Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

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> But we think in words.

Not everyone does this.

> The only difference really is who it's directed to, whether we've voiced it or wrote it down, and whether we self-censored some of it in the process.

That last part is the part that's key to computational thinking. What has been elided from your thoughts (expressed as an inner monologue, communicated via writing or voice to others)? Computational thinking requires you to be able to provide sufficient detail that a "computer" can repeat the process that you have performed, and potentially enough logical information that it can handle exceptional cases and situations. For a sufficiently advanced computer (read: intelligent and educated human), "Solve the equation for X" may be sufficient. For a program in C, you'll have to provide more detail. For a Mathematica program, it's about the same as communicating it to a human (depending on their level of education and the qualities of the equation, Mathematica may require more or less detail).

> Not everyone does this.

Yes, you do need to be literate. But if you are, and you think, what do you hear? And what did you just write, if not your thoughts? Except directed to me/HN after confirmed with yourself?

I would not use the term computational thinking for what you are describing, and I wouldn't consider natural languages and programming languages and mathematics all "languages of thought" either. Mathematics is formal. Programming languages are Turing Complete instruction sets with abstraction and other language features. Natural language is something entirely different. The only thing they all have in common is that they are expressed with symbols.

> Computational thinking requires you to be able to provide...

That part is just computation. I would not consider being able to duplicate instructions in C as a computational thinking goal. I would consider duplicating the instruments we have that back our thought processes in C that would generate thought processes within a machine as "computational thinking" or just "thinking" or "artificial intelligence". A computer solving a problem we can solve is not artificial intelligence. It's just intelligence copied.

I will admit though that we may be using some terms to mean slightly different things.

> > Not everyone does this.

> Yes, you do need to be literate.

At some level, I suppose. But there's a lot of thought that occurs without words, and the conversion into words when I'm writing or speaking happens so late in the process that is indistinguishable from the act of writing or speaking.

> But if you are, and you think, what do you hear?

If I hear anything at all, it's more like music than words. But usually, what I see in my mind's eye is more relevant than what I hear.

It actually took me a very long time to figure out that when people say "internal monologue" they aren't speaking metaphorically. It's not something I've ever experienced.

> And what did you just write, if not your thoughts?

It's more of a description of the relevant parts of my thoughts than my actual thoughts. Words feel like a crappy copy of thoughts to me.

When one speaks of visual thinking, one does not mean literal pictures either though, right? For me, when tackling a programming problem for example, I may see a data structure or some piece of architecture as a graph, without really seeing the pictorial representation of that graph that I'd draw on a paper. There's no scaling or positional geometry to speak of; merely connections. Was just wondering if this is similar to what others mean.

Yeah, that's representative of my experience. It feels visual, but not exactly in the same way as drawing to communicate--I just "know" what the parts mean instead of them being shaped in some meaningful way.

Some people literally don't hear an inner monologue. It doesn't have anything to do with literacy. If you can speak you have the faculty of language to produce such a thing. But some people think in images and abstract sounds. When I program I rarely hear a monologue, I mostly visualize the structure of the program being formed. My internal monologue is primarily present when I'm in the act of writing or imagining a dialogue or speech I intend to take part in, acts specifically involving words. My driving trips don't involve a monologue, my mind is filled with images of where I'm going and a visual (sort of) image of the vehicles around me (situational awareness), and a graphical representation of the route as a totally not to scale map.

Look up the definition of computational thinking. It isn't AI.

> driving trips don't involve a monologue

You're not thinking when you're driving though. The term is highway hypnosis. When we know what we're doing, we become unconscious and unaware, granting us bandwidth to think of other things. When I drive I think of other things.

For the most part, I don't think we're referring to the same things with "thinking". If we were, we'd see we're contradicting a lot less.

> definition of computational thinking

Right. And disagreeing with this definition (or formulation) is where I started, so no surprise there. I would say the original article deviated from (or may have even been irrelevant with) the formal definition (or maybe not).

(edit: What I'm saying is, if you're thinking straight, it is already computational, so there is no need to make the distinction. I still stand by that statement after considering everything thoughtful posted here, by you and everyone else.)

You're not thinking when you're driving though. The term is highway hypnosis.

That's a thing to avoid because it's dangerous; it isn't the usual case.

That's not the point though.

Even just driving is "just doing it". Most driving is autopilot. Awareness is not necessarily "thinking". We don't deliberate/contemplate/philosophize while driving unless we're incompetent. And we can very much decide/simulate/execute/do without much thought. Thought helps, but those things themselves are not thinking. We have our gut, our instincts, our imagination, our intuitions, and our spurs of the moments, all which are used as opposites to "deliberate thought". Considering all computing the brain does as "thinking" undermines all of these differences.

It'd be easier if my use of the word was just wrong, but reviewing the definition of "computational thinking", they only refer to the deliberate kind also. If there was a better word than "thinking" for what I'm referring to, I'm sure "computational thinking" would adopt that expression also.

At the end of the day we're just nitpicking semantics, and there are better uses of our time.

The harder I'm thinking, the less sense my inner monologue seems to make. Even for fairly simple things -- other than reading -- it tends to be a jumble of half-articulated sentence fragments and images. When I'm thinking hard, there tend to be significant portions that I have no idea what to call them.

So the inner monologue clearly isn't how I think (what I use to think), but seems to be something more like samples from a debug trace or audit log.

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