This seems similar to Kaj’s query about unusual mind features. I’m not sure if you should just post your description there or if attempting a complete description of your thought process is significantly different enough to warrant a separate post.
Anyway, I’m a bit bored, so my (incomplete) answer:
I’m largely a blind-sighter. I can somehow sense geometric relationships and arrangements, but I barely see anything, unless I’m extremely tired and have just spent 10 hours playing the same game. I just know how stuff is.
If you ask me to visualize a cow, I get a mental label “cow” and a vague kinetic sense of where stuff on the cow is. It doesn’t look like anything and most features don’t exist unless I specifically need them. Some faint images of a cow (or related things) flicker on for maybe 0.1-0.5 seconds, with very little detail.
Almost all my thought is direct speech. I can think better if I speak out loud (which I do as much as I can) or if I write. I have little control over the specific content of the speech (planning ahead? huh?). Rather, I have a mental accept/deny button. If speech goes into directions I like, I go into the “accept” state and I get more, or I go into “deny”, then it changes. I have no idea how it does that. If I’m confused about something, I simply don’t get speech or can’t go into “accept”, which is unpleasant. So basically, I feel a bit like AIXI without access to the hypothesis-generating module.
I can not create sound. I hear my own voice (or something close to it), but that’s it. I can’t make music, sounds, other voices or anything else. If I sit around in meditation long enough, I hear whispering, chanting and weird not-quite-horror-movie sounds, but that’s it. Ditto for smell, touch and other senses.
Logical inference feel right to me. This is probably like your 3 and 4. I can think in (pseudo-)code. It feels like sensing stuff you know is there in a dark room without visualizing it. So again, more on the p-zombie side of consciousness. When trying to understand / intellectually judge something, I use a “does this feel right / elegant?” query that is completely emotional. Basically, I just look at stuff (text, mostly) until I feel good (in a specific way). Then I know it is correct. (Or less incorrect at least.) If I don’t get that feeling, I narrow it down to individual parts and check if they feel right until I find something small enough that I can make changes to until it is correct. I don’t know where the decision to make certain changes comes from. I have no control over this part.
I’m largely sequential. I can’t hear, talk, think etc. in parallel. I can just about watch something and listen to someone talk. I can’t read or think while I listen. When I read, I both subvocalize and read visually. The more concentrated I am, the more I read visually. Normal reading speed is ~450wpm, visual is ~600-800wpm, but a bit tiring. The only cognitively demanding task I can always run in parallel is play video games. I have no problem with rapid context switching, though. (Say jump between different windows on the scale of tens of a second.)
I have a mental minimap. I can’t quite see it (see 1), but I know where everything is, the same way I know where my arms are. This includes the position of rooms, streets, important objects, NPCs^W people, etc. This is largely parallel. I find it relatively easy to say where north is. Again, I blame video games for this mostly useless skill.
My thinking patterns change drastically when I sleep. I am always lucid, can change the world, have direct control over my emotional state. It makes me go insane, so I try to dream as little as possible. I can largely suppress dreaming if I want.
Thanks for the link! Regarding Kaj’s query, i think its bit wrong to ask people how their process is different from others… we don’t see into other people’s heads and one could report very usual feature as unusual and at same time see very unusual feature as usual and never report on that.
This seems similar to Kaj’s query about unusual mind features. I’m not sure if you should just post your description there or if attempting a complete description of your thought process is significantly different enough to warrant a separate post.
Anyway, I’m a bit bored, so my (incomplete) answer:
I’m largely a blind-sighter. I can somehow sense geometric relationships and arrangements, but I barely see anything, unless I’m extremely tired and have just spent 10 hours playing the same game. I just know how stuff is.
If you ask me to visualize a cow, I get a mental label “cow” and a vague kinetic sense of where stuff on the cow is. It doesn’t look like anything and most features don’t exist unless I specifically need them. Some faint images of a cow (or related things) flicker on for maybe 0.1-0.5 seconds, with very little detail.
Almost all my thought is direct speech. I can think better if I speak out loud (which I do as much as I can) or if I write. I have little control over the specific content of the speech (planning ahead? huh?). Rather, I have a mental accept/deny button. If speech goes into directions I like, I go into the “accept” state and I get more, or I go into “deny”, then it changes. I have no idea how it does that. If I’m confused about something, I simply don’t get speech or can’t go into “accept”, which is unpleasant. So basically, I feel a bit like AIXI without access to the hypothesis-generating module.
I can not create sound. I hear my own voice (or something close to it), but that’s it. I can’t make music, sounds, other voices or anything else. If I sit around in meditation long enough, I hear whispering, chanting and weird not-quite-horror-movie sounds, but that’s it. Ditto for smell, touch and other senses.
Logical inference feel right to me. This is probably like your 3 and 4. I can think in (pseudo-)code. It feels like sensing stuff you know is there in a dark room without visualizing it. So again, more on the p-zombie side of consciousness. When trying to understand / intellectually judge something, I use a “does this feel right / elegant?” query that is completely emotional. Basically, I just look at stuff (text, mostly) until I feel good (in a specific way). Then I know it is correct. (Or less incorrect at least.) If I don’t get that feeling, I narrow it down to individual parts and check if they feel right until I find something small enough that I can make changes to until it is correct. I don’t know where the decision to make certain changes comes from. I have no control over this part.
I’m largely sequential. I can’t hear, talk, think etc. in parallel. I can just about watch something and listen to someone talk. I can’t read or think while I listen. When I read, I both subvocalize and read visually. The more concentrated I am, the more I read visually. Normal reading speed is ~450wpm, visual is ~600-800wpm, but a bit tiring. The only cognitively demanding task I can always run in parallel is play video games. I have no problem with rapid context switching, though. (Say jump between different windows on the scale of tens of a second.)
I have a mental minimap. I can’t quite see it (see 1), but I know where everything is, the same way I know where my arms are. This includes the position of rooms, streets, important objects, NPCs^W people, etc. This is largely parallel. I find it relatively easy to say where north is. Again, I blame video games for this mostly useless skill.
My thinking patterns change drastically when I sleep. I am always lucid, can change the world, have direct control over my emotional state. It makes me go insane, so I try to dream as little as possible. I can largely suppress dreaming if I want.
Thanks for the link! Regarding Kaj’s query, i think its bit wrong to ask people how their process is different from others… we don’t see into other people’s heads and one could report very usual feature as unusual and at same time see very unusual feature as usual and never report on that.