101–107 of 107 posts
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I'm surprised that ~45 and counting people would downvote this. I assume these are people who saw "See no evil, hear no evil" and are taking it out on me.
Or, they felt you turned an honest, personal, on-topic comment into a bad joke.
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I don't think in English as if I was having a conversation with myself. I think the best way to describe it is my brain precaches the words of objects or things or concepts I am thinking about. If I look at the bolts sitting on my table, I don't literally think in my mind 'oh look those are bolts'. I recognize them for what they are, my brain does some processing, and at the same time as my mind is about to wander of…
Agreed, thinking isn't words. Thinking happens lightning-fast below words. We just routinely load it into and out of the "language buffer" because we are the communicating animal. I often solve problems when thinking about something else - a song, a radio program. THen when I go back to the problem, the solution is clear. Where did that "Thinking" occur? Not in my language buffer, it was fully occupied. In fact in mi…
But what's the definition of thinking?
For me there are two ways of "thinking", the conscious one, in which I'm talking to myself and the unconscious, intuitive one, in which I don't talk to myself, but get some kind of "enlightenment", just see or understand something without a conscious thought.
The unconscious thinking works for me on all stuff I'm good at, stuff I learned und exercised a lot, so in a way the conscious thinking has been done before, created some kind of neural connection, and know this connection is activated without my assistance.
For me it's also the case that my logic sometimes works in a unconscious way, that I just get something, but it's the question how much this unconscious logic is assisted by former training.
A quite long time I only used the unconscious thinking. As long I advanced, there has been no need for an other way of thinking. But I got at a barrier, where my unconscious thinking couldn't go further.
I think, that If you're confronted with something completely new and very hard, then the unconscious thinking can go some way, but at some point it won't get further. You need then to change to the conscious thinking, create the necessary neural connections, and If that's done, then you're able to think again in an unconscious way.
I think, that you can limit yourself, if you're only used to one way of thinking
Often I'm debbuging in the same way as you. But sometimes it's very inefficient, when I'm stumble around without a direction.
Sometimes it's way more efficient to step back, get the bigger picture, ask yourself some questions, build assumptions and verify them.
Sometimes during the "conscious" debugging, when I'm talking to myself I'm getting an "enlightenment", and the bug is solved.
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Agreed, thinking isn't words. Thinking happens lightning-fast below words. We just routinely load it into and out of the "language buffer" because we are the communicating animal. I often solve problems when thinking about something else - a song, a radio program. THen when I go back to the problem, the solution is clear. Where did that "Thinking" occur? Not in my language buffer, it was fully occupied. In fact in mi…
"Agreed, thinking isn't words." But what's the definition of thinking? For me there are two ways of "thinking", the conscious one, in which I'm talking to myself and the unconscious, intuitive one, in which I don't talk to myself, but get some kind of "enlightenment", just see or understand something without a conscious thought. The unconscious thinking works for me on all stuff I'm good at, stuff I learned und exerc…
E.g. play a kids match game, where you turn up pairs of cards looking for a match. Two of spades, Three of hearts - no match. Turn them back over, try again.
But really, you aren't saying those things in your head - you might but you don't have to. You just look at the cards, and if they don't match you turn them back down. Try another pair - five of diamonds, two of spades - hey! that matches the 1st two of spades I saw!
The whole time you are consciously looking for a match, and unless you're explaining the game to somebody, your language processor can remain idle.
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"Agreed, thinking isn't words." But what's the definition of thinking? For me there are two ways of "thinking", the conscious one, in which I'm talking to myself and the unconscious, intuitive one, in which I don't talk to myself, but get some kind of "enlightenment", just see or understand something without a conscious thought. The unconscious thinking works for me on all stuff I'm good at, stuff I learned und exerc…
I don't see thinking without words as "unconscious" at all. I'm aware I'm doing it; I keep the thoughts in the forefront of my brain and direct my investigation consciously. Its just not in words at all. E.g. play a kids match game, where you turn up pairs of cards looking for a match. Two of spades, Three of hearts - no match. Turn them back over, try again. But really, you aren't saying those things in your head -…
That's right. My naming of the thinking "styles" has been suboptimal.
I think, that the kids game is just easy enough, that your brain can get the rules and playing it without contorted maneuvers.
This isn't unconscious, you're aware of everything, but in a way you just see it, without the need understanding. In a way you're brain understands for you, you don't see the needed steps to get to the understanding.
But when something is a lot harder, than your brain can't just understand all at once, then you need to do the steps for "yourself", by talking to you, by explaining it to you, or by reading an explanation, and this explanation is "written" in your brain, so that the next time the brain can do the steps for itself.
> Your speculations raise a larger question: Can you think without language? Answer: Nope, at least not at the level humans are accustomed to. Wait, I have a question: by thinking in language, does this mean, that, it's very common for people (in the English speaking world) to think like there was a background voice speaking in your head, like the thinking bubble scenes depicted in movies and sitcoms? As a Chinese, n…
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html Have you heard about the ideographic myth?
see http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/writjap.htm
To quote from that page: "Kana are read phonetically and kanji are read visually, with a dissociation between the processes involved, according to Morton & Sasanuma and popular Japanese belief. (This must be a little awkward in reading pages of mixed text, surely?) Nomura found that meaning was extracted faster from kanji than kana words, and thought that kana pronunciation was data-driven and that kanji pronunciation was conceptually-driven. Morton & Sasanuma (1982) also claimed that evidence supports the intuitive belief that kanji can give direct access to the meaning of words, but that kana always require translation into a phonological code when they are being read, and there is no development of automatic visual recognition of the kana symbols."
I believe Japanese uses the ideographic kanji for nouns, plus some adjectival and verbal roots, and the phonological kana for the rest, e.g. grammar words. In English, these same words classes (nouns, adjectives, inluding adverbs ending in -ly, and mosts verbs, except the most common ones) are the words we stress when speaking. Is this the same principle at work in both Japanese and English, where the content words of a language are stressed and easier to remember semantically, and the grammar words and morphological inflections are unstressed and easier to remember phonologically?
Is this also why in written German, the nouns are capitalized (as was Dutch until 50yrs ago and English until a few hundred years ago), because it helps if they stand out?
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I don't see thinking without words as "unconscious" at all. I'm aware I'm doing it; I keep the thoughts in the forefront of my brain and direct my investigation consciously. Its just not in words at all. E.g. play a kids match game, where you turn up pairs of cards looking for a match. Two of spades, Three of hearts - no match. Turn them back over, try again. But really, you aren't saying those things in your head -…
"I don't see thinking without words as "unconscious" at all. I'm aware I'm doing it; I keep the thoughts in the forefront of my brain and direct my investigation consciously. Its just not in words at all." That's right. My naming of the thinking "styles" has been suboptimal. I think, that the kids game is just easy enough, that your brain can get the rules and playing it without contorted maneuvers. This isn't uncons…
When learning from a textbook, there are those that need pictures to understand explanations. There are those that need the explanation, pictures are useless to them. I don't think they are necessarily thinking any differently, just entering the knowledge through different i/o ports.
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Equations :-). But seriously, I think of e.g. freedom as that feeling you get when you're on a tropical island with the wind blowing through your hair. Much more interesting than thinking of "freedom" or "Freiheit" or "свобода".
>I think of e.g. freedom as that feeling you get when you're on a tropical island with the wind blowing through your hair. Really? How do you then differentiate freedom internally from the literal feeling you are using as a metaphor for it or say from an idea like "tropical breeze"? What's your internal token for "tropical breeze"?