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It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…
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>I reach conclusions by feel That sounds like intuition to me
Words are also based on the same intuition, you just verbalize it and restrict yourself to what you have words for instead of all concepts and thoughts. For example I do math entirely without any words in my process, and I easily got a master in math that way, barely had to study. No problem, you just translate it at the end. Limiting myself to words just makes it harder to think freely.
I always had problem with trusting my intuition or gut so I was worse in a lot of other real life things however. But math seemed abstract and solvable by words and brute force.
I wish things just magically came to me, but I think I always have to go through things with my inner monologue.
Like if I was to do multiplication in my head e.g. with same numbers, for example 62 x 62. I would have to go through it as a monologue.
I first remind myself of the strategy to do it, which is first I will do 60 x 60. Then it is 3600, then I add 2 x 60, 3720, and then there is 2 x 62 left, but I have to keep reminding myself occasionally what the last numbers were, that initial multiplication was 62 x 62, then I got 3720, and now I have to add 124... okay lets go 3820, 24 left, now 3844. Of course it is easier to remember as I am typing this, but in my head I have to keep reminding myself. And now I am not sure if I did a mistake so I go verify that on the calculator.
You can't think if you don't speak. Babies don't "think" like adults do, rather they just follow instincts. Go ahead, try it. Think something but don't say it in your head.
edit: also, I don't even know what you mean by "instinct(s)" here, or how you differentiate them from thoughts. Even language is an instinct. If you have entities that you are applying operations to in your head in order to create new entities, you're thinking.
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This is such an interesting topic. I believe I also have aphantasia and I find that communicating about the topic is rather challenging as the right vocabulary doesn't seem to exist (or I'm ignorant of it). I have no "mind's eye" and can't produce an image in my head. But confusingly, I am quite good at the mental 3D manipulation. I can spin the cow in my head and describe its orientation, but I don't actually see th…
You're deriving the cow. You don't see the cow, but you know things logically about the cow, and you can describe it just as well as would someone who does see it. But you are not, and don't need to be, actually seeing the cow.
Well, I was able to, but it didn't come from first principles or even visualizing it. It came from imagining myself at a keyboard and "simulating" typing. In my mind's body, I would type a sentence, which enabled me to extract the location of the keys, which I could then translate into part of the visual sketch on paper. The initial sketch came out with key sizes and shapes heavily distorted, but all of them spatially located in the correct relative horizontal ordering, and a second sketch made it possible to regularize them.
Not sure what it means, but it was an interesting exercise.
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Words are also based on the same intuition, you just verbalize it and restrict yourself to what you have words for instead of all concepts and thoughts. For example I do math entirely without any words in my process, and I easily got a master in math that way, barely had to study. No problem, you just translate it at the end. Limiting myself to words just makes it harder to think freely.
That just sounds so different to how I solve math problems. I was naturally good at maths, but it was always from monologue kind of bruteforcing different solutions until one of them seemed to work. I guess it might be a reason also why I find LLMs really exciting since I feel like if I can do it, LLM should be able to do it. I don't feel like I am doing anything special. I always had problem with trusting my intuiti…
I do multiplication in my head similarly, just strip out the words, the numbers just flickers through and operations happens by themselves and I'm done in a second or two when I'm not rusty. Now that I'm rusty I do it more like (60x60=3600, 2x2=4, 60x2=120, 3600 + 4 + 120 + 120 = 3844), without doing any words, I just did that in my head right now and I am 100% sure not a single word, just the steps, I do sometimes verbalize the numbers so what I wrote in those parentheses is the most verbal my process for mathing that out gets.
Edit: Looking at that, I think it might be easier for someone to correct your thinking if you think in words, but thinking without words is way faster and way more creative since it removes the restriction of only thinking about concepts you have words for.
Edit2: I think your verbalization there is a ritual for the concepts to get to you. For me all I need to do is see 62x62 and imagine I want to solve it and all those thoughts flow to me automatically, basically a shortcut instead of having a large verbal ritual to piece together the concepts. I never did math verbally the way it is taught, so I am not sure how people think that way, to me this was always automatically this way.
It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're deriving the cow. You don't see the cow, but you know things logically about the cow, and you can describe it just as well as would someone who does see it. But you are not, and don't need to be, actually seeing the cow.
The weird thing obviously is that next to nobody with a mind's eye is actually seeing the cow. A tiny tiny fraction of people talk about their mind's eye being part of their visual field, to the point that they can sort of functionally see -- hallucinate -- an imaginary object on a table like AR. Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to desc…
But this is different from the kids tea party. I can easily pretend to hold a teacup without closing my eyes and visualizing a teacup, I don't think one has anything to do with the other.
If you ask someone to actually imagine seeing a teacup but what they're imagining doesn't have a colour or size, _what are they imagining_?
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> it purportedly uses date and place of birth, but those hardly have anything to do with me While astrology is bogus, you'd be surprised how much "date and place of birth" has to do with you. There are statistics and studies showing higher than chance similar behavior/tendecies in people born in the same months (for things like depression, health outcomes, etc). Could have to do with exposure to sunlight during early…
Makes sense to me. But my date and place of birth don't define me, they only correlate me with others. Astrology's just a particularly bogus way of not doing that, but anything that would try to derive anything about me from just my date and place of birth, without any actual data to correlate with my answers, isn't really worth my time. i.e. you'd need to know "people born around this date in this place tend to have…
Well, it depends on the degree which we require it to define you. In a looser degree, it would define most people quite a lot.
Put another way your "place of birth" alone, would be a huge information point towards predicting lots of things about someone vs someone from another place of birth, given they're different enough (say, India vs Italy, not Spain vs Portugal or Germany vs Austria).
If betting and money was involved about e.g. income, wealth level, studies or not, food preferences, religion, politics, morals, and so on, knowing the place of birth would be a great boon (all other information being equally shared). Repeated many times with different people, you'd be correct way more.
>i.e. you'd need to know "people born around this date in this place tend to have whatever human design" in order to provide me actual predictions based on only date and place of birth, but no such data has ever been collected.
If we were to bet on whether a person is black or white, freckled or not, has epicanthic fold or not, etc, I don't need no special "data collected" to know what people born in Lagos vs Dublin would look like for example. It's common knowledge.
And in some cases where this changes over time, the data of birth would also come in handy. E.g. in the tendency of a random London citizen to have say South Asian features in 2024 vs 1950.
My takes: 1. The existence of “rubber duck debugging”, and a whole bunch of studies on verbally explaining a concept indicate that language is essential for thought. In rubber duck debugging, programmers tell their problem to an object and this is beneficial in finding the solution. There are studies that show when we verbally teach material to someone we remember it better. Also the act of taking a test increases le…
Explaining things to others - imaginary or not - engages the parts of my brain imagining how they will receive and understand it.
This is primarily so I can phrase it in a way other people can understand. But that imagined model of other minds is often smart enough to imagine what they would answer.
Which I guess means my "social brain" is smarter than my "thinking" brain in some ways.
Don't know how universal that is. My brain tends to be an outlier.
Okay, so my first experiment was to try to think without language. Go ahead, you try it. I can't do it. So a simple conclusion is that language gives rise to what we call thought. However, I do some things - which I do not call thought - without language. There was/is an old IBM programming test of patterns and I can choose the correct pattern even when I cannot think why that is. In "Notes on the Synthesis of Form",…
Some 3D modeling part of my brain does most of the work, and "I" largely watch and guide it.
Maybe not everyone has this "GPU" installed.