Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…
How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)
51–60 of 91 posts
Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm right there with you. Always find it weird that people associate language so strongly with intelligence, and consciousness. First, I'm conscious when I'm aware of anything. I don't have to be thinking. Second, my thinking is 99% non-verbal except when I'm communicating to another person or imagining doing so , and even then it's only partly verbal. Almost all of my thinking is in moving or rotating 3D spaces and…
So how do you think about abstract concepts, like morality, which have no visual structure?
By analogy? They don't necessary have verbal structure either.
Use of spatial analogies for abstract concepts is common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor
Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)
#53Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…
The Feral Child
Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)
#54There seems to be an accepted idea that ancient people had a totally different way of thinking: that up to around 300 BC, humans navigated through the world with a dream-like, pre-scientific logic, and didn't view the world as comprehensible or subject to predictable laws and patterns. I've always wondered, do we actually know this for sure? What's the evidence? Just by introspection, it is so hard for me to imagine…
I don't think that's a generally accepted idea at all. It's an idea that, in various forms, some modern philosophers have floated. Because it's so radical it's something you'll hear (and remember) people chatter about, but that doesn't mean many people take it literally, especially people familiar with ancient works. At best I think such ideas help challenge beliefs about ourselves in the modern era. At worst I think…
I'm glad to hear that. I've definitely seen it mentioned by a bunch of experts/academics as if it were accepted fact (Jordan Peterson is the only one that comes right to mind).
I think the idea might partly come from the dream-like quality of ancient myths, but I feel like that underestimates the ability of people to partition those myths from daily life. It's not like our current religious stories are exactly logical.
Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)
#55I had a couple of episodes of sleep paralysis where I experienced auditory hallucinations. Often times, the voices I heard were clear as day, which was strange since I wore ear plugs during a lot of these experiences.
Also, I saw an article on the news about a treatment involving VR for people who hears voices in their head. In the video, the person described the voices as distinct and she could even interact with them.
So I would say there's something to explore there.
Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm right there with you. Always find it weird that people associate language so strongly with intelligence, and consciousness. First, I'm conscious when I'm aware of anything. I don't have to be thinking. Second, my thinking is 99% non-verbal except when I'm communicating to another person or imagining doing so , and even then it's only partly verbal. Almost all of my thinking is in moving or rotating 3D spaces and…
So how do you think about abstract concepts, like morality, which have no visual structure?
Morality is actually purely visual to me. It's daydreams about scenarios, their outcomes, even the expression on people's faces. Just about everything is visual to me.
Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)
#57Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…
I'm right there with you. Always find it weird that people associate language so strongly with intelligence, and consciousness. First, I'm conscious when I'm aware of anything. I don't have to be thinking. Second, my thinking is 99% non-verbal except when I'm communicating to another person or imagining doing so , and even then it's only partly verbal. Almost all of my thinking is in moving or rotating 3D spaces and…
My understanding is that all of us do our logical reasoning spatially, but there are different interfaces to it (visual, verbal, tactile, audible, etc), and each person is likely to have preferences among those. I find words to be a powerful medium between my memory and reasoning; it’s a good indexing system for memories/associations, and by carefully verbalizing and interpreting, I can load up a new spatial reasoning context and perform whatever evaluation is necessary.
Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)
#58Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…
I'm right there with you. Always find it weird that people associate language so strongly with intelligence, and consciousness. First, I'm conscious when I'm aware of anything. I don't have to be thinking. Second, my thinking is 99% non-verbal except when I'm communicating to another person or imagining doing so , and even then it's only partly verbal. Almost all of my thinking is in moving or rotating 3D spaces and…
I have had some astonishing discussions where people actually refuse to accept that the verbal part of the thinking (talking in my head) is almost insignificant part of what thinking actually is. Or to be accurate, people claim that language is somehow crucial component of thinking.
To me that is really weird idea, and I think that it can even be "proved" to be wrong (obviously my opponents disagreed also there)
Namely, if language or verbal thinking was the defining part of thinking, following two things would necessarily be true:
1. There would need to be significant concepts that people talking different languages think differently. But of course, those are extremely rare and not so significant exceptions. Even if in some languages age is something a person owns and in another something a person is (I have 20 years vs I am 20 years), people in both languages both grasp the idea of age similarly, it is the time since you were born.
2. If the verbal thoughts were what thinking actually is, there would be no difficulties to convey my thought to you without errors. But obviously that is very difficult for anything but the most trivial thoughts. So it should be obvious that language is really only a very vague presentation of what thoughts really are.
Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)
#59Any useful theory of consciousness has to be able to explain animal consciousness too. Language is really the only differentiator between us and other primates, cognitively. (naturally it's a powerful difference) Primates far and away clear the bar for sentience, we know enough about dogs and cats to grudgingly accept them into the fold too. Plenty of birds are extremely intelligent and social as well.
Language is really the only differentiator between us and other primates, cognitively I don't agree. Many other types of animals have rudimentary languages, but I wouldn't dispute the sophistication of human language towers above all others, that in itself rests (along with other uniquely sophisticated behavioural endowments) upon what really differentiates us which is the capacity for imagination and abstract though…
The book Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans makes a cogent argument for my position. It examines carefully the difference between Animal Communication Systems and our own, in all the variety primitive humanity could devise.
https://www.amazon.com/Adams-Tongue-Humans-Made-Language-ebo...
Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)
#60Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…
Completely.
I've been surprised by the hostility/resistance to the idea that we don't think in language, especially when I'm trying to convey to people how my own mind works.
In trying to convey my experience with language, I have to try to express a layer of...as best as I can get in programmer speak...multithreaded-notthreadsafe-consciousness-impressions. These I then have to translate into single-threaded verbal language in order to communicate with others.
Indeed, without my years of practice to try to become a better communicator, I find this results in my natural speech being a kind of stocatto-mid-sentence-pausing way of speaking, as I have to join each thread of threaded-conscious-impressions before coercing and outputting it in the best approximation of a serial structured verbal language. Over the years I've just become better at pre-buffering before the verbal component is output and consciously shutting down other threads.
When I'm thinking of logic and computer programs alternatively, I often find myself thinking visual-spatially.
Indeed, when I'm really thinking hard and trying to understand some algorithms, I can sometimes be seen closing my eyes and even engaging my arms/hands as though i'm moving, conducting or manipulating physical things. Because in my head that's exactly what I'm doing: the arrays/lists/things exist as spatial objects in my mind, and I'm running things through by manipulating them in space or seeing how they fit together spatially/in relation to each other.