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> I have always had trouble understanding why people link verbal thinking and consciousness

I came across the same conundrum when I was studying psychology. It all came down to the medium becoming the message. Language is the prime means through which we convey experience. Of course there are other means visual, spacial but when you're "studying consciousness" you're typically reading books. Serious treatise in the area are delivered in the form of books. We come to think of thought as being predominantly verbal because that's the predominant means through which we acquire an "objective" appreciation for what consciousness "is". Even to use a word "consciousness" puts that set of concepts in a delineated box. I could go on ... but I risk becoming stream of consciousness ...

I had interesting discussion about logical thinking once. My fried claimed that it's impossible to think logically (btw. etymology of word logic is "word" or "what is spoken") without verbally running the the words and sentences in your head. Then I explained that I have always used logic visuospatially. "and" is choice between places or fork in the road, "or" is combining two objects in the same place and so on.

Content of our consciousness seems to be based on sensory input and sensor fusion. Thinking is running simulated sequences and scenarios in our head. Different people use different sensory content more than others. I wouldn't be surprised if some people use feelings or motor imaginary more than others.

We have visuospatial ability, audioverbal perception and motor imagery/proprioception. Interoceptive senses seem to relate feelings somehow. If you really drill and analyze what if feels to love, hate or fear. The feeling is related to our internal senses.

> My fried claimed that it's impossible to think logically (btw. etymology of word logic is "word" or "what is spoken") without verbally running the the words and sentences in your head.

In this case, would numbers represent “words” in the language of mathematics? When I was younger and sharper, I used to see products of numbers physically manifest in my mind. This is a form of logic, but it also required an “alphabet” of sorts.

As an aside, I once saw an interview with a mathematical genius of sorts who stated that he associated numbers with colors. He saw the product of two numbers as a third color. Again, logic without traditional language.

Mathematical proof did not originate with number, but geometry.

Different people have different brains.

Your friend was probably right about his/her brain, and you're right about yours.

When you see the mathematical phrase "1 + 1" (a trite example, but please substitute something more complex if you like), your reasoning to get the answer is symbolic, but not verbal. That said, I personally have to say the math to myself to "upload" it into my brain, but somebody with more expertise in maths would just have to "see" it.

Not just psychology, look up the linguistic turn in philosophy in the 20th century.

There is support for a weak version of Sapir-Whorf, but in general any time someone says "the limits of your language determine the limits of your thought" I just s/language/culture.

So, we use words to abstract our thought, but wouldn’t it seem there to be lower levels of abstraction as well? I believe this is the point Temple Grandin is working toward. I think I agree that words tend to puts thoughts or acknowledgements in a box, but maybe the box is mutable.

Yea but different boxes are mutable for different people in different ways. When communicating by way of the written word language is the common abstraction. To be synthesised as per the receivers own “internal boxes” but in the macro structure imposed by language

This is synthesizing well with me.

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 objects.

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.

>There would need to be significant concepts that people talking different languages think differently.

Not necessarily. If you study linguistics you will find that (human) languages are very similar. So it is possible, that lanugage is a central part of thinking, but the differences between languages are too minor to have significant effects.

I agree with point 2 though.

That is a valid point. But to give context, the discussion I refer to was about whether there are reasons to keep small languages alive. And my opponents argument was that losing a languagle loses also ways to think, whereas my argument was that language is to a very good approximation means to communicate, nothing more, nothing less. so there is no reason to keep small languages alive. (My native language is a relatively small language)

> ... 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.

The sentence itself is evidence against.

I think that is pretty trivial thought. To go tto the other end, if thinking is verbal, why can't I pick a book where Einstein explains general relativity and immediately grasp it?

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.

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

I'm convinced that different people have very different experiences thinking about the world.

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.

On this front, and to stray closer to a topic many of us spend too much time on, how do you conceptualise programs and their structure (control, data, etc, etc)?

It's clearly formalised in words (except for the occasional visual programming languages/programs), but that's mostly superficial. The actual structure, or thoughts of how to change it seem to me more abstract and often hard to explain other than by combinations of diagrams and code - but those weren't the source of the idea(s).

--> it's not clear to me that programming (which is quite clearly a conscious activity) is reducible to purely verbal or visual thoughts.

Similar comments apply to other intellectual endeavours.

I usually visualize data structures as pipe systems, and interfaces as 3D shapes around these pipe systems. One thing that took some getting used to was flipping between the interface and flow representations while navigating the abstraction graph, but learning more about nature/physics/math has helped enormously with building and practicing that intuition (and applying it in non-software scenarios by understanding natural phenomena as data structures).

I see programs as data (mostly atoms, tuples, and dicts) and a nested list of TODOs.

Each todo is a sequence of tasks, but I don't necessarily assign names to the task parts or think of them verbally. The "local variables" have names in the final code, but not necessarily in the blueprint for the sequence of tasks. The naming of things really comes in only for the dict key names when passing data around.

I generally think verbally. Then I started learning American Sign Language. For the 3 years I was actively using it, I thought differently, more with ideas than words. It was fascinating both in the change, and the fact that I've changed back.

This. Learning sign language really expands your horizons. I had always thought of language as linear strings of symbols, because that's what written and spoken language are. But sign language is spatial. It also uses facial expressions as modifiers.

I'm looking to learn ASL. Any recommended resources?

This is going to sound like I'm joking, but alcohol is the key to learning.

Find a class on it, one that's at night and one that has half the class go to the bar afterwards, ideally with Deaf people at the bar too.

The social situation, the lack of inhibitions/fears to try stuff, you really pick it up fast.

Hmm, I think the assumption that consciousness is wrapped-up in language is justified.

Language involves representation. "self-consciousness" as generally expressed, is one's representation of one's self.

Obviously one can have visual or spatial representation of one's body. But the unique quality of language is that it involves an easy shorthand for the manipulation of representations. "Who am I?" is the standard question of consciousness - as language, it has a thousand shades. I don't know if it can even be meaningfully expressed in other modalities but if it could, it doesn't seem like it could be easily manipulated in the fashion of language.

Much of how I think involves a pretend version of my body and a manipulation of virtual objects or better yet sets of those objects in some kind of physical space, to understand, manipulate, test hypotheses, and reach conclusions (I can feel my muscles twitch often as I do this). Also, there are shadowy visuals with edges, colors, and I move around those objects to get different viewpoints. This is most concrete when contemplating how to navigate or manipulate the physical world, but even quite concrete when contemplating how I build and understand software -- hypothetical data structures, functions, objects, etc., they take on some almost tangible form, and I might give them a verbal tag, but they're very much not verbal.

Even when dealing with people, social situations, my feelings for them, about them, situations I am in or might be in, or things I'm contemplating in the past -- so little of that is verbal. I flash to prior experience, prior situations, I posit new ones, I wonder how a person might sound, what their voice might show. I had a very hard time completing sentences and constructing verbal arguments before I was around 25. I was different, and my senior classmates in high school in Brazil, I don't think maliciously, voted me "most likely to go insane".

The stream-of-consciousness self-dialog in some literature is a necessarily limited mapping of this mode of thinking to words. It's a hint of how I feel most people really think. Words and phrases are but one element of inner thought, and become paramount only when laying out written or verbal communications with others ... and even then, in live or recorded conversation, can be overshadowed by vocal quality and intonation, and non-verbal body-language.

EDIT: added high-school superlative ... and also, I'm INFP, if there's anything to that.

You seem to be describing non-verbal subjective experience. Of course I wouldn't argue with someone's non-verbal experience.

The thing is that I don't think language being tied to self-consciousness in the sense of Jaynes is really a statement about what internal experience involves.

Further, the point is that language is a tag which allows to whatever extent internal experience to be represented and sent to other "consciousnesses" (other language-processors who attempt to reproduce those experiences either verbally or non-verbally).

Same here. I often mix names up or have problems learning them, especially when tired. I don't think verbally as much as I suspect others do.

Same here! I am really bad with names, but I remember faces, personalities and character very well.

I've actually asked people if they think in language and the answer has always either been "yes" or "what do you mean? Of course!"

However, for me "rubber duck debugging," or just talking things through with someone is exceedingly helpful to help sort my thoughts out--or 'bring them into consciousness,' as the author would say.

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.

> as best as I can get in programmer speak...multithreaded-notthreadsafe-consciousness-impressions

The way I explain it, thoughts in my mind are organized in graphs, perhaps like a wiki. As I communicate, I'm constantly deciding which concepts to render inline into text, which to keep handy in case it comes up, and which to ignore. I find that I have decent memory, but it's hard to get to a story from a prompt (like: "tell me something funny from your childhood").

I agree language should not be considered so fundamental. It gives a structure which is more formal than fundamental. Noam Chomsky also promoted a version of the fundamental-language concept in his linguistic work. I think the notion will fade with time.

This Temple Grandin bit is great!

https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_though...

When I want to figure something out, I find it helps to express it in words, written or spoken. So I could say my way of thinking is verbal more than visual or anything else. But I have the sense that I have a "background task" running that finds the answer to a problem while my conscious mind is forming the verbal expression. I am not sure I do analysis with the aware part of my mind. I also have the odd sense that I cannot think clearly about a problem while looking over someone's shoulder, but when I sit down at my own computer, putting my hands on my own keyboard allows me to concentrate.

The Feral Child

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child

> When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do.

Perhaps at some point you will travel into the past and do the nasty in the pasty with one of your ancestors, and that past nastification results in you being your own ancestor. That is known to be capable of causing one to have a mind that works differently from that of the rest of humanity.

Huh? Yes, yes I am watching the Futurama marathon on SyFy right now. How did you know?

> “There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought.” - Rilke

But whatever that information space is could be called a language too, right?

I don't think so. 'Language' per se is inherently abstract-symbolic and serial. Other types of thought rely on non-symbolic types of metaphor, often quite concrete ones, and on more graph-like connections between ideas. Sometimes the relationships between nodes are very fuzzy and inexplicit.

The best you'll get with 'language' is poetry and puns and outline-style hierarchies, but these don't cover anywhere near all types of thought. As stark examples, I don't think you can classify e.g. sculptures or textile patterns or mechanical designs as 'language'.