Ask HN: What is the nature of deafblind people's and animals' thoughts?
Onto the questions.
When I think, I am simulating speaking to myself - I run over the words and sentences in my head and my internal experience is as if I hear the words pronounced. I am assuming that this is the case with most of us.
In contrast to this, what kind of thinking experience do people who have never associated any "utterances" (lip movement, hand signals, sounds) with ideas have?
A related question: Assume that animals can think, because they clearly seem to. What would be their thoughts like? Clearly they can't be talking to themselves as we do. Could they be using a lot of pronouns ("I could do that to that which will cause it to do that and that and then I can catch and eat it").
My basic motivation is to try to find a meaningful continuity between animals and ourselves in terms of intelligence. Biologically there are a lot of similarities, but it seems that intelligence-wise, there is a marked discontinuity between humans and other living organisms. What is it that causes this?
This is mainly for fun speculative thinking on a Saturday morning. I also think there's a need for succinct insights about thinking and consciousness to coagulate in various places on the net so that it may someday be useful to someone.