Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

Some human had Neanderthal ancestors, some did not, as you rightly suggest. However, all humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor that's much more recent than our last common ancestor with chimps.

Ie we only have 'chimp DNA' in the sense that we share a lot of DNA with them, and that we haven't changed too much since our last common ancestor. Exactly the same is true of us and Neanderthals.

That's fine in general. Many words are like that. But it makes it flawed as a scientific concept.

I respectfully disagree, as started in my earlier post. It would be nice if human language worked like that, but it does not always. A "stone frigate" isn't a boat, an "iron lung" isn't a respiratory organ.

I've always thought of my mental model as an endless conversation with myself, but I think the more fitting description would be a "smooth" series of thoughts which only materialize into language when I explicitly focus on those thoughts as their own thing.

I do also think visually for things that have a visual component though.

I have some experience with a meditative/dissociative state in which that monologue - which I think of as the "narrator process" - can be observed as just one of many mental subsystems, neither containing the whole of my consciousness nor acting as the agent of my will. The narrator merely describes the feelings which arise in other mental components and arranges them, along with the actions I take, into some plausible linear causal sequence.

Minds differ in many ways, and perhaps one way your mind and mine differ is that words flow quickly for me and do not feel slow or limiting; so I suppose I am easily fooled into perceiving that narrative as the medium of thought in itself. It had not occurred to me to describe the activities of the other mental subsystems as thoughts, but why shouldn't they be? And now I have a better guess at what it might be like to experience the world in a different way. Thank you!

I bet you can answer all of these at a moment's notice, but where does your answer come from? Have you ever sat down and tried to reason out which one you like more? Or do you just 'know' the answer and then 'come up' with the justification afterwards?

People can think in words, but it's certainly not their only way of thinking. I think the thinking in words is kind of like "thinking on paper" where you're trying to explicitly reason through something. The thinking process itself seems to be something on a deeper level.

From that perspective, the experience of thinking in words or pictures is distinct from actually thinking in words or pictures. Saying one thinks in one of these ways seems to be saying what they identify thinking with.

For example, I don't usually think of fantasy as thinking. If I day dream, I wouldn't say I am thinking, but that is fairly visual. To what degree am I saying something about myself vs my identity if I say I do or don't think in words given that context?

Relatedly, I've noticed that when it comes to remembering something, it is not 'I' that remember. Rather 'I' set up mental cues and direct focus, which then hopefully causes the memory to be placed within my awareness. This happens below the level of direct experience. But I might say I failed to remember, taking responsibility for something that 'I' - the part separated from the automatic functions of the body - did not do.

So I'm suggesting statements about words vs pictures are about ego, metaphor and meaning-building, and not about actual mechanisms or communicating actual differences in the experience of thinking.

It can be difficult to talk about these things because such conversations implicitly occur between our identities, not between who we actually are - something beyond our grasp - and the noise this introduces is something I don't know how to surmount, or if it can be surmounted.

Except for this part of thinking, paradoxically.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-reference/

Language certainly helps shape thoughts, even to the extent that, certainly for older kids and adults, different languages influence and constrain thought in different ways.

But consider dreams. These are adjacent to thoughts, and don't require language. Some dreamers are even able to express will not only on their actions, but over the dream itself. And if proof were needed of a conscious agent, it's there even in an apparently unconscious being.

There is not a prerequisite of it being either or but I guess it is both.

Same thing happens if you ask “what surface is the table on” or “what country is this image in”. It’s layers I can add to the mental state, but if they’re not important they’re just not there.

I’d say the closest thing to what I was “seeing” before the color question is something like a wireframe, or maybe the gray color of a Blender model without colors/textures applied. Grey in the sense that you don’t really notice it’s grey, you just understand the grey color means color is absent.

I'm terrible at recognising faces - changing a "symbolic" feature like facial hair or glasses will completely throw me - but great at reading maps.

Sometimes people seem to not be sure how to describe the experience of thinking... Which I suppose explains a lot! /laughs

Trying to describe culture with stories feels like trying to describe biology with proteins. It gets us most of the way there but also adds a whole ton of complexity because it misses the fundamental nature of the system.

Humans are great at general and accurate imitation. This probably seeded a runaway evolutionary process, the result of which was tools, fire, and language.

>If most animals are operating on a calorie deficit and fixing this can lead to larger brains then why haven’t domesticated animals evolved towards our level of intelligence?

Because farm animals do not evolve, they are bred. We have directed their evolutionary paths for centuries, away from what it would do on it's own, towards creatures that produce more milk, more meat, or fattier meat.

From a calories-per-unit-of-labor standpoint, dogs and cats have now clearly eclipsed humanity, using their emotional intelligence to create a post-scarcity Marxian utopia where they can mostly do whatever they want all day while humans toil for them.