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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever tried meditating? The first time you do you probably think your mind isn't wandering, it actually takes a bit of practice to even notice quite how much internal dialogue you actually have. It's non stop for most of us.

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Yes, but part of the point, at least in the Buddhist tradition, is that those thoughts are just another phenomenon you're experiencing. Do a lot of the right kind of practice, and you can get it to stop, while still maintaining a high level of conscious awareness. E.g. see the book The Mind Illuminated.

> see the book The Mind Illuminated.

I am at around stage 3 just now.... Nowhere near enough to stop my thoughts but they are definitely calmer.

I think using the terms 'dialogue' for that is very loaded. It's pre-supposing that it's linguistic in nature by using a term that is linguistic in nature. If you think of it as simply a stream of representations of experience and cognition, why can't language be a separate layer constructed on top of it that we have and animals don't?

Have you ever had an idea or thought, and found it initially impossible to find the right words and phrases to express it? I certainly have. babies with no language can identify objects and people, develop emotional connections, learn skills and solve problems long before they can speak. Are they not concious?

Yes, this experience of knowing before verbalising confirms it for me. I find it happens most when I'm solving a problem and I know there is a line of thinking I could go down but have not yet gone down, an intuition for some nuance of the problem, a cross contextual connection. If I follow the feeling it materialises into words that reference the problem I am solving but until I do it remains an abstract notion. Sometimes it feels like memories of similar problems and sometimes it feels entirely abstract. Once you look at it though it disappears as it is verbalised so it can only be seen in the corner of your mind's eye.

Is it established that internal dialogue is facilitated by our language faculties, though? That’s certainly not was I would guess from my subjective experience.

This seems like something that should be obvious: most people's internal monologue is delineated in their primary language, or in a pastiche of the languages they know well. Just think about your own thoughts - if they crystallize into something and you serialize it out, it's going to be in language form.

I think the implication here is that it’s a linguistic dialogue.

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