Comment by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
2 days ago
<< My "abstract thoughts" are a stream of words too, they just don't get sounded out.
Hmm, seems unlikely. They are not sounded out part is true, sure, but I question whether 'abstract thoughts' can be so easily dismissed as mere words.
edit: come to think of it and I am asking this for a reason: do you hear your abstract thoughts?
Different people have different levels of internal monologuing or none at all. I don't generally think with words in sentences in my head, but many people I know do.
Internal monologue is a like a war correspondent's report of the daily battle. The journalist didn't plan or fight the battle, they just provided an after-the-fact description. Likewise the brain's thinking--a highly parallelized process involving billions of neurons--is not done with words.
Play a little game of "what word will I think of next?" ... just let it happen. Those word choices are fed to the monologue, they aren't a product of it.
Hmm, yes, but, and it is not a small but, do people -- including full blown internal monologue people - think thoughts akin to:
move.panic.fear.run
that effectively becomes one thought and not a word exactly. I am stating it like this, because I worry that my initial point may have been lost.
edit: I can only really speak for myself, but I am curious how people might respond to the distinction.
>do you hear your abstract thoughts?
Most of the fucking time, and I would prefer that I didn't. I even wrote that, lol.
I don't think they're really "mine", either. It's just all the stuff I heard somewhere, coalescing into potential verbalizations in response to perceiving my surroundings or introspecting my memory.
If you are a materialist positivist, well sure, the process underlying all that is some bunch of neural activation patterns or whatever; the words remain the qualia in which that process is available to my perception.
It's all cuz I grew up in a cargo cult - where not presenting the correct passwords would result in denial of sustenance, shelter, and eventually bodily integrity. While presenting the correct passwords had sufficient intimidation value to advance one's movement towards the "mock airbase" (i.e. the feeder and/or pleasure center activation button as provided during the given timeframe).
Furthermore - regardless whether I've been historically afforded any sort of choice in how to conceptualize my own thought processes, or indeed whether to have those in the first place - any entity which has actual power to determine my state of existence (think institutions, businesses, gangs, particularly capable individuals - all sorts of autonomous corpora) has no choice but to interpret me as either a sequence of words, a sequence of numbers, or some other symbol sequence (e.g. the ones printed on my identity documents, the ones recorded in my bank's database, or the metadata gathered from my online represence).
My first-person perspective, being constitutionally inaccessible to such entities, does not have practical significance to them, and is thus elided from the process of "self-determination". As far as anyone's concerned, "I" am a particular sequence of that anyone's preferred representational symbols. For example if you relate to me on the personal level, I will probably be a sequence of your emotions. Either way, what I may hypothetically be to myself is practically immaterial and therefore not a valid object of communication.