Hacker News Reader

Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes see these reddit threads of people talking about the experience of having an internal monologue. I have no such monologue, at least not one that is accessible to the part of my mind that calls itself 'me', but I have often wondered if that monologue is something like a 'chain of thought'. I feel like maybe without access to that 'idea feed' maybe my planning and executive functioning is less effective than some other people. I do find myself quite more effective with those sort of tasks when I do a little 'chain of thought' notepad.

I also suspect I spend less time ruminating and second-guessing myself and other anxious behaviours that I imagine would come with having someone talking in your ear all day, but that's probably off topic.

View on HN

You never form thoughts in your mind in a linguistic way? Can you read a sentence and be aware of it as a sentence in your mind, or are you unable to do that?

I don't doubt you or anything like that, just very curious. As someone with a very strong internal monologue, it's hard for me to imagine not having one.

For me it has linguistics components for sure, but it is many in parallel and a lot less 'linear'.

Where inner language most certainly comes into play is in the 'output' phase, be it spoken or written, as serialization is required there, but to be honest that often feels like a projection or even a reconstruction with an inherrent sense of loss as the inner is so much richer and nuanced.

That is not to say linearization has no merits. Even if it loses so much it forces consistency and rigor in the lower dimensional reasoning.

If you were in a debate, and had to think through your reasoning and arguments, refining your argument, not the words you want to say but the substance of what you will say, would there be an inner voice in that situation?

Non-chain of thought models just "come up with" words to say. It's probably a bit like that.

So do chain-of-thoughts. The "come up with words to say" aka. selecting the best-fitting token to continue the sequence, is more-less exactly how my inner monologue feels. It sits at the boundary of the conscious and the unconscious, and from the point of view of my own introspection, the words just appear, complete with an emotional undertone of whether they "feel right" and how much.

In my case, no. There is no conscious 'refinement' of speech options like a Disco Elysium scene or something like that. I mostly just say what I think. There is definitely some impulse control type function to keep me from saying, for example, offensive things, but it's not in the form of myself telling myself 'dont say this thing'. It's usually in the form of an intrusive memory of a facial expression or negative emotion that I associate with that branch of conversation, if that makes sense? Same end, I think, just without a verbal component.

I have moderate inattentive type ADHD that manifests as me being hyper focused on specific sometimes minor things and failing to effectively plan larger picture things and often results in poor executive function outcomes. Maybe that's part of it.

Interesting. Thanks for your answer. For what it's worth I likely have the same type of ADHD but also have a strong inner monologue.

Best I can put it not one but many (not voices but) narratives at once, and shared with stuff that is not linguistic, but more like analogue waves of concept activation.

In a fast debate you have no time for inner single dimension explicit reasoning. It flows more directly.

Compare it to running on uneven terrain. Somehow decisions are being made where to put the next foot, but most of the time not after an introspective deliberation (although these would occur sometimes in e.g. very tricky rock climbing moves). The steering of where to go occurs at a much higher level, and the steps flow from higher level coarse grained directions.

Now in hindsight you can go back and analyze a recording or memory of the debate and see how it all makes sense as if it was rationally reasoned at every step of the way, but during the debate it most certainly is not an "inner voice", homunculus reasoning before consciously uttering the next phrase.

Thank you for answering. I can't wait to this stuff starts to get examined in more detail and more experiences shared, I think we are only at the tip of the iceberg.

No. I don't think in 'first person' words at all. I might consciously compose a phrase if I'm doing something like writing a poem, which is more akin to arranging a puzzle or something or I might recall words of a conversation someone said to me and i do think of song lyrics if I have a song in my head, but there's no voice in my head and it's absolutely baffling to me to imagine otherwise, as I imagine it is for other people to imagine my situation.

When I read a sentence in a book I don't hear any kind of narration or anything, but I do assemble a 'scene' of images, sounds, facial expressions, motions, etc. not like a movie, but more like a series of small related ideas if that makes sense?

I find that I understand dialogue and characters in books much better when I listen to an audiobook than when I read, not sure if that's related or not.

I am a relatively intelligent successful professional, but I wonder sometimes if I am missing some processing hardware other people have access to.

Not missing hardware, maybe just different. Those of us with an internal monologue will still say there is thinking that happens before that is voiced, so maybe you're still thinking, maybe the same hardware for an internal monologue is there, I guess, but it just isn't being voiced maybe? It doesn't sound like you are missing anything important, given you are still able to reason just fine.

Anyway thank you for answering!

Genuine question, how does multi step reasoning work for you then? Like eg if you have some math problem that's trivially to solve individually but needs multiple steps, lets say 16 * 3 + 5? How does 16 * 3 = 48 land in some 'register' of your brain (short term memory), so that you can then add 5 to get to 53? Maybe 16 * 3 + 5 is to easy for you and you'll just 'see' it but the question still stands, just choose a more complex problem.

Isn't the same meta process at play when thinking about more fuzzy topics?

I believe I have an internal narrator but I’m not certain exactly what others mean by that so I don’t know for sure.

However the way I think about math is different than the way I plan my day or other things. In my case, it is very much like I have registers that would hold the result of 16 x 3 in it so I can add the 5 to it later. I have a certain number of registers and with effort like repeating what Ive already solved I could temporarily create more.

It also feels somewhat physical, as if the register is an actual box or has a “location” or like I’ve put the answer down on the desk like a part of something I’m building. Perhaps not coincidentally I am one of the many people who have a “calendar shape” for the months.

Not that poster, but for me it's directly manipulating numbers (for example, "16×3 + 5" turns into "10×3 + 6×3 + 5" into "30 + 18 + 5" into "30 + 10 + 8 + 5" into "40 + 13" into "53"). There's no language involved, though in some cases I might use some spatial reasoning by doing something like associating given chunks of an equation with different fingers.

I don't really follow. Say, during the in-between step "10×3 + 6×3 + 5", how do you store and cognize the individual numeric and operator elements?

Surely, even if the arithmetics can be simplified and "lookup-table'd", you are still aware of the numbers in Arabic form or whatever equivalent you're using, right? Or do you somehow have 53 individual blobs swirling inside your consciousness?

Language (human) and language (theoretical computer science) are different concepts.

Not poster you replied to but it sounds like we might have a similar internal model.

I store numbers as pictures of numbers, or a geometric representation depending on how big or precise the number is.

Are you saying when you think of the concept of 'twelve plus twelve' you have the equivalent of someone in your head saying 'hmm, well twelve is 2 more than ten, so if I add up ten and ten and two and two I get twenty four?'

That's wild if so.

For your reference, I would follow the procedure above approximately, but visually with numbers that just do the thing that feels right. I think under the hood we're probably doing the same thing, just with a different interface layer

I can just speak for me, obviously, but yes, that is what's happening. But it's not someone, it is more like me explaining / telling it to myself. Depending on the complexity this can be more or less verbal - the more complex, the less verbal I would say.

Not sure if it helps you make sense of it, but at least myself I only verbalize more complicated things. 10x3 for example I just "see" as 30 without needing to "think" or "speak" about it.

If you see a cat walking along the road, do you have to think to yourself "oh, that's a cat" or do you just know that it's a cat without verbalizing anything? It has its own abstract concept, right? Same thing with sufficiently simple numeric transformations.

> you are still aware of the numbers in Arabic form or whatever equivalent you're using, right?

Not sure if you're in a Fahrenheit or Celsius sort of place but if someone says that it's 70 degrees out do you really think in terms of numbers? Or do you just "know" what 70 degrees is without thinking about it?

In short, I just do. It's not a linguistic representation of the number 10, it's the concept of the number 10, the same way as (to extend on the mention of another comment) I don't need the word "cat" to know how to interact with a pet cat.

I speak out loud or write on paper, or just do it a tiny bit slower and sometimes have to redo steps when I forget a result.

It's also very probable that the verbalization the majority does internally is just that - a verbalization of the actual underlying thought process. That is what much of current cognitive linguistics points to as far as I have understood.

(Also a reason why I'm very sceptical that the current LLM approach will eventually lead to AGI, BTW)

I think you're probably right that the verbalization is the 'interface layer' but why does that mean LLMs can't approach AGI? They also only use words as an 'interface' layer. Underlying weights are vectors in an abstract space.

With humans, it has been shown that reasoning processes for different aspects of human behavior are completely distinct from verbalization, they work fully autonomous, and the (inner) verbalization comes afterwards.

For LLMs, the tokens (i.e. words) are what the weights are based on, as there isn't other input into them.

I do have an internal monologue. I can also think in pictures and I can also think in terms of neither, just pure raw thought.

I would say most people are like me. They have 3 modes of thinking and they probably have a primary mode which they favor. I favor none and go into all 3 depending on whether I’m reading, writing or doing something else.

The second bigger group has only one primary mode of thinking. The internal monologue. They can only think in terms of an inner voice and this inner voice is so powerful I often encountered people who think this inner voice is the definition of thought. They assumed thinking was COT.

The even rarer versions you get people who assign colors to numbers or people who can’t even perceive to think in pictures. You’re the first person I’ve encountered who can’t even have an internal monologue.

I think you'd be surprised. I never knew that internal monologues were a thing until there was a HN thread about it and a lot of people had them and a lot of people didn't.

I always thought it was something that we did in TV shows or books to give you a sense of what a character was feeling, I didn't know this was an actual literal experience people had.

I can certainly have an internal monologue, in the way that you could put on a puppet show. I can conciously think to myself 'self, this is self. Clean your car out' I can form the feeling of those words in my head. But there's nobody 'saying' them if that makes sense. I'm playing back a design of my conscious self.

There's a fascinating thing called aphantasia where people can't picture things at all in their mind, but such people are able to lead normal lives and may never realize there's something different. This feels like a similar concept but for imaging speech.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

That said, most of my thinking is not done in the form of a linear monologue where I "talk through" steps to myself.

So you cannot think in language? Sounds kinda scary to be honest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com