i dont know how you can formulate concrete thoughts using abstract or symbolic things. maybe they are neanderthals or some other species.
It's called complete aphantasia* and it's not too incredibly rare. I've met at least two people who would sit down and have a conversation with me about it.
By the way, my aphantasic friend is a talented composer and an INCREDIBLY powerful writer. He's described composition as "sitting down at the piano and letting his hands do the work." He's never heard music in his mind because he's never had any internal experience whatsoever.
* No dreams * No internal chatter * No internal recollection at all
When asked to recall his life, he is able to tell a basic story, but it's not because he internally experiences remembering anything. Instead, he opens his mouth, and the story flows from him, as he has learned to say it.
He's sought out psychedelic experiences just to feel something that is not there, and even then on the most powerful psychedelics he sees nothing (though he does feel things from them).
The range of internal experience is far vaster than many of us ever thought possible. Sometimes I wonder if what is cartoon to me, is the lived experience of some other human being out there.
It certainly would explain somethings.
Or possibly he just has a radically different way to bring all of his own self together.
What if he were to sit in the morning to write down a plan of what he'll do in the afternoon with the idea that he'd do it?
What if he didn't even write it?
My point is, it is conceivable that your friend has some odd wiring to the parts of his brain which process language. It'd be interesting to get him to an fMRI and see whether the language is processed somewhere completely different to normal people - why not even in the cerebellum.
Yes. Very much so. "Sometimes I like to think of myself as a philosophical zombie".
Would you also call bullshit if some people told you that they don't see colors the way you do or that they can hear colors?
Not being "neurotypical" whatever the fuck that means, has become SUPER trendy. Out of nowhere, suddenly everyone has a mental disorder.
I don't fucking buy it.
It's possible what people have talked about here is a pretty normal spectrum between the extremes of hyperphantasia and aphantasia. Especially aphantasia is not well researched yet.
The idea is to simultaneously do two tasks that would interfere with each other if they were of the same kind, and would be performed successfully if they are different. So, give a person a text to read out loud and make them perform a cognitive task that requires, in your opinion, verbal reasoning. If they can read and still solve the task in the same time as "normal" people, they could probably reason in non-verbal terms.
Then when I stop thinking about it, my mind fades back into whatever it was on before, usually some music that's stuck in my head (which interestingly is always in the correct key and tempo even if it repeats the catchy bit more than it should if I'm not paying attention). The weirdest part is that when I'm actually listening to or playing music the narrative DOES actually collapse into a single spoken-conversation-speed track.
What are you saying here, thoughts are abstract, but to me seem purer and more varied than the (both abstract and symbolic) constraints of language. There are lots of things that come to mind that are almost impossible to describe fully and clearly -- thoughts would seem very constrained if you could only have them in a language you knew.
Children often described things they don't really have the language for. I think that constraining thought to use language is only an appearance and must necessarily arrive with language learning.
Side note: I suffer intrusive thoughts which are in the form of images and compulsions, they are never word based and I never choose to describe them to myself (perhaps I should?).
i dont think people have some kind of mental sign language to represent every possible concept they have ever experienced. thats what language is for.
You think about what you want to write, then you write it. No, not images, thoughts doesn't need to be images, its just thoughts. No, they aren't code, the thoughts are just representations of programming concepts and abstractions that I can't name or visualize. It is like, when you think about a person and their personality, how does those thoughts work? Do you get words that represents everything about that persons personality? No, of course not, you can't fully capture a person in words or images. Yet you can still think and reason about their personality. That is the pure way your thoughts works. You can think about everything using abstract thoughts like that, including math, programming etc.
The fact that some people can't think about math or programming without translating that to language is very fascinating to me.
When I code, I simply sit in front of the computer and it happens.
It's similar to tying knots or driving a car, except applied to my entire life.
Once people master tying their shoes they don't think "alright friend, let's have this rabbit run around the tree". They just do it and it happens.
When you drive as an experienced driver, you do not think "red means stop, red means stop, look in the mirror, look at the road". You just automatically compute what is going around you.
Simply apply that to everything and that's how my mind, and the mind of a lot of people, works.
I once tried to learn how to speed read. One of the core concept is "do not vocalize the words, just think through them". At first this had me confused as to why people would actually focus for long enough to generate an internal noise for each sound. This sounded like a way to slow down your reading on purpose. Then I learned that some people have an automatic voice that reads everything and the effort is flipped, it's a conscious effort to quiet it while for me it's a conscious effort to generate it.
In my eyes, since people are able to unlearn that, it's not impossible for you to empathize about it. It's simply hard to put yourself in someone else's shoes when the concepts are very alien to how you experience life. Take the aphantasic community as an example, at first many people "call bs" about the fact that other people could see images.
My mind defaults to such a jumbled mess of simultanelous trains of thought that attempting to linearize them into a single voice is impossible.