No, I’m not letting it go this time. I’ve heard people talking about internal monologues before, but I’ve never been quite sure what those are—I’m pretty sure I don’t have one. Could you try to define the term?
Gosh. New item added to my list of “Not everyone does that.”
...I have difficulty imagining what it would be to be like someone who isn’t the little voice in their own head, though. Seriously, who’s posting that comment?
I may be in a somewhat unique position to address this question, as one of the many many many weird transient neurological things that happened to me after my stroke was a period I can best describe as my internal monologue going away.
So I know what it’s like to be the voice in my head, and what it’s like not to be.
And it’s still godawful difficult to describe the difference in words.
One way I can try is this: have you ever experienced the difference between “I know what I’m going to say, and here I am saying it” and “words are coming out of my mouth, and I’m kind of surprised by what I’m hearing myself say”?
If so, I think I can say that losing my “little voice” is similar to that difference. If not, I suspect the explanation will be just as inaccessible as the phenomenon it purported to explain, but I can try again.
One way I can try is this: have you ever experienced the difference between “I know what I’m going to say, and here I am saying it” and “words are coming out of my mouth, and I’m kind of surprised by what I’m hearing myself say”?
...no, I haven’t. I’m always in the state of “I know what I’m going to say, and here I am saying it” (sometimes modified very soon afterwards by “on second thoughts, that was a very poor way to phrase it and I’ve probably been misunderstood”).
I’m dying to know whether we’re stumbling on a difference in the way we think or the way we describe what we think, here. To me, the first state sounds like rehearsing what I’m going to say in my head before I say it, which I only do when I’m racking my brains on eg how to put something tactfully, where the latter sounds like what I do in conversation all the time, which is simply to let the words fall out of my mouth and find out what I’ve said.
My internal monologue is a lot faster than the words can get out of my mouth (when I was younger, I tried to speak as fast as I think, with the result that no-one could understand me; of course, to speak that fast, I needed to drop significant parts of most of the words, which didn’t help). I don’t always plan out every sentence in advance; but thinking about it, I think I do plan out every phrase in advance, relying on the speed of my internal monologue to produce the next phrase before or at worst very shortly after I complete the current phrase. (It often helps to include a brief pause at the end of a phrase in any case). It’s very much a just-in-time thing.
If I’m making a special effort to be tactful, then I’ll produce and consider a full sentence inside my head before saying it out loud.
Incidentally, I’m also a member of Toastmasters, and one thing that Toastmasters has is impromptu speaking, when a person is asked to give a one-to-two minute speech and is told the topic just before stepping up to give the speech. The topic could be anything (I’ve had “common sense”, “stick”, and “nail”, among others). Most people seem to be scared of this, apparently seeing it as an opportunity to stand up and be embarrassed; I find that I enjoy it. I often start an impromptu speech with very little idea of how it’s going to end; I usually make some sort of pun about the topic (I changed ‘common sense’ into a very snooty, upper-crust type of person complaining about commoners with money - ‘common cents’), and often talk more-or-less total nonsense.
But, through the whole speech, I always know what I am saying. I am not surprised by my own words (no matter how surprised other people may be by the idea of ‘common cents’). I don’t think I know how to be surprised at what I am saying. (Of course, my words are not always well-considered, in hindsight; and sometimes I will be surprised at someone else’s interpretation of my words, and be forced to explain that that’s not what I meant)
I’m the same—except occasionally, when I’m ‘flowing’ in conversation, I’ll find that my inner monologue fails to produce what I think it can, and my mouth just halts without input from it
I find that happens to me sometimes when I talk in Afrikaans; my Afrikaans vocabulary is poor enough that I often get halfway through a sentance and find that I can’t remember the word for what I want to say.
It occasionally happens to me in any language. I usually manage to rephrase the sentence on the flight or to replace the word with something generic like “thing” and let the listener figure it out from the context, without much trouble.
Something that occurred to me on this topic; reading has a lot to do with the inner monologue. Writing is, in my view, a code of symbols on a piece of paper (or a screen) which tell the reader what their inner monologue should say. Reading, therefore, is the voluntary (and temporary) replacement of the reader’s internal monologue with an internal monologue supplied and encoded by the author.
At least, that’s what happens when I read. Do other people have the same experience?
Hypothesis: Since I am more used to read sentences without a full stop after each word than sentences like that, of course I will read the former more quickly—because it takes less effort.
Experiment to test this hypothesis: Ilikehowwhenyoureadthisthelittlevoiceinyourheadspeaksveryquickly.
Result of the experiment: at least for me, my hypothesis is wrong. YMMV.
The little voice in my head speaks quickly for that experimental phrase, yes. It should be taking slightly longer to decode—since the information on word borders is missing—which suggests that the voice in my head is doing special effects. I think that that is becausewordslikethis can be used in fiction as the voice of someone who is speaking quickly; so if the voice in my head speeds up when reading it, then that makes the story more immersive.
That sounds in my head like the voice in Italian TV ads for medicines reading the disclaimers required (I guess) by law (ultra-fast words, but pauses between sentences of nearly normal length).
(If anyone picks any option except ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, could you please elaborate?)
I can parse it both ways. Actually, on further experimentation, it appears to be tied directly to my eye-scanning speed! If I force my eyes to scan over the line quickly from left-to-right, I read it without pause; if I read the way I normally do (by staring at the ‘When’ to take a “snapshot” of I, like, how, when, you, and read all at once; then staring at the space between “little” and “voice” to take a snapshot of this, the, little, voice, in, and your all at once, then staring at the “pauses” to take a snapshot of head, takes, and pauses), then the pauses get inserted—but not as normal sentence stops; more like… a clipped robot.
Yeah, something clicked while I was reading an old encyclopedia sometime around age 7; I remember it quite vividly. My brain started being able to process chunks of text at a time instead of single words, so I could sort of focus on the middle of a short sentence or phrase and read the whole thing at once. I went from reading at about one-quarter conversation speed, to about ten times conversation speed, over the course of a few minutes. I still don’t quite understand what the process was that enabled the change; I just sort of experienced it happening.
One trade-off is that I don’t have full conscious recall of each word when I read things that quickly—but I do tend to be able to pull up a reasonable paraphrasing of the information later if I need to.
I can see both pros and cons to this talent. The pro is obvious; faster reading. The con is that it may cause trouble parsing subtly-worded legal contracts; the sort where one misplaced word may potentially land up with both parties arguing the matter in court. Or anything else where exact wording is important, like preparing a wish for a genie.
Of course, since it seems that you can choose when to use this, um, snapshot reading and when not to, you can gain the full benefit of the pros most of the time while carefully removing the cons in any situation where they become important.
Assuming you’re literally talking about subvocalization, it depends on what I’m reading (I do it more with poetry than with academic papers), on how quickly I’m reading (I don’t do that as much when skimming), on whether I know what the author’s voice sounds like (in which case I subvocalize in their voice—which slows me down a great deal if I’m reading stuff by someone who speaks slowly and with a strong foreign accent e.g. Benedict XVI), and possibly on something else I’m overlooking at the moment.
I do not notice that I am subvocalising when I read, even when I am looking for it (I tested this on the wiki page that you linked to). I do notice, however, that it mentions that subvocalising is often not detectable by the person doing the subvocalising.
More specifically, if I place my hand lightly on my throat while reading, I feel no movement of the muscles; and I am able to continue reading while swallowing.
So, no, I don’t think I’m talking about subvocalising. I’m talking about an imaginary voice in my head that narrates my thought processes.
Hmmm… my inner monologue does not tend to speak in the voice of someone whose voice I know. I can get it to speak in other peoples’ voices, or in what I imagine other people’s voices to sound like, if I try to, but it defaults to a sort of neutral gear which, now that I think about it, sounds like a voice but not quite like my (external) voice. Similar, but not the same. (And, of course, the way that I hear my voice when I speak differs from how I hear it when recorded on tape—my inner monologue sounds more like the way I hear my voice, but still somewhat different)
...this is strange. I don’t know who my inner monologue sounds like, if anyone.
Hmmm… my inner monologue does not tend to speak in the voice of someone whose voice I know. I can get it to speak in other peoples’ voices, or in what I imagine other people’s voices to sound like, if I try to, but it defaults to a sort of neutral gear which, now that I think about it, sounds like a voice but not quite like my (external) voice. Similar, but not the same. (And, of course, the way that I hear my voice when I speak differs from how I hear it when recorded on tape—my inner monologue sounds more like the way I hear my voice, but still somewhat different)
Mine usually sounds more or less like I’m whispering.
My inner monologue definitely doesn’t sound like whispering; it’s a voice, speaking normally.
I think I can best describe it by saying that it sounds more like I imagine myself sounding than like I actually sound to myself; but I suspect that’s recursive, i.e. I imagine myself sounding like that because that’s what my inner monologue sounds like.
Yes. If my mood or emotional state is sufficiently severe, then my inner voice will sound different; both in choice of phrasing and in tone of voice.
It’s not an audible voice, as such; I think the best way that I can describe it is to say that it’s very much like a memory of a voice, except that it’s generated on-the-fly instead of being, well, remembered. As such, it has most of the properties of an audible voice (except actual audibility) - including such markers as ‘tone of voice’. This tone changes with my emotional state in reasonable ways; that is, if I am sufficiently angry, then my inner voice may take on an angry, menacing tone.
If my emotional state is not sufficiently severe, then I am unable to notice any change in my inner-voice tone. I also note that my spoken voice shows a noticeable change of tone at significantly lower emotional severity than my inner voice does.
It’s not an audible voice, as such; I think the best way that I can describe it is to say that it’s very much like a memory of a voice, except that it’s generated on-the-fly instead of being, well, remembered.
I was about to say that it’s the same for me, but then I remember that at least for me actual memories of voices can be very vivid (especially in hypnagogic state or when I’m reading stuff written by that person), whereas my inner voice seldom is. (And memories of voices can also be generated on-the-fly—I can pick a sentence and imagine a bunch of people I know each saying it, even if I can’t remember hearing any of them actually ever saying that sentence.)
Huh. Either my memories of voices are less vivid than yours, or my inner monologue is more vivid. Quite possibly both.
Of course, when I remember someone saying something, it can include information aside from the voice (e.g. where it happened, the surroundings at the time) which is never included in my inner monologue. I consider these details to be seperate from the voice-memory; the voice-memory is merely a part of the whole “what-he-said” memory.
BTW, I think I have one kind of memory for people’s timbre, rate of speech, volume, accent, etc., and one for sequences of phonemes, and when recalling what a person sounded like when saying a given sentence I combine the two on the flight.
My experience is that I generally have some kind of fuzzy idea of what I’m going to say before I say it. When I actually speak, sometimes it comes out as a coherent and streamlined sentence whose contents I figure out as a I speak it. At other times—particularly if I’m feeling nervous, or trying to communicate a complicated concept that I haven’t expressed in speech before—my fuzzy idea seems to disintegrate at the moment I start talking, and even if I had carefully rehearsed a line many times in my mind, I forget most of it. Out comes either what feels to me like an incoherent jumble, or a lot of “umm, no, wait”.
Writing feels a lot easier, possibly because I have the stuff-that-I’ve-already-written right in front of me and I only need to keep the stuff that I’m about to say in memory, instead of also needing to constantly remind myself about what I’ve said so far.
ETA: Here’s an earlier explanation of how writing sometimes feels like to me.
The parts of your brain that generate speech and the part that generate your internal sense-of-self are less integrated than CCC’s. An interesting experiment might be to stop ascribing ownership to your words when you find yourself surprised by them—i.e., instead of framing the phenomenon as “I said that”, frame it as “my brain generated those words”.
Learn to recognize that the parts of your brain that handle text generation and output are no more “you” than the parts of your brain that handle motor reflex control.
Learn to recognize that the parts of your brain that handle text generation and output are no more “you” than the parts of your brain that handle motor reflex control.
No! The parts of my brain that handle text generation are the only parts that… *slap*… Ow. Nevermind. It seems we have reached an ‘understanding’.
Right! I mean, I do realize you’re being funny, but pretty much exactly this.
I don’t recommend aphasia as a way of shock-treating this presumption, but I will admit it’s effective. At some point I had the epiphany that my language-generating systems were offline but I was still there; I was still thinking the way I always did, I just wasn’t using language to do it.
Which sounds almost reasonable expressed that way, but it was just about as creepy as the experience of moving my arm around normally while the flesh and bone of my arm lay immobile on the bed.
A good way I’ve found to reach this state is to start to describe a concept in your internal monologue but “cancel” the monologue right at the start—the concept will probably have been already synthesized and will just be hanging around in your mind, undescribed and unspoken but still recognizable.
[edit] Afaict the key step is noticing that you’ve started a monologue, and sort of interrupting yourself mentally.
So, FWIW, after about 20 minutes spent trying to do this I wasn’t in a recognizably different state than I was when I started. I can kind of see what you’re getting at, though.
Right, I mean as a way of realizing that there’s something noticeable going on in your head that precedes the internal monologue. I wrote that comment wrong. Sorry for wasting your time.
That’s… hm. I’m not sure I know what you mean. I’ll experiment with behaving as if I did when I’m not in an airport waiting lounge and see what happens.
A good way I’ve found to reach this state is to start to describe a concept in your internal monologue but “cancel” the monologue right at the start—the concept will probably have been already synthesized and will just be hanging around in your mind, undescribed and unspoken but still recognizable.
I’ve had this happen to me semi-accidentally, the resulting state is extremely unpleasant.
The problem is that “what is part of you” at the interconnectedness-level of the brain is largely a matter of preference, imo; that is, treating it as truth implies taking a more authoritive position than is reasonable. Same goes for 2) - there’s a difference between telling somebody what you think and outright stating that their subjective self-image is factually incorrect.
I think there’s a difference between analysis and authoritive-sounding statements like “X is not actually a part of you, you are wrong about this”, especially when it comes to personal attributes like selfness, especially in a thread demonstrating the folly of the typical-mind assumption.
Interesting. It was not my intent to sound any more authoritative than typical. Are there particular signals that indicate abnormally authoritarian-sounding statements that I should watch out for? And are there protocols that I should be aware of here that determine who is allowed to sound more or less authoritarian than whom, and under what circumstances?
I should have mentioned this earlier, but I did not downvote you so this is somewhat conjectured. In my opinion it’s not a question of who but of topic—specifically, and this holds in a more general sense, you might want to be cautious when correcting people about beliefs that are part of their self-image. Couch it in terms like “I don’t think”, “I believe”, “in my opinion”, “personally speaking”. That’ll make it sound less like you think you know their minds better than they do.
FWIW, I understood you in the first place to be saying that this was a choice, and it was good to be aware of it as a choice, rather than making authoritarian statements about what choice to make.
Learn to recognize that the parts of your brain that handle text generation and output are no more “you” than the parts of your brain that handle motor reflex control.
I’d certainly call them much more significant to my identity than a e.g. my deltoid muscle, or some motor function parts of my brain.
I’d certainly call them much more significant to my identity than a e.g. my deltoid muscle, or some motor function parts of my brain.
It may be useful to recognize that this is a choice, rather than an innate principle of identity. The parts that speak are just modules, just like the parts that handle motor control. They can (and often do) run autonomously, and then the module that handles generating a coherent narrative stitches together an explanation of why you “decided” to cause whatever they happened to generate.
This sounds like a theory of identity as epiphenomenal homunculus. A module whose job is to sit there weaving a narrative, but which has no effect on anything outside itself (except to make the speech module utter its narrative from time to time). “Mr Volition”, as Greg Egan calls it in one of his stories. Is that your view?
More or less, yes. It does have some effect on things outside itself, of course, in that its ‘narrative’ tends to influence our emotional investment in situations, which in turn influences our reactions.
It seems to me that the Mr. Volition theory suffers from the same logical flaw as p-zombies. How would a non-conscious entity, a p-zombie, come to talk about consciousness? And how does an epiphenomenon come to think it’s in charge, how does it even arrive at the very idea of “being in charge”, if it was never in charge of anything?
An illusion has to be an illusion of something real. Fake gold can exist only because there is such a thing as real gold. There is no such thing as fake mithril, because there is no such thing as real mithril.
By that analogy, then, fake gods can exist only because there is such a thing as real gods; fake ghosts can only exist because there is such a thing as real ghosts; fake magic can only exist because there is such a thing as real magic.
It’s perfectly possible to be ontologically mistaken about the nature of one’s world.
By that analogy, then, fake gods can exist only because there is such a thing as real gods; fake ghosts can only exist because there is such a thing as real ghosts; fake magic can only exist because there is such a thing as real magic.
It’s perfectly possible to be ontologically mistaken about the nature of one’s world.
Indeed. There is real agency, so people have imagined really big agents that created and rule the world. People’s consciousness persists, even after the interruptions of sleep, and they imagine it persists even after death. People’s actions appear to happen purely by their intention, and they imagine doing arbitrary things purely by intention. These are the real things that the fakes, pretences, or errors are based on.
But how do the p-zombie and the homunculus even get to the point of having their mistaken ontology?
The p-zombie doesn’t, because the p-zombie is not a logically consistent concept. Imagine if there was a word that meant “four-sided triangle”—that’s the level of absurdity that the ‘p-zombie’ idea represents.
On the other hand, the epiphenomenal consciousness (for which I’ll accept the appelature ‘homunculus’ until a more consistent and accurate one occurs to me) is simply mistaken in that it is drawing too large a boundary in some respects, and too small a boundary in others. It’s drawing a line around certain phenomena and ascribing a causal relationship between those and its own so-called ‘agency’, while excluding others. The algorithm that draws those lines doesn’t have a particularly strong map-territory correlation; it just happens to be one of those evo-psych things that developed and self-reinforced because it worked in the ancestral environment.
Note that I never claimed that “agency” and “volition” are nonexistent on the whole; merely that the vast majority of what people internally consider “agency” and “volition”, aren’t.
EDIT: And I see that you’ve added some to the comment I’m replying to, here. In particular, this stood out:
People’s consciousness persists, even after the interruptions of sleep, and they imagine it persists even after death.
I don’t believe that “my” consciousness persists after sleep. I believe that a new consciousness generates itself upon waking, and pieces itself together using the memories it has access to as a consequence of being generated by “my” brain; but I don’t think that the creature that will wake up tomorrow is “me” in the same way that I am. I continue to use words like “me” and “I” for two reasons:
Social convenience—it’s damn hard to get along with other hominids without at least pretending to share their cultural assumptions
It is, admittedly, an incredibly persistent illusion. However, it is a logically incoherent illusion, and I have upon occasion pierced it and seen others pierce it, so I’m not entirely inclined to give it ontological reality with p=1.0 anymore.
Do you believe that the creature you are now (as you read this parenthetical expression) is “you” in the same way as the creature you are now (as you read this parenthetical expression)?
Yes(ish), on the basis that the change between me(expr1) and me(expr2) is small enough that assigning them a single consistent identity is more convenient than acknowledging the differences.
But if I’m operating in a more rigorous context, then no; under most circumstances that appear to require epistemological rigor, it seems better to taboo concepts like “I” and “is” altogether.
I share something like this attitude, but in normal non-rigorous contexts I treat me-before-sleep and me-after-sleep as equally me in much the same way as you do me(expr1) and me(expr2).
More generally, my non-rigorous standard for “me” is such that all of my remembered states when I wasn’t sleeping, delirious, or younger than 16 or so unambiguously qualify for “me”dom, despite varying rather broadly amongst themselves. This is mostly because the maximum variation along salient parameters among that set of states seems significantly smaller than the minimum variations between that set and the various other sets of states I observe others demonstrating. (If I lived in a community seeded by copies of myself-as-of-five-minutes ago who could transfer memories among one another, I can imagine my notion of “I” changing radically.)
More generally, my non-rigorous standard for “me” is such that all of my remembered states when I wasn’t sleeping, delirious, or younger than 16 or so unambiguously qualify for “me”dom, despite varying rather broadly amongst themselves. This is mostly because the maximum variation along salient parameters among that set of states seems significantly smaller than the minimum variations between that set and the various other sets of states I observe others demonstrating. (If I lived in a community seeded by copies of myself-as-of-five-minutes ago who could transfer memories among one another, I can imagine my notion of “I” changing radically.)
Nice! I like that reasoning.
I personally experience a somewhat less coherent sense of self, and what sense of self I do experience seems particularly maladaptive to my environment, so we definitely seem to have different epistemological and pragmatic goals—but I think we’re applying very similar reasoning to arrive at our premises.
Jobs are a particularly egregious case where tabooing “is” seems like a good idea—do you find the idea that people “are” their jobs a particularly useful encapsulation of the human experience? Do you, personally find your self fully encapsulated by the ritualized economic actions you perform?
But if ‘I’ differ day to day, then doesn’t this body differ day to day too?
Certainly. How far do you want to go? Maps are not territories, but some maps provide useful representations of territories for certain contexts and purposes.
The danger represented by “I” and “is” come from their tendency to blow away the map-territory relation, and convince the reader that an identity exists between a particular concept and a particular phenomenon.
An illusion has to be an illusion of something real. Fake gold can exist only because there is such a thing as real gold. There is no such thing as fake mithril, because there is no such thing as real mithril.
Suppose I am standing next to a wall so high that I am left with the subjective impression that it just goes on forever and ever, with no upper bound. Or next to a chasm so deep that I am left with the subjective impression that it’s bottomless.
Would you say these subjective impressions are impossible? If possible, would you say they aren’t illusory?
My own answer would be that such subjective impressions are both illusory and possible, but that this is not evidence of the existence of such things as real bottomless pits and infinitely tall walls. Rather, they are indications that my imagination is capable of creating synthetic/composite data structures.
Setting aside the question of whether this is fake iron man armor, or a real costume of the fake iron man, or a fake costume designed after the fake iron man portrayed by special effects artists in the movies, I think an illusion can be anything that triggers a category recognition by matching some of the features strongly enough to trigger the recognition, while failing to match on a significant amount of the other features that are harder to detect at first.
I think it’s not an epiphenomenon, it’s just wired in more circuitously than people believe. It has effects; it just doesn’t have some effects that we tend to ascribe to it, like decisionmaking and highlevel thought.
The epiphenomenal homunculus theory claims that there’s nothing but p-zombies, so there are no conscious beings for them to be functionally equivalent to. After all, as the alien that has just materialised on my monitor has pointed out to me, no humans have zardlequeep (approximate transcription), and they don’t go around insisting that they do. They don’t even have the concept to talk about.
The theory that there is nothing but zombies runs into the difficulty of explaining why many of them would believe they are non-zombies. The standard p-zombie argument, that you can have qualia-less functional duplicates of non-zombies does not have that problem.
The theory that there is nothing but zombies runs into the much bigger difficulty of explaining to myself why I’m a zombie. When I poke myself with a needle, I sure as hell have the qualia of pain.
And don’t tell me it’s an illusion—any illusion is a qualia by itself.
The standard p-zombie argument still has a problem explaining why p-zombies claim to be conscious. It leaves no role for consciousness in explaining why conscious humans talk of being conscious. It’s a short road (for a philosopher) to then argue that consciousness plays no role, and we’re back with consciousness as either an epiphenomenon or non-existent, and the problem of why—especially when consciousness is conceded to exist, but cause nothing—the non-conscious system claims to be conscious.
Even worse, the question of how the word “conscious” can possibly even refer to this thing that is claimed to be epiphenomenal, since the word can’t have been invented in response to the existence or observations of consciousness (since there aren’t any observations). And in fact there is nothing to allow a human to distinguish between this thing, and every other thing that has never been observed, so in a way the claim that a person is “conscious” is perfectly empty.
ETA: Well, of course one can argue that it is defined intensionally, like “a unicorn is a horse with a single horn extending from its head, and [various magical properties]” which does define a meaningful predicate even if a unicorn has never been seen. But in that case any human’s claim to have a consciousness is perfectly evidence-free, since there are no observations of it with which to verify that it (to the extent that you can even refer to a particular unobservable thing) has the relevant properties.
The standard p-zombie argument still has a problem explaining why p-zombies claim to be conscious. It leaves no role for consciousness in explaining why conscious humans talk of being conscious.
Yes. Thats the standard epiphenomenalism objection.
. It’s a short road (for a philosopher) to then argue that consciousness plays no role,
Maybe I’m being unnecessarily cryptic. My point is that when you say that something is “talking about consciousness,” you’re assigning meaning to what is ultimately a particular sequence of vibrations of the air (or a particular pattern of pigment on a rock, or a particular sequence of ASCII characters on a screen). I don’t need a soul to “talk about souls,” and I don’t need to be conscious to “talk about consciousness”: it just needs to happen to be the case that my mouth emits a particular sequence of vibrations in the air that you’re inclined to interpret in a particular way (but that interpretation is in your map, not the territory).
In other words, I’m trying to dissolve the question you’re asking. Am I making sense?
In other words, I’m trying to dissolve the question you’re asking. Am I making sense?
Not yet. I really think you need to read the GLUT post that nsheppard linked to.
I don’t need a soul to “talk about souls,” and I don’t need to be conscious to “talk about consciousness”
You do need to have those concepts, though, and concepts cannot arise without there being something that gave rise to them. That something may not have all the properties one ascribes to it (e.g. magical powers), but discovering that that one was mistaken about some aspects does not allow one to conclude that there is no such thing. One still has to discover what the right account of it is.
If consciousness is an illusion, what experiences the illusion?
it just needs to happen to be the case that my mouth emits a particular sequence of vibrations in the air
This falls foul of the GAZP v. GLUT thing. It cannot “just happen to be the case”. When you pull out for attention the case where a random process generates something that appears to be about consciousness, out of all the other random strings, you’ve used your own concept of consciousness to do that.
I think so; at least, I have now. (I don’t know why someone would downvote your comment, it wasn’t me.) So, something went wrong in his head, to the point that asking “was he, or was he not, conscious” is too abstract a question to ask. Nowadays, we’d want to do science to someone like that, to try to find out what was physically going on.
I don’t need to be conscious to “talk about consciousness”:
That is not obvious. You do need to be a langue-user to use language, you do need to know English to communicate in English, and so on. If consciousness involves things like self-reflection and volition, you do need to be conscious to interntionally use language to express your reflections on your own consciousness.
I write a computer program that outputs every possible sequence of 16 characters to a different monitor. Is the monitor which outputs ‘I am conscious’ talking about consciousness in the same way the rock is? Whose attempt at communication is it a medium for?
Your decision to point out the particular monitor displaying this message as an example of something imparts information about your mental state in exactly the same way that your decision to pick a particular sequence of 16 characters out of platonia to engrave on a rock does.
Why would we have these modules that seem quite complex, and likely to negatively effect fitness (thinking’s expensive), if they don’t do anything? What are the odds of this becoming a prevalent without a favourable selection pressure?
Sometimes you get spandrels, and sometimes you get systems built on foundations that are no longer what we would call “adaptive”, but that can’t be removed without crashing systems that are adaptive.
Here’s one: it turns out that ascribing consistent identity to nominal entities is a side-effect of one of the most easily constructed implementations of “predict the behavior of my environment.” Predicting the behavior of my environment is enormously useful, so the first mutant to construct this implementation had a huge advantage. Pretty soon everyone was doing it, and competing for who could do it best, and we had foreclosed the evolutionary paths that allowed environmental prediction without identity-ascribing. So the selection pressure for environmental prediction also produced (as an incidental side-effect) selection pressure for identity-ascribing, despite the identity-ascribing itself being basically useless, and here we are.
I have no idea if that story is true or not; I’m not sure what I’d expect to see differentially were it true or false. My point is more that I’m skeptical of “why would our brains do this if it weren’t a useful thing to do?” as a reason for believing that everything my brain does is useful.
It’s also broadly similar to the difference between explicit and implicit knowledge. Have you ever practiced a skill enough that it goes from being something where you hold the “outline” of the skill in explicit memory as you perform it, to being something where you simply perform it without that “outline”? For example, driving to an unfamiliar location and thinking “ok, turn right here, turn left here” vs. just turning in the correct direction at each intersection, or something similar to that?
Yes, I have. Driving is such a skill; when I was first learning to drive, I had to think about driving (”...need to change gear, which was the clutch again? Ordered CBA, so on the left...”). Now that I am more practiced, I can just think about changing gear and change gear, without having to examine my actions in so much detail. Which allows my internal monologue to wonder into other directions.
On a couple of occasions, as a result of this thread, I’ve tried just quietening down my internal monologue—just saying nothing for a bit—and observing my own thought processes. I find that the result is that I pay a lot more attention to audio cues—if I hear a bird in the distance, I picture a bird. There’s associations going on inside my head that I’d never paid much attention to before.
I’ve found I can quiet my internal monologue if I try. (It’s tricky, though; the monologue starts up again at the slightest provocation—I try to observe my own though processes without the monologue, and as soon as something odd happens, the internal monologue says “That’s odd… ooops.”)
I’m not sure if I can talk without the monologue automatically starting up again, but I’ll try that first.
I wasn’t to add another data point, but I’m not sure the one I got can even be called that: I have no consistent memory on this subject. I am notoriously horrible at luminosity and introspection. When I do try to ask my brain, I receive a model/metaphor based of what I already know for neuroscience which may or may not contain data I couldn’t access otherwise, and which is presented as a machine I can manipulate in the hopes of trying to manipulate the states of distant brains. The machine is clearly based on whatever concepts happen to be primed and the results would probably be completely different in every way if I tried this an hour later. Note that the usage of the word “I” here is inconsistent and ill-defined. This might be related to the fact this brain is self-diagnosed with posible ego-death (in the good way).
Edit: it is also noticed that like seemingly the case with most attempts to introspection, the act of observation strongly and aversely influence the functioning of the relevant circuity, in this case heavily altering my speech-patterns.
Huh. They way you describe attempting introspection is exactly the way our brain behaves when we try to access any personal memories outside of working memory. This doesn’t seem to be as effective as whatever the typical way is, as our personal memory’s notoriously atrocious compared with others.
I don’t seem to have any sort of ego death. Vigil might have something similar, though.
A more tenuously related datapoint is that in fiction, I try to design BMIs around emulating having memorized >GLUTs.
What are GLUTs? I’m guessing you’re not talking about Glucose Transporters.
Basically; maybe a much larger chunk of my cognition passes through memory machinery for some reason?
This seems like a plausible hypothesis. Alternatively, perhaps your working memory is less differentiated from your long-term memory.
Hmm, this seems related to another datapoint: reportedly, when I’m asked about my current mood and distracts, >I answer “I can’t remember”.
Hm. I have the same reaction if I’m asked what I’m thinking about, but I don’t think it’s because my thoughts are running through my long-term memory, so much as my train of thought usually gets flushed out of working memory when other people are talking.
GLUT=Giant Look-Up Table. Basically, implementing multiplication by memorizing the multiplication tables up to 2 147 483 647.
Hmm, that’s an interesting theory. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
And no I’m not talking about trying to remember what happened a few seconds ago. I mean direct sensory experiences; as in someone holds p 3 fingers in the darkness and asks “how many fingers am I holding up right now” and I answer “I can’t remember” instead of “I can’t see”.
One way I can try is this: have you ever experienced the difference between “I know what I’m going to say, and here I am saying it” and “words are coming out of my mouth, and I’m kind of surprised by what I’m hearing myself say”?
BTW, my internal monologue usually sounds quite different from what I actually say in most casual situations: for example, it uses less dialectal/non-standard language and more technical terms. (IOW, it resembles the way I write more than the way I speak. So, “I know what I’m going to say, and here I am saying it” is my default state when writing, and “words are coming out of my mouth, and I’m kind of surprised by what I’m hearing myself say” is the state I’m most often in when speaking.) Anyone else finds the same?
That’s pretty close to how I operate, except the words are more like the skeletons of the thoughts than the thoughts themselves, stripped of all the internal connotation and imagery that provided 99% of the internal meaning.
Oh, that’s hard. The latter was awful, but of course most of that was due to all the other crap that was going on at the time. If I take my best shot at adjusting for that… well, I am most comfortable being the voice in my head. But not-being the voice in my head has an uncomfortable gloriousness associated with it. I doubt the latter is sustainable, though.
When you’re playing a sport… wait, maybe you don’t… okay, when you’re playing an instrum—hm. Surely there is a kinesthetic skill you occasionally perform, during which your locus of identity is not in your articulatory loop? (If not, fixing that might be high value?) And you can imagine being in states similar to that much of the time? I would imagine intense computer programming sessions would be more kinesthetic than verbal. Comment linked to hints at what my default thinking process is like.
When I’m playing music or martial arts, and I’m doing it well, I’m usually in a state of flow—not exactly self-aware in the way I usually think of it.
When I’m working inside a computer or motorcycle, I think I’m less self-aware, and what I’m aware of is my manipulating actuators, and the objects than I need to manipulate, and what I need to do to them.
When I’m sitting in my armchair, thinking “who am I?” this is almost entirely symbolic, and I feel more self-aware than at the other times.
So, I think having my locus of identity in my articulatory loop is correlated with having a strong sense of identity.
I’m not sure whether my sense of identity would be weaker there, and stronger in a state of kinesthetic flow, if I spent more time sparring than sitting.
I’m not sure how to answer that question. But when I think verbally I often lose track of the bigger picture of what I’m doing and get bogged down on details or tangents.
...I have difficulty imagining what it would be to be like someone who isn’t the little voice in their own head, though. Seriously, who’s posting that comment?
I play other people’s voices through my head as I imagine what they would say (or are saying, when I interpret text,) but I don’t have my own voice in my head as an internal monologue, and I think of “myself” as the conductor, which directs all the voices.
I think in terms of ideas and impulses, not voices. I can describe an impulse as if it had been expressed in words, but when it’s going through my head, it’s not.
I’d be kind of surprised if people who have internal monologues need an inner voice telling them “I’m so angry, I feel like throwing something!” in order to recognize that they feel angry and have an urge to throw something. I just recognize urges directly, including ones which are more subtle and don’t need to be expressed externally, without needing to mediate them through language.
It definitely hasn’t been my experience that not thinking in terms of a distinct inner “voice” makes it hard for me to pin down my thoughts; I have a much easier time following my own thought processes than most people I know.
I’d be kind of surprised if people who have internal monologues need an inner voice telling them “I’m so angry, I >feel like throwing something!” in order to recognize that they feel angry and have an urge to throw something. I >just recognize urges directly, including ones which are more subtle and don’t need to be expressed externally, >without needing to mediate them through language.
In our case at least, you are correct that we don’t need to vocalize impulses. Emotions and urges seem to run on a different, concurrent modality.
Do ideas and impulses both use the same modality for you?
I’d be kind of surprised if people who have internal monologues need an inner voice telling them “I’m so angry, I feel like throwing something!” in order to recognize that they feel angry and have an urge to throw something.
I can recognise that I’m angry without the voice. When I’m angry, the inner voice will often be saying unflattering things about the object of my anger; something along the lines of “Aaaaaargh, this is so frustrating! I wish it would just work like it’s supposed to!” Wordless internal angry growls may also happen.
It’s something like watching a movie. You can see hands typing and words appearing on the screen, but you aren’t precisely thinking them. You can feel lips moving and hear words forming in the air, but you aren’t precisely thinking them. They’re just things your body is doing, like walking. When you walk, you don’t consciously think of each muscle to move, do you? most of the time you don’t even think about putting one foot in front of the other; you just think about where you’re going (if that) and your motor control does the rest.
For some people, verbal articulation works the same way. Words get formed, maybe even in response to other peoples’ words, but it’s not something you’re consciously acting on; those processes are running on their own without conscious input.
When I walk, yes, I don’t consciously think of every muscle; but I do decide to walk. I decide my destination, I decide my route. (I may, if distracted, fall by force of habit into a default route; on noticing this, I can immediately override).
So… for someone without the internal monologue… how much do you decide about what you say? Do you just decide what subject to speak about, what opinions to express, and leave the exact phrasing up to the autopilot? Or do you not even decide that—do you sit there and enjoy the taste of icecream while letting the conversation run entirely by itself?
Didn’t think this was going to be my first contribution to LessWrong, but here goes (hi, everybody, I’m Phil!)
I came to what I like to think was a realisation useful to my psychological health a few months ago when I was invited to realise that there is more to me than my inner monologue. That is, I came to understand that identifying myself as only the little voice in my head was not good for me in any sense. For one thing, my body is not part of my inner monologue, ergo I was a fat guy, because I didn’t identify with it and therefore didn’t care what I fed it on. For another, one of the things I explicitly excluded from my identity was the subprocess that talks to people. I had (and still have) an internal monologue, but it was at best only advisory to the talking process, so you can count me as one of the people for whom conversation is not something I’m consciously acting on. Result: I didn’t consider the person people meet and talk to to be “me”, but (as I came to understand), nevertheless I am held responsible for everything he says and does.
My approach to this was somewhat luminousavant (ma lecture de) la lettre: I now construe my identity as consisting of at least two sub-personalities. There is one for my inner monologue, and one for the version of me that people get to meet and talk to. I call them Al and Greg, respectively, so that by giving them names I hopefully remember that neither alone is Phil. So, to answer CCC’s question: Al is Greg’s lawyer, and Greg is Al’s PR man. When I’m alone, I’m mostly Al, cogitating and opining and whatnot to the wall, with the occasional burst of non-verbal input from Greg that amounts to “That’s not going to play in (Peoria|the office|LessWrong comment threads)”. On the other hand, when other people are around, I’m mostly Greg, conversating in ways that Al would never have thought of, and getting closer and closer to an impersonation of Robin Williams depending on prettiness and proximity of the ladies in the room. Al could in theory sit back and let Greg do his thing, but he’s usually too busy facepalming or yelling “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP” in a way that I can’t hear until I get alone again.
The problem I used to have was that I was all on Al’s side. I’d berate myself (that is, I’d identify with Al berating Greg) incessantly for paranoid interpretations of the way people reacted to what I said, without ever noticing that, y’know what, people do generally seem to like Greg, and Greg is also me.
Single data point but:
I can alternate between inner monologue (heard [in somebody else’s voice not mine(!)]) and no monologue (mainly social activity—say stuff then catch myself saying it and keep going) - stuff just happens. When inner monologue is present it seems I’m in real time constructing what I imagine the future to be and then adapt to that.
I can feel as if my body moved without moving it, but don’t use it for thinking (mainly kinesthethic imagination or whatever).
I can force myself to see images, and, at the fringe, close to sleep, can make up symphonies in my mind, but don’t use them to think.
I have an internal monologue. It’s a bit like a narrator in my head, narrating my thoughts.
I think—and this is highly speculative on my part—that it’s a sign of thinking mainly with the part of the brain that handles language. Whenever I take one of those questionnaires designed to tell whether I use mainly the left or right side of my brain, I land very heavily on the left side—analytical, linguistic, mathematical. I can use the other side if I want to; but I find it surprisingly easy to become almost a caricature of a left-brain thinker.
My internal monologue quite probably restricts me to (mainly) ideas that are easily expressed in English. Up until now, I could see this as a weakness, but I couldn’t see any easy way around it. (One advantage of the internal monologue, on the other hand, is that I usually find it easy to speak my thoughts out loud; because they’re already in word form)
But now, you tell me that you don’t seem to have an internal monologue. Does this mean that you can easily think of things that are not easily expressed in English?
Well.. I can easily think of things I subsequently have seriously trouble expressing in any language, sure. Occasionally through reflection via visuals (or kinesthetics, or..), but more often not using such modalities at all.
Okay, visual I can understand. I don’t use it often, but I do use it on occasion. Kinesthetic, I use even less often, but again I can more-or-less imagine how that works. (Incidentally, I also have a lot of trouble catching a thrown object. This may be related.)
But this ‘no modalities at all’… this intrigues me. How does it work?
But this ‘no modalities at all’… this intrigues me. How does it work?
I can’t speak for Baughn but as for myself, sometimes It feels like I know ahead of time what I’m going to say as my inner voice, and sometimes this results in me not actually bothering to say it.
I went on vacation during this discussion, and completely lost track of it in the process—oops. It’s an interesting question, though. Let me try to answer.
First off, using a sensory modality for the purpose of thinking. That’s something I do, sure enough; for instance, right now I’m “hearing” what I’m saying at the same time as I’m writing it. Occasionally, if I’m unsure of how to phrase something, I’ll quickly loop through a few options; more often, I’ll do that without bothering with the “hearing” part.
When thinking about physical objects, sometimes I’ll imagine them visually. Sometimes I won’t bother.
For planning, etc. I never bother—there’s no modality that seems useful.
That’s not to say I don’t have an experience of thinking. I’m going to explain this in terms of a model of thought[1] that’s been handy for me (because it seems to fit me internally, and also because it’s handy for models in fiction-writing where I’m modifying human minds), but keep in mind that there is a very good chance it’s completely wrong. You might still be able to translate it to something that makes sense to you.
..basically, the workspace model of consciousness combined with a semi-modular brain architecture. That is to say, where the human mind consists of a large number of semi-independent modules, and consciousness is what happens when those modules are all talking to each other using a central workspace. They can also go off and do their own thing, in which case they’re subconscious.
Now, some of the major modules here are sensory. For good reason; being aware of your environment is important. It’s not terribly surprising, then, that the ability to loop information back—feeding internal data into the sensory modules, using their (massive) computational power to massage it—is useful, though it also involves what would be hallucinations if I wasn’t fully aware it’s not real. It’s sufficiently useful that, well, it seems like a lot of people don’t notice there’s anything else going on.
Non-sensory modes of thought, now… sensory modes are frequently useful, but not always. When they aren’t, they’re noise. In that case—and I didn’t quite realise that was going on until now—I’m not just not hallucinating an internal monologue, but in fact entirely disconnecting my senses from my conscious experience. It’s a bit hard to tell, since they’re naturally right there if I check, but I can be extremely easy to surprise at times.
Instead, I have an experience of… everything else. All the modules normally involved with thinking, except the sensory ones. Well, probably not all of them at once, but missing the sensory modules appears to be a sufficiently large outlier that the normal churn becomes insignificant...
Did that help? Hm. Maybe if you think about said “churn”; it’s not like you always use every possible method of thought you’re capable of, at the same time. I’m just including sensory modalities in the list of hot-swappable ones?
...
This is hard.
One more example, I suppose. I mentioned that, while I was writing this, I hallucinated my voice reading it; this appears to be necessary to actually writing. Not for deciding on the meaning I’m trying to get across, but in order to serialise it as English. Not quite sure what’s going on there, since I don’t seem to be doing it ahead of time—I’m doing it word by word.
Okay, let me summarise your statement so as to ensure that I understand it correctly.
In short, you have a number of internal functional modules in the brain; each module has a speciality. There will be, for example, a module for sight; a module for hearing; a module for language, and so on. Your thoughts consist—almost entirely—of these modules exchanging information in some sort of central space.
The modules are, in effect, having a chat.
Now, you can swap these modules out quite a bit. When you’re planning what to type, for example, it seems you run that through your ‘hearing’ module, in order to check that the word choice is correct; you know that this is not something which you are actually hearing, and thus are in no danger of treating it as a hallucination, but as a side effect of this your hearing module isn’t running through the actual input from your ears, and you may be missing something that someone else is saying to you. (I imagine that sufficiently loud or out-of-place noises are still wired directly to your survival subsystem, though, and will get your attention as normal).
But you don’t have to use your hearing module to think with. Or your sight module. You have other modules which can do the thinking, even when those modules have nothing to do. When your sensory modules have nothing to add, you can and do shut them out of the main circuit, ignoring any non-urgent input from those modules.
Your modules communicate by some means which are somehow independent of language, and your thoughts must be translated through your hearing module (which seems to have your language module buried inside it) in order to be described in English.
This is very different to how I think. I have one major module—the language module (not the hearing module, there’s no audio component to this, just a direct language model) which does almost all my thinking. Other modules can be used, but it’s like an occasional illustration in a book—very much not the main medium. (And also like an illustration in that it’s usually visual, though not necessarily limited to two dimensions).
When it comes to my internal thoughts, all modules that are not my language model are unimportant in comparison. I suspect that some modules may be so neglected as to be near nonexistent, and I wonder what those modules could be.
My sensory modules appear to be input-only. I can ignore them, but I can’t seem to consciously run other information into them. (I still dream, which I imagine indicates that I can subconsciously run other information through my sensory modules)
This leaves me with three questions:
Aside from your sensory modules, what other module(s) do you have?
Am I correct in thinking that you still require at least one module in order to think (but that can be any one module)?
When your modules share information, what form does that information take?
I imagine these will be difficult to translate to language, but I am very curious as to what your answers will be.
It’s interesting to me that you say your hearing and language modules are independent. I mean, it’s reasonably obvious that this has to be possible—deaf people do have language—but it’s absolutely impossible for me to separate the two, at least in one direction; I can’t deal with language without ‘hearing’ it.
And I just checked; it doesn’t appear I can multitask and examine non-language sounds while I’m using language, either. For comparison, I absolutely can (re)use e.g. visual modules while I’m writing this, although it gets really messy if I try to do so while remaining conscious of what they’re doing—that’s not actually required, though.
Aside from your sensory modules, what other module(s) do you have?
Well… my introspection isn’t really good enough to tell, and it’s really more of a zeroth-approximation model than something I have a lot of confidence in. That said, I suspect the question doesn’t have an answer even in principle; that there’s no clear border between two adjacent subsystems, so it depends on where you want to draw the line. It doesn’t help that some elements of my thinking almost certainly only exist as a property of the communication between other systems, not as a physical piece of meat in itself, and I can’t really tell which is which.
Am I correct in thinking that you still require at least one module in order to think (but that can be any one module)?
I think if it was just one, I wouldn’t really be conscious of it. But that’s not what you asked, so the answer is “Probably yes”.
When your modules share information, what form does that information take?
I’m very tempted to say “conscious experience”, here, but I have no real basis for that other than a hunch. I’m not sure I can give you a better answer, though. Feelings, visual input (or “hallucinations”), predictions of how people or physical systems will behave, plans—not embedded in any kind of visualization, just raw plans—etc. etc. And before you ask what that’s like, it’s a bit like asking what a Python dictionary feels like.. though emotions aren’t much involved, at that level; those are separate.
The one common theme is that there’s always at least one meta-level of thought associated. Not just “Here’s a plan”, but “Here’s a plan, and oh by the way, here’s what everyone else in the tightly knit community you like to call a brain thinks of the plan. In particular, “memory” here just pattern-matched it to something you read in a novel, which didn’t work, but then again a different segment is pointing out that fictional evidence is fictional.”
...without the words, of course.
So the various ideas get bounced back and forth between various segments of my mind, and that bouncing is what I’m aware of. Never the base idea, but all the thinking about the idea… well, it wouldn’t really make sense to be “aware of the base idea” if I wasn’t thinking about it.
Sight is something else again. It certainly feels like I’m aware of my entire visual field, but I’m at least half convinced that’s an illusion. I’m in a prime position to fool myself about that.
It’s interesting to me that you say your hearing and language modules are independent.
This may be related to the fact that I learnt to read at a very young age; when I read, I run my visual input through my language module; the visual model pre-processes the input to extract the words, which are then run through the language module directly.
At least, that’s what I think is happening.
Running the language module without the hearing module a lot, and from a young age, probably helped quite a bit to seperate the two.
Aside from your sensory modules, what other module(s) do you have?
Well… my introspection isn’t really good enough to tell, and it’s really more of a zeroth-approximation model than something I have a lot of confidence in. That said, I suspect the question doesn’t have an answer even in principle; that there’s no clear border between two adjacent subsystems, so it depends on where you want to draw the line. It doesn’t help that some elements of my thinking almost certainly only exist as a property of the communication between other systems, not as a physical piece of meat in itself, and I can’t really tell which is which.
Hmph. Disappointing, but thanks for answering the question.
I think I was hoping for more clearly defined modules than appears to be the case. Still, what’s there is there.
When your modules share information, what form does that information take?
I’m very tempted to say “conscious experience”, here, but I have no real basis for that other than a hunch. I’m not sure I can give you a better answer, though. Feelings, visual input (or “hallucinations”), predictions of how people or physical systems will behave, plans—not embedded in any kind of visualization, just raw plans—etc. etc. And before you ask what that’s like, it’s a bit like asking what a Python dictionary feels like.. though emotions aren’t much involved, at that level; those are separate.
The one common theme is that there’s always at least one meta-level of thought associated. Not just “Here’s a plan”, but “Here’s a plan, and oh by the way, here’s what everyone else in the tightly knit community you like to call a brain thinks of the plan. In particular, “memory” here just pattern-matched it to something you read in a novel, which didn’t work, but then again a different segment is pointing out that fictional evidence is fictional.”
...without the words, of course.
So the various ideas get bounced back and forth between various segments of my mind, and that bouncing is what I’m aware of. Never the base idea, but all the thinking about the idea… well, it wouldn’t really make sense to be “aware of the base idea” if I wasn’t thinking about it.
Now, this is interesting. I’m really going to have to go and think about this for a while. You have a kind of continual meta-commentary in your mind, thinking about what you’re thinking, cross-referencing with other stuff… that seems like a useful talent to have.
It also seems that, by concentrating more on the individual modules and less on the inter-module communication, I pretty much entirely missed where most of your thinking happens.
One question comes to mind; you mention ‘raw plans’. You’ve correctly predicted my obvious question—what raw plans feel like—but I still don’t really have much of a sense of it, so I’d like to poke at that a bit if you don’t mind.
So; how are these raw plans organised?
Let us say, for example, that you need to plan… oh, say, to travel to a library, return one set of books, and take out another. Would the plan be a series of steps arranged in order of completion, or a set of subgoals that need to be accomplished in order (subgoal one: find the car keys); or would the plan be simply a label saying ‘LIBRARY PLAN’ that connects to the memory of the last time you went on a similar errand?
As for me, I have a few different ways that I can formulate plans. For a routine errand, my plan consists of the goal (e.g. “I need to go and buy bread”) and a number of habits (which, now that I think about it, hardly impinge on my conscious mind at all; if I think about it, I know where I plan to go to get bread, but the answer’s routine enough that I don’t usually bother). When driving, there are points at which I run a quick self-check (“do I need to buy bread today? Yes? Then I must turn into the shopping centre...”)
For a less routine errand, my plan will consist of a number of steps to follow. These will be arranged in the order I expect to complete them, and I will (barring unexpected developments or the failure of any step) follow the steps in order as specified. If I were to write down the steps on paper, they would appear horrendously under-specified to a neutral observer; but in the privacy of my own head, I know exactly which shop I mean when I simply specify ‘the shop’; both the denotations and connotations intended by every word in my head are there as part of the word.
If the plan is one that I particularly look forward to fulfilling, I may run through it repeatedly, particularly the desirable parts (”...that icecream is going to taste so good...”). This all runs through my language system, of course.
Sight is something else again. It certainly feels like I’m aware of my entire visual field, but I’m at least half convinced that’s an illusion. I’m in a prime position to fool myself about that.
I have a vague memory of having read something that suggested that humans are not aware of their entire visual field, but that there is a common illusion that people are, agreeing with your hypothesis here. I vaguely suspect that it might have been in one of the ‘Science of the Discworld’ books, but I am uncertain.
A very high proportion of what I call thinking is me talking to myself. I have some ability to imagine sounds and images, but it’s pretty limited. I’m better with kinesthesia, but that’s mostly for thinking about movement.
While I’m writing fiction there’ll be dialogue, the characters’ emotions and feelings, visuals of the scenery, point-of-view visuals (often multiple angles at the same time), motor actions, etc. It’s a lot like lucid dreaming, only without the dreaming. Occasionally monologues, yes, but those don’t really count; they’re not mine.
While I’m writing this there is, yes, a monologue. One that’s just-in-time, however; I don’t normally bother to listen to a speech in my head before writing it down. Not for this kind of thing; more often for said fiction, where I’ll do that to better understand how it reads.
Mostly I’m not writing anything, though.
Most of the time, I don’t seem to have any particular internal experience at all. I just do whatever it is I’m doing, and experience that, but unless it’s relatively complex there doesn’t seem to be much call for pre-action reflections. (Well, of course I still feel emotions and such, but.. nothing monologue-like, in any modality. Hope that makes sense.)
A lot of the time I have (am conscious of) thoughts that don’t correspond to any sensor modality whatsoever. I have no idea how I’d explain those.
If I’m working on a computer program.. anything goes, but I’ll typically borrow visual capacity to model graph structures and such. A lot of the modalities I’d use there, I don’t really have words for, and it doesn’t seem worthwhile to try inventing them; doing so usefully would turn this into a novel.
While I’m writing this there is, yes, a monologue. One that’s just-in-time, however; I don’t normally bother to listen to a speech in my head before writing it down.
That’s the internal monologue. Mine is also often just-in-time (not always, of course). I can listen to it in my head a whole lot faster than I can talk, type, or write, so sometimes I’ll start out just-in-time at the start of the sentence and then my internal monologue has to regularly wait for the typing/writing/speaking to catch up before I can continue.
For example, in this post, when I clicked the ‘reply’ button I had already planned out the first two sentences of the above post (before the first bracket). The contents of the first bracket were added when I got to the end of the second sentence, and then edited to add the ‘of course’. The next sentence was added in sections, built up and then put down and occasionally re-edited as I went along (things like replacing ‘on occasion’ with ‘sometimes’).
Most of the time, I don’t seem to have any particular internal experience at all. I just do whatever it is I’m doing, and experience that, but unless it’s relatively complex there doesn’t seem to be much call for pre-action reflections.
Hmmm. Living in the moment. I’m curious; how would you go about (say) planning for a camping trip? Not so much ‘what would you do’, but ‘how would you think about it’?
Can’t speak for Nancy, but I think I know what she refers to.
Different people have different thought… processes, I guess is the word. My brother’s thought process is, by his description, functional; he assigns parts of his mind tasks, and gets the results back in a stack. (He’s pretty good at multi-tasking, as a result.) My own thought process is, as Nancy specifies, an internal monologue; I’m literally talking to myself. (Although the conversation is only partially English. It’s kind of like… 4Chan. Each “line” of dialogue is associated with an “image” (in some cases each word, depending on the complexity of the concept encoded in it), which is an abstract conceptualization. If you’ve ever read a flow-of-consciousness book, that’s kind of like a low-resolution version of what’s going on in my brain, and, I presume, hers.
I’ve actually discovered at least one other “mode” I can switch my brain into—I call it Visual Mode. Whereas normally my attention is very tunnel vision-ish (I can track only one object reliably), I can expand my consciousness (at the cost of eliminating the flow-of-consciousness that is usually my mind) and be capable of tracking multiple objects in my field of vision. (I cannot, for some reason, actually move my eyes while in this state; it breaks my concentration and returns me to a “normal” mode of thought.) I’m capable of thinking in this state, but oddly, incapable of tracking or remembering what those thoughts are; I can sustain a full conversation which I will not remember, at all, later.
Hm, the obvious question there is: “How do you know you can sustain a full conversation, if you don’t remember it at all later?” (..edit: With other people? Er, right. Somehow I was assuming it was an internal conversation.)
I’ve got some idea what you’re talking about, though—focusing my consciousness entirely on sensory input. More useful outside of cities, and I don’t have any kind of associated amnesia, but it seems similar to how I’d describe the state otherwise.
Neither your brother’s nor your own thought processes otherwise seem to be any kind of match for mine. It’s interesting that there’s this much variation, really.
I’ve actually discovered at least one other “mode” I can switch my brain into—I call it Visual Mode.
I can do a weaker version of this—basically, by telling my brain to “focus on the entire field of your perception” as if it was a single object. As far as I am aware, it doesn’t do any of the mental effects you describe for me. It’s very relaxing though.
Add one to the sample size. My thought process is also mostly lacking in sensory modality. My thoughts do have a large verbal component, but they are almost exclusively for planning things that I could potentially say or write.
Rather than trying to justify how this works to the others, I will instead ask my own questions: How can words help in creating thoughts? In order to generate a sentence in your head, surely you must already know what you want to say. And if you already know what you have to say, what’s the point of saying it? I presume you cannot jump to the next thought without saying the previous one in full. With my own ability to generate sentences, that would be a crippling handicap.
My thoughts are largely made up of words. Although some internal experimentation has shown that my brain can still work when the internal monologue is silent, I still associate ‘thoughts’ very, very strongly with ‘internal monologue’.
I think that, while thoughts can exist without words, the word make the thoughts easier to remember; thus, the internal monologue is used as part of a ‘write-to-long-term-storage’ function. (I can write images and feelings as well; but words seem to be my default write-mode).
Also, the words—how shall I put this—the words solidify the thought. They turn the thought into something that I can then take and inspect for internal integrity. Something that I can check for errors; something that I can think about, instead of something that I can just think. Images can do the same, but take more working-memory space to hold and are thus harder to inspect as a whole.
I presume you cannot jump to the next thought without saying the previous one in full.
I don’t think I’ve ever tried. I can generate sentences fast enough that it’s not a significant delay, though. I suspect that this is simply due to long practice in sentence construction. (Also, if I’m not going to actually say it out loud, I don’t generally bother to correct it if it’s not grammatically correct).
I presume you cannot jump to the next thought without saying the previous one in full.
Personally, I can do this to degrees. I can skip verbalizing a concept completely, but it feels like inserting a hiccup into my train of thought (pardon the mixed analogy). I can usually safely skip verbalizing all of it; that is, it feels like I have a mental monologue but upon reflection it went by too fast to actually be spoken language so I assume it was actually some precursor that did not require full auditory representation. I usually only use full monologues when planning conversations in advance or thinking about a hard problem.
As far as I can tell, the process helps me ensure consistency in my thoughts by making my train of thought easier to hold on to and recall, and also enables coherence checking by explicitly feeding my brain’s output back into itself.
Now I’m worrying that I might have been exaggerating. Although you are implicitly describing your thoughts as being verbal, they seem to work in a way similar to mine.
ETA: More information: I still believe I am less verbal than you. In particular, I believe my thoughts become less verbal when thinking about hard problems are than becoming more so as in your case. However, my statement about my verbal thoughts being “almost exclusively for planning things that I could potentially say or write” is a half-truth; A lot of it is more along the lines that sometimes when I have an interesting thought I imagine explaining it to someone else. Some confounding factors:
There is a continuum here from completely nonverbal to having connotations of various words and grammatical structures to being completely verbal. I’m not sure when it should count as having an internal monologue.
Asking myself weather a thought was verbal naturally leads to create a verbalization of it, while not asking myself this creates a danger of not noticing a verbal thought.
I basing this a lot on introspection done while I am thinking about this discussion, which would make my thoughts more verbal.
Wikipedia article. I’m really curious how you would describe your thoughts if you don’t describe them as an internal monologue. Are you more of a visual thinker?
Do you actually hear the voice? I often have words in my head when I think about things, but there isn’t really an auditory component. It’s just words in a more abstract form.
I wouldn’t say I literally hear the voice; I can easily distinguish it from sounds I’m actually hearing. But the experience is definitely auditory, at least some of the time; I could tell you whether the voice is male or female, what accent they’re speaking in (usually my own), how high or low the voice is, and so on.
I definitely also have non-auditory thoughts as well. Sometimes they’re visual, sometimes they’re spatial, and sometimes they don’t seem to have any sensory-like component at all. (For what it’s worth, visual and spatial thoughts are essential to the way I think about math.)
If you want to poke at this a bit, one way could be to test what sort of interferences disrupt different activities for you, compared to a friend.
I’m thinking of the bit in “Surely you’re joking” where Feynman finds that he can’t talk and maintain a mental counter at the same time, while a friend of his can—because his friend’s mental counter is visual.
Neat. I can do it both ways… actually, I can name at least four different ways of counting:
“Raw” counting, without any sensory component; really just a sense of magnitude. Seems to be a floating-point, with a really small number of bits; I usually lose track of the exact number by, oh, six.
Verbally. Interferes with talking, as you’d expect.
Visually, using actual 2/3D models of whatever I’m counting. No interference, but a strict upper limit, and interferes with seeing—well, usually the other way around. The upper limit still seems to be five-six picture elements, but I can arrange them in various ways to count higher; binary, for starters, but also geometrically or.. various ways.
Visually, using pictures of decimal numbers. That interferes with speaking when updating the number, but otherwise sticks around without any active maintenance, at least so long as I have my eyes closed. I’m still limited to five-six digits, though… either decimal or hexadecimal works. I could probably figure out a more efficient encoding if I worked at it.
I, for one, actually hear the voice. It’s quite clear. Not loud like an actual voice but a “so loud I can’t hear myself think” moment has never literally happened to me since the voice seems more like its on its own track, parallel to my actual hearing. I would never get it confused with actual sounds, though I can’t really separate the hearing it to the making it to be sure of that.
but a “so loud I can’t hear myself think” moment has never literally happened to me since the voice seems more like its on its own track, parallel to my actual hearing.
That’s interesting! Because I have definitely had “so loud I can’t hear myself think” moments (even though I don’t literally hear thoughts) - just two days ago, I had to ask somebody to stop talking for a while so that I could focus.
Being distracted is one thing—I mean literally not being able to hear my thoughts in the manner that I might not be able to hear what you said if a jet was taking off nearby. This was to emphasize that even though I perceive them as sounds there is ‘something’ different about them than sounds-from-ears that seems to prevent them from audibly mingling. Loud noises can still make me lose track of what I was thinking and break focus.
Hmm. Now that I think of it, I’m not sure to what extent it was just distraction and to what extent a literal inability to hear my thoughts. Could’ve been exclusively one, or parts of both.
I added more detail in a sibling post, but it can’t be that universal; I practically never do that at all, basically only for thoughts that are destined to actually be spoken. (Or written, etc.)
Actually, I believe I used to do so most of the time (..about twenty years ago, before the age of ten), but then made a concerted effort to stop doing so on the basis that pretending to speak aloud takes more time. Those memories may be inaccurate, though.
I added more detail in a sibling post, but it can’t be that universal; I practically never do that at all, basically only for thoughts that are destined to actually be spoken.
It very universal but some people shut down their awareness of the process. It’s like people who don’t say they don’t dream. They just don’t remember it. Most people can’t perceive their own heartbeat.
It can take some effort to build awareness.
What’s your internal reaction when someone insults yourself?
You’re claiming that you understand his thought better than he does. That is a severe accusation and is not epistemologically justified. Also, I can’t recall off the top of my head any time somebody insulted me, I think my reaction would depend on the context, but I don’t see why it will involve imagined words.
That is a severe accusation and is not epistemologically justified.
How do you know that there’s no epistemological justification?
So, how do I know? Empirical experience at NLP seminars. At the beginning plenty of people say that they don’t have an internal dialoge, that they can’t view mental images or that they can’t perceive emotions within their own body.
It’s something that usually get’s fixed in a short amount of time.
Around two month ago I was chatting with a girl who had two voices in her head. One that did big picture thinking and another that did analytic thinking. She herself wasn’t consciously aware that one of the voices came from the left and the other from the right.
After I told her which voice came from which direction, she checked and I was right. I can’t diagnose what Baughn does with internal dialog in the same depth through online conversation but there nothing that stops me from putting forth generally observations about people who believe that they have no internal dialog until they were taught to perceive it.
I think my reaction would depend on the context, but I don’t see why it will involve imagined words.
Yes, you don’t seeimagined words. That’s kind of the point of words. You either hear them or don’t hear them. If you try to see them you will fail. If you try to perceive your internal dialog that way you won’t see any internal dialog.
But why did I pick that example? It’s emotional. Being insulted frequently get’s people to reflect on themselves and the other person. They might ask themselves: “Why did he do that?” or answer to themselves “No, he has no basis for making that claim.”
In addition judgement is usually done via words.
I’m however not sure whether I can build up enough awareness in Baughn via text based online conversation that he can pick up his mental dialog.
Also, I can’t recall off the top of my head any time somebody insulted me,
If you don’t have strong internal dialog it doesn’t surprise me that you aren’t good at recalling a type of event that usually goes with strong internal dialog.
Those are interesting claims, but I think you misunderstood a little. I do have an internal monologue, sometimes; I just don’t bother to use it, a lot of the time. It depends on circumstances.
You moved in the span of half a year from: “I’m pretty sure I don’t have a internal monologue, I don’t know what the term is supposed to mean.” to “I do have an internal monologue, sometimes”.
That’s basically my point. With a bit of direction there something that you could recognize there to be an internal monologue in your mind.
Of course once you recognize it, you aren’t in the state anymore where you would say: “I’m pretty sure I don’t have a internal monologue.” That’s typical for those kind of issues.
I was basically right with my claim that “I’m pretty sure I don’t have a internal monologue.” is wrong, and did what it took to for you to recognize it.
itaibn0 claimed that the claim was etymologically unsubstantiated. It was substantiated and turned out to be right.
Actually, I would have made the same claim half a year ago. The only difference is that I have a different model of what the words “internal monologue” mean—that, and I’ve done some extra modelling and introspection for a novel.
Yes, now you have a mental model that allows you to believe “I do have an internal monologue, sometimes” back then you didn’t. What I did write was intended to create that model in your mind.
To me it seems like it worked. It’s also typical that people backport their mental models into the past when they remember what happened in the past.
So, how do I know? Empirical experience at NLP seminars. At the beginning plenty of people say that they don’t have an internal dialoge, that they can’t view mental images or that they can’t perceive emotions within their own body.
It’s something that usually get’s fixed in a short amount of time.
First different people use different system with underlying strength. Some people like Tesla can visualize a chair and the chair they visualize get’s perceived by them the same way as a real chair.
You don’t get someone who doesn’t think he can visualize pictures to that level of visualization ability by doing a few tricks.
In general you do something that triggers a reaction in someone. You observe the person and when she has the image or has the dialog you stop and tell the person to focus their attention on it.
There are cases where that’s enough.
There are also cases where a person has a real reason why they repress a certain way of perception.
A person with a strong emotional trauma might have completely stopped relating to emotions within their body to escape the emotional pain.
Then it’s necessary for the person to become into a state where they are resourceful enough to face the pain so that they can process it.
A third layer would consist of different suggestion that it’s possible to perceive something new. Both at a conscious level and on a deep metaphoric level.
I just do what I feel like. And my feelings are generally in line with my previous experiences with the other person. If I feel like they’re a reasonable person and generally nice then I feel like giving them the benefit of the doubt, if I feel like they’re a total toss-pot then I’m liable to fire back at them. There’s so much cached thought that’s felt rather than verbalised at that point that it’s pretty much a reaction.
Your what?
No, I’m not letting it go this time. I’ve heard people talking about internal monologues before, but I’ve never been quite sure what those are—I’m pretty sure I don’t have one. Could you try to define the term?
Gosh. New item added to my list of “Not everyone does that.”
...I have difficulty imagining what it would be to be like someone who isn’t the little voice in their own head, though. Seriously, who’s posting that comment?
I may be in a somewhat unique position to address this question, as one of the many many many weird transient neurological things that happened to me after my stroke was a period I can best describe as my internal monologue going away.
So I know what it’s like to be the voice in my head, and what it’s like not to be.
And it’s still godawful difficult to describe the difference in words.
One way I can try is this: have you ever experienced the difference between “I know what I’m going to say, and here I am saying it” and “words are coming out of my mouth, and I’m kind of surprised by what I’m hearing myself say”?
If so, I think I can say that losing my “little voice” is similar to that difference.
If not, I suspect the explanation will be just as inaccessible as the phenomenon it purported to explain, but I can try again.
...no, I haven’t. I’m always in the state of “I know what I’m going to say, and here I am saying it” (sometimes modified very soon afterwards by “on second thoughts, that was a very poor way to phrase it and I’ve probably been misunderstood”).
...what? Wow!
I’m dying to know whether we’re stumbling on a difference in the way we think or the way we describe what we think, here. To me, the first state sounds like rehearsing what I’m going to say in my head before I say it, which I only do when I’m racking my brains on eg how to put something tactfully, where the latter sounds like what I do in conversation all the time, which is simply to let the words fall out of my mouth and find out what I’ve said.
My internal monologue is a lot faster than the words can get out of my mouth (when I was younger, I tried to speak as fast as I think, with the result that no-one could understand me; of course, to speak that fast, I needed to drop significant parts of most of the words, which didn’t help). I don’t always plan out every sentence in advance; but thinking about it, I think I do plan out every phrase in advance, relying on the speed of my internal monologue to produce the next phrase before or at worst very shortly after I complete the current phrase. (It often helps to include a brief pause at the end of a phrase in any case). It’s very much a just-in-time thing.
If I’m making a special effort to be tactful, then I’ll produce and consider a full sentence inside my head before saying it out loud.
Incidentally, I’m also a member of Toastmasters, and one thing that Toastmasters has is impromptu speaking, when a person is asked to give a one-to-two minute speech and is told the topic just before stepping up to give the speech. The topic could be anything (I’ve had “common sense”, “stick”, and “nail”, among others). Most people seem to be scared of this, apparently seeing it as an opportunity to stand up and be embarrassed; I find that I enjoy it. I often start an impromptu speech with very little idea of how it’s going to end; I usually make some sort of pun about the topic (I changed ‘common sense’ into a very snooty, upper-crust type of person complaining about commoners with money - ‘common cents’), and often talk more-or-less total nonsense.
But, through the whole speech, I always know what I am saying. I am not surprised by my own words (no matter how surprised other people may be by the idea of ‘common cents’). I don’t think I know how to be surprised at what I am saying. (Of course, my words are not always well-considered, in hindsight; and sometimes I will be surprised at someone else’s interpretation of my words, and be forced to explain that that’s not what I meant)
I’m the same—except occasionally, when I’m ‘flowing’ in conversation, I’ll find that my inner monologue fails to produce what I think it can, and my mouth just halts without input from it
I find that happens to me sometimes when I talk in Afrikaans; my Afrikaans vocabulary is poor enough that I often get halfway through a sentance and find that I can’t remember the word for what I want to say.
It occasionally happens to me in any language. I usually manage to rephrase the sentence on the flight or to replace the word with something generic like “thing” and let the listener figure it out from the context, without much trouble.
Something that occurred to me on this topic; reading has a lot to do with the inner monologue. Writing is, in my view, a code of symbols on a piece of paper (or a screen) which tell the reader what their inner monologue should say. Reading, therefore, is the voluntary (and temporary) replacement of the reader’s internal monologue with an internal monologue supplied and encoded by the author.
At least, that’s what happens when I read. Do other people have the same experience?
Inner monologue test:
I. like. how. when. you. read. this. the. little. voice. in. your. head. takes. pauses..
Does anyone find that the periods don’t make the sentence sound different?
Let’s make it a poll:
When you read NancyLebovitz’s sentence (quoted above) do the periods make it sound different?
[pollid:470]
(If anyone picks any option except ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, could you please elaborate?)
Hypothesis: Since I am more used to read sentences without a full stop after each word than sentences like that, of course I will read the former more quickly—because it takes less effort.
Experiment to test this hypothesis: Ilikehowwhenyoureadthisthelittlevoiceinyourheadspeaksveryquickly.
Result of the experiment: at least for me, my hypothesis is wrong. YMMV.
As far as I can tell, I started reading the test phrase more slowly than normal, then “shifted gears” and sped up, perhaps to faster than normal.
Same here, for both test sentences.
The little voice in my head speaks quickly for that experimental phrase, yes. It should be taking slightly longer to decode—since the information on word borders is missing—which suggests that the voice in my head is doing special effects. I think that that is becausewordslikethis can be used in fiction as the voice of someone who is speaking quickly; so if the voice in my head speeds up when reading it, then that makes the story more immersive.
Hypothesisconfirmedforme.Perhapstoomanyhourslisteningtoaudiobooksatfivetimesspeed. Normalspeedheadvoicejustseemssoslow.
That sounds in my head like the voice in Italian TV ads for medicines reading the disclaimers required (I guess) by law (ultra-fast words, but pauses between sentences of nearly normal length).
I can parse it both ways. Actually, on further experimentation, it appears to be tied directly to my eye-scanning speed! If I force my eyes to scan over the line quickly from left-to-right, I read it without pause; if I read the way I normally do (by staring at the ‘When’ to take a “snapshot” of I, like, how, when, you, and read all at once; then staring at the space between “little” and “voice” to take a snapshot of this, the, little, voice, in, and your all at once, then staring at the “pauses” to take a snapshot of head, takes, and pauses), then the pauses get inserted—but not as normal sentence stops; more like… a clipped robot.
Huh. You read in a different way to what I do; I normally scan the line left-to-right. And I insert the pauses when I do so.
It sounds like a clipped robot to me too.
Yeah, something clicked while I was reading an old encyclopedia sometime around age 7; I remember it quite vividly. My brain started being able to process chunks of text at a time instead of single words, so I could sort of focus on the middle of a short sentence or phrase and read the whole thing at once. I went from reading at about one-quarter conversation speed, to about ten times conversation speed, over the course of a few minutes. I still don’t quite understand what the process was that enabled the change; I just sort of experienced it happening.
One trade-off is that I don’t have full conscious recall of each word when I read things that quickly—but I do tend to be able to pull up a reasonable paraphrasing of the information later if I need to.
I can see both pros and cons to this talent. The pro is obvious; faster reading. The con is that it may cause trouble parsing subtly-worded legal contracts; the sort where one misplaced word may potentially land up with both parties arguing the matter in court. Or anything else where exact wording is important, like preparing a wish for a genie.
Of course, since it seems that you can choose when to use this, um, snapshot reading and when not to, you can gain the full benefit of the pros most of the time while carefully removing the cons in any situation where they become important.
I call that “skimming”, but maybe that’s something else?
Assuming you’re literally talking about subvocalization, it depends on what I’m reading (I do it more with poetry than with academic papers), on how quickly I’m reading (I don’t do that as much when skimming), on whether I know what the author’s voice sounds like (in which case I subvocalize in their voice—which slows me down a great deal if I’m reading stuff by someone who speaks slowly and with a strong foreign accent e.g. Benedict XVI), and possibly on something else I’m overlooking at the moment.
I do not notice that I am subvocalising when I read, even when I am looking for it (I tested this on the wiki page that you linked to). I do notice, however, that it mentions that subvocalising is often not detectable by the person doing the subvocalising.
More specifically, if I place my hand lightly on my throat while reading, I feel no movement of the muscles; and I am able to continue reading while swallowing.
So, no, I don’t think I’m talking about subvocalising. I’m talking about an imaginary voice in my head that narrates my thought processes.
Hmmm… my inner monologue does not tend to speak in the voice of someone whose voice I know. I can get it to speak in other peoples’ voices, or in what I imagine other people’s voices to sound like, if I try to, but it defaults to a sort of neutral gear which, now that I think about it, sounds like a voice but not quite like my (external) voice. Similar, but not the same. (And, of course, the way that I hear my voice when I speak differs from how I hear it when recorded on tape—my inner monologue sounds more like the way I hear my voice, but still somewhat different)
...this is strange. I don’t know who my inner monologue sounds like, if anyone.
Mine usually sounds more or less like I’m whispering.
My inner monologue definitely doesn’t sound like whispering; it’s a voice, speaking normally.
I think I can best describe it by saying that it sounds more like I imagine myself sounding than like I actually sound to myself; but I suspect that’s recursive, i.e. I imagine myself sounding like that because that’s what my inner monologue sounds like.
Does your inner voice sound different depending on your mood or emotional state?
Yes. If my mood or emotional state is sufficiently severe, then my inner voice will sound different; both in choice of phrasing and in tone of voice.
It’s not an audible voice, as such; I think the best way that I can describe it is to say that it’s very much like a memory of a voice, except that it’s generated on-the-fly instead of being, well, remembered. As such, it has most of the properties of an audible voice (except actual audibility) - including such markers as ‘tone of voice’. This tone changes with my emotional state in reasonable ways; that is, if I am sufficiently angry, then my inner voice may take on an angry, menacing tone.
If my emotional state is not sufficiently severe, then I am unable to notice any change in my inner-voice tone. I also note that my spoken voice shows a noticeable change of tone at significantly lower emotional severity than my inner voice does.
I was about to say that it’s the same for me, but then I remember that at least for me actual memories of voices can be very vivid (especially in hypnagogic state or when I’m reading stuff written by that person), whereas my inner voice seldom is. (And memories of voices can also be generated on-the-fly—I can pick a sentence and imagine a bunch of people I know each saying it, even if I can’t remember hearing any of them actually ever saying that sentence.)
Huh. Either my memories of voices are less vivid than yours, or my inner monologue is more vivid. Quite possibly both.
Of course, when I remember someone saying something, it can include information aside from the voice (e.g. where it happened, the surroundings at the time) which is never included in my inner monologue. I consider these details to be seperate from the voice-memory; the voice-memory is merely a part of the whole “what-he-said” memory.
BTW, I think I have one kind of memory for people’s timbre, rate of speech, volume, accent, etc., and one for sequences of phonemes, and when recalling what a person sounded like when saying a given sentence I combine the two on the flight.
My experience is that I generally have some kind of fuzzy idea of what I’m going to say before I say it. When I actually speak, sometimes it comes out as a coherent and streamlined sentence whose contents I figure out as a I speak it. At other times—particularly if I’m feeling nervous, or trying to communicate a complicated concept that I haven’t expressed in speech before—my fuzzy idea seems to disintegrate at the moment I start talking, and even if I had carefully rehearsed a line many times in my mind, I forget most of it. Out comes either what feels to me like an incoherent jumble, or a lot of “umm, no, wait”.
Writing feels a lot easier, possibly because I have the stuff-that-I’ve-already-written right in front of me and I only need to keep the stuff that I’m about to say in memory, instead of also needing to constantly remind myself about what I’ve said so far.
ETA: Here’s an earlier explanation of how writing sometimes feels like to me.
The parts of your brain that generate speech and the part that generate your internal sense-of-self are less integrated than CCC’s. An interesting experiment might be to stop ascribing ownership to your words when you find yourself surprised by them—i.e., instead of framing the phenomenon as “I said that”, frame it as “my brain generated those words”.
Learn to recognize that the parts of your brain that handle text generation and output are no more “you” than the parts of your brain that handle motor reflex control.
EDIT: Is there a problem with this post?
No! The parts of my brain that handle text generation are the only parts that… *slap*… Ow. Nevermind. It seems we have reached an ‘understanding’.
Right!
I mean, I do realize you’re being funny, but pretty much exactly this.
I don’t recommend aphasia as a way of shock-treating this presumption, but I will admit it’s effective. At some point I had the epiphany that my language-generating systems were offline but I was still there; I was still thinking the way I always did, I just wasn’t using language to do it.
Which sounds almost reasonable expressed that way, but it was just about as creepy as the experience of moving my arm around normally while the flesh and bone of my arm lay immobile on the bed.
A good way I’ve found to reach this state is to start to describe a concept in your internal monologue but “cancel” the monologue right at the start—the concept will probably have been already synthesized and will just be hanging around in your mind, undescribed and unspoken but still recognizable.
[edit] Afaict the key step is noticing that you’ve started a monologue, and sort of interrupting yourself mentally.
So, FWIW, after about 20 minutes spent trying to do this I wasn’t in a recognizably different state than I was when I started. I can kind of see what you’re getting at, though.
Right, I mean as a way of realizing that there’s something noticeable going on in your head that precedes the internal monologue. I wrote that comment wrong. Sorry for wasting your time.
Ah! I get you now. (nods) Yeah, that makes sense.
That’s… hm.
I’m not sure I know what you mean.
I’ll experiment with behaving as if I did when I’m not in an airport waiting lounge and see what happens.
I’ve had this happen to me semi-accidentally, the resulting state is extremely unpleasant.
A smash equilibrium.
It’s a bit rude to try to change others’ definition of themselves unasked.
Where does that intersect with “that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be”?
“I’m dying to know whether we’re stumbling on a difference in the way we think or the way we describe what we think, here.” wasn’t asking?
The problem is that “what is part of you” at the interconnectedness-level of the brain is largely a matter of preference, imo; that is, treating it as truth implies taking a more authoritive position than is reasonable. Same goes for 2) - there’s a difference between telling somebody what you think and outright stating that their subjective self-image is factually incorrect.
I appear to be confused.
Are you implying that subjective self-image is something that we should respect rather than analyze?
I think there’s a difference between analysis and authoritive-sounding statements like “X is not actually a part of you, you are wrong about this”, especially when it comes to personal attributes like selfness, especially in a thread demonstrating the folly of the typical-mind assumption.
Interesting. It was not my intent to sound any more authoritative than typical. Are there particular signals that indicate abnormally authoritarian-sounding statements that I should watch out for? And are there protocols that I should be aware of here that determine who is allowed to sound more or less authoritarian than whom, and under what circumstances?
I should have mentioned this earlier, but I did not downvote you so this is somewhat conjectured. In my opinion it’s not a question of who but of topic—specifically, and this holds in a more general sense, you might want to be cautious when correcting people about beliefs that are part of their self-image. Couch it in terms like “I don’t think”, “I believe”, “in my opinion”, “personally speaking”. That’ll make it sound less like you think you know their minds better than they do.
FWIW, I understood you in the first place to be saying that this was a choice, and it was good to be aware of it as a choice, rather than making authoritarian statements about what choice to make.
I’d certainly call them much more significant to my identity than a e.g. my deltoid muscle, or some motor function parts of my brain.
It may be useful to recognize that this is a choice, rather than an innate principle of identity. The parts that speak are just modules, just like the parts that handle motor control. They can (and often do) run autonomously, and then the module that handles generating a coherent narrative stitches together an explanation of why you “decided” to cause whatever they happened to generate.
This sounds like a theory of identity as epiphenomenal homunculus. A module whose job is to sit there weaving a narrative, but which has no effect on anything outside itself (except to make the speech module utter its narrative from time to time). “Mr Volition”, as Greg Egan calls it in one of his stories. Is that your view?
More or less, yes. It does have some effect on things outside itself, of course, in that its ‘narrative’ tends to influence our emotional investment in situations, which in turn influences our reactions.
It seems to me that the Mr. Volition theory suffers from the same logical flaw as p-zombies. How would a non-conscious entity, a p-zombie, come to talk about consciousness? And how does an epiphenomenon come to think it’s in charge, how does it even arrive at the very idea of “being in charge”, if it was never in charge of anything?
An illusion has to be an illusion of something real. Fake gold can exist only because there is such a thing as real gold. There is no such thing as fake mithril, because there is no such thing as real mithril.
By that analogy, then, fake gods can exist only because there is such a thing as real gods; fake ghosts can only exist because there is such a thing as real ghosts; fake magic can only exist because there is such a thing as real magic.
It’s perfectly possible to be ontologically mistaken about the nature of one’s world.
Indeed. There is real agency, so people have imagined really big agents that created and rule the world. People’s consciousness persists, even after the interruptions of sleep, and they imagine it persists even after death. People’s actions appear to happen purely by their intention, and they imagine doing arbitrary things purely by intention. These are the real things that the fakes, pretences, or errors are based on.
But how do the p-zombie and the homunculus even get to the point of having their mistaken ontology?
The p-zombie doesn’t, because the p-zombie is not a logically consistent concept. Imagine if there was a word that meant “four-sided triangle”—that’s the level of absurdity that the ‘p-zombie’ idea represents.
On the other hand, the epiphenomenal consciousness (for which I’ll accept the appelature ‘homunculus’ until a more consistent and accurate one occurs to me) is simply mistaken in that it is drawing too large a boundary in some respects, and too small a boundary in others. It’s drawing a line around certain phenomena and ascribing a causal relationship between those and its own so-called ‘agency’, while excluding others. The algorithm that draws those lines doesn’t have a particularly strong map-territory correlation; it just happens to be one of those evo-psych things that developed and self-reinforced because it worked in the ancestral environment.
Note that I never claimed that “agency” and “volition” are nonexistent on the whole; merely that the vast majority of what people internally consider “agency” and “volition”, aren’t.
EDIT: And I see that you’ve added some to the comment I’m replying to, here. In particular, this stood out:
I don’t believe that “my” consciousness persists after sleep. I believe that a new consciousness generates itself upon waking, and pieces itself together using the memories it has access to as a consequence of being generated by “my” brain; but I don’t think that the creature that will wake up tomorrow is “me” in the same way that I am. I continue to use words like “me” and “I” for two reasons:
Social convenience—it’s damn hard to get along with other hominids without at least pretending to share their cultural assumptions
It is, admittedly, an incredibly persistent illusion. However, it is a logically incoherent illusion, and I have upon occasion pierced it and seen others pierce it, so I’m not entirely inclined to give it ontological reality with p=1.0 anymore.
Do you believe that the creature you are now (as you read this parenthetical expression) is “you” in the same way as the creature you are now (as you read this parenthetical expression)?
If so, on what basis?
Yes(ish), on the basis that the change between me(expr1) and me(expr2) is small enough that assigning them a single consistent identity is more convenient than acknowledging the differences.
But if I’m operating in a more rigorous context, then no; under most circumstances that appear to require epistemological rigor, it seems better to taboo concepts like “I” and “is” altogether.
(nods) Fair enough.
I share something like this attitude, but in normal non-rigorous contexts I treat me-before-sleep and me-after-sleep as equally me in much the same way as you do me(expr1) and me(expr2).
More generally, my non-rigorous standard for “me” is such that all of my remembered states when I wasn’t sleeping, delirious, or younger than 16 or so unambiguously qualify for “me”dom, despite varying rather broadly amongst themselves. This is mostly because the maximum variation along salient parameters among that set of states seems significantly smaller than the minimum variations between that set and the various other sets of states I observe others demonstrating. (If I lived in a community seeded by copies of myself-as-of-five-minutes ago who could transfer memories among one another, I can imagine my notion of “I” changing radically.)
Nice! I like that reasoning.
I personally experience a somewhat less coherent sense of self, and what sense of self I do experience seems particularly maladaptive to my environment, so we definitely seem to have different epistemological and pragmatic goals—but I think we’re applying very similar reasoning to arrive at our premises.
So in the following sentence...
“I am a construction worker”
Can you taboo ‘I’ and “am’ for me?
This body works construction.
Jobs are a particularly egregious case where tabooing “is” seems like a good idea—do you find the idea that people “are” their jobs a particularly useful encapsulation of the human experience? Do you, personally find your self fully encapsulated by the ritualized economic actions you perform?
But if ‘I’ differ day to day, then doesn’t this body differ day to day too?
I am fully and happily encapsulated by my job, though I think I may have the only job where this really possible.
Certainly. How far do you want to go? Maps are not territories, but some maps provide useful representations of territories for certain contexts and purposes.
The danger represented by “I” and “is” come from their tendency to blow away the map-territory relation, and convince the reader that an identity exists between a particular concept and a particular phenomenon.
Is the camel’s nose the same thing as his tail? Are the nose and the tail parts of the same thing? What needs tabooing is “same” and “thing”.
I have also found that process useful (although like ‘I’, there are contexts where it is very cumbersome to get around using them).
Suppose I am standing next to a wall so high that I am left with the subjective impression that it just goes on forever and ever, with no upper bound. Or next to a chasm so deep that I am left with the subjective impression that it’s bottomless.
Would you say these subjective impressions are impossible?
If possible, would you say they aren’t illusory?
My own answer would be that such subjective impressions are both illusory and possible, but that this is not evidence of the existence of such things as real bottomless pits and infinitely tall walls. Rather, they are indications that my imagination is capable of creating synthetic/composite data structures.
Mesh mail “mithril” vest, $335.
Setting aside the question of whether this is fake iron man armor, or a real costume of the fake iron man, or a fake costume designed after the fake iron man portrayed by special effects artists in the movies, I think an illusion can be anything that triggers a category recognition by matching some of the features strongly enough to trigger the recognition, while failing to match on a significant amount of the other features that are harder to detect at first.
That’s not fake mithril, it’s pretend mithril.
To have the recognotion, there must have already been a category to recognise.
A tape recorder is a non-conscious entity. I can get a tape recorder to talk about consciousness quite easily.
Or are you asking how it would decide to talk about consciousness? It’s a bit ambiguous.
I think it’s not an epiphenomenon, it’s just wired in more circuitously than people believe. It has effects; it just doesn’t have some effects that we tend to ascribe to it, like decisionmaking and highlevel thought.
.> How would a non-conscious entity, a p-zombie, come to talk about consciousness?
By functional equivalence. A zombie Chalmers is bound to will utter sentences asserting its possession of qualia, a zombie Dennett will utter sentences denying the same.
The only getout is to claim that it is not really talking at all.
The epiphenomenal homunculus theory claims that there’s nothing but p-zombies, so there are no conscious beings for them to be functionally equivalent to. After all, as the alien that has just materialised on my monitor has pointed out to me, no humans have zardlequeep (approximate transcription), and they don’t go around insisting that they do. They don’t even have the concept to talk about.
The theory that there is nothing but zombies runs into the difficulty of explaining why many of them would believe they are non-zombies. The standard p-zombie argument, that you can have qualia-less functional duplicates of non-zombies does not have that problem.
The theory that there is nothing but zombies runs into the much bigger difficulty of explaining to myself why I’m a zombie. When I poke myself with a needle, I sure as hell have the qualia of pain.
And don’t tell me it’s an illusion—any illusion is a qualia by itself.
Don’t tell me tell Dennett
The standard p-zombie argument still has a problem explaining why p-zombies claim to be conscious. It leaves no role for consciousness in explaining why conscious humans talk of being conscious. It’s a short road (for a philosopher) to then argue that consciousness plays no role, and we’re back with consciousness as either an epiphenomenon or non-existent, and the problem of why—especially when consciousness is conceded to exist, but cause nothing—the non-conscious system claims to be conscious.
Even worse, the question of how the word “conscious” can possibly even refer to this thing that is claimed to be epiphenomenal, since the word can’t have been invented in response to the existence or observations of consciousness (since there aren’t any observations). And in fact there is nothing to allow a human to distinguish between this thing, and every other thing that has never been observed, so in a way the claim that a person is “conscious” is perfectly empty.
ETA: Well, of course one can argue that it is defined intensionally, like “a unicorn is a horse with a single horn extending from its head, and [various magical properties]” which does define a meaningful predicate even if a unicorn has never been seen. But in that case any human’s claim to have a consciousness is perfectly evidence-free, since there are no observations of it with which to verify that it (to the extent that you can even refer to a particular unobservable thing) has the relevant properties.
Yes. Thats the standard epiphenomenalism objection.
Often a bit too short.
I scrawl on a rock “I am conscious.” Is the rock talking about consciousness?
No, you are.
I run a program that randomly outputs strings. One day it outputs the string “I am conscious.” Is the program talking about consciousness? Am I?
No, see nsheppard’s comment.
Maybe I’m being unnecessarily cryptic. My point is that when you say that something is “talking about consciousness,” you’re assigning meaning to what is ultimately a particular sequence of vibrations of the air (or a particular pattern of pigment on a rock, or a particular sequence of ASCII characters on a screen). I don’t need a soul to “talk about souls,” and I don’t need to be conscious to “talk about consciousness”: it just needs to happen to be the case that my mouth emits a particular sequence of vibrations in the air that you’re inclined to interpret in a particular way (but that interpretation is in your map, not the territory).
In other words, I’m trying to dissolve the question you’re asking. Am I making sense?
Not yet. I really think you need to read the GLUT post that nsheppard linked to.
You do need to have those concepts, though, and concepts cannot arise without there being something that gave rise to them. That something may not have all the properties one ascribes to it (e.g. magical powers), but discovering that that one was mistaken about some aspects does not allow one to conclude that there is no such thing. One still has to discover what the right account of it is.
If consciousness is an illusion, what experiences the illusion?
This falls foul of the GAZP v. GLUT thing. It cannot “just happen to be the case”. When you pull out for attention the case where a random process generates something that appears to be about consciousness, out of all the other random strings, you’ve used your own concept of consciousness to do that.
I’ve read GLUT. Have you read The Zombie Preacher of Somerset?
I think so; at least, I have now. (I don’t know why someone would downvote your comment, it wasn’t me.) So, something went wrong in his head, to the point that asking “was he, or was he not, conscious” is too abstract a question to ask. Nowadays, we’d want to do science to someone like that, to try to find out what was physically going on.
Sure, I’m happy with that interpretation.
That is not obvious. You do need to be a langue-user to use language, you do need to know English to communicate in English, and so on. If consciousness involves things like self-reflection and volition, you do need to be conscious to interntionally use language to express your reflections on your own consciousness.
In the same way that a philosophy paper does… yes. Of course, the rock is just a medium for your attempt at communication.
I write a computer program that outputs every possible sequence of 16 characters to a different monitor. Is the monitor which outputs ‘I am conscious’ talking about consciousness in the same way the rock is? Whose attempt at communication is it a medium for?
Your decision to point out the particular monitor displaying this message as an example of something imparts information about your mental state in exactly the same way that your decision to pick a particular sequence of 16 characters out of platonia to engrave on a rock does.
See also: on GLUTs.
The reader’s. Paradolia is a signal-processing system’s attempt to find a signal.
On a long enough timeline, all random noise generators become hidden word puzzles.
Why would we have these modules that seem quite complex, and likely to negatively effect fitness (thinking’s expensive), if they don’t do anything? What are the odds of this becoming a prevalent without a favourable selection pressure?
High, if they happen to be foundational.
Sometimes you get spandrels, and sometimes you get systems built on foundations that are no longer what we would call “adaptive”, but that can’t be removed without crashing systems that are adaptive.
Evo-psych just-so stories are cheap.
Here’s one: it turns out that ascribing consistent identity to nominal entities is a side-effect of one of the most easily constructed implementations of “predict the behavior of my environment.” Predicting the behavior of my environment is enormously useful, so the first mutant to construct this implementation had a huge advantage. Pretty soon everyone was doing it, and competing for who could do it best, and we had foreclosed the evolutionary paths that allowed environmental prediction without identity-ascribing. So the selection pressure for environmental prediction also produced (as an incidental side-effect) selection pressure for identity-ascribing, despite the identity-ascribing itself being basically useless, and here we are.
I have no idea if that story is true or not; I’m not sure what I’d expect to see differentially were it true or false. My point is more that I’m skeptical of “why would our brains do this if it weren’t a useful thing to do?” as a reason for believing that everything my brain does is useful.
(nods) Yeah, OK. Take 2.
It’s also broadly similar to the difference between explicit and implicit knowledge. Have you ever practiced a skill enough that it goes from being something where you hold the “outline” of the skill in explicit memory as you perform it, to being something where you simply perform it without that “outline”? For example, driving to an unfamiliar location and thinking “ok, turn right here, turn left here” vs. just turning in the correct direction at each intersection, or something similar to that?
Yes, I have. Driving is such a skill; when I was first learning to drive, I had to think about driving (”...need to change gear, which was the clutch again? Ordered CBA, so on the left...”). Now that I am more practiced, I can just think about changing gear and change gear, without having to examine my actions in so much detail. Which allows my internal monologue to wonder into other directions.
On a couple of occasions, as a result of this thread, I’ve tried just quietening down my internal monologue—just saying nothing for a bit—and observing my own thought processes. I find that the result is that I pay a lot more attention to audio cues—if I hear a bird in the distance, I picture a bird. There’s associations going on inside my head that I’d never paid much attention to before.
Is this still true under significant influence of alcohol?
I wouldn’t know, I don’t drink alcohol.
Well, if you ever did want to experience what TheOtherDave describes, that might be a good way to induce it.
I’ve found I can quiet my internal monologue if I try. (It’s tricky, though; the monologue starts up again at the slightest provocation—I try to observe my own though processes without the monologue, and as soon as something odd happens, the internal monologue says “That’s odd… ooops.”)
I’m not sure if I can talk without the monologue automatically starting up again, but I’ll try that first.
I wasn’t to add another data point, but I’m not sure the one I got can even be called that: I have no consistent memory on this subject. I am notoriously horrible at luminosity and introspection. When I do try to ask my brain, I receive a model/metaphor based of what I already know for neuroscience which may or may not contain data I couldn’t access otherwise, and which is presented as a machine I can manipulate in the hopes of trying to manipulate the states of distant brains. The machine is clearly based on whatever concepts happen to be primed and the results would probably be completely different in every way if I tried this an hour later. Note that the usage of the word “I” here is inconsistent and ill-defined. This might be related to the fact this brain is self-diagnosed with posible ego-death (in the good way).
Edit: it is also noticed that like seemingly the case with most attempts to introspection, the act of observation strongly and aversely influence the functioning of the relevant circuity, in this case heavily altering my speech-patterns.
Huh. They way you describe attempting introspection is exactly the way our brain behaves when we try to access any personal memories outside of working memory. This doesn’t seem to be as effective as whatever the typical way is, as our personal memory’s notoriously atrocious compared with others.
I don’t seem to have any sort of ego death. Vigil might have something similar, though.
Hmm, this seems related to another datapoint: reportedly, when I’m asked about my current mood and distracts, I answer “I can’t remember”.
A more tenuously related datapoint is that in fiction, I try to design BMIs around emulating having memorized GLUTs.
And some other thing come to think of it: I do have abnormal memory function in a bunch of various ways.
Basically; maybe a much larger chunk of my cognition passes through memory machinery for some reason?
What are GLUTs? I’m guessing you’re not talking about Glucose Transporters.
This seems like a plausible hypothesis. Alternatively, perhaps your working memory is less differentiated from your long-term memory.
Hm. I have the same reaction if I’m asked what I’m thinking about, but I don’t think it’s because my thoughts are running through my long-term memory, so much as my train of thought usually gets flushed out of working memory when other people are talking.
GLUT=Giant Look-Up Table. Basically, implementing multiplication by memorizing the multiplication tables up to 2 147 483 647.
Hmm, that’s an interesting theory. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
And no I’m not talking about trying to remember what happened a few seconds ago. I mean direct sensory experiences; as in someone holds p 3 fingers in the darkness and asks “how many fingers am I holding up right now” and I answer “I can’t remember” instead of “I can’t see”.
Giant Look-Up Table
What are BMIs? I’m guessing you’re not talking about body mass indexes.
:-)
Brain machine Interface.
BTW, my internal monologue usually sounds quite different from what I actually say in most casual situations: for example, it uses less dialectal/non-standard language and more technical terms. (IOW, it resembles the way I write more than the way I speak. So, “I know what I’m going to say, and here I am saying it” is my default state when writing, and “words are coming out of my mouth, and I’m kind of surprised by what I’m hearing myself say” is the state I’m most often in when speaking.) Anyone else finds the same?
That’s pretty close to how I operate, except the words are more like the skeletons of the thoughts than the thoughts themselves, stripped of all the internal connotation and imagery that provided 99% of the internal meaning.
Well, which one do you prefer?
Oh, that’s hard. The latter was awful, but of course most of that was due to all the other crap that was going on at the time. If I take my best shot at adjusting for that… well, I am most comfortable being the voice in my head. But not-being the voice in my head has an uncomfortable gloriousness associated with it. I doubt the latter is sustainable, though.
When you’re playing a sport… wait, maybe you don’t… okay, when you’re playing an instrum—hm. Surely there is a kinesthetic skill you occasionally perform, during which your locus of identity is not in your articulatory loop? (If not, fixing that might be high value?) And you can imagine being in states similar to that much of the time? I would imagine intense computer programming sessions would be more kinesthetic than verbal. Comment linked to hints at what my default thinking process is like.
When I’m playing music or martial arts, and I’m doing it well, I’m usually in a state of flow—not exactly self-aware in the way I usually think of it.
When I’m working inside a computer or motorcycle, I think I’m less self-aware, and what I’m aware of is my manipulating actuators, and the objects than I need to manipulate, and what I need to do to them.
When I’m sitting in my armchair, thinking “who am I?” this is almost entirely symbolic, and I feel more self-aware than at the other times.
So, I think having my locus of identity in my articulatory loop is correlated with having a strong sense of identity.
I’m not sure whether my sense of identity would be weaker there, and stronger in a state of kinesthetic flow, if I spent more time sparring than sitting.
I wouldn’t want to identify with the voice in my head. It can only think one thought at a time; it’s slow.
How many things can you think of at once? I’m curious now.
I’m not sure how to answer that question. But when I think verbally I often lose track of the bigger picture of what I’m doing and get bogged down on details or tangents.
I play other people’s voices through my head as I imagine what they would say (or are saying, when I interpret text,) but I don’t have my own voice in my head as an internal monologue, and I think of “myself” as the conductor, which directs all the voices.
What happens when you are not thinking about what anyone else is saying or would say?
I think in terms of ideas and impulses, not voices. I can describe an impulse as if it had been expressed in words, but when it’s going through my head, it’s not.
I’d be kind of surprised if people who have internal monologues need an inner voice telling them “I’m so angry, I feel like throwing something!” in order to recognize that they feel angry and have an urge to throw something. I just recognize urges directly, including ones which are more subtle and don’t need to be expressed externally, without needing to mediate them through language.
It definitely hasn’t been my experience that not thinking in terms of a distinct inner “voice” makes it hard for me to pin down my thoughts; I have a much easier time following my own thought processes than most people I know.
In our case at least, you are correct that we don’t need to vocalize impulses. Emotions and urges seem to run on a different, concurrent modality.
Do ideas and impulses both use the same modality for you?
Maybe not quite the same, but the difference feels smaller than that between impulse and language.
To me, words are what I need to communicate with other people, not something I need to represent complex ideas within my own head.
I can represent a voice in my head if I choose to, but I don’t find much use for it.
Not quite the same thing, but I’ve discovered that “I feel ragged around the edges” is my internal code for “I need B12″.
One part of therapy for some people is giving them a vocabulary for their emotions.
I can recognise that I’m angry without the voice. When I’m angry, the inner voice will often be saying unflattering things about the object of my anger; something along the lines of “Aaaaaargh, this is so frustrating! I wish it would just work like it’s supposed to!” Wordless internal angry growls may also happen.
It’s something like watching a movie. You can see hands typing and words appearing on the screen, but you aren’t precisely thinking them. You can feel lips moving and hear words forming in the air, but you aren’t precisely thinking them. They’re just things your body is doing, like walking. When you walk, you don’t consciously think of each muscle to move, do you? most of the time you don’t even think about putting one foot in front of the other; you just think about where you’re going (if that) and your motor control does the rest.
For some people, verbal articulation works the same way. Words get formed, maybe even in response to other peoples’ words, but it’s not something you’re consciously acting on; those processes are running on their own without conscious input.
I find this very strange.
When I walk, yes, I don’t consciously think of every muscle; but I do decide to walk. I decide my destination, I decide my route. (I may, if distracted, fall by force of habit into a default route; on noticing this, I can immediately override).
So… for someone without the internal monologue… how much do you decide about what you say? Do you just decide what subject to speak about, what opinions to express, and leave the exact phrasing up to the autopilot? Or do you not even decide that—do you sit there and enjoy the taste of icecream while letting the conversation run entirely by itself?
Didn’t think this was going to be my first contribution to LessWrong, but here goes (hi, everybody, I’m Phil!)
I came to what I like to think was a realisation useful to my psychological health a few months ago when I was invited to realise that there is more to me than my inner monologue. That is, I came to understand that identifying myself as only the little voice in my head was not good for me in any sense. For one thing, my body is not part of my inner monologue, ergo I was a fat guy, because I didn’t identify with it and therefore didn’t care what I fed it on. For another, one of the things I explicitly excluded from my identity was the subprocess that talks to people. I had (and still have) an internal monologue, but it was at best only advisory to the talking process, so you can count me as one of the people for whom conversation is not something I’m consciously acting on. Result: I didn’t consider the person people meet and talk to to be “me”, but (as I came to understand), nevertheless I am held responsible for everything he says and does.
My approach to this was somewhat luminous avant (ma lecture de) la lettre: I now construe my identity as consisting of at least two sub-personalities. There is one for my inner monologue, and one for the version of me that people get to meet and talk to. I call them Al and Greg, respectively, so that by giving them names I hopefully remember that neither alone is Phil. So, to answer CCC’s question: Al is Greg’s lawyer, and Greg is Al’s PR man. When I’m alone, I’m mostly Al, cogitating and opining and whatnot to the wall, with the occasional burst of non-verbal input from Greg that amounts to “That’s not going to play in (Peoria|the office|LessWrong comment threads)”. On the other hand, when other people are around, I’m mostly Greg, conversating in ways that Al would never have thought of, and getting closer and closer to an impersonation of Robin Williams depending on prettiness and proximity of the ladies in the room. Al could in theory sit back and let Greg do his thing, but he’s usually too busy facepalming or yelling “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP” in a way that I can’t hear until I get alone again.
The problem I used to have was that I was all on Al’s side. I’d berate myself (that is, I’d identify with Al berating Greg) incessantly for paranoid interpretations of the way people reacted to what I said, without ever noticing that, y’know what, people do generally seem to like Greg, and Greg is also me.
Single data point but: I can alternate between inner monologue (heard [in somebody else’s voice not mine(!)]) and no monologue (mainly social activity—say stuff then catch myself saying it and keep going) - stuff just happens. When inner monologue is present it seems I’m in real time constructing what I imagine the future to be and then adapt to that. I can feel as if my body moved without moving it, but don’t use it for thinking (mainly kinesthethic imagination or whatever). I can force myself to see images, and, at the fringe, close to sleep, can make up symphonies in my mind, but don’t use them to think.
Who’s speaking the voice in your head? Seems like another layer of abstraction.
Obviously the speaker is the homunculus that makes Eliezer conscious rather than a p-zombie.
A collective of neural hardware collectively calling itself “Baughn”. Everyone gets some input.
I have an internal monologue. It’s a bit like a narrator in my head, narrating my thoughts.
I think—and this is highly speculative on my part—that it’s a sign of thinking mainly with the part of the brain that handles language. Whenever I take one of those questionnaires designed to tell whether I use mainly the left or right side of my brain, I land very heavily on the left side—analytical, linguistic, mathematical. I can use the other side if I want to; but I find it surprisingly easy to become almost a caricature of a left-brain thinker.
My internal monologue quite probably restricts me to (mainly) ideas that are easily expressed in English. Up until now, I could see this as a weakness, but I couldn’t see any easy way around it. (One advantage of the internal monologue, on the other hand, is that I usually find it easy to speak my thoughts out loud; because they’re already in word form)
But now, you tell me that you don’t seem to have an internal monologue. Does this mean that you can easily think of things that are not easily expressed in English?
Well.. I can easily think of things I subsequently have seriously trouble expressing in any language, sure. Occasionally through reflection via visuals (or kinesthetics, or..), but more often not using such modalities at all.
(See sibling post)
Richard Feynman tells the story of how he learned that thinking isn’t only internal monologue.
Okay, visual I can understand. I don’t use it often, but I do use it on occasion. Kinesthetic, I use even less often, but again I can more-or-less imagine how that works. (Incidentally, I also have a lot of trouble catching a thrown object. This may be related.)
But this ‘no modalities at all’… this intrigues me. How does it work?
All I know is some ways in which it doesn’t work.
I can’t speak for Baughn but as for myself, sometimes It feels like I know ahead of time what I’m going to say as my inner voice, and sometimes this results in me not actually bothering to say it.
I went on vacation during this discussion, and completely lost track of it in the process—oops. It’s an interesting question, though. Let me try to answer.
First off, using a sensory modality for the purpose of thinking. That’s something I do, sure enough; for instance, right now I’m “hearing” what I’m saying at the same time as I’m writing it. Occasionally, if I’m unsure of how to phrase something, I’ll quickly loop through a few options; more often, I’ll do that without bothering with the “hearing” part.
When thinking about physical objects, sometimes I’ll imagine them visually. Sometimes I won’t bother.
For planning, etc. I never bother—there’s no modality that seems useful.
That’s not to say I don’t have an experience of thinking. I’m going to explain this in terms of a model of thought[1] that’s been handy for me (because it seems to fit me internally, and also because it’s handy for models in fiction-writing where I’m modifying human minds), but keep in mind that there is a very good chance it’s completely wrong. You might still be able to translate it to something that makes sense to you.
..basically, the workspace model of consciousness combined with a semi-modular brain architecture. That is to say, where the human mind consists of a large number of semi-independent modules, and consciousness is what happens when those modules are all talking to each other using a central workspace. They can also go off and do their own thing, in which case they’re subconscious.
Now, some of the major modules here are sensory. For good reason; being aware of your environment is important. It’s not terribly surprising, then, that the ability to loop information back—feeding internal data into the sensory modules, using their (massive) computational power to massage it—is useful, though it also involves what would be hallucinations if I wasn’t fully aware it’s not real. It’s sufficiently useful that, well, it seems like a lot of people don’t notice there’s anything else going on.
Non-sensory modes of thought, now… sensory modes are frequently useful, but not always. When they aren’t, they’re noise. In that case—and I didn’t quite realise that was going on until now—I’m not just not hallucinating an internal monologue, but in fact entirely disconnecting my senses from my conscious experience. It’s a bit hard to tell, since they’re naturally right there if I check, but I can be extremely easy to surprise at times.
Instead, I have an experience of… everything else. All the modules normally involved with thinking, except the sensory ones. Well, probably not all of them at once, but missing the sensory modules appears to be a sufficiently large outlier that the normal churn becomes insignificant...
Did that help? Hm. Maybe if you think about said “churn”; it’s not like you always use every possible method of thought you’re capable of, at the same time. I’m just including sensory modalities in the list of hot-swappable ones?
...
This is hard.
One more example, I suppose. I mentioned that, while I was writing this, I hallucinated my voice reading it; this appears to be necessary to actually writing. Not for deciding on the meaning I’m trying to get across, but in order to serialise it as English. Not quite sure what’s going on there, since I don’t seem to be doing it ahead of time—I’m doing it word by word.
1: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yArXzSQUqkSr_eBd6JhIECdUKQoWyUaPHh_qz7S9n54/edit#heading=h.ug167zx6z472 may or may not be useful in figuring out what I’m talking about; it’s a somewhat more long-winded use of the model. It also has enormous macroplot spoilers for the Death Game SAO fanfic, which.. you probably don’t care about.
Okay, let me summarise your statement so as to ensure that I understand it correctly.
In short, you have a number of internal functional modules in the brain; each module has a speciality. There will be, for example, a module for sight; a module for hearing; a module for language, and so on. Your thoughts consist—almost entirely—of these modules exchanging information in some sort of central space.
The modules are, in effect, having a chat.
Now, you can swap these modules out quite a bit. When you’re planning what to type, for example, it seems you run that through your ‘hearing’ module, in order to check that the word choice is correct; you know that this is not something which you are actually hearing, and thus are in no danger of treating it as a hallucination, but as a side effect of this your hearing module isn’t running through the actual input from your ears, and you may be missing something that someone else is saying to you. (I imagine that sufficiently loud or out-of-place noises are still wired directly to your survival subsystem, though, and will get your attention as normal).
But you don’t have to use your hearing module to think with. Or your sight module. You have other modules which can do the thinking, even when those modules have nothing to do. When your sensory modules have nothing to add, you can and do shut them out of the main circuit, ignoring any non-urgent input from those modules.
Your modules communicate by some means which are somehow independent of language, and your thoughts must be translated through your hearing module (which seems to have your language module buried inside it) in order to be described in English.
This is very different to how I think. I have one major module—the language module (not the hearing module, there’s no audio component to this, just a direct language model) which does almost all my thinking. Other modules can be used, but it’s like an occasional illustration in a book—very much not the main medium. (And also like an illustration in that it’s usually visual, though not necessarily limited to two dimensions).
When it comes to my internal thoughts, all modules that are not my language model are unimportant in comparison. I suspect that some modules may be so neglected as to be near nonexistent, and I wonder what those modules could be.
My sensory modules appear to be input-only. I can ignore them, but I can’t seem to consciously run other information into them. (I still dream, which I imagine indicates that I can subconsciously run other information through my sensory modules)
This leaves me with three questions:
Aside from your sensory modules, what other module(s) do you have?
Am I correct in thinking that you still require at least one module in order to think (but that can be any one module)?
When your modules share information, what form does that information take?
I imagine these will be difficult to translate to language, but I am very curious as to what your answers will be.
Your analysis is pretty much spot on.
It’s interesting to me that you say your hearing and language modules are independent. I mean, it’s reasonably obvious that this has to be possible—deaf people do have language—but it’s absolutely impossible for me to separate the two, at least in one direction; I can’t deal with language without ‘hearing’ it.
And I just checked; it doesn’t appear I can multitask and examine non-language sounds while I’m using language, either. For comparison, I absolutely can (re)use e.g. visual modules while I’m writing this, although it gets really messy if I try to do so while remaining conscious of what they’re doing—that’s not actually required, though.
Well… my introspection isn’t really good enough to tell, and it’s really more of a zeroth-approximation model than something I have a lot of confidence in. That said, I suspect the question doesn’t have an answer even in principle; that there’s no clear border between two adjacent subsystems, so it depends on where you want to draw the line. It doesn’t help that some elements of my thinking almost certainly only exist as a property of the communication between other systems, not as a physical piece of meat in itself, and I can’t really tell which is which.
I think if it was just one, I wouldn’t really be conscious of it. But that’s not what you asked, so the answer is “Probably yes”.
I’m very tempted to say “conscious experience”, here, but I have no real basis for that other than a hunch. I’m not sure I can give you a better answer, though. Feelings, visual input (or “hallucinations”), predictions of how people or physical systems will behave, plans—not embedded in any kind of visualization, just raw plans—etc. etc. And before you ask what that’s like, it’s a bit like asking what a Python dictionary feels like.. though emotions aren’t much involved, at that level; those are separate.
The one common theme is that there’s always at least one meta-level of thought associated. Not just “Here’s a plan”, but “Here’s a plan, and oh by the way, here’s what everyone else in the tightly knit community you like to call a brain thinks of the plan. In particular, “memory” here just pattern-matched it to something you read in a novel, which didn’t work, but then again a different segment is pointing out that fictional evidence is fictional.”
...without the words, of course.
So the various ideas get bounced back and forth between various segments of my mind, and that bouncing is what I’m aware of. Never the base idea, but all the thinking about the idea… well, it wouldn’t really make sense to be “aware of the base idea” if I wasn’t thinking about it.
Sight is something else again. It certainly feels like I’m aware of my entire visual field, but I’m at least half convinced that’s an illusion. I’m in a prime position to fool myself about that.
This may be related to the fact that I learnt to read at a very young age; when I read, I run my visual input through my language module; the visual model pre-processes the input to extract the words, which are then run through the language module directly.
At least, that’s what I think is happening.
Running the language module without the hearing module a lot, and from a young age, probably helped quite a bit to seperate the two.
Hmph. Disappointing, but thanks for answering the question.
I think I was hoping for more clearly defined modules than appears to be the case. Still, what’s there is there.
Now, this is interesting. I’m really going to have to go and think about this for a while. You have a kind of continual meta-commentary in your mind, thinking about what you’re thinking, cross-referencing with other stuff… that seems like a useful talent to have.
It also seems that, by concentrating more on the individual modules and less on the inter-module communication, I pretty much entirely missed where most of your thinking happens.
One question comes to mind; you mention ‘raw plans’. You’ve correctly predicted my obvious question—what raw plans feel like—but I still don’t really have much of a sense of it, so I’d like to poke at that a bit if you don’t mind.
So; how are these raw plans organised?
Let us say, for example, that you need to plan… oh, say, to travel to a library, return one set of books, and take out another. Would the plan be a series of steps arranged in order of completion, or a set of subgoals that need to be accomplished in order (subgoal one: find the car keys); or would the plan be simply a label saying ‘LIBRARY PLAN’ that connects to the memory of the last time you went on a similar errand?
As for me, I have a few different ways that I can formulate plans. For a routine errand, my plan consists of the goal (e.g. “I need to go and buy bread”) and a number of habits (which, now that I think about it, hardly impinge on my conscious mind at all; if I think about it, I know where I plan to go to get bread, but the answer’s routine enough that I don’t usually bother). When driving, there are points at which I run a quick self-check (“do I need to buy bread today? Yes? Then I must turn into the shopping centre...”)
For a less routine errand, my plan will consist of a number of steps to follow. These will be arranged in the order I expect to complete them, and I will (barring unexpected developments or the failure of any step) follow the steps in order as specified. If I were to write down the steps on paper, they would appear horrendously under-specified to a neutral observer; but in the privacy of my own head, I know exactly which shop I mean when I simply specify ‘the shop’; both the denotations and connotations intended by every word in my head are there as part of the word.
If the plan is one that I particularly look forward to fulfilling, I may run through it repeatedly, particularly the desirable parts (”...that icecream is going to taste so good...”). This all runs through my language system, of course.
I have a vague memory of having read something that suggested that humans are not aware of their entire visual field, but that there is a common illusion that people are, agreeing with your hypothesis here. I vaguely suspect that it might have been in one of the ‘Science of the Discworld’ books, but I am uncertain.
Obligatory link to Yvain’s article on the topic.
A very high proportion of what I call thinking is me talking to myself. I have some ability to imagine sounds and images, but it’s pretty limited. I’m better with kinesthesia, but that’s mostly for thinking about movement.
What’s your internal experience composed of?
That varies.. quite a lot.
While I’m writing fiction there’ll be dialogue, the characters’ emotions and feelings, visuals of the scenery, point-of-view visuals (often multiple angles at the same time), motor actions, etc. It’s a lot like lucid dreaming, only without the dreaming. Occasionally monologues, yes, but those don’t really count; they’re not mine.
While I’m writing this there is, yes, a monologue. One that’s just-in-time, however; I don’t normally bother to listen to a speech in my head before writing it down. Not for this kind of thing; more often for said fiction, where I’ll do that to better understand how it reads.
Mostly I’m not writing anything, though.
Most of the time, I don’t seem to have any particular internal experience at all. I just do whatever it is I’m doing, and experience that, but unless it’s relatively complex there doesn’t seem to be much call for pre-action reflections. (Well, of course I still feel emotions and such, but.. nothing monologue-like, in any modality. Hope that makes sense.)
A lot of the time I have (am conscious of) thoughts that don’t correspond to any sensor modality whatsoever. I have no idea how I’d explain those.
If I’m working on a computer program.. anything goes, but I’ll typically borrow visual capacity to model graph structures and such. A lot of the modalities I’d use there, I don’t really have words for, and it doesn’t seem worthwhile to try inventing them; doing so usefully would turn this into a novel.
That’s the internal monologue. Mine is also often just-in-time (not always, of course). I can listen to it in my head a whole lot faster than I can talk, type, or write, so sometimes I’ll start out just-in-time at the start of the sentence and then my internal monologue has to regularly wait for the typing/writing/speaking to catch up before I can continue.
For example, in this post, when I clicked the ‘reply’ button I had already planned out the first two sentences of the above post (before the first bracket). The contents of the first bracket were added when I got to the end of the second sentence, and then edited to add the ‘of course’. The next sentence was added in sections, built up and then put down and occasionally re-edited as I went along (things like replacing ‘on occasion’ with ‘sometimes’).
Hmmm. Living in the moment. I’m curious; how would you go about (say) planning for a camping trip? Not so much ‘what would you do’, but ‘how would you think about it’?
Can’t speak for Nancy, but I think I know what she refers to.
Different people have different thought… processes, I guess is the word. My brother’s thought process is, by his description, functional; he assigns parts of his mind tasks, and gets the results back in a stack. (He’s pretty good at multi-tasking, as a result.) My own thought process is, as Nancy specifies, an internal monologue; I’m literally talking to myself. (Although the conversation is only partially English. It’s kind of like… 4Chan. Each “line” of dialogue is associated with an “image” (in some cases each word, depending on the complexity of the concept encoded in it), which is an abstract conceptualization. If you’ve ever read a flow-of-consciousness book, that’s kind of like a low-resolution version of what’s going on in my brain, and, I presume, hers.
I’ve actually discovered at least one other “mode” I can switch my brain into—I call it Visual Mode. Whereas normally my attention is very tunnel vision-ish (I can track only one object reliably), I can expand my consciousness (at the cost of eliminating the flow-of-consciousness that is usually my mind) and be capable of tracking multiple objects in my field of vision. (I cannot, for some reason, actually move my eyes while in this state; it breaks my concentration and returns me to a “normal” mode of thought.) I’m capable of thinking in this state, but oddly, incapable of tracking or remembering what those thoughts are; I can sustain a full conversation which I will not remember, at all, later.
Hm, the obvious question there is: “How do you know you can sustain a full conversation, if you don’t remember it at all later?” (..edit: With other people? Er, right. Somehow I was assuming it was an internal conversation.)
I’ve got some idea what you’re talking about, though—focusing my consciousness entirely on sensory input. More useful outside of cities, and I don’t have any kind of associated amnesia, but it seems similar to how I’d describe the state otherwise.
Neither your brother’s nor your own thought processes otherwise seem to be any kind of match for mine. It’s interesting that there’s this much variation, really.
Otherwise.. see sibling post for more details.
I can do a weaker version of this—basically, by telling my brain to “focus on the entire field of your perception” as if it was a single object. As far as I am aware, it doesn’t do any of the mental effects you describe for me. It’s very relaxing though.
Add one to the sample size. My thought process is also mostly lacking in sensory modality. My thoughts do have a large verbal component, but they are almost exclusively for planning things that I could potentially say or write.
Rather than trying to justify how this works to the others, I will instead ask my own questions: How can words help in creating thoughts? In order to generate a sentence in your head, surely you must already know what you want to say. And if you already know what you have to say, what’s the point of saying it? I presume you cannot jump to the next thought without saying the previous one in full. With my own ability to generate sentences, that would be a crippling handicap.
My thoughts are largely made up of words. Although some internal experimentation has shown that my brain can still work when the internal monologue is silent, I still associate ‘thoughts’ very, very strongly with ‘internal monologue’.
I think that, while thoughts can exist without words, the word make the thoughts easier to remember; thus, the internal monologue is used as part of a ‘write-to-long-term-storage’ function. (I can write images and feelings as well; but words seem to be my default write-mode).
Also, the words—how shall I put this—the words solidify the thought. They turn the thought into something that I can then take and inspect for internal integrity. Something that I can check for errors; something that I can think about, instead of something that I can just think. Images can do the same, but take more working-memory space to hold and are thus harder to inspect as a whole.
I don’t think I’ve ever tried. I can generate sentences fast enough that it’s not a significant delay, though. I suspect that this is simply due to long practice in sentence construction. (Also, if I’m not going to actually say it out loud, I don’t generally bother to correct it if it’s not grammatically correct).
Personally, I can do this to degrees. I can skip verbalizing a concept completely, but it feels like inserting a hiccup into my train of thought (pardon the mixed analogy). I can usually safely skip verbalizing all of it; that is, it feels like I have a mental monologue but upon reflection it went by too fast to actually be spoken language so I assume it was actually some precursor that did not require full auditory representation. I usually only use full monologues when planning conversations in advance or thinking about a hard problem.
As far as I can tell, the process helps me ensure consistency in my thoughts by making my train of thought easier to hold on to and recall, and also enables coherence checking by explicitly feeding my brain’s output back into itself.
Now I’m worrying that I might have been exaggerating. Although you are implicitly describing your thoughts as being verbal, they seem to work in a way similar to mine.
ETA: More information: I still believe I am less verbal than you. In particular, I believe my thoughts become less verbal when thinking about hard problems are than becoming more so as in your case. However, my statement about my verbal thoughts being “almost exclusively for planning things that I could potentially say or write” is a half-truth; A lot of it is more along the lines that sometimes when I have an interesting thought I imagine explaining it to someone else. Some confounding factors:
There is a continuum here from completely nonverbal to having connotations of various words and grammatical structures to being completely verbal. I’m not sure when it should count as having an internal monologue.
Asking myself weather a thought was verbal naturally leads to create a verbalization of it, while not asking myself this creates a danger of not noticing a verbal thought.
I basing this a lot on introspection done while I am thinking about this discussion, which would make my thoughts more verbal.
Wikipedia article. I’m really curious how you would describe your thoughts if you don’t describe them as an internal monologue. Are you more of a visual thinker?
When I think about stuff, often I imagine a voice speaking some of the thoughts. This seems to me to be a common, if not nearly universal, experience.
I only really think using voices. Whenever I read, if I’m not ‘hearing’ the words in my head, nothing stays in.
Do you actually hear the voice? I often have words in my head when I think about things, but there isn’t really an auditory component. It’s just words in a more abstract form.
I wouldn’t say I literally hear the voice; I can easily distinguish it from sounds I’m actually hearing. But the experience is definitely auditory, at least some of the time; I could tell you whether the voice is male or female, what accent they’re speaking in (usually my own), how high or low the voice is, and so on.
I definitely also have non-auditory thoughts as well. Sometimes they’re visual, sometimes they’re spatial, and sometimes they don’t seem to have any sensory-like component at all. (For what it’s worth, visual and spatial thoughts are essential to the way I think about math.)
If you want to poke at this a bit, one way could be to test what sort of interferences disrupt different activities for you, compared to a friend.
I’m thinking of the bit in “Surely you’re joking” where Feynman finds that he can’t talk and maintain a mental counter at the same time, while a friend of his can—because his friend’s mental counter is visual.
Neat. I can do it both ways… actually, I can name at least four different ways of counting:
“Raw” counting, without any sensory component; really just a sense of magnitude. Seems to be a floating-point, with a really small number of bits; I usually lose track of the exact number by, oh, six.
Verbally. Interferes with talking, as you’d expect.
Visually, using actual 2/3D models of whatever I’m counting. No interference, but a strict upper limit, and interferes with seeing—well, usually the other way around. The upper limit still seems to be five-six picture elements, but I can arrange them in various ways to count higher; binary, for starters, but also geometrically or.. various ways.
Visually, using pictures of decimal numbers. That interferes with speaking when updating the number, but otherwise sticks around without any active maintenance, at least so long as I have my eyes closed. I’m still limited to five-six digits, though… either decimal or hexadecimal works. I could probably figure out a more efficient encoding if I worked at it.
I, for one, actually hear the voice. It’s quite clear. Not loud like an actual voice but a “so loud I can’t hear myself think” moment has never literally happened to me since the voice seems more like its on its own track, parallel to my actual hearing. I would never get it confused with actual sounds, though I can’t really separate the hearing it to the making it to be sure of that.
That’s interesting! Because I have definitely had “so loud I can’t hear myself think” moments (even though I don’t literally hear thoughts) - just two days ago, I had to ask somebody to stop talking for a while so that I could focus.
Being distracted is one thing—I mean literally not being able to hear my thoughts in the manner that I might not be able to hear what you said if a jet was taking off nearby. This was to emphasize that even though I perceive them as sounds there is ‘something’ different about them than sounds-from-ears that seems to prevent them from audibly mingling. Loud noises can still make me lose track of what I was thinking and break focus.
Hmm. Now that I think of it, I’m not sure to what extent it was just distraction and to what extent a literal inability to hear my thoughts. Could’ve been exclusively one, or parts of both.
I added more detail in a sibling post, but it can’t be that universal; I practically never do that at all, basically only for thoughts that are destined to actually be spoken. (Or written, etc.)
Actually, I believe I used to do so most of the time (..about twenty years ago, before the age of ten), but then made a concerted effort to stop doing so on the basis that pretending to speak aloud takes more time. Those memories may be inaccurate, though.
It very universal but some people shut down their awareness of the process. It’s like people who don’t say they don’t dream. They just don’t remember it. Most people can’t perceive their own heartbeat. It can take some effort to build awareness.
What’s your internal reaction when someone insults yourself?
You’re claiming that you understand his thought better than he does. That is a severe accusation and is not epistemologically justified. Also, I can’t recall off the top of my head any time somebody insulted me, I think my reaction would depend on the context, but I don’t see why it will involve imagined words.
How do you know that there’s no epistemological justification?
So, how do I know? Empirical experience at NLP seminars. At the beginning plenty of people say that they don’t have an internal dialoge, that they can’t view mental images or that they can’t perceive emotions within their own body.
It’s something that usually get’s fixed in a short amount of time.
Around two month ago I was chatting with a girl who had two voices in her head. One that did big picture thinking and another that did analytic thinking. She herself wasn’t consciously aware that one of the voices came from the left and the other from the right.
After I told her which voice came from which direction, she checked and I was right. I can’t diagnose what Baughn does with internal dialog in the same depth through online conversation but there nothing that stops me from putting forth generally observations about people who believe that they have no internal dialog until they were taught to perceive it.
Yes, you don’t see imagined words. That’s kind of the point of words. You either hear them or don’t hear them. If you try to see them you will fail. If you try to perceive your internal dialog that way you won’t see any internal dialog.
But why did I pick that example? It’s emotional. Being insulted frequently get’s people to reflect on themselves and the other person. They might ask themselves: “Why did he do that?” or answer to themselves “No, he has no basis for making that claim.” In addition judgement is usually done via words.
I’m however not sure whether I can build up enough awareness in Baughn via text based online conversation that he can pick up his mental dialog.
If you don’t have strong internal dialog it doesn’t surprise me that you aren’t good at recalling a type of event that usually goes with strong internal dialog.
Hm~
Those are interesting claims, but I think you misunderstood a little. I do have an internal monologue, sometimes; I just don’t bother to use it, a lot of the time. It depends on circumstances.
You moved in the span of half a year from: “I’m pretty sure I don’t have a internal monologue, I don’t know what the term is supposed to mean.” to “I do have an internal monologue, sometimes”.
That’s basically my point. With a bit of direction there something that you could recognize there to be an internal monologue in your mind.
Of course once you recognize it, you aren’t in the state anymore where you would say: “I’m pretty sure I don’t have a internal monologue.” That’s typical for those kind of issues.
I was basically right with my claim that “I’m pretty sure I don’t have a internal monologue.” is wrong, and did what it took to for you to recognize it. itaibn0 claimed that the claim was etymologically unsubstantiated. It was substantiated and turned out to be right.
Actually, I would have made the same claim half a year ago. The only difference is that I have a different model of what the words “internal monologue” mean—that, and I’ve done some extra modelling and introspection for a novel.
Yes, now you have a mental model that allows you to believe “I do have an internal monologue, sometimes” back then you didn’t. What I did write was intended to create that model in your mind.
To me it seems like it worked. It’s also typical that people backport their mental models into the past when they remember what happened in the past.
How does it get fixed?
First different people use different system with underlying strength. Some people like Tesla can visualize a chair and the chair they visualize get’s perceived by them the same way as a real chair. You don’t get someone who doesn’t think he can visualize pictures to that level of visualization ability by doing a few tricks.
In general you do something that triggers a reaction in someone. You observe the person and when she has the image or has the dialog you stop and tell the person to focus their attention on it. There are cases where that’s enough.
There are also cases where a person has a real reason why they repress a certain way of perception. A person with a strong emotional trauma might have completely stopped relating to emotions within their body to escape the emotional pain. Then it’s necessary for the person to become into a state where they are resourceful enough to face the pain so that they can process it.
A third layer would consist of different suggestion that it’s possible to perceive something new. Both at a conscious level and on a deep metaphoric level.
I feel like I’m floating. Adrenaline rush, the same feeling I used to get when fights were imminent as a kid.
How do you know how you want to respond to the insult? What mental strategy did you use the last time you were insulted?
I just do what I feel like. And my feelings are generally in line with my previous experiences with the other person. If I feel like they’re a reasonable person and generally nice then I feel like giving them the benefit of the doubt, if I feel like they’re a total toss-pot then I’m liable to fire back at them. There’s so much cached thought that’s felt rather than verbalised at that point that it’s pretty much a reaction.