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Comment by lo_zamoyski | Hacker News Reader

The distinction between language and "thought" to me is odd. Language and "thought" are the same thing. The mouth sounds or hand scribbles aren't the language, but expressions of it.

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You don't need language to catch a ball, but clearly thinking is required to intercept its trajectory correctly.

Language is about communication.

There’s an argument that communication which is internal is still communication, and that a language of trajectories required for coordination is still linguistic in a meaningful sense. Most of the ways to differentiate thought from language are probably going to end up splitting hairs. It all comes back to Wittgenstein, and it’s arguable whether the POV is useful, but it’s certainly coherent and defensible.

I think this entire thread of discussion would benefit from remembering multimodal models exist. In other words, pictures are worth a thousand words and have their own place in thought. The existence of a way to translate between modalities doesn't make any of them superior overall--they each have their roles to play.

The idea that language is about thought is only referring to the kind of higher level thinking specific to humans. Any animal can catch a tennis ball, but only humans can construct and then execute complex plans of actions.

This line of thought stems mostly from two observations: one, that the vast majority of language you use is your internal monologue; and two, that this internal monologue would have been extremely helpful for the hominids that would have first developed it even while the rest of the population had not developed language (in contrast, if language is about communication, then it's only useful to a hominid if the whole population speaks language, but then it's hard for it to spread initially).

One issue here is semantics. The things that happen in our brains which we can put into words tend to be the things we categorize as ‘thoughts’. But there are things that happen in our brains which we struggle to connect to language too, and we might call those ‘feelings’ or ‘emotions’ or ‘instincts’ instead. So we’re trying to use language to think about how we think about language and I suspect this might be why that end of neurolinguistics falls off the deep end into philosophy.

>But there are things that happen in our brains which we struggle to connect to language too, and we might call those ‘feelings’ or ‘emotions’ or ‘instincts’ instead

Yes, and we could argue that those are not thoughts, while there still being a distinction between thought language (which could very well be subconscious) and inner monologue/spoken language.

I consider a sentence as a formatted thought. That implies a thought exists before it is expressed in words. There's a ton of thoughts in my head which can't be transformed into any language I speak. I wish I could somehow acquire some proficiency in the other thousands of languages spoken by humans on this planet, just to proof their immense lack of features.

Also our natural languages restrict information bandwidth to a few bytes per second. Imagine doing sports like tennis, chess or soccer at this speed...

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