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Not everyone has an internal monologue

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Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#471

Post by james-imitative »

mannykannot wrote: post #409
lqet wrote: post #314

I have a serious question to people here describing themselves (as I understand it) as thinking in words and whole sentences: How can you think about concepts which cannot be put into words or for which no words exist? Do you have to come up with elaborate verbal descriptions of abstract concepts in your head before you can think about them? If so, don't you think that any verbal description is essentially incomplete…

A great many abstract concepts can be put into words (which are, to generalize, abstract symbols) - that is one of the great powers of human language. I wanted to ask what ideas cannot be so expressed, but of course there is a problem... There may be candidates in qualia, the subjective experiences that tend to tie the philosophy of mind in knots, and which, being subjective, cannot be communicated precisely in langu…

Yes, indexically

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#473

Post by JoeAltmaier »

rc_hadoken wrote: post #137
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #116

Had a writer say "We think in words. Without language, we could not form thoughts". Which is instantly nonsense. I can think of a blue elephant, then the Gettysburg Address. If I'm asked "What did you think of first?" I'd say "a blue elephant". So where was that blue elephant in the mean time? Still in my mind, still a thought. Just not at the surface, not words. I look at code projects by scrolling through all the s…

I'm confused -- are you saying the writer is wrong because of your anecdotal process for coding? As someone who writes I would have a very hard time imagining writing without the ability to have a mental monologue. I do know Alan Moore said in an interview that he would talk to himself in the mirror. Maybe he's an instance of a writer who doesn't think in words. I would not think of a blue elephant as the word 'blue…

How would a writer decide what a character will say? By trying random words until something makes sense? Or by an idea of what their values and emotions are at the point in the plot? Lots of thinking going on, without rehearsing "she's in a paint factory, its dark, she's stalking the victim…" as words in our mind.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#474

Post by pier25 »

warent wrote: post #430
pier25 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the process is spontaneous and involuntary Do you consider that the parts of yourself that are not conscious are in fact not part of yourself? Otherwise it cannot be involuntary. Some part of you has decided to have those thoughts. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

I'm not sure what point you're making, but it sounds like this is less about how you define the self and more about how you define involuntary. The heartbeat is an involuntary action and is simultaneously part of yourself. That's all I mean.

I agree that a heartbeat is an involuntary reflex but I don't see how you can compare that to the mind chatter which is AFAIK related to cognition much like the rest of your thoughts and mental processes.

Not only that, your inner monologue is completely unique to you. Probably from a part that you do not identify with which is why I was asking.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#475

Post by vitaflo »

xvector wrote: post #419
aaroninsf wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am having this reaction also. I am literally speechless, thinking that it wasn't an idiom; and that the monologue as recorded in e.g. modern literature, was likely meant to be read and as is read as a transcription... I have always at a deeply unexamined level assumed that that was just a convention of how literature functions through its medium, language; that the recording of thought through its semantic content…

Yes, I always thought that when a novelist describes the “voice in the head” of a character, or when a coworker does the same, they are trying to convey thought over a medium incapable of conveying true thought. I never imagined that that was the actual thought !

Do you not hear music in your head? Like I have a song running through my mind right now, lyrics and all. No visuals just the music. If you don’t hear a voice in your head wouldn’t that mean you can’t ever hear music in your head either?

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#476

Post by james-imitative »

sushisource wrote: post #326
lqet wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the same way you would talk about the concepts out loud to someone else. But isn't this extremely exhausting and time-consuming? And if it indeed works this way, then where do you think the idea you are trying to formulate in your inner monologue comes from?

I suspect the author is exaggerating a bit when he says it's the only way he thinks. I also have the "narrative voice" but I absolutely can think about things without the voice, it just doesn't feel as much like "thinking", if that makes sense. There are some things that are explicitly visualized, like an object I'm thinking about, where I wouldn't say in my head "I am imagining the sun. It is bright. Etc. etc.". I'd…

> I suspect the author is exaggerating a bit

yep

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#477

Post by JabavuAdams »

kedean wrote: post #447
JabavuAdams wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to explore this aphantasia idea a bit more. I would classify myself as very visual, but on thinking about this more ... it's not like I have a high-fidelity visual impression of the imagined object in my mind's eye. It's more like a physical / tactile impression of presence. Is that what it's like for you? As I'm sitting here, I'm thinking of describing it as ... If I shut my eyes I still know roughly where…

I think in a very spatial way. I can roughly imagine objects or scenes as something like a 3d graph of connected points. I can imagine the facade of my house if I close my eyes only by sort of tracing its shape, in which case I can feel my eyes moving along that dimension as I do it. I cannot imagine a person's actual face, which I'm told is really weird, although I'm very good with recognizing them when I'm shown th…

See, what intrigues me about this is I wonder if you're just more nuanced and precise in your description. I always thought of myself as being very visual, and I'm like ninety-nine point something percent of spatial ability, and yet your description seems like a fairly accurate description of what I experience.

The problem is that the descriptions depend on so many subjective things. For instance what does it mean to be able to see someone's face in one's mind? At what resolution question mark at what level of detail? I mean it seems like a lot of people with uncorrected vision can't even see faces to any standards I would consider seeing. So could it be that you're holding your mental visualizations too too high a bar and comparing them with people you have a low bar for mental visualizations?

Edit .. your description of having to trace out the facade is particularly apt to me. It's almost like some kind of DRAM thing where I have to refresh my mental image by touching / scanning parts of it or it goes away.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#478

Post by james-imitative »

rayiner wrote: post #384
lqet wrote: post #314

I have a serious question to people here describing themselves (as I understand it) as thinking in words and whole sentences: How can you think about concepts which cannot be put into words or for which no words exist? Do you have to come up with elaborate verbal descriptions of abstract concepts in your head before you can think about them? If so, don't you think that any verbal description is essentially incomplete…

What is a concept which cannot be put into words?

Silence?

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#479

Post by james-imitative »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #401
rayiner wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a concept which cannot be put into words?

Concisely describe the space battle you see in your mind's eye in less than 0.5 seconds. It's not that it can't be described. It's that I'm looking at / living a shot from a movie in realtime or faster than realtime. If I tried to write that out ... it would be too slow and actually over-specified.

> It's that I'm looking at / living a shot from a movie in realtime

Sounds really cool! I do that too!

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#480

Post by csomar »

pier25 wrote: post #399
warent wrote: post #262

This isn't so hard to understand if you've ever meditated. It becomes clearer that the internal monologue is a process that just runs on its own almost endlessly, and the feeling that we control it is mostly just an illusion. You can test this for yourself by trying to find out what your next thought is going to be. You never know until you have it, which indicates that the process is spontaneous and involuntary. I h…

> the process is spontaneous and involuntary Do you consider that the parts of yourself that are not conscious are in fact not part of yourself? Otherwise it cannot be involuntary. Some part of you has decided to have those thoughts. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

I guess the idea is that the part that makes decisions is not under your control and you are just an "observer" who justifies what this "person" is doing. It is a scary thing if true, but can help in understanding why things are the way they are.
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