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Inner Speech

plato.stanford.edu

61–70 of 141 posts

Re: Inner Speech

#61
post #45
post #19

I'm not sure if I have inner voice or not. Do you really "hear" a voice? I can imagine concepts as well as construct whole sentences in my mind but there is no actual voice that I'm hearing. Is this what's called inner voice?

I think "hearing" the voice is the confusing part, or only. Hard to know if it's a difference in the phenomenon itself or in how people characterize and perceive it. To me the question is about thinking conversationally. Internal dialogue. Whether or not that dialogue is perceived as sound is perhaps interesting, it's not hard to imagine it working differently. Written language exists. Sign language. Non-auditory lan…

What do you mean by "internal dialogue" here?

To me a dialog would mean some back-and-forth, some difference of opinion or two individuals sharing ideas that one side doesn't have.

Does your inner voice have autonomy, does it want things separate from what "you" want? Is it in any way "other" from you?

Apologies if these seem like dumb questions. I have never heard a voice in my head so it's a bit like a monochromatic person discovering people see in color, it just seems very strange.

Re: Inner Speech

#62
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that?

How could one "think about what they're going to say" without some level of prior inner speech or conceptualization? It may not be precisely the same as spoken speech, but it would still be a kind of speech.

Why do you assume conceptualization requires verbalization?

Re: Inner Speech

#63
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could one "think about what they're going to say" without some level of prior inner speech or conceptualization? It may not be precisely the same as spoken speech, but it would still be a kind of speech.

Why do you assume conceptualization requires verbalization?

That's just how I understand the process, from my experience.

Can you elaborate why you think it doesn't, instead of writing single sentence replies?

Re: Inner Speech

#64
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you assume conceptualization requires verbalization?

That's just how I understand the process, from my experience. Can you elaborate why you think it doesn't, instead of writing single sentence replies?

I don't know whether it does or doesn't, but I just don't see any evidence that demonstrates that we do. E.g. how do you know from your experience whether the verbalization drove the conceptualization or whether it's effectively purely narration of non-verbal conceptualization? It's not even a given that they happen at the same time vs. being a post-rationalization of processes happening separately (e.g. we know from split-brain experiments that the brain halves are perfectly happy to verbalize explanations for decisions they demonstrably didn't make)

Re: Inner Speech

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be surprising, but I indeed can "ask myself" (aka. think about) things, without explicitely verbalizing the question in my head. "Thinking" is more abstract, but it can be faster that way.

I also don't always explicitly verbalize things. The whole problem seems to be more of disagreement about a definition of inner voice and what it means for different people.

Maybe not the whole problem, but yeah, I also wonder about what people mean with "inner voice" respectively.

I do think though that I verbalize less than other (maybe most) people.

Re: Inner Speech

#66
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait... Isn't that normal? I mean, doing that kind of stuff is kind of mentally taxing as it requires quite the amount of focus but excluding people with aphantasia and the like, isn't it normal just to be able to imagine sensory stimuli and overlay it with any of your senses? I mean, the inner dialogue is just doing this with auditory stimuli and even empathy is just an extension of that, were you overlay your perce…

I don't know what's normal anymore but most of your examples are not normal for me :D > I mean, the whole phrase "imagine everyone else is nude" that is given to people that are going to do something with a public to reduce their awkwardness is based on this, you overlay your imagination of everyone nude with your vision. Do you imagine this visually? Like, do you mentally see them nude? I just imagine the idea of it…

Yep, I mean, is a bit tricky, like an optical illusion that requires you to focus in the center, but if i focus enough, I can, imagining a whole person with all their details and overlaying it with my POV is quite hard and usually requires way too much focus, but just overlaying the image of a person over the same person in front of you is easy, specially if you are just changing the body and hands and face are already visible, thus not needing change. Is a bit weird to explain, is not like an allucination in the sense that it literally replaces your normal vision, is like overlaying another vision on top of your vision, it requires focus and you can tell the imaginary overlay is distinct from your actual visual stimuli but like with some optical illusions you can force your brain to just accept it and you see people nude, even if the nude models are not very detailed. The easiest stuff to overlay are ruler thingies tho, for example to extime distance you imagine a line similar to the letter "I" with a base on top and at the bottom of your reference and then you can copy paste a bunch of times and count them it to measure stuff roughly. That is the most common day to day use for overlay imagination I use, the imagining people nude is not exactly a everyday stuff. When I was a kiddo I used to use this to play with things that are not toys as if they were, for example I could pick up a 2L bottle, overlay the image of a rocket and play with it, same with a lot of other stuff that had somewhat similar shapes to things interesting for a kid, I still can do it, sometimes do in the bathroom while taking a very long shit.

For me this is normal and I tough most people were like that, like... the phrase about imagining people being nude is there for a reason... and kids do play with random stuff as if they were other things, people look at stuff and use it as a reference to visually measure stuff even if it is rough.

I mean, there is not that much difference between imagining inside the black void and outside, you are just moving it, the only thing is that outside it is fighting with your actual visual stimuly for attention so it requires a bit of extra focus or to anchor it to something similar, you know the visual illusion were there are pink spots but when you look at the center a green spot appear and eats all the pink spots until it is blank but the moment you ever so slightly unfocus from the center the pink appear again, it feels like that, the illusion is named "Lilac chaser" for reference, it feels kinda like that in the sense that if you lose focus, the effect disappears but if you focus yo can keep it?

IDK, as I said, I thought this was normal, so it is quite hard to explain? is not like imagining stuff in the black void, there one can easy mount a movie if they want, a crappy movie usually, but its possible, outside not so much, but it is still possible to imagine stuff there, just harder.

Re: Inner Speech

#67
post #33
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what is the experience of "asking yourself something" like for you if you don't literally hear a question being asked in your head?

In Chinese, if you just put 'big' and 'small' together, you get 'size', and if you just put 'big' and 'not big' together, it means 'Is it big?'. By the same token, juxtaposed memories are questions or suggestions. I think it's the logic before logic.

That's a really interesting tidbit about Chinese. Can't think of anything similar in any language I know, though. Does remind me of those primitive languages where the word for "forest" is just the word for "tree" repeated two or three times.

Re: Inner Speech

#68
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "hearing" the voice is the confusing part, or only. Hard to know if it's a difference in the phenomenon itself or in how people characterize and perceive it. To me the question is about thinking conversationally. Internal dialogue. Whether or not that dialogue is perceived as sound is perhaps interesting, it's not hard to imagine it working differently. Written language exists. Sign language. Non-auditory lan…

What do you mean by "internal dialogue" here? To me a dialog would mean some back-and-forth, some difference of opinion or two individuals sharing ideas that one side doesn't have. Does your inner voice have autonomy, does it want things separate from what "you" want? Is it in any way "other" from you? Apologies if these seem like dumb questions. I have never heard a voice in my head so it's a bit like a monochromati…

Im not netcan, but in my case... I am the inner voice, the inner voice is essentially the me in me, it is myself, the most basic and self, mind you, the conversation while 99% verbal can be non verbal, I can talk to myself in images and even concepts and have a dialogue/debate with that, its just kind of weird?

But the inner voice, at least from my POV is essentially the self, if you want to experience, just go to a bathroom with a mirror and try to debate with your reflection, it is essentially the same thing, ofc to debate with yourself you have to be able to debate points you do not believe in, like a lawyer or a politic, there is only you only a single opinion, but you are putting your opinion to the test, so you try to defend and try to attack your opinion and your acts, is like playing devil's advocate against your own opinions while you defend them, there is not two people or two wills is like talking to the mirror, is only you. It can also be used to essentially praise yourself if you do something good, or console yourself if you are sad or insult yourself drill sargent style to get that extra adrenaline to run the extra meter to not lose the train, you can also sign to yourself with that, which is horrible, s you will distill any song to its most catchy part and repeat it ad infinitum every moment like a very crappy self-sountrack.

Inner dialogue ofc can also be used for the obvious... simulate conversations with others if you know them well enough to have counterarguments against them available, is like thinking a comeback later but instead of later, before and instead of one, a lot of them, 99% never used.

Another use is that you can use your inner voice to repeat a thing constantly to nor forget it short term, for example holding into a 4 digit code that you can only read for 1 second and you have to remember a minute later, you can just read it the first second in your head "one two there seven" and just keep repeating it over and over in your head "one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there seven" until you need it, that way you can store a bit of info very short term without memorizing anything, I remember doing exactly this with a multiplication table math test when i was a kiddo, I was not able to memorize the multiplications with 7, so 2 minutes before the test i just started chanting the results of 27 up to 29 and when i received the test i just wrote that on the side(we were allowed to write stuff on the side) and thus i used my inner voice to sneak a cheat sheet into the test, I did similar stuff all trough my school years.

Re: Inner Speech

#69
post #5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then, by which mean did you "ask yourself the same" ? Or is it that you cannot imagine a conversation ?

I don't have an inner voice myself. So I asked myself whether the authors of the Plato post can't imagine that.

It's an interesting question, since learning that some people have visualization and internal monologue I've been paying attention to how writers/philosophers describe thought processes and based on that whether they are visualizers (and monologue-havers) or not, and whether they are aware that the other thing is also possible. One really gets the sense that a lot of writers/philosophers[1] are visualizers and monologue-havers and are completely unaware of the other possibilities. An exception was Musil (The Man without Qualities) who goes quite deep into the thought processes of his characters and describes both varieties. Also interesting to read in this respect is Julian Jaynes, who purports (quite controversially) to trace a development from a primitive type of mentality that obeyed something like command hallucinations to the current type of mentality that can think freely. But (even though his theory seemed deeply involved with internal monologue) I couldn't really get a grip on what he actually thinks of how people think these days.

[1] it does seem that it is much more common among "humanities-type" people and the general population, and more common to have no visualization among "exact sciences-type" people. This was also the observation of Galton https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm (ctrl-f "men of science")

Re: Inner Speech

#70
post #18
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily the text editor has been invented giving you the possibility of endlessly editing your sentence until it makes some sense. Only half joking. I'm always impressed by those ancient people who could write long letters by hand in beautiful orthography, composing complex texts and make them just flow linearly. I'm sure here and there there would be a rewriting step involved but that can't have been always the case…

i think it’s a matter of training/habit. Also, back then (educated) people used memory a lot more efficiently; this might have played a role too… i.e. compose and edit the whole text in your mind before writing it down.

> compose and edit the whole text in your mind before writing it down

yeah; doesn't that basically mean you have to have "inner speech"?

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