Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

> I am not sure that I think in words, and I never seem to hear any inner voices. This caused a bit of an embarrassment once at a meeting about the evolution of conscience, when fellow scholars kept referring to an inner voice that tells us what is right and wrong. I am sorry, I said, but I never hear such voices.

Speaking overbroadly, with way too many generalizations, simplifications, and the like...

You stand a stronger chance of hearing such voices if you actively seek out and speak to those voices. The directive given to young children to actively seek out and talk to their conscience (a la Pinnochio) is a cultural one which, over time, can shape a portion of your mind to give you this sort of feedback. Further training of this portion of your mind might be provided through a channel such as certain traditions of prayer or meditation found in western Christianity, seeking to program this part of the brain to guide you to be as ethical as possible; some Protestant denominations in particular focus extensively on building a "personal relationship with God" through conversational prayer. Specifics may vary widely within individual cultures, and even over an individual's lifetime, but America in general has seen a strong influence from Protestantism over the years, and it may be affecting the way people in America organize their thoughts with inner dialogue.

I wonder if those working in the science of conscience are subject to some sort of cognitive self-selection bias...

He just might be one of the roughly 1 in 70 people that lack inner monologue. I remember reading about another person a month back that had a hard time reading books because we use visual metaphors in books and can do thing like imagine a beach in our minds eye. But not everyone can apparently. Can't find the link will keep digging through my history.

That's interesting, can you point me to a source about the 1 to 70 ratio?

I once had a weird conversation with a friend about thinking in a foreign language: he said he didn't understand what that would mean, as he didn't usually think in our own language anyway.

Nobody has ever been able to properly explain to me what it means to think in a language.

For me, it's not much different than reading silently, where I convert text into mental auditory speech and the corresponding concepts are simultaneously activated.

I am not a neuroscientist, but believe the following to be mainly noncontroversial:

When you speak to another person, there is a neural activation pattern distributed over space and time which encodes, somehow, a sentiment to be expressed. There is also a multistage neural structure (L) that converts that pattern into another, more sequential pattern that drives motor neurons to articulate a series of phonemes.

Sometimes an activation pattern will drive this sort of conversion to yield a serial, phonetic activation pattern, but activity elsewhere in the brain that interferes with the final stage of structure L to prevent the actual articulation from happening. You could call this "covert speech".

You probably perform covert speech at least occasionally. If you stub your toe, you may have the sense that you have just sworn/cursed, even if there was no utterance. (This might be because the processing in earlier stages of L leads to a brain state encoding an expectation of hearing the utterance, but this is getting a bit speculative.) I'll call this sort experience "hearing your own covert speech".

It may be the case that certain types of cognition, like multistep logical deduction, are performed by use of L. This is a small minority of human mental activity, but it is probably the mental activity that we are most aware of performing.

If people go through the day being totally unaware of most of their cognitive activity, but "hear" their own covert logical reasoning whenever they do it, I can see how they would form the impression that they "think in English".

Once having studied, for example, rational arithmetic, or predicate logic, it is difficult NOT to think in those languages. Yet we are perfectly capable of performing rational or predicative inference if we have no knowledge of those languages, if less precisely. Presumptively this is due to the abstraction of rules from experience facilitating a branching sequence model for abstractions and hypotheses represented during inarticulate thought - abstractions being holographic summary statistics of concepts derived more directly from the sensory manifold.

> I remember reading about another person a month back that had a hard time reading books because we use visual metaphors in books and can do thing like imagine a beach in our minds eye. But not everyone can apparently. Can't find the link will keep digging through my history.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...

He doesn't mean he lacks conscience, he means it doesn't appear as a voice.

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