in Chinese and Japanese.

Because 矛盾 is so common, the story 自相矛盾 (=etymology) gets taught only later to native speakers. Similarly, consider the surprising etymology of word "rob", deriving from "robe" [1].

Consider also: - "Seven at One Blow" [2] = bamboozle

This proverb everyone knows, yet nobody uses it. It only cumbersomely embeds in a sentence; "bamboozle" is briefer. But 成语 do easily embed in Chinese or any phrase does in Tamarian.

1: https://www.etymonline.com/word/robe 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Little_Tailor

creamyhorror
0 replies
1h26m

"Seven at One Blow" is certainly not a proverb that everyone knows in English; it's the name of the fairytale in English, but not something that people use to mean "bamboozle".

It's simply the case that Chinese relies far more on literary/historical allusions (chengyu) than English does. We might talk about someone's "Achilles heel" or a "Trojan horse", but these literary/historical allusions are simply nowhere near as common as chengyu in Chinese.

082349872349872
0 replies
10h20m

Cap Gets The Reference. (talking about Steve Rogers, but trying to stay in the 4 word format, like "Big Hat No Cattle")

in a different vein, "Tony and Manny, at the pool" might refer to:

  这个国家:
  先拿到钱,
  得到力量,
  然后淫乐。
[at least in "Antonio Montana's Journey to the West" (1983)]

posterboy
0 replies
4h44m

You are missing that to drive one-self home is a metaphor, possibly a visual metaphor in this case, for DIY self-service in the private domain, as it were.

leobg
0 replies
2m

These are fascinating. Anyone know a book our other source for a list of such Chinese shorthand figures of speech and the tales/aphorisms behind them about human nature? Kinda like “sour grapes” in English, or Aesop’s fables.

TeMPOraL
2 replies
11h7m

Interesting examples. For me, a predominantly linguistic thinker, it's actually those concepts having words that make it possible for me to really think about them on their own.

So "buying books and never reading them", yes, it's a phenomenon that happens and one could presumably talk about it, but it's hard to even think of in the first place - it's a complex set of ideas joined together in a specific way. Tsundoku, however, is a concept. A single word. A token. A point in the latent space. Something I feel existing independently in my mind, as a node that I can feel emotions about, that grows attachments. That's much easier to access, and thus much more common to talk about.

Nam-jai, I already have an English word for this in my mind, "pay -it-forward". Yeah, it's one semantic unit in my mind. Funny enough, I'm ESL and I don't know a word in my native language for this (Polish); the concept exists in my head literally as "pay it forward", and brings up associations with some broken down car story, and Jesus for some reason.

Guanxi - in English, isn't that a "social network"? That's another good example of a concept I find much easier to think about once it's pinned down with a name.

mewpmewp2
1 replies
10h57m

And I can definitely think about buying books without reading them. Firstly, coincidentally I thought about this in the morning, but I didn't need a word, but it was still linguistic. I just thought the whole sentence.

TeMPOraL
0 replies
10h31m

I can think of that too. But it's not the same. A crude analogy would be to working memory. "Buying books without reading them, as a phenomenon" takes half a dozen or more slots in memory. "Tsundoku" is one slot.

blueboo
0 replies
9h55m

I find this unconvincing. Words described those terms just fine as you just proved.

calf
15 replies
13h11m

The crux of their argument is that the language faculty and other faculties (math/logic/abstract, theory of mind/social reasoning, spatial/temporal imagination, and other cognitive abilities) all evolved in parallel, so the most plausible explanation is that language is mostly independent of all those other faculties which are activated in distinct neural network areas of the human brain, based on brain scan studies in the last 20 years.

I imagine a counterargument (or complication) to that is that such parallel evolution would require the neural networks to independently evolve certain breakthroughs multiple times before reaching the Homo sapiens stage. For example, language is recursive and yet human mathematical reasoning is recursive, but these use two different brain areas (according to the paper). So in their figure of two different brain regions for language processing versus math/code thinking, both regions had to somehow evolve the "wetware" for recursive computation. How did natural evolution manage that in general?

derriz
12 replies
11h46m

Actual human natural language isn’t recursive in any meaningful sense. Formal grammar - an (often futile) attempt to describe the structure of natural languages - is generally expressed using a formal mathematical system which features recursion.

calf
11 replies
11h3m

Actual human natural language is meaningfully recursive, because any grade school student understands the recursive properties of certain toy sentence examples in that they could "go on forever" as a set of arbitrarily larger complex sentences.

The commonality of mathematical grammars (as mathematical objects in their own right) and natural language is that both have computational properties such as recursive structure - or ambiguity, which was discussed in the paper.

derriz
10 replies
10h36m

You're confusing the object language (human natural language) and the meta-language (formal grammars - ala Chomsky).

Formal grammar theory relies on recursive formulae to define what is a a language (formally set of sentences), natural language itself does not use/require recursion as understood in the same way. Some natural languages support grammatical features like sub-clauses but that's only "recursive" in the sense that attempts to describe such features (using formal language grammars) use recursion when in fact and in practice nesting sub-clauses do not "go on forever".

An analogy with computer programming languages - programming languages exist that do NOT support recursion (pre-Algol) but nonetheless require recursion to define their formal grammar. For example, a programming language can support limitless nested lexical scoping (loosely analogous to sub-clauses in natural language) WITHOUT supporting recursion (which requires a stack and managing frames).

For some programming languages (functional for example), recursion is such a key feature that it's inconceivable that the language could be useful without it.

This is not the case for natural languages. Most of the people I interact with daily have English as a second language and rarely or never use sub-clauses (which are not recursive but are often used to claim that language is recursive) so from practical experience, I know that English as a communication tool looses very little expressive power when users do not use sub-clauses.

082349872349872
4 replies
8h58m

English as a communication tool looses very little expressive power when users do not use sub-clauses.

Very little for that subset you wish to communicate, maybe.

In some literary traditions, not only are clauses nested within clauses at the sentence level, but whole narratives are nested within others.

(hmm, are there any in-the-wild examples of recursive tmesis? if so, that'd be just fan-far-fucking-out-tastic)

derriz
3 replies
7h13m

Clauses within clauses are not "recursive", no more than "let x = 1 in (let y = 2 in (let z = 3 in x + y + z)" represents recursion in some hypothetical programming language.

Programming languages and human languages existed before people felt the need to define them using formal grammars. Yes most formal grammars use recursion but that's a property of the system you are trying to use to describe (meta) the structure of the object language - not part of the object language itself.

Try to use Haskell without recursion, it's effectively useless. But using an Algol derived language (Java, C, C++, etc.) without recursion is fine and hardly restricts the power of the language at all. Try to use English (or any other indo-European language - I've no knowledge of others) without sub-clauses and it remains a very powerful and useful communication tool.

trealira
0 replies
7h11m

Clauses within clauses are not "recursive", no more than "let x = 1 in (let y = 2 in (let z = 3 in x + y + z)" represents recursion in some hypothetical programming language.

But that is an example of a recursive context free grammar. The parser needs to use a stack or be defined recursively to parse things like that.

foobarqux
0 replies
4h8m

You are saying that text on a (finite) page is not recursive (because recursion is a computation, not the output of that computation). But we are interested in the computations that the language faculty performs not the output.

082349872349872
0 replies
7h1m

Agreed: if you're willing to be as limited with composing in english as you would be with programming in C, lack of recursion is not an issue.

(there's a bit of a parallel, in that XVII english writers, not having readers as pressed for time as our current variant, make far more use of nested sub-clauses than we tend to; similarly, CPL, not having been as pressed for space as either BCPL or C, made far more use of nested sub-expressions than its successor languages)

bbor
3 replies
9h57m

I'd definitely say all language use must rely on recursion, you're just highlighting our tendency to halt the pronunciation of it early at arbitrary points due to linguistic norms. Like, AFAIU this was Chomsky's whole impetus, and I really don't think anyone has answered better than he: how can a finite system compute linguistic meaning in finite time, otherwise? I'd guess the "natural language" answer would be along the lines of "it just comes naturally who knows", in which case I'm staying I'm on my side of the battle lines ;)

Either way, I think you'd win a Nobel for proving that complex recursive processes aren't going on inside the head of someone speaking in natural language. We can discuss the likely situation all day, but directly measuring this in the moment seems well beyond our technical capabilities

derriz
1 replies
7h25m

I think Chomsky is a linguist really more famous and respected among non-linguists than actual experts in the field. I don't think modern linguistics - particularly applied linguistics for example in the area of language acquisition - references Chomsky.

His theories are unfalsifiable and un-empirical and thus, for me, unscientific. This discussion is typical. Chomsky's definition of "recursion" - like that of a "language organ" - has become completely plastic. In his initial work, it was deeply tied to the same notion in formal grammar theory but is constantly redefined and evolving as the initial notion becomes more and more dubious. The "human language is unique in that it is _recursive_" theory has no practical application and has provided no path for advancement in the field of language pedagogy for example.

Watch me chew up a bunch of karma dismissing Chomsky's theories of language. It's what often happens with comments that question his theories of language - I don't know why it's seemingly impossible to just admire his politics without feeling the need to vigorously defend his 60 or 70-year-old theories of language which have long been abandoned in the field.

foobarqux
0 replies
3h27m

It would genuinely shock me if Chomsky wasn't the most cited author for works published today even if you exclude works that are dismissive of him.

The reason the specifics of Chomsky's proposals are changing is that it isn't a solved problem and he and others are continuing to try to advance the understanding by revising proposals in light of better arguments, simpler explanation and (contrary to what you say, see [1] which lists some examples) experimental evidence. In Chomsky's most recent book he himself quotes Wheeler: "Surely someday, we can believe, we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say to each other, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind so long!’". I think people have a hard time understanding this because it is one of the few nascent sciences and therefore no one has figured out the fundamental theories.

And if some specific proposal like X-bar theory is falsified or supplanted by something else that doesn't falsify the core ideas of universal grammar or the minimalist program. You say that it isn't possible to provide evidence that these are false but Moro for example conducted experiments comparing hierarchical and linear language processing that potentially would have provided reasonable evidence against language being hierarchical had they shown linear languages were processed similarly (instead they support it).

The reason you should be downvoted is that you made a bunch of evidence free assertions; You could have said "Neil Bohr's work has been completely falsified and is of dubious value" with the same amount of supporting argument.

[1] https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007363

numpad0
0 replies
3h36m

"How can $static_config_generator programming itself be Turing complete if its output weren't!?" yeah x86 assembly can generate HTML. yawn.

"How else? Anyone? Gotcha!" followed by silence is not a propositional logic, it's a comedy cliche.

YeGoblynQueenne
0 replies
5h15m

> Some natural languages support grammatical features like sub-clauses but that's only "recursive" in the sense that attempts to describe such features (using formal language grammars) use recursion when in fact and in practice nesting sub-clauses do not "go on forever".

Recursion doesn't have to go on forever.

4b11b4
1 replies
12h51m

If language is no longer part of thought, then sure, breaking down... thought... into many different mechanisms also makes sense (quite a bit of sense actually).

From there, you ask: "What is the fundamental aspect underlying each of these different faculties?"

calf
0 replies
10h54m

The authors say their opponents want a singular fundamental aspect, supposedly because of parsimony or Occam's razor (but this is the authors' framing). It's not clear to me who's account is more likely.

vishnugupta
5 replies
12h2m

Most of the time we are communicating (internal monologue) with ourselves which I’m sure shapes our thoughts. I’d guess a large percentage of that is through a language.

In fact languages codify a community’s culture, values, a way of life all of which go way beyond communication.

anon22981
2 replies
11h54m

Imo the internal monologue is often about summarizing or sorting out something, while I’ve already figured it out non-verbally. Like a verbal confirmation. Though sometimes the internal monologue is about processing something and figuring stuff out.

vishnugupta
0 replies
11h19m

Though sometimes the internal monologue is about processing something and figuring stuff out

Indeed. And my non-expert assertion was that our brain doesn't compartmentalise between communication and thought processing. Our thoughts are getting shaped even as we are verbalising something. IMO it's a continuous stream of chatter of jumbled up things a part of which gets used to create/shape our thoughts.

hliyan
0 replies
9h39m

Agreed. I used to think (haha) that I was thinking the thoughts I as thought them verbally, but as of late, I've come to realise that I've already had the thought as a sort of a series of perceptual flashes or traces, and when I think I'm thinking, I'm merely verbalising what I've already internally "perceived".

x3n0ph3n3
1 replies
11h11m

Lot's of people (me included) do not have persistent internal monologues.

vishnugupta
0 replies
10h39m

Sure. But when you do have it, would it be fair to say it does shape your thoughts, no matter how small?

talkingtab
5 replies
4h35m

Okay, so my first experiment was to try to think without language. Go ahead, you try it. I can't do it. So a simple conclusion is that language gives rise to what we call thought. However, I do some things - which I do not call thought - without language. There was/is an old IBM programming test of patterns and I can choose the correct pattern even when I cannot think why that is. In "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", Christopher Alexander talks about how we can tell "good art" even when we do not know why. As a painter, I often do not paint well and I know it.N Sometimes I do well, but I cannot tell you why or what.

Next issue: communication. Humans are currently dominate because we collaborate. The idea of communication as "I can tell you the day of the month" is useful. But communication as a way of effectively collaborating is another thing all together.

If we accept collaboration as the thing that gives people survival fitness - which I do - then you can invert the whole thing and focus on how we achieve that. Ants are another species that collaborate well and are successful. But, arguably, ants neither think nor speak. Unless you want to call leaving a pheromone trail "speaking"? And why not? So now we can consider the issue of from another perspective - what constitutes a language? Sapir Whorf says our language affects if not determines what we think. Perhaps we need to look at language not as what we think it is but instead that language is any system that provides collaboration. And then we start going down an interesting rat hole. "Twitter and Teargas" argues that that extwitter does "affords" people ways to do some things but not others.

It is a complex and interesting issue. My take is that language is primarily a tool for collaboration.

segmondy
0 replies
3h50m

I can think without language, and so can you. That's why we have the phrase, "what just happened?" "what was that" you have seen an event, you can see think about it, but you don't understand it. thoughts come before language, language helps to cement understand. I also speak multiple languages, I don't think in any language.

paraschopra
0 replies
4h19m

Fascinating. Does it mean that when we have an internal monologue, we're in effect collaborating with our immediate-future self?

This has parallels to the Chain-of-Thought prompting in LLMs, where simply by letting the model speak its reasoning, it generates better responses.

The way I look at things: language-less thinking is tapping into our evolved or ingrained patterns (aka intuition). This is like one forward pass of LLMs. But if you have to reason in a novel situation that you haven't seen before, you have to break it down into simpler steps and that necessarily requires some form of "thinking aloud".

I need to follow the references in the original paper, but most of their evidence of language-less thought was about intuition-type thinking, not multi-step reasoning.

andrewflnr
0 replies
4h8m

So a simple conclusion is that language gives rise to what we call thought.

Simple and wrong. Remember that thought is highly influenced by habit. If you habitually think in language, it might just possibly take more than thirty seconds of trying before you can conclude it's impossible.

Unless you're defining "thought" to be "internal mental processes that take the form of language", in which case have fun at tautology club.

BurningFrog
0 replies
2h35m

When I think about moving objects around, for example, there are very few words.

Some 3D modeling part of my brain does most of the work, and "I" largely watch and guide it.

Maybe not everyone has this "GPU" installed.

leshokunin
5 replies
13h13m

We don't have better tooling to transfer information between humans though. We have language, and we have art. It seems that art transcends humans in some ways: happy / sad music seems to affect animals, and we've seen animals contemplating things. Without language, we can't really create a mapping to what that means though. We simply don't have a better way to compress multiple concepts into few bits of information we can pass around.

Interestingly, removing language as a tool for communication is a cool thought experiment. I imagine one could use maths, or music, as a way of expressing thoughts and ideas. Would that process of condensing information not be language-making though?

082349872349872
4 replies
12h34m

I often work with animals who show signs of thought: presented with a novel situation, they pause, reflect, and select the prudent option.

I sometimes work with people who show no signs of thought: external stimuli are perceived, converted into a stream of language, and conveyed, with no apparent effort at audience-based compression (selection of an appropriate message from a wide variety of potential messages), or even compression in general (selection of a short message...).

leshokunin
3 replies
11h52m

That's great insight. How do you think animals store or communicate those thoughts? From your own experience.

082349872349872
2 replies
9h36m

Storage I have no idea. (for that matter, I have little idea how we store non-linguistic thoughts)

Communication is primarily via posture, secondarily via sound. No "grammar" is involved, intensification is via intensification of signal, not addition of symbols. (that said, much human-animal communication is by means of arbitrary symbols, just that each symbol is serving as a sign because combinations of symbols and even their ordering doesn't really matter)

Animals certainly get order: they'll easily learn sequences of actions, but if you're getting different behaviour from AB than BA, I currently believe that's because the animal has learnt, and is perceiving, those as two different gestalts.

Imperative and Vocative are the basic cases. (and to what extent the latter belongs to the former I can't really say: when the stock greets in the morning, are they saying "good morning, 0823", as we'd like to believe, or are they really saying "Hey, you, thumb-monkey, feed us!"?)

Interrogative exists, but barely: "where is everyone?" "fren?" (or, if wondering about more* than friendship: "gotta light?")

An example of linear use of order in equines: a young equid has what my wife calls "filly rights" and generally gets to do what it wants. As it gets either older, or too obnoxious, though, the other members of the herd will start to socialise it. This usually occurs via an ascending scale of pressure, from the subtle (eye contact - "are you sure that's an acceptable behaviour?") through the clear (coming up alongside — "all right, what's all this then?") to behaviours reserved for outlaws (full-power kick with both hinds — "what we've got here is failure to communicate").

[the biggest problem I see novice humans have is they attempt to bargain with animals; offer-consideration-acceptance is, for me, far too human-abstract a framework. That's not to say you can't come to consensus on a modus vivendi, but you're not going to get there through a contract approach, calibrated to the capabilities of two-legged mammals.]

My stock all know index finger up is a non-linguistic way humans ask "are you sure?" (and their name may be a linguistic escalation), but I have no clue if they understand it as a sign of potential aggression (being generally produced as a sharp movement), or as a symbol of potential displeasure?

Cattle (both mobs and individuals) can be steered by use of their fight-or-flight in response to posture. You don't directly tell them "go left" ("haw" for a carriage horse) or "go right" ("gee" for a carriage horse) but instead either confirm the pressure (if they're already pointed the right direction) or change the pressure (reduce-intensify if you wish them to flip towards you, intensify-reduce if you wish them to flip away from you) to get them going in the desired direction.

[as you all can tell, feudalism (or IR) is basically what you get when you think politics should be entirely based on this level of communication; however even in democracies use of the bovine principle to manufacture consensus in an electorate occurs, for my sensitivities, way too often]

If anyone can think of experiments that would clarify some of these situations, I'm all ears!

* I understand these days you all mediate all your flirting via text, which seems like a very difficult thing to calibrate; in my day we had analogue signals that (to me alone?) are much easier to dial up or down:

  We laugh just a little too loud
  Stand just a little too close
  We stare just a little too long
WTF are kids doing these days? "we put just a little too many 'e's in our heeeeys?"

YeGoblynQueenne
1 replies
5h10m

> Storage I have no idea. (for that matter, I have little idea how we store non-linguistic thoughts)

Efficiently, probably. There was an article about chickadees' memories, recently:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/29/birds-create...

Although I haven't read the original article.

> "Hey, you, thumb-monkey, feed us!"

Well, they do stick around because we can open tin cans...

082349872349872
0 replies
30m

I am bitterly disappointed in the error message:

  cat: food in tin cans: No such file or directory
because at some point it used to report:

  cat: can't open food in tin cans
At least that's not as great a loss as:

  make: *** No rule to make target `love'.  Stop.

justacomment100
5 replies
6h14m

My takes:

1. The existence of “rubber duck debugging”, and a whole bunch of studies on verbally explaining a concept indicate that language is essential for thought. In rubber duck debugging, programmers tell their problem to an object and this is beneficial in finding the solution. There are studies that show when we verbally teach material to someone we remember it better. Also the act of taking a test increases learning and memory, but why should this be if learning is secondary?

2. Everything we know about memory tells us that externality is essential for memorizing something. If there’s nothing visual, aural, or sensory then it is unlikely to be remembered. Language acts as an externality even as inner speech, meaning that thoughts can be said in language (ascribed onto the words) and remembered for short-term and long-term memory. A thought without externality seems more like a passing whim, unrooted in any more permanent mode of cognition and thus liable to be forgotten. I can imagine thinking in visuals, melodies, words, but if there is a kind of thought that isn’t occurring based off of these then it probably can’t be sophisticated.

ordu
0 replies
1h23m

Disclaimer: I do not know, really, what role language plays in a thought process. I just want to point why your takes are not enough to make me to believe that language is a necessary prerequisite for a thought.

1. Rubber duck maybe just help with attention issues. All the studies I heard of do not try to untangle the mechanism. People tend to use language for a multi-brain thinking, and in this mode people do not think their thoughts fully, they propose ideas allowing other to support them or dismiss them. In this way they've got combined knowledge and experience to do the work, simplifying the early rejection of bad ideas. And I'm sure this mode of thinking shapes mind and in particular attention processes. You need to track which bits of information you told already and which you didn't, and you trained for that. Rubber duck can be just a trigger for that mode of attention.

2. I didn't hear about externalities, but to my mind what really helps to remember it is a number of associated details. I believe that ideas extracted from the memory when some of these details is popped up in your thought. It serves like a key in an associative map. When you name a concept with a word, and then use this word in different combinations with other words building associations, then sometimes your mind just like LLM will suggest the first word when you used words associated with it. It seems like externalities you talk about. Language plays its role with this, but you can achieve the same result without a language but thinking about all connected concepts of a concept you are trying to remember. You can build associations this way.

maizeq
0 replies
4h39m

1. This doesn’t indicate language is necessary for thought but rather that language is useful for refining thought. If anything it shows that some form of thought exists before it is articulated into language. I would assume inverse cases also exist, where articulation into language narrows a thought down into the vocabulary of a language.

2. I thought rare individuals who did not develop language abilities (e.g due to isolation) still had memories of their time prior to thought. The most obvious example to me is Helen Keller, who writes about her time prior to meeting her teacher.

jyscao
0 replies
3h23m

There are studies that show when we verbally teach material to someone we remember it better.

I am convinced that teaching material to other people helps us remember concepts better. Doing it verbally just so happen to be the most common and convenient form of knowledge transmission between individuals.

empath75
0 replies
4h49m

I think you can think of rubber duck debugging and similar ideas as "forcing functions." In order to communicate an idea one must have "an idea" to communicate. The process of putting vague notions into words forces you to reason about them and clarify them.

BurningFrog
0 replies
2h40m

How I think Rubber Ducking works for me:

Explaining things to others - imaginary or not - engages the parts of my brain imagining how they will receive and understand it.

This is primarily so I can phrase it in a way other people can understand. But that imagined model of other minds is often smart enough to imagine what they would answer.

Which I guess means my "social brain" is smarter than my "thinking" brain in some ways.

Don't know how universal that is. My brain tends to be an outlier.

foldr
2 replies
9h43m

This is related but not really the same thing. The Language of Thought may or may not be closely related to human language. (Some animals may also have concepts and compositional mental representations.)

cubefox
1 replies
9h1m

I didn't read the SEP article, but is the language of thought hypothesis perhaps already verified by our ability to do some sort of logic on neural network embeddings? E.g. queen-royal=woman.

foldr
0 replies
8h30m

Fundamentally LoT is a hypothesis about human (and possibly animal) cognition, not a hypothesis about what artificial neural network models can or can't do. But you can see Fodor and Pylyshyn's thoughts on 'connectionist' models (as they were known at the time) in this extensive article from 1988: https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/pro... The discussion on p. 14 is particularly relevant.

lukasb
0 replies
11h19m

Complaint not targeted at you personally but - why does thought have to take place in language at all? I sometimes reason using physical or kinesthetic metaphors that would be impossible to capture perfectly in language.

visarga
3 replies
11h35m

Let's do a mental experiment: Put 2 year old Einstein on a remote island, all alone, and come back 30 years later. Assume he survives. Will he impress you with his insights?

They say we don't use language for thought, but language informs our strategies and choices, and collective experience is essential for progress. We only add small increments of insight from our own experiences to the pool, but the experience captured in language is greater than any one of us.

And more interestingly, LLMs trained on this data show amazing capabilities that go beyond mere reproduction. LLMs gain everything Einstein lost in this experiment, what is the language part and what is the pure insight part? Looks to me humans are like LLMs on feet, and with a full social complement surrounding them.

somenameforme
1 replies
11h21m

I know your answer is supposed to be no, but I think there's a good chance the answer would be yes. There's a seemingly endless amount that can be learned about basically anything. And surviving for 30 years on an isolated island is going to involve developing a wide range of skills and masteries ranging from healthcare, seasonal prediction, animal habits, hunting, medicine, shelter construction, and much more.

It'd be akin to chatting with an isolated tribesman - that alone would already be fascinating and endlessly informative. These are people who can walk into the woods naked, and walk out weeks later fed, clothed, and sheltered. And now also add in this individual happening to be a several sigma outlier in learning capacity, creativity, and so on. It'd be an absolutely fascinating discussion!

mewpmewp2
0 replies
10h53m

Pretty sure he would die, to be honest.

miika
3 replies
13h12m

How do you define “thinking”?

To me thinking is primary tool of communication between I and “me” and it’s entirely based on sound and language.

Can you think without using language?

When you have song playing in your head, how is that different from your thoughts?

Isn’t talking out loud just act of thinking, the output being connected to mouth?

Have you ever tried to repeat mantra in your thought, slow down until coming to full stop? What remains when thinking stops?

Have you noticed that thinking is like breathing, in a way that it’s happening automatically and you can also take over?

Have you noticed that thinking consciously is linked with breath and being aware of space?

Fascinating topic!

tamimio
0 replies
10h39m

Thinking is more than just communication; it involves reasoning, problem-solving, etc., according to the paper. You can definitely think without using language, such as while driving, flying, or even playing sports. A subcategory of thinking probably requires language, one that will be used to communicate with others, like addressing an issue at work or even writing a comment here.

jbkly7
0 replies
11h57m

Most of my thinking is not in language, though I do sometimes talk to myself in my head. If someone asks me what I'm thinking or feeling, it sometimes takes great effort to translate it into words; and when I do attempt to express it I often feel the words are pretty inadequate. Like encoding a high-res image into a few pixels, or music into a few notes. Super interesting topic indeed.

082349872349872
0 replies
12h49m

To me most communication between I and "me" occurs in symbol arrangements, not sound and language.

This can be annoying: when my wife asks me what I'm thinking about, if I'm thinking about something relatively linguistic (an HN comment, say), it's easy to tell her. Otherwise, I need a fair amount of time and effort to make the consecutive interpretation (and forget about simultaneous!).

Further evidence that my thought is not especially language-mediated: my wife and I share a little over three languages in common; however translating into any of these is about as difficult as any other, suggesting that the original thought is equally "far away" from all of them.

abetusk
3 replies
12h26m

In contrast to Noam Chomsky who was pushing the idea that language was developed primarily for thought [0].

I don't know how much weight should be given to this paper but, if true, directly contradicts Chomsky. Here is one quote from Chomsky:

""" ... One general assumption about language, almost a dogma in philosophy ... [and] linguistics ... is that language is primarily a means of communication ... probably that's totally false. It seems language ... is designed as a mode of creating and interpreting thought. """

In my opinion, I find Chomsky to get mired in certain quagmires around intelligence and computation, especially in regards to AI, where he's somehow managed to rationalize an absurd stance. I remember watching a video with Chomsky claiming that language's primary purpose was not communication and thinking it was potentially plausible but highly unlikely. I'd be curious to see if people think this paper, and maybe any other research, refute this position.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEmpRtj34xg

contingencies
1 replies
12h7m

Perhaps an artificial dichotomy between thought and communication is itself false. After all, is thinking not in some sense remembered experience (ie. the past self) communicating with the present (ie. future self)?

calf
0 replies
10h40m

To be fair to Chomsky, the historical context is that he was pushing against a particular dogma of his time. So later on Chomsky evolved his own position and came up with i-language/e-language for internal vs external language and so forth. And a few years ago he was recommending a new cognitive science textbook where the first chapter begins with Claude Shannon's communication/information theory.

Merrill
3 replies
1h47m

In college I was struck by a housemate's law books. They only contained text with no pictures, drawings, diagrams, tables, graphs, formulae, or any of the other tools for organizing information common to engineering. They looked to be extremely tedious and boring.

Later, another former housemate, a math major who was developing software, went to law school for a JD. It was his opinion that many of the tools from computer science were useful for deciphering the more complex laws and regulations.

How you think may be a significant factor in whether you are a good match to certain occupations.

creamyhorror
1 replies
1h13m

the tools from computer science were useful for deciphering the more complex laws and regulations.

I've sometimes thought that certain aspects of law (e.g. contracts) are very similar to the strict rule-based thinking required in programming, and that the same basic logical thinking is required. It's just that some concepts have been formalised differently between the fields, and also that law has inherent fuzziness due to incomplete specification of its programs, the ambiguity of some language/phrasing, and the changing societal environment.

With programs, the computer interprets the rules deterministically (generally speaking), and we programmers are forced to draft our regulations accordingly or we'll get unwanted results. Whereas contracts are a bit less deterministically interpreted, and human incentives and potential interpretations have to be considered in drafting.

wavemode
0 replies
57m

In the modern day, there's almost no way to decipher the true precise meaning of a law just from its text. What really matters is case law - how the law has been applied in practice by courts over the years.

leobg
0 replies
10m

I was the only one in my class in law school who used mind maps and spaces repetition (back then on a Palm Pilot).

After I graduated, new professors came in who now are popularizing such methods, writing books about it, etc..

I think it’s a zeitgeist thing. If you’re too early, nobody will take you seriously. But at some point the tide is strong enough to break through.

Kinda the same as with AI/automation. I tried selling this to lawyers in 2020 and failed miserably. Three years later, ChatGPT became a thing, and now every lawyer wants a piece of AI.

It’s not the better mousetrap. It’s not people wanting new things that moves the world. It’s people not wanting to be left behind.

(Slightly paraphrasing the late Charlie Munger.)

verghese
2 replies
13h3m

Reminds me of the the quote from Albert Einstein: "I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards."

Language is a higher level abstraction for the brain. Sort of like a higher level programming language vs assembly or binary.

kevinventullo
0 replies
9h17m

I think of language more as a lossy serialization format for thoughts.

BurningFrog
0 replies
2h31m

Not claiming to be like Einstein in other ways, but I could say the same.

Sometimes people ask me if I think in English or my native language. I'm tempted to say "mostly not".

BTW, loose speculation: Maybe being bilingual does "free" the brain from word thinking.

renegade-otter
2 replies
3h35m

You can't think if you don't speak. Babies don't "think" like adults do, rather they just follow instincts.

Go ahead, try it. Think something but don't say it in your head.

pessimizer
0 replies
3h14m

This is not at all true. You think this is true because this is how you think (or how you think you think.) Translating my thoughts into words has always taken an effort, even when I was a child, and I'm always surprised at how many words it takes to describe concepts or relationships that when I think them seem very simple.

edit: also, I don't even know what you mean by "instinct(s)" here, or how you differentiate them from thoughts. Even language is an instinct. If you have entities that you are applying operations to in your head in order to create new entities, you're thinking.

Jensson
0 replies
3h30m

Go ahead, try it. Think something but don't say it in your head.

I can think about how much food left I have in my fridge, then if I need more now, then formulating a plan to go to the store etc, all without any words ever being in my head.

There is no "I have a gallon of milk" etc, instead I remember how much milk was left as images or events, and then going to the store etc is also similar events and images. There are no words, and I can't put those things into words I can only do bad translations of them, since my thought of going to the store also includes how I'll be tying my shoelaces and the path I'll take etc, imagining how much I have left includes the exact shape I last saw it in etc, translating that to words would take insane amount of words and still be very lossy.

Unless I write or read or speak I don't hear any words in my mind. Only when directly interfacing with language in some way are the words there. Not when doing math problems or physics problems either etc, not when programming, those arne't languages, only when I write down rationalizations or comments etc do the words pop out.

mrgaro
2 replies
8h37m

Does anybody else often visualie memories as they would watch them via a movie camera? I do. I can see myself walking in places with a cinematic camera movements and angles. Haven't heard much others having the same.

soxocx
1 replies
8h29m

How could you possibly know how you really looked like walking in those said places? You haven’t seen yourself walking there. Also, you haven’t seen all of the possible angles that this cinematic camera would capture and replay.

This is an interesting concept about memories, part of them is just made up by our brains.

Edit: So the next time you have an argument about a thing that happened or how it happened, ask yourself, do you really remember or is your brain filling the gaps?

mrgaro
0 replies
7h56m

Oh I absolutely agree that our minds are extending our memories and fabricating rest and it's next to impossible to difference what was real.

But getting back to my cinematic memories: I remember the places I've visited (and imagine places which I haven't) and then my mind constructs the cinematics. Fascinating!

feverzsj
2 replies
12h14m

I believe so, as some people don't even have inner voice.

rsoto2
1 replies
12h7m

is it possible these people just can't "hear" their inner voice? or regard it as something else?

polytely
0 replies
9h34m

I'm definitely mostly without inner voice but I can drop down to it if I want to.

I also have this with reading. normally it seems it skips the internal voice and goes straight from image to thought. but once I start verbalising it, it's hard to stop doing it.

toasterlovin
1 replies
13h20m

Something to keep in mind is that according to Wikipedia, Helen Keller met Anne Sullivan, her caretaker and the person who introduced her to language, at around 7, which is probably around the age many people with normal language acquisition would start to have the kinds of changes in cognition that Keller attributes to learning language.

082349872349872
0 replies
12h38m

See also Spacetime for Springers

cubefox
2 replies
9h20m

Here is my explanation why language seems to be, while not necessary, so useful for abstract thought: Thinking thoughts with abstract concepts takes up a lot of working memory. We can't hold many of those in mind at once. But if they are expressed in words they take very little memory. So we can have long winding and abstract thoughts because language compresses the parts of the thought complex we are not currently focusing on, so we can hold more of it in short term memory. In effect it increases our thinking cache.

HL33tibCe7
1 replies
8h54m

I find the opposite. The more complex a thought, the harder it is to reason about using language in my head. Speaking as someone who has a constant inner monologue.

cubefox
0 replies
8h27m

I'm not so much talking about "reasoning using language", I mean that if you have intermediate reasoning results, you can mentally express them in language, which means you can still remember them after you have focused on something else for a minute. Otherwise you might forget them very quickly. Because we apparently can't hold a lot of thoughts in mind, while we can easily store words in memory.

beaned
2 replies
14h3m

Language is for both. Every concept is tied to a label that is a word. We identify pieces of reality by their common attributes while omitting their specific measurements, and attach these identifications to a label which is a word. It is a unique ability that we have as humans, which no other animal shares. It is essential for rational thought. Communication may have been an evolutionary forcing function on our ability to conceive generally (rather than simply perceive), but communication is still downstream from having concepts to communicate.

pama
0 replies
13h21m

Take a detailed look at an abstract painting and you might form thousands of unlabeled concepts per second; examine life in a microscope; listen to complex instrumental music; taste spicy/tingly XiAn noodles; smell a forest in the fall after the rain: there is a ton of thought involved in common human function without the need or ability of using language. A serialized version of language is too slow to capture parallel complex ideas that can race through your brain in an emergency and save your life. Learning how to use words is useful but there are not enough combinations of words in the world for the richness of thought you can experience in a single morning, in a single breath. We have way too many smell receptors in our genome and way too few words formed for the smell combinations we experience daily. We can recollect experiences, or we can visualize generate experiences in our mind; I dont see a reason we would label every internal or external experience and we certainly dont have to forget or not imagine all the parts we havent labeled yet.

larsrc
0 replies
11h55m

"It is a unique ability that we have as humans, which no other animal shares."

Dogs at least can learn that, too. Probably also cats. Using buttons to express themselves has proven that. Hell, even our dog, who never figured out the buttons, understood that "bed" meant "soft thing next to human's bed", not "the particular bed I usually sleep in".

Humans are merely a lot better at communicating this, having a more complex speech apparatus.

somenameforme
1 replies
11h32m

While I think this is a really interesting topic, it should also be self evident because of a simple fact. Humans developed language long after our species evolved. The most recent estimates put the development of language at as recently as 40,000 years ago.

It'd be impossible to 'invent' language without thought, so therefore it must be the case that thought exists independently of language.

tanepiper
0 replies
10h49m

The problem here is you are putting language as mutually exclusive to humans.

Other animals communicate, by our standards they have language - although their concepts and form is quite different. Language can also be non-verbal.

More likely 40,000 years ago we needed to go beyond simple concepts to more abstract ones.

soloist11
1 replies
11h47m

So it sounds like LLMs will not achieve AGI.

jschrf
0 replies
10h10m

They are regurgitrons that will eventually begin training themselves on their own output, and humanity will get stupider as a result.

RIP art and poetry.

patryn20
1 replies
12h6m

Language is a tool for manipulation. Sure it is used for communication with people considered “equals”. But primarily people use it to get what they want from people they can outmaneuver and/or manipulate verbally and legally (both are an extension of language).

Language’s roots are in trade and survival. Therefore manipulation of others for the speakers benefit has ALWAYS been the primary purpose.

larsrc
0 replies
11h59m

Language's roots are in survival, as in being able to talk to others of your tribe. I'm sure manipulation has always been part of language, but it's a tool for communication foremost. "Og, watch out for that sabretooth tiger!" is hardly manipulation.

I feel sorry for you that you consider manipulation to be so central.

m3kw9
1 replies
13h26m

To all engineers, it’s just an API

mirekrusin
0 replies
12h32m

And LLMs are mock we want to ship to production because in some cases it's indistinguishable from service.

It's also like a burrito.

Also not engineers - devs.

jschrf
1 replies
10h2m

I think cetaceans use sound to broadcast visual and emotional holographs to each other, and as humans we could do good by being stewards of the differing specie and steer their linguistics together somehow.

Conservation through cognitive neuroscience and linguistics.

Can dolphins communicate with sperm whales? What if they could?

euroderf
0 replies
9h57m

I've seen this idea before, that cetaceans might basically project ideas holographically.

Is there any evidence for this ? Or is the idea simply rooted in the possibilities of sound ?

Genuinely curious here.

giorgosts
1 replies
13h41m

False dichotomy. Of course language is for communication like in all other animals, but where would man be without the invention of the language of mathematics? Probably not in the space and nuclear age. So the linguistic tools can push the boundaries of human cognition.

subuwm
0 replies
6h41m

Did you read the paper? According to the authors, mathematics isn't a "language" in this sense.

darth_avocado
1 replies
13h53m

Somehow, when I say Pow-el street instead of Pow-ul street, everyone feigns ignorance, even though they completely know what I’m talking about. Doesn’t seem like language as a communication tool works well, when it is I used as a way to establish superiority.

tamimio
0 replies
10h53m

I agree, especially regarding accents. Something becomes really clear if you move to different areas with even a slight accent change: the dynamics shift to "your accent is bad and ours is better."

bbor
1 replies
10h5m

I hate to quote an abstract, but I'm really struggling to understand the purpose here -- it seems like they're angry that Chomsky defined language as symbolic operations and relegated the external facets to "history of language" or "anthropology of language" or other such fields.

  We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly
co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.

What is the difference between "language is a cognitive adaptation used for communication" and "language is the communication enabled by a cognitive adaption", really? Other than a, as Chomsky would call it, "terminological dispute"

sprawld
0 replies
6h58m

The one part that directly contradicted Chomsky was the argument languages tend to minimise dependency length, which flies in the face of long range dependencies like question movement, topicalisation, pronoun binding etc. And misses the main point Chomsky was making: why have a system with movement?

The article seems to be arguing that statistically most sentences (in most languages) are simple. OK, sentences like "Which boys do the girls expect to fight each other?" may not be common, but you instantly understand that "each other" binds not to the closer "the girls", but the long range dependency "which boys". In order to understand it you reconstruct the question to its original position "the girls expect <which boys> to fight each other" to know that the boys are the ones fighting, and bind to each other (the boys are fighting the boys)

Why have a system like that (in basically every language)? How is that optimised for simple dependencies & communication?

ajb
1 replies
4h9m

An important concept , and one that also has implications for mental health treatment. Eg, many talk therapies operate under the assumption that 'saying the wrong words in your head' is a factor maintaining the problem, and replacing these with better ones will result in improvement.

But since words are not thoughts, and further they are not mental actions (such as relaxing), saying different words in your head is only useful if they help put you in a frame of mind where you can access, or discover, the right thoughts or 'mental actions'.

I conjecture that within the diversity of human minds, there are some for whom language closely bound to thoughts and mental actions, and others less so, and that talk therapy is more useful for the former than the latter. If this is true, then it is also likely to be the case that most talk therapists are of the former persuasion, since they are not likely to espouse a practice which has no effect on themselves.

lukeschlather
0 replies
39m

Words are thoughts but thoughts are not necessarily words. I do think words form better thoughts. Without words, thoughts are memories and can shift and change meaning and I won't be aware of it. If I think my thoughts in words then I can review my thoughts more carefully and be sure the meanings are not changing.

If I'm solving some complicated problem, this is a big deal since if my solution to a sub-problem changes that's very bad. Of course also I can then write my thoughts down and refer back to them repeatedly so I can be sure they remain consistent.

ffsm8
0 replies
12h58m

Both of your links send me to nature, which is paywalled.

That'd be worse then the currently linked PDF, which includes everything.

zarzavat
0 replies
13h9m

Language is a major component of thought. Every programmer knows the unreasonable effectiveness of rubber duck debugging whereby one can solve logical problems more effectively by talking aloud.

If language were merely a tool for communicating thoughts rather than an integral part of thinking, then talking aloud wouldn’t help. But since raising the volume of one’s internal monologue does improve reasoning, this shows that the internal monologue is part of the thinking process - not a passive reflection of thought that is happening “elsewhere”.

Yes, of course you can engage in complex thought without language. There is verbal and non-verbal reasoning. A chess player thinks spatially in terms of how the knight moves, not just verbally, though verbal reasoning does help in chess somewhat.

xjay
0 replies
7h13m

Perspectives

[2015-09] Anne C. Reboul: "Why language really is not a communication system: a cognitive view of language evolution" - , Laboratory on Language, Brain and Cognition (L2C2), Institute for Cognitive Sciences-Marc Jeannerod, Bron, France [1]

[2013-09] Noam Chomsky: One of the most striking cases of incompatibility, that I know, is the sharp conflict between computational efficiency, and communicative efficiency. Language is just badly designed for communication, but well-designed to be efficient, it seems. [2]

[2013-09] Noam Chomsky adds: There's a kind of phrase that is sometimes used for this that drives people crazy; "Language is beautiful, but unusable." It's kind of true, you know. Even if people don't like it. [2]

[2022] Nick Enfield: "Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists" [3]

Language cannot create or change physical reality, but it can do the next best thing: reframe and invert our view of the world. In Language vs. Reality, Enfield explains why language is bad for scientists (who are bound by reality) but good for lawyers (who want to win their cases), ... [3]

[2023-01] Ev Fedorenko: "Although language and thought often go together, they are robustly dissociable." [4]

[2023-01] Ev Fedorenko: Fallacy 1: "Good at language = Good at thought". Fallacy 2: "Bad at thought = Bad at language". Fallacy 3: "Bad at language = Bad at thought" (emphasis in being judged on how smart you are based on how you say something). [4]

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-72JNZZBoVw&t=4493s

[3] https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5472/Language-vs-Real...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE9AiYuCwdE&t=250s

sturza
0 replies
9h49m

A counterargument to the claim that language is not sufficient for thought could be that while individuals with intact language abilities may exhibit impairments in reasoning and problem-solving due to brain damage or disorders like schizophrenia, these impairments might not be a direct result of language function itself. Instead, they could be caused by damage to other cognitive systems that interact with language, or by the disorder's broader impact on cognitive function.

For instance, schizophrenia is a complex disorder affecting various cognitive domains, including attention, memory, and executive functions, which are crucial for reasoning and problem-solving. Therefore, the observed impairments might stem from these broader cognitive deficits rather than a lack of language proficiency.

Brain damage can affect multiple brain regions and their connections, leading to a wide range of cognitive impairments. It is possible that the observed deficits in reasoning and problem-solving are due to damage to specific brain regions responsible for these functions, rather than a disruption of language processing itself.

While the presence of intact language abilities does not guarantee intact thinking abilities, it is necessary to consider the potential confounding factors, such as broader cognitive deficits or damage to other brain regions, before concluding that language is not sufficient for thought. Further research is needed to disentangle the complex relationship between language and thought and to determine the specific contributions of language to various cognitive processes.

stoniejohnson
0 replies
13h13m

Language is the medium through which raw perspective refined itself.

Language birthed social games and the sense of self.

Yes, language evolved for communication.

But without communication, thought would still be stuck in the land of instinct, never forged by the tribal dances of love, art, deceit, debate and organization.

stall84
0 replies
11h38m

The first thing that strikes me is the definitions of thoughts and language used on the first page.

scoofy
0 replies
10h30m

I see aphasia as the insight into animal thoughts. Imagine when you’re trying to remember a name, and it’s just not coming. You can still understand the thing, see the thing, think about using the thing. You can do all that without language, you just can’t communicate the thing.

richrichie
0 replies
9h14m

I wish Oliver Sacks were alive and writing.

peter_vukovic
0 replies
8h43m

Language helps us shape our thoughts, in a way a ruler helps us draw straight lines, but thoughts do not begin with language.

Our thoughts and ideas come from an unknown source. We might call it intuition, but scientifically speaking, it remains a black box.

Lethologica - a temporary inability to remember a particular word or name - is one evidence of this. You can have a fully formed thought in your mind, but be unable to express it with words.

passwordle
0 replies
8h33m

Agreed.

ofslidingfeet
0 replies
5h8m

Basically a blogpost tbh, and it begs the question by defining language as verbal communication.

mleroy
0 replies
10h53m

I believe the concept of multimodal token embeddings is quite fitting for my own thinking. Certainly, my 'embeddings' are not always fully formed words, but sometimes they are.

meowface
0 replies
13h6m

Side note, but I enjoy papers with meta-contrarian theses like these.

max_
0 replies
9h18m

Well 99% of the use of language is for thought not communication.

Also, People that are considered to be good at language skills (public speaking, writing) are either politicians, writers of fiction or seducers.

These fields have one thing in common they are normally about deception/changing the way people think about something. Not exactly communication.

We know that language is very bad for communication if we try to transmit scientific insights like climate change or health advice.

This explains why scientific fields had to invent their own notation like benzine rings, maths equations & free body diagrams to make communication of ideas more effective instead of the verbose, unexact tool of natural language.

klik99
0 replies
5h38m

I’ve noticed during meditation that the words come after the realization - I think we put thoughts into words after out of a habit of trying to explain our thoughts - we’re imagining how we would explain it to others.

kartoshechka
0 replies
59m

offtopic, but I can't fathom why academia and Nature specifically thinks that 2 columns of tiny text is a comfortable format for reading off screen

jumploops
0 replies
13h15m

I think this is largely correct, but may miss some higher-order concepts related to language and the structure of one’s complex thoughts.

To me they appear to go hand-in-hand, similar to the way a backend’s logic may inadvertently be structured to support an API. Another metaphor may be Conway’s Law, where the way one is forced to communicate, may in turn shape the way they structure their (brain) processes.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that speakers of different languages seem to “think” more similarly than not. For instance, native speakers of non-English Germanic languages appear to think more similarly compared to those native speakers of Romance languages, and vice-versa.

Obviously I’m using English as a middle-man, and am likely projecting on what their internal thoughts actually are, but the pathways they take to express an idea or a solution is oftentimes more similar than not within the same base language background.

Now is language necessary for complex thought? Absolutely not. We’ve seen evidence from many different life forms that show complex problem-solving, pattern matching, and novel tool use that all seem to happen without having a seemingly complex language background (i.e. Zipf’s Law).

guerreroguy
0 replies
1h34m

From what I read in this paper, it seems like the authors are depending on some very strict definition of what can be considered language. Can anyone provide more context on what definition they're using?

I ask because certain assumptions that seem to be built into the paper and its references seem to exclude a lot of things that I would personally consider other forms of language. For example, they say the subjects with impairments to the parts of the brain supposedly required for speech could "follow non-verbal instructions" and "understand what another person believes". What makes those exchanges distinct from use of language, albeit a poorly defined one? I know nothing about this field of study, so I assume there's some assumptions and definitions they aren't stating explicitly. It seems weird to me that they say "these representations need not be specifically linguistic: they could be symbolic but non-linguistic (for example, ‘9’), and the use of symbolic non-linguistic representations does not engage linguistic resources (for example, mathematical reasoning elicits no response in the language brain areas and is preserved in individuals with severe aphasia". Why not go back and question the initial assumption that all language depends on those specific parts of the brain? Why are symbols not language?

dekken_
0 replies
8h9m

thought is communicating with yourself

bombdailer
0 replies
10h28m

That makes sense given the analogous LLM, which doesn't 'think' via the individual or even sum of the tokens it produces, but in-between in the hidden layers. The output - or actualization of the token - is simply just the form of communication used to convey the 'thought'.

I guess you could say its inappropriate of an analogy since the LLM must use generated tokens to feed into itself in order to 'think' over time beyond a single token. But I would argue that's simply because we enforce the communication method.

One does not need language to have a known concept for "objects fall to the ground when let go". Babies learn this without language. They do not have words for the particular concepts such as "object", "fall", "ground", but as concepts they are learned all the same.

For thought, all there really is, are concepts, or forms in platonic terms. In our case, learned patterns in the world which correspond to particular sense perceptions. Imagination, or the latent space between the forms, is our initial (and only, I'd argue) mode of thinking. These forms, encoding both logical and sensory - of which they are inseparably bound - can be strung together to form thought. They agree to a type of logic, affording the capacity to extract meaning out of the world.

It is an embodied logic, not boolean algebra. The logic is grounded in the ground, the earth underneath your feet. It is grounded in the sun, in its heat and light. It is grounded in the logos, or the intelligible unfolding of the universe. The intelligibility is afforded because of its own nature - that it is built up out of real patterns, patterns all the way down. But it also requires the appearance of the patterns in our sense perceptions in order to be 'seen' and thus known.

As such, logic of this sort is found to be based off of the learned patterns of how the world appears to us so as to make it intelligible, affording our ability to live within it. Then you get sensory being mapped into grounded logic and vise versa, so as to experience the unfolding of the logic with imagination, and I suppose the affective state changes it produces are then fed back into the logic. So emotions seem necessary in order to 'react' to sense perceptions, so that the logic is grounded in caring about what happens, like a mother does with a child. Otherwise there is just appearance, which has no qualia in and of itself, and so the patterns that can be discovered in the world have no ground.

Determining the necessity of the ground of appearances is probably what will determine if we can have AGI or not. We'd like to think computation alone will get us there, or even embodied cognition, but without the transcendentals, its dimensionality of knowing will always exclude this ground, so it cannot know what patterns are most relevant or salient, so it cannot perform relevance realization and overcome combinatorial explosion. So AI cannot be a temporal embodied agent, since the logos of the world is incomprehensible, except through itself, of which we Beings are made out of. We rely on lower order logic, such as math, for our AI. It is how we make sense of the real patterns we see in the world, but they are an abstraction over the thing itself. So a machine is confined by boolean algebra, while we are confined by the logos itself. Sounds nice anyhow.

badrunaway
0 replies
7h10m

I believe language allows having more than one layer i.e. enabling complexity of representation. For example, If I want to think about the person thinking inside - these kind of recursive concepts need some sort of symbolic nesting to even materialise the idea.

ankit219
0 replies
8h59m

In my limited (to one person) experience, it may not be as clear cut.

I am one of those who uses language to think. I would have an internal monologue and I would also say things out loud just to see how they sound. It's not always a fully fledged idea, or even a coherent thought for that matter. I have no idea why i do this. But that is me. In a sense, my thoughts are forming when I speak. Hence, i am somewhat better at written communication than being asked for things on the spot.

I have encountered people who when they speak, are communicating their thoughts, not formulating them unlike the way I do. I have to be careful with them because they assume I am also communicating my thought vs formulating it and that makes it sound more rigid than it is in my mind. I have seen many nerds like me who understand what thinking out loud is and are more forgiving about missteps or "wrong sounding thoughts". They are also more understanding because in our experience, that is how people tend to think.

amgalan
0 replies
8h38m

...

SillyUsername
0 replies
10h17m

Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra.

^ Reference types in the language seems pretty good at this...

PLenz
0 replies
8h0m

I definately talk to think. Even in my head I'm talking to myself.

ModernMech
0 replies
13h58m

Makes sense -- I don't think in language but shapes and graphs and blobs and other things I can't even describe with words. The words are vehicles for my thoughts but they are not my thoughts. So communication is sort of like a serialization process where thoughts in my head, however I represent them, are packaged into language; sent over a medium; received as language through eyes or ears or touch; and then unpacked into thoughts in the receivers head, however they represent them.

Gimpei
0 replies
9h53m

How accepted is this result? If it’s true, it basically destroys a huge fraction of modern philosophy. A large fraction of the continental tradition would have the rug pulled out from under it.