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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

I had the same reaction, but you have to keep reading. He's building a stack. He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them. There's no reason to start constructing the abstract objects yet, we're not at that layer of the 'stack'.

It's kind of like saying that when you dive down to the network layer, video doesn't exist. It's up to the application running the network to assemble all the packets to turn it into video.

Thoughts are constructed from the stream of physical experiences that get formed into words, not the other way around. It's perfectly possible for the brain to still operate without thoughts the way we experience them, in fact, deaf people think visually rather than auditorially like most of us do.

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That reasoning completely falls on its face though. AFAIK, Stroke patients whose language areas have been destroyed are still able to perform complex tasks.

You can think visually and procedurally (imagining actions) without putting things into words. IIRC Broca's area (which is responsible for grammar) may be related to the temporal planning of non-verbal actions though, so the above may be limited to Wernike's aphasia.

What do they mean by putting things into words? When thinking, it seems that the assumption is that we are silently putting our thoughts into <insert language> words? This is by experience not the case anyway, right?

It depends. Some people (most people?) think their thoughts in words, and find it hard to believe that other people don't. Other people (me, maybe you?) just think "thoughts". Wordlessly, imagelessly. The article supports this, but the GP (it seems to me) finds it worthwhile to point out that people can still think without words, which indicates to me that he thinks with words.

I have had a very hard time explaining to people that I just think thoughts, like flashes of... thinking, without words or actions or images. It's like when speaking or typing, you already know what you're going to say or type or write before you put it into words, but some people have trouble relating to that.

I generally use words only when I need to communicate. I have different forms that I think with depending on what I'm doing. For example, when I'm coding, I think in terms of methods, objects, and data. The process of selecting words to speak or type is very much like finding the right code pattern.

Thanks for your explanation, I did not know that this was the case. I had until now assumed that words are a kind of medium for conveying the underlying thoughts which are abstract and exist separately. Observations like this make me wonder if actually there might be quite substantial differences from person to person when it comes to thinking and perception.

> I have had a very hard time explaining to people that I just think thoughts, like flashes of... thinking, without words or actions or images. It's like when speaking or typing, you already know what you're going to say or type or write before you put it into words, but some people have trouble relating to that.

I'm in the same boat, actually. While I can't read without vocalizing mentally, I have speechless thoughts especially when it comes to math/logic stuff, and I sometimes find it painful to have to wait for my mouth to serialize what I have in mind.

> He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them.

We know this is wrong though. Memory of a chair is distinct from memory of the word "chair". If this wasn't true, then it would be difficult or impossible to speak multiple languages fluently. Also, animals wouldn't be able to understand the world around them, because they don't have language like we have language.

He starts from an unfamiliar place, saying "there are no mental objects separate from real objects," and thinking is a process of re-experiencing these objects and rearranging them in our heads. Sounds pretty radical, but when he's done building his stack, it's all much more conventional. He doesn't mean physical objects so much as experiences, and physical experiences aren't replayed exactly in our heads but rather changed, rearranged, organized, and manipulated, and ways of organizing these experiences can be transmitted via language. So when he says, "Simply, there is no need to introduce this new entity, thought, between body and object," it is a little disingenuous because he is using words such as "experience" and "rearrangement" and "reorganization" to describe mental processes. At that point I lose track of what original point he's trying to make. I think when it comes down to it he is just making a big deal out of replacing nouns with verbs (and nouns more obviously made from verbs) to make it sound like he has a unique appreciation for the fact that what goes on in your head is dynamic rather than static.

I think it’s obvious that brains can operate without thoughts because animals and insects do it.

What makes you think other living beings besides humans don't have thoughts? IMHO we're just a slightly souped up version of everything else, exist along a continuity, and are not 'special' except in contrived and technical ways.

What makes you think all humans have "thoughts" (I assume you mean "word thoughts")? I, for example, don't think in words or images, I just... think.

'slightly' seems a bit understated to me. There is no other species whose members are anywhere close to sitting around typing messages to each other across hundreds or thousand of miles.

We are steering our evolution as a species outside of biology, in large part, via social and cultural institutions. What other species does that?

> What other species does that?

None. Sometimes I wonder if they know something we don't.

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