I vividly remember when Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind came out in 1977, and the rave reviews it got (the bloody thing was nominated for the National Book Award!); I thought then, and continue to think, that it is as prime an example of crackpottery as The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which came out a couple of years later to similar acclaim. I was lured into reading Scott Alexander’s review because he started so winningly, saying it has “only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind.” Thus suckered in, I read and enjoyed the whole thing, but wouldn’t have thought of it as LH material except for this excursus:
Jaynes partisans are able to come up with a few anthropological works suggesting that the minds of primitive people are pretty weird, and I believe that, but they don’t seem quite as weird as Jaynes wants them to be. So the question becomes whether we would notice if some people worked in a pre-bicameral and pre-conscious way.
I’m tempted to answer “yes, obviously”, but for the counterargument, see this Reddit thread.
I think I’m very different from most people because of one main thing. I never thought with language. Ever. I moved to Canada when I was 2 from Asia, and have been basically been around English speakers my whole life. I’m in my twenties now and I can speak it relatively well, and can understand every single word. However, growing up, I never ever thought with language. Not once did I ever think something in my mind with words like “What are my friends doing right now?” to planning things like “I’m going to do my homework right after watching this show.” I went through elementary school like this, I went through Highschool like this, I went through University like this…and I couldnt help but feel something was off about me that I couldnt put my hand on. Just last year, I had a straight up revalation, ephiphany….and this is hard to explain…but the best way that I can put it is that…I figured out that I SHOULD be thinking in language. So all of a sudden, I made a conscious effort to think things through with language. I spent a years time refining this new “skill” and it has COMPLETELY, and utterly changed my perception, my mental capabilities, and to be frank, my life. I can suddenly describe my emotions which was so insanely confusing to me before. I understand the concept that my friends are still “existing” even if they’re not in site by thinking about their names. I now suddenly have opinions and feelings about things that I never had before. What the heck happened to me? I started thinking in language after not doing so my whole life. It’s weird because I can now look back at my life before and see just how weird it was. Since I now have this new “skill” I can only describe my past life as …. “Mindless”… “empty”….. “soul-less”…. As weird as this sounds, I’m not even sure what I was, If i was even human, because I was barely even conscious. I felt like I was just reacting to the immediate environment and wasn’t able to think anything outside of it. It’s such a strange time in my life. It feels like I just found out the ultimate secret or something. …..Can anyone relate, or understand what Im saying? Can anyone explain what is happening to me? I have no idea where to even post this but this has been on my mind ever since I’ve been able to think about it.
This guy thinks he “barely” had consciousness (in the Jaynesian sense), and it took him however many years to notice this about himself. It was just another universal human experience you can miss without realizing it! And notice how it was the culturally learned knowledge that other people worked differently which shifted him to the normal equilibrium. So maybe if there was some tribe like this somewhere, it would be easy to miss.
I confess I can’t quite wrap my head around what it would mean not to “think with language,” but (assuming the poster is sincere and accurate) it’s certainly interesting, and I pass it along for what it’s worth.
I’ve never been sure what people mean when they say they ‘think with language.’ Is an architect designing a building thinking with language, or is he imagining three-dimensional shapes in his mind, and how they fit together? Did Beethoven think in language, or was he imagining sounds and their relationships? Just the other evening I idled away a few minutes doing a sudoku, and I wouldn’t say I was thinking in language but mentally imagining which numbers were allowed in a space and which were not. I don’t see how language comes into it.
If I were trying to parse a legal document I suppose I would be thinking in language, but surely there are many example of thinking that don’t involve language.
Or maybe I’m missing the point here. Clarification welcome.
Not thinking in words is quite widespread (my wife, for instance, doesn’t). I wish I had a sense of the proportions, but I don’t, but in any case non-verbal thinkers are often just as astonished to find out their form of human consciousness is not universal. Food for thought!
I recall this came up before. Here and here, but maybe yet another time too.
Me, I slipped into thinking in words at some point when I was a kid, and quickly shed off the habit, with a bit of an effort. It made thinking very cumbersome. I don’t remember very well what it was like, or I’d share it to help answer David L’s question.
P.S. I wouldn’t touch books like Jaynes’s or Zukav’s, but I find them repellent in somewhat different ways.
Is there a joke lurking here? I mean, given that “primitive people” are by definition non-WEIRD (in the sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias) and Alexander is certainly aware of the ongoing discussion of the ways in which studies of subjects from WEIRD societies should not be presumed to automatically scale up to the entire human species.
Is it commonly accepted that certain universals underly different ways of thinking? E.g.
1. Events or sense perceptions can be correlated and sorted.
2. Learning is possible.
3. Manipulation of symbols usefully precedes manipulation of real world entities.
4. In order to achieve objectives, both individual and cooperative effort may be required.
If the laws governing the universe were different, e.g., causality or time itself were different or e.g., physical laws changed rapidly with time or location, or could be altered by thoughts or actions, then a different basis for thinking would be necessary.
I think the article is itself unfortunately somewhat tainted by the Jaynesian drivel.
In talking about “theory of mind” as a culture-bound thing you are actually taught by your parents, he is not using the term in its normal sense at all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
Lacking “theory of mind” in this sense is a pathological state, not a cultural thing: all normal adult human beings have it, just as all normal adult human beings have language.
I have never heard of a culture in which there was no concept of deliberate deception, and the concept of deliberate deception entails having a theory of mind.
He also uses “hallucination” in a highly odd way. I had an imaginary friend as a child, but I was never under the impression that he was real in the sense my parents or siblings were. I also believe that God answers my prayers (sometimes) but have yet to hear him actually talking to me. I think I’m fairly mainstream in this … indeed, even the more enthusiastic of my coreligionists seem to regard actual hearing of the voice of God as something worthy of particular note, not an everyday occurrence. To use “hallucination” in the way the article does is just antireligious polemic, not making any actual point about anything.
However, he puts me in mind of an Argentine psychiatrist I once knew in London. She was an altogether admirable person, though almost completely lacking in a sense of humour. I remember her talking about the time Rastafarians first arrived in any numbers in the UK, and how there was a great tendency to misdiagnose them as schizophrenic before the penny dropped that hearing voices and seeing visions is in fact a cultural norm for Rastafarians. “Nowadays”, she said earnestly, “we don’t diagnose Rastafarians as schizophrenic unless other Rastafarians agree that they’ve been acting oddly.” It immediately struck me that wearing a suit and tie probably qualifies …
That sounds to me like the “inner voice”. I just learned about this a few days ago, it’s summarized well here:
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/inner-voice.htm
I don’t have an inner voice and I’m surprised that it’s an actual thing. I don’t think I could learn to have one either.
And I recently discovered that some people imagine things by seeing pictures inside their head, which I don’t. Turns out that most people see the pictures. (If you aren’t sure which group you are in: Imagine a horse galloping past you. Now, is it galloping to the right or the left? If your answer is “Huh?” then you don’t see the pictures.)
As for consciousness, a lot of people are studying it but I think nobody really has a good idea of what it is. Or even if there’s an “it” there. A lot of what people say seems to be trying to explain why humans are better than other animals.
@DE: There’s also Everett writing about the Pirahã matter-of-factly seeing and talking to ghosts in broad daylight, which he couldn’t see or hear. With Everett, though, I never know how much he’s exoticizing the Pirahã.
I don’t think in language either. I find it bizarre when people assert to do that. Maybe in my middle age I’ve begun to “think in language” a little, but my fundamental thought process has nothing to do with language.
@Y:
The normal way to greet somebody sitting quietly alone in Kusaal is to say Nɛ sɔnsiga “(Blessing) on the conversation”, the same greeting as you would use to greet a group of people talking together. This is because a person sitting alone is assumed to be (silently) conversing with their own win “spiritual individuality, genius.” I’ve always imagined this as describing essentially the experience of just thinking your own thoughts to yourself, but that could be just my own cultural preconceptions. I suppose that at the very least it does illustrate how different cultures may express the same experiences in very different ways.
People describe talking to kikiris “tutelary spirits” too; and there are also supposed to be hostile kikiris in the bush which deliberately lead wanderers astray, and whose feet are attached backwards to confuse trackers. They sound pretty corporeal. Some sources describe them as “invisible”, but I suspect that this is some sort of oversimplification introduced to smooth over the disconnect between two very different worldviews.
There was some discussion of closely related topics around here.
Something in all that reminded me of James Hogg’s grandfather being one of the last people to meet fairy folk in Ettrick, and being told by them that they were flitting (I think because there were too many people about).
And yet that is sort of relevant, because I don’t believe that 18th century Scots had no idea of consciousness, and yet there does seem to be an era before which people sometimes had vivid encounters with fairy folk, and after which they mostly didn’t.
David E: I’ve never seen an imaginary friend, but I have seen the monster which lived in the cupboard in my gramma’s spare room, although a few years later it mostly looked like a roll of old carpet…
I feel like I don’t really know whether I think in language or not and in fact don’t actually understand the question “do you or don’t you think in language.” Outside of contexts where the language is explicit because I’m ruminating about what to say in a hypothetical conversation and/or thinking about what to write, at least. And of course there’s not a particularly clear line between “thinking” in some narrow-scope sense and “whatever my brain is generally doing that I am aware of when I am either conscious or dreaming.”
@David L I idled away a few minutes doing a sudoku, and I wouldn’t say I was thinking in language but mentally imagining which numbers …
And didn’t you name the numbers? You might point at cells (with a finger, or mentally, or by eye movement) rather than internally voicing ‘if this cell is a …, that cell must be …’; but how do you “think” the contents of the cell? If you don’t voice them you might imagine shape ‘7’ — but that’s just as much symbolic thought as saying ‘seven’. Do you visualise seven swans swimming in the cell?
Did Beethoven think in language, or was he imagining sounds and their relationships?
I can call to mind long passages of music. (Don’t count myself as a composer/no comparison to Beethoven.) And yes that recall involves no words. “their relationships” is a tricky question: Beethoven would know that sound-sequence is a ‘plagal cadence’. It’s a compartmentalised/symbolic thought, whether or not the actual words go through his head alongside the music.
As @JWB describes, “whatever my brain is generally doing” is in words. The only way I can stop the words is concentrating hard on a complex passage of music. Increasingly I find the only composer whose music is demanding enough, is Bach. (Or Beethoven, Shostakovich honouring Bach.)
As for consciousness, a lot of people are studying it but I think nobody really has a good idea of what it is. Or even if there’s an “it” there.
Except in its crasser meanings – as awareness of the kind that an anaesthetist interrupts, for example – consciousness is overripe for removal from our inventory of what there is. Let’s expunge persons, while we’re at it. Together these notions remain responsible for ruinous confusion, and reams of futile philosophastry.
From the review [**] Jaynes (writing in the 1970s) was both a psychology professor at Princeton and an expert in ancient languages, so the perfect person to make this case. He reviews various samples of Bronze Age writing from before and after this period, and shows that the early writings have no references to mental processes, and the later ones do.
I thought most early writing (that’s survived) is administrative records and accounts. I wouldn’t expect to find there references to mental processes/that’s no evidence early Bronze Age peoples had no theory of mind.
That the (non-interpolated) text of Iliad locates Achilles’ fears in his guts rather than a construct of ‘mind’ strikes me as no evidence for anything. I wouldn’t locate my mental life any particular place; I’m not aware of my brain ‘buzzing’ any more than any other part of my anatomy.
Jaynes argues the Bronze Age was obsessed with burials and the afterlife (eg the Pyramids) …
Very little of Bronze Age artefacts have survived. Only the Pharaohs/rulers could command enough resources to build permanent memorials. If people were obsessed with other stuff that got memorialised only in now-decayed or only-ceremonial forms, we wouldn’t know. Would there be celebrations of new life/Spring? What traces would those leave?
[**] I agree with @Hat, I don’t think I’d stomach (hah!) the actual book for more than a few pages.
I probably should have said “whatever my mind is doing” rather than unconsciously parroting the modern assumption that the “mind” is physically situated in the physical brain rather than in the spleen or gall bladder or whatever some other some less modern and more Homeric (or third-thing) civilization may have hypothesized.
consciousness is overripe for removal from our inventory of what there is
Well, one way of solving a problem is indeed to assert that it does not exist.
The Jaynesian thesis seems to boil down to: other cultures used very different metaphors to express some things from those we are accustomed to use ourselves nowadays. Ergo, the things in question must be mere illusions.
Well, one way of solving a problem is indeed to assert that it does not exist.
Well, where’s the onus? One way to guarantee a philosophical problem’s perdurance is to insist at all costs on a dubious ontology, with a show of Cartesian certainty buttressed by “common sense”.
@David L I idled away a few minutes doing a sudoku, and I wouldn’t say I was thinking in language but mentally imagining which numbers …
@AntC: And didn’t you name the numbers?
Not consciously, no. I see which numbers are permitted and which are not, but they are simply a set of nine symbols. I visualize them but don’t need to name them.
May it please the court, I would like to amend my testimony. I just did a sudoku and realized that if I am figuring out which number is missing from a row or a square, then I mentally count them out. But if I am looking at patterns of numbers in two adjacent squares, says, to figure out where to place a number in a third square, then I do not name them. I think.
Basically, what I wanted to write. Except that JWB very well formulated this: ‘“whatever my brain is generally doing that I am aware of when I am either conscious or dreaming.”’ and I tried, but was not able to do that:-)
Instead I began thinking what happens when I formulate (in words) a line I’m goint to type and then type it – and when I just type it.
Can we say that in the former case I first think it, then subvocalise, then type and in the second case I first think and then type? Or in the former case I first think (in words) and then type and in the second I think by typing? There does not seem to be much difference between typing and subvocalising…
I’m not sure if I am aware of any meaning of consciousness other than what Noetica calls “crasser”, “awareness” etc. “Awareness” is hardly less problematic.
Accordingly, I don’t quite understand people who explain that some people or animals have it and other do not.
I find that for me the process of formulating (in words) a line I’m going to type and then typing it is not that straightforward. It often happens that I think that I have a sentence clear in my mind, but when I type I find that there are still decisions to be made about the best word to use or details of the sentence construction.
I think it was Steven Pinker who suggested that we think in ‘mentalese’ and translate into words. This made sense to me as in my example above, and when in speaking I choose between words to express the shade of meaning that I want to convey, which implies that the thought was not already in words.
Sometimes I think via “inner monologue/dialogue.” It doesn’t mean I hear voices in my head; rather, I simply talk or dispute with myself, sometimes silently, sometimes in a whisper. But I’ve always regarded this mode of thinking as shallow and childish. Proper thinking, in my mental world, is deeper than language and original thought has to be translated into human language.
Pinker may be wrong about many things but his “mentalese” theory makes sense to me. Even if it’s flawed, Pinker is on home turf here. He only gets in big trouble when he ventures into alien fields like statistics.
The post is not absolutely crazy.
Obviously, a prson like me or JWB can use language in thinking more or less (cf. Y: “I slipped into thinking in words at some point when I was a kid, and quickly shed off the habit”). We even can speculate which particular skills may benefit from doint it “more” [than I do currently] or in some optimal combination.
It’s the experience as a whole which is unfamiliar.
I see Alexander goes in hard against Jaynes focuses heavily on “bicamerality” . I suppose in 1977 left-brain : right-brain was a big buzz. I remember in 1980’s suffering Management Training that traditional management over-emphasises right brain, whereas winning hearts needed left-brain appeals. (Or was it the other way round? It was total bollox, anyway.)
Research on brain bicamerality has validated the ‘bollox’ assessment AFAICT. Alexander: recent research has not been kind to any theories too reliant on hemispheric lateralization.
Are there population-wide correlations between left-handedness and … anything? (Maybe difficulty in writing l-to-r scripts? Now that we’re all on keyboards, that’s probably disappeared.)
By the way, I meant to comment on the unusual word in this sentence: “A few years ago, someone rediscovered/invented tulpamancy, the idea of cultivating multiple personalities on purpose because it’s cool.” Never heard of it, but there’s a Wiktionary entry: “(neologism) The culture and practice of talking to tulpas (autonomous thoughtforms).” And tulpa is:
Tulpas (or at least Lynch’s take on the concept) feature prominently in the latest even-weirderer series of Twin Peaks.
When this matter was discussed previously, and some people were asking “How is it possible to think without language?”, I wanted to say “How is it possible to think with language? Does that mean you can’t think any faster than you can talk?”
I think (heh) for me it means my mind is continually throwing out verbalizations of whatever processes are going on (“whatever my brain is generally doing that I am aware of when I am either conscious or dreaming”) behind the scenes. If I’m in another language mode for whatever reason, those verbalizations may be in French, Spanish, or Russian (the usual suspects). I certainly don’t suppose my thought-activities (“whatever my brain is generally doing”) are carried on in language, but I also can’t imagine accessing them with my conscious mind without the aid of language. The phenomenon described in the Reddit thread is alien to me.
@LH but what about say, geometry problems? Solving them requires creativity and spatial imagination.
I use some language in doing jigsaw puzzles. For instance, “let’s group all the pieces with red over here.” The primary work of putting pieces together is not verbal.
I would agree that my mind is routinely throwing out verbal descriptions of what I’m doing, and some of those verbalizations may occasionally lead to recognitions, but the bulk of the processing work seems to be happening elsewhere, as far as I can tell.
@LH but what about say, geometry problems? Solving them requires creativity and spatial imagination.
I’m not very good at geometry problems.
When I think without words it’s
I also find it hard to say if I think in words. It feels more like I am thinking thoughts, then articulating them if needed.
One thing that strikes me, though, is that I will occasionally use concepts from a foreign language when thinking. This suggests that words and their semantics do have a reality in thinking. One example that I can think of is the Japanese term 迷惑 meiwaku, which can be translated into English as ‘to cause inconvenience, disturbance, trouble for others’. I personally do think in terms of meiwaku as a concept. Of course this is not a particularistic concept — I know it occurs in most, if not all, cultures — but is not linking them all into a single semantic concept an illustration of the role of words? And thinking in terms of avoiding meiwaku surely shows that our thoughts are expressed in ‘words’. Or perhaps this is just another case where it’s not possible to really know if we are thinking in words or not.
I always thought of “The Origin of Consciousness …” as one of those elaborate hoaxes which demand admiration for the ingenious and intricate nature of its construction. Like “The White Goddess” or “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”.
I recently saw an article speculating that, because ancient texts, such as Homer, don’t have a word for “blue”, that indicates that Bronze Age people had a visual system more limited in wavelength than modern people.
The book is like that, but blown up to gargantuan proportions.
(Although I now know that the backstory of HBHG is a bit weirder than I originally thought.)
This reminds me of some passages from Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir. In addition to baboon studies, he also had various interactions with local Kenyans.
I tried trimming this down. It’s not until now that I realize how very stream-of-consciousness the narrative is.
There’s another couple of paragraphs on the same topic many chapters later:
I note that Sapolsky did his field work in the 1970s through the 1990s. I don’t know how much Kenya may have changed in the ~3 decades since.
Oh, that wasn’t what I was expecting after such a build-up. I was expecting (what might be the other half) “she hears the wrong voices” — that is, channeling personas/deities that aren’t usually voiced/don’t usually speak/don’t say stuff like that.
Is it not only that killing goats is a male prerogative, but also that there’s care and ritual in the butchering? Presumably in order to cook/eat the goat(?)
1. I seem to remember part of Jaynes’ argument was that a genetic predisposition to hearing and obeying an imaginary God’s or chief’s voice conveyed an advantage to larger groupings, enabling them to cooperate, settle disputes without collapsing in to anarchy, etc., offsetting the evolutionary disadvantage of missing the odd predator because busy taking a call from God.
2. You could probably say that all human non-extended-family groupings rely on some sort of mass psychosis (or, if one prefers, shared myths) in order to function. In this case, the mad one is the one whose individual psychosis overrides his (ok, this was a she, but I think numbers favour the male here) allegiance to the “normal” mass psychosis. If you prefer a more precise metaphor, if members of a society are like coupled cars on a track, it is easy for members to see when a car has uncoupled and left the track.
In Sapolsky’s smug anecdote Rhoda’s “She’s crazy. Can’t you just see from how she acts?” seems pretty justifiable to me. I don’t find Sapolsky’s posturing quite as amusing he he himself seems to. No doubt he enjoys gently mocking (as he supposes) the ways of amusing foreigners in general. Such people are common.
Schizophrenia is common in Africa, and the provision for dealing humanely with those afflicted is generally minimal. Deep anthropological analysis in aid of diagnosis only called for if you subscribe to R D Laing bollocks about such things. These things are really not difficult, Sapolsky.
I was trying to remember who Rhoda was, so I found the paragraph that introduces her:
So while she had more than one perspective on the world, she had no actual training in diagnostics, and Sapolsky had no reason to think that she might have a sophisticated theory of insanity.
I have a vague memory of watching a video of Sapolsky describing some sort of diagnostic test for clinical sociopathy. And he looked at the test, and applied it to himself, and found that he himself met quite a few of the criteria.
I’m not sure if the conclusion was that the tests are problematic, or that he himself is problematic, or both.
Yeah, I don’t think many groups of people, whatever their views on magic, voices, and the like, have much trouble identifying when somebody is having a severe psychotic break in public.
@Brett, there are cultures where such people are thought to be possessed by spirits, they go to the [cleric] the cleric reads [holy text], the person screams, and the spirit gets expelled from his victim’s body. Then the person is fine.
I’m pretty sure that even in such cultures there are people who are not thought to be possessed by spirits but are considered just plain crazy. People are not blind or stupid. (I trust you are not under the delusion that all crazy people could be cured by a shaman saying the right words.)
a person sitting alone is assumed to be (silently) conversing with their own win “spiritual individuality, genius.” I’ve always imagined this as describing essentially the experience of just thinking your own thoughts to yourself
One Ainu word for “think” is yay-nu, literally “listen to oneself.” Worth trying every once in a while.
When I think without words it’s
(tips hat)
Jaynes is obviously ridiculously wrong, but wrong in interestingly thought-provoking ways.
His theories would make a great concept for a science fiction novel. (Indeed, I imagine that they already have done, though I can’t immediately think of an example.)
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, IIRC.
AFAIK the Kusaasi have (or used to have, prior the the European invasions) no concept of spirit possession. (The relevant Bible verses translate “he is possessed by an evil spirit” as “a bad kikirig follows him”, leveraging the translationese use of kikirig, generally rendered “fairy” in the local Ghanaian English, for “devil, demon”, a concept absent from the traditional Kusaasi worldview.)
On the other hand, they have some perfectly good words for “mad”, readily reconstructable to proto-Western Oti-Volta.
@drasvi: I have mentioned a few times that I took Magic, Witchcraft, and the Spirit World in college. One of the things we discussed was how forms of spirit contact (Professor James Howe’s preferred term) were extremely culturally bound. Whether people were possessed, or had visions, or spoke in tongues, was determined by their societal environment. Certain forms of atypical, seemingly irrational behavior were accepted as (more or less) normal occurrences, but generic schizoid behavior was not. Frequently, the “allowed” episodes provided outlets for people (often low-status women) to express dissatisfaction with their circumstances and to have their issues addressed, without upsetting the existing power structure. Someone who is possessed by a demon (or abducted by an alien) is most typically stressed, pained, searching for fulfillment and affirmation. When the community accepts the reality of the condition and comes together to assist and to treat the possession, that confirms the sufferer’s importance and attractiveness and gives them time to recuperate and develop arrangements for further, more mundane assistance in the future.
even in such cultures there are people who are not thought to be possessed by spirits but are considered just plain crazy
The usual Standard Arabic word for “crazy” is literally “possessed by jinn” (majnūn). The current use of the term doesn’t even automatically entail a belief in jinn; but most people do, and the semantic shift suggests that the distinction was not considered particularly important.
Are you saying that people who speak Arabic do not acknowledge the existence of insanity in the medical sense (schizophrenia, paranoia, etc.) — it’s all just jinns, and can be dealt with by some sort of exorcism? Because I find that hard to believe. Needless to say, etymology is neither destiny nor semantics.
Of course not! But it is a clue about the past. No one had a concept of schizophrenia before the 20th century anyway, Arabic-speaking or not. Probably doctors in previous centuries would have drawn a distinction between “medical” insanity and possession (with schizophrenia falling squarely under the latter, obviously.) My hazy memories of premodern medical practice suggest that the former would involve humoral imbalances, to be treated by changes of diet or sleep patterns or music or the like. But most people aren’t doctors, and the generalisation of majnūn to “crazy” in general suggests that at some point they saw the distinction as just a pedantic detail.
Oh, OK, I didn’t realize you were talking only about the past — thanks for clarifying!
And he looked at the test, and applied it to himself, and found that he himself met quite a few of the criteria.
I’m not sure if the conclusion was that the tests are problematic, or that he himself is problematic, or both.
I don’t think it has to be either. It’s well-known that merely reading a list of the signs and symptoms of a specific mental disease tends to make the reader believe that they themselves have the condition in question.
Jaynes’s theories would make a great concept for a science fiction novel.
Harry Turtledove’s short story “Bluff” is specifically about this idea: the aliens turn out to have bicameral minds, but the situation is unstable and beginning to break down, starting with traders and soldiers who interact with other bicameral societies with different gods. After the story was published in Analog, Jaynes wrote to Turtledove saying he had liked the story and found that it represented his ideas well, to Turtledove’s considerable relief. Turtledove’s later fantasy novel Between the Rivers is based on a similar set of ideas, but without the external visiting-Earthman perspective of “Bluff”.
Back to the original topic.
Language production is a conscious activity. When you speak you are aware that you do. It is interesting because of the association between speech and awareness in the OP.
Whether it is unique in the concentration it requires, it is one activity you are always aware of.
Another fact (possibly related to this awareness) is that langage is either directed at someone or addressed by someone to you (I know, LH believes that language is not merely for communication, but I think he will agree that communication is an important part). It is interactive.
I also beleive it is recursive… No, I don’t associate “recursion” with Chomsky. I mean recursive in the sense: your choice of forms when it is not habitual/formulaic can be based on somewhat recursive calculations like “if I say this she’ll think that I think that I think that …”.
Daniel Everett, Don’t Look, There Are Snakes, p. xvi:
I have occasionally tried to figure out if there is a point in a recursion like he knows that she knows that … the dog is dead where both parties have exactly the same model of the other’s state of mind. Or is it like continued fractions where the infinite series can express an irrational or even transcendental number, but cutting it off at any stage leaves you with a rational number?
Does the result change if you assume that both parties are language and logic nerds like yourself and will model the outcome of the infinite series for themself and the other?
@lars
How good are you at remembering directions to an unfamiliar destination involving a number of direction changes? I do not mean “proceed at X compass bearing for a distance of N metres….” but “turn left at the second set of traffic lights…”. I suspect that the answer depends on “what are the consequences if I navigate incorrectly?” perhaps more than on your mapping or logical recursion abilities.
a recursion like he knows that she knows that …
Grice (talking of nerds) did some ur-quantification of this recursing/reciprocating in the cooperative principle. After only a few cycles, if he knows that she knows that he knows the dog is dead, she knows that he knows that she knows that the dog is dead, then both parties can infer all higher cycles of knowing-otherness. We presume each party can verify for themselves the liveness of the dog.
It works because a mind can’t keep secrets from itself — ex hypothesi, YMMV.
It gets trickier if one party is trying to deceive the other in some sort of double-bluff. But that’s for mutually promised undertakings/contracts, or for relying on some other’s claims, not independently verifiable facts about the world.
My lecturer in ‘mathematical political theory’ also was pioneering longitudinal quantification of ‘the iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma’, where if both parties know they’re going to go through the challenge repeatedly (but don’t know exactly how many times), they’ll in effect appear to be co-operating out of mutual interest. Which might or might not be a way to model ‘tactical voting’ in electoral systems with Proportional Representation. And for political aspirants who know the electorate will remember what they claimed last time. YPMV (Your Politician Might Vary.)
@pp, I’d probably be pretty bad at “random” sequences of turns, but this is more like “turn left and right at alternate corners until you see a dead dog”. I can do that, I think.
(In most cities, such a set of directions is a witness to the director not understanding the main grid. If I can tell someone “Go straight west to the Birmingham road and turn right, then straight north for 6 lights and you’ll be at the town hall” I feel that I’ve done something useful. My ex-wife hated when I did that, she preferred to construct a route from little local patches that she was confident in and was happy as long as each patch brought us “closer” to the goal in some sense — possibly just in the sense of being more confident that we could actually get there eventually — so going to some crossing of main roads out of the usual haunts was not on).
I’m squarely in the camp of putting thoughts in words when I’m thinking. Whether that’s the actual thinking process or some simultaneous translation from mentalese, I can’t tell. But I am able to solve purely visual problems (with my job, mostly where to put what graphic element on a powerpoint slide) by manipulating images in my head without talking to myself.
I do a lot of thinking in language, but that’s not my only mode of thinking. I remember a discussion I had with my mother when I was in elementary school about whether it was possible to think about certain kinds of things without forming them into words. (We did not come to any firm conclusions.) In any case, I have definitely observed the phenomenon of thinking in mentalese. Sometimes, I have a statement in my head, which feels like it is completely and explicitly laid out in words; however, when I then go to say or write it, it turns out that there are some pieces that my mentalese version had not completely specified, and which I need to decide on the fly as I speak or type.
I just ran across a post from 2010 quoting Tom Lubbock’s account of his brain tumor and consequent loss of control over speech and writing, which makes interesting reading in this context; a couple of bits:
That seems to be most of what I think.
The rest, though, is in images or motions/”muscle memory” (probably all with emotions attached – have I complained about the kolinahr fallacy recently…). For example, when I need to plan my movements because they’re of kinds I can’t leave to the cerebellum (climbing a tree, running down a muddy hill so I need to plan very fast where exactly to step…), there’s no language involved.
Supposedly yes: a recent and long history of fighting. In the West some 10% of the population are left-handed; there are more peaceful societies where there are only 5%; and there are warlike societies where the advantage of surprise that a left-handed fighter apparently has is so great that there are 20%.
This implies, BTW, that lefthandedness has, or comes with, a Darwinian disadvantage by default. I have no idea what that could be, and my source never brought this up.
That source was… something popularizing I read a long time ago. Sorry. :-/
I can read much faster than I can articulate, and there’s obviously language processing involved in that. Whether I can think in language faster than I can read I have no idea.
The immense progress of recent decades has replaced this by a tendency to dispense hydroxychloroquine…
That’s a bit of a matter of definition. Some people are capable of falling asleep while talking – in the middle of a sentence that suddenly turns into a random sequence of random, but normally articulated, words.
In my case, AFAIK, it only turns out that some of the pieces aren’t specified in the language I need to put this in – they’re simply in another, and I forgot to make sure I can translate them.
Some people are capable of falling asleep while talking …
Grandmother Tells a Ghost Story, with stage direction ‘grandmother goes to sleep’ about 1:40.
This implies, BTW, that lefthandedness has, or comes with, a Darwinian disadvantage by default.
According to what my wife said vs. what my daughter says, it’s a matter of chronic stress from being coerced into right-handed uniformity in many things from writing to which hand holds the knife when eating. (The tendency to coercion has diminished over time.) Statistics on right-handed and southpaw pitchers show that while the latter have a definite advantage when playing baseball, they don’t tend to live as long.
As I have often told my left-handed daughter, left-handed woman are all witches. (She seems OK with the idea.)
How globally widespread has that ever been, though?
It was certainly usual in my father’s day: he (also left-handed) was made to write right-handed, and he still does. It doesn’t seem to have done either his handwriting or his personality any particular damage, though.
Some people are capable of falling asleep while talking …
Presumably this depends on how boring you are. It puts me in mind of an exchange from Leo Rosten (I think) along the lines of
Patient: Doctor! You have to help me. I talk to myself all the time.
Doctor: I really wouldn’t worry about it. Lots of people talk to themselves. It’s quite normal.
Patient: But Doc, you don’t know what a nudnik I am!
Yes, it was universal in the West until quite recently, but my source’s claim spanned the globe and enough centuries for natural selection.
An interesting thread that I only just noticed. I think my responses are running a little long – and that’s with skipping a few where I wasn’t very sure what exactly I wanted to say…
And I recently discovered that some people imagine things by seeing pictures inside their head, which I don’t. Turns out that most people see the pictures. (If you aren’t sure which group you are in: Imagine a horse galloping past you. Now, is it galloping to the right or the left? If your answer is “Huh?” then you don’t see the pictures.)
Apparently it’s called “aphantasia”.
I heard that some people go very far in the other direction: their mental images are so vivid that they can almost confuse them for reality. I fortunately don’t seem to have this.
(In my case, the horse is galloping from behind, slightly to the right of me but roughly perpendicular to the right-left direction. Also, I think it might actually be trotting.)
That the (non-interpolated) text of Iliad locates Achilles’ fears in his guts rather than a construct of ‘mind’ strikes me as no evidence for anything. I wouldn’t locate my mental life any particular place; I’m not aware of my brain ‘buzzing’ any more than any other part of my anatomy.
There’s the infamous story (not sure how true) that the ancient Egyptians tried to preserve all the organs of a (high-status) dead person except the brain, because they thought that the brain isn’t actually used for anything and consequently wouldn’t be needed in the underworld.
AFAIK active thinking does seem to correlate with headaches, but this could easily be merely an artifact of cultural knowledge that thinking goes in the head.
IIRC fear, in particular, being placed in the guts (or thereabouts) is a common metaphor in many languages into the modern day, or at least into the 20th century. (In Russian it’s commonly the spleen, AFAIK.)
By the way, I meant to comment on the unusual word in this sentence: “A few years ago, someone rediscovered/invented tulpamancy, the idea of cultivating multiple personalities on purpose because it’s cool.” Never heard of it, but there’s a Wiktionary entry: “(neologism) The culture and practice of talking to tulpas (autonomous thoughtforms).”
Previously on LH.
Incidentally, when the review was written (June 2020) – and indeed when the linked comment was written (November 2020) – the phrase in brackets had read “magical creatures or imaginary friends”.
In January 2021, a practicing tulpamancer who really didn’t like this phrasing changed it to “thoughtforms capable of independent action, with a persistent personality and identity”; this was quickly reverted, and then rephrased again by the same (unregistered) contributor as “autonomous mental constructs with a persistent personality and identity”.
The current phrasing (which puts “thoughtforms” back in) dates from March 2023.
My ex-wife hated when I did that, she preferred to construct a route from little local patches that she was confident in and was happy as long as each patch brought us “closer” to the goal in some sense — possibly just in the sense of being more confident that we could actually get there eventually — so going to some crossing of main roads out of the usual haunts was not on
This is actually a not-necessarily-bad idea if you’re in a city that is not entirely built on a grid, such that local incongruencies in the grid can make a direct two-part route significantly longer and/or significantly more inconvenient.
In one route I commonly took in Izmaylovo (a relatively griddy bit of Moscow), going north and then west took me a good deal farther north than required; going west and then north took me a good deal farther south than required; and my usual route involved a complicated (and varying) combination of both westward and northward directions.
Of course if your city is not on a grid at all you’re often better off looking on a map anyway, because there could be a shortcut to your destination that is a lot shorter than the obvious route but that you wouldn’t necessarily think of because it goes in a non-obvious direction.
Sometimes, I have a statement in my head, which feels like it is completely and explicitly laid out in words; however, when I then go to say or write it, it turns out that there are some pieces that my mentalese version had not completely specified, and which I need to decide on the fly as I speak or type.
In my case, AFAIK, it only turns out that some of the pieces aren’t specified in the language I need to put this in – they’re simply in another, and I forgot to make sure I can translate them.
I think I’ve had both at various times? Certainly phrases from dreams can feel like that, but that’s a general tendency of dreams.
I’ve also noticed a few cases where the mental version included some grammatical specifications that were not actually represented in English. It’s a strange feeling to be assembling a sentence in English and have a strong impression that a particular adjective or verb should take feminine agreement.
(Side-note: English has it so nice with gender agreement that only shows up in third-person pronouns, and that with plenty of nonbinary options. In Russian you can’t say “Sam was nice” without specifying whether Sam was male, female, or neuter; Hebrew is the same except you don’t even get the neuter option.
I wonder if there are “nonbinary” West Africans who would prefer to be referred to with one of the nonhuman noun classes.)
I can read much faster than I can articulate, and there’s obviously language processing involved in that. Whether I can think in language faster than I can read I have no idea.
In my case I always assumed that I can, at least, think in language faster than I can articulate [note for comparison with further figures: the human articulatory limit is on the order of 300-500 wpm, though some exceptional cases can allow slightly higher speeds]. Whether I can think in language at least as fast as I can read, I have no idea.
The reason this is so confusing to me is that my reading (as far as I could tell) is, effectively, super-skimming: AFAICT it’s combining speed-reading techniques with skimming techniques to produce reading speeds approaching (and sometimes exceeding) 2000 wpm, but with skimming-level comprehension/retention (previously on LH; I think I might have mentioned it a few more times but I’m not sure how to search for that).
This means my brain probably gets away with not necessarily being able to directly process everything on the page by reconstructing the intermediate bits. (Obviously I can’t tell for sure, and obviously in any case there’s a ton of under-the-hood complexity that I can only vaguely approximate at.)
So I don’t actually know if I’m doing language processing at 2000 wpm (or faster) when I’m reading; presumably some place in my brain must be, but this might easily happen at a level well below that of conscious thought. I do seem to be able to think pretty fast, though.
The brain also just rots too fast.
Heraclitus supposedly: “A blow to the head can confuse a man’s thinking, a blow to the foot has no such effect, this cannot be due to an immortal soul.”
Yes, and strenuously trying to follow a conversation in a language I know just well enough for that gives me a localized headache – evidently in both frontotemporal lobes.
I wonder if there are “nonbinary” West Africans who would prefer to be referred to with one of the nonhuman noun classes.
Not in any language I know of*: referring to people with non-human concords is usually pejorative (unsurprisingly.) There’s also not a lot of point in it, with languages in which biological sex is completely irrelevant to grammatical gender anyway. It may be different in Chadic languages, but if they have gender at all, they don’t have a neuter that you could choose, anyway: just masculine and feminine.
In the Volta-Congo languages there tend to be lots of nouns in non-human classes that do refer to people, but they then take human-class agreement instead of the class-determined “grammatical gender” agreement; in Swahili, nouns referring to animals do this too. Swahili nouns placed in non-human classes secondarily, in order to produce affective senses like “dear little” or “lumbering great”, can take the corresponding class agreement, but even that is more usual with pejoratives.
Kusaal doesn’t have noun-class-based agreement any more, but only three of its seven morphological noun classes contain all sorts of nouns referring to people (and one of those probably got all its human-reference nouns through historical sound changes which led to them being thrown out of the original core “human-only” class); of the other four, three never refer to people, and the fourth is pejorative when used for people (typical human-reference members: “fool”, “coward”, “ugly person”, “slave.”)
* A tiny subset of all the West African languages that there are, though, of course.