https://www.quantamagazine.org/lean-computer-program-confirm...
That seems valid at first, but if look at that premise closely, you'll see that even assuming wordless thoughts always come first, doesn't mean that during the process of thinking they don't give way to words. That is to say, thoughts can be a precursor, but words do offer a framework which you can use structure thought.
That's specially handy for abstract concepts, like individuality, the split of the self and the world, which are fundamental to thought as we understand it through language.
Nothing prevents you from understanding a concept with the help of language and then using the concept by itself, detached from the symbols you used to arrive at it, to think. But that requires a certain effort and intention that maybe is what the article is aiming for.
is something many buddhists and hindus would consider an illusion and fundamental error
Some people have no inner voice, but aren't thoughtless automatons. They can still task-switch the same as everyone else.
I was with some friends that were in a band together, and we got thinking about this topic, and ended up arranging ourselves from least verbal to most verbal. I was on one end, where all of my thoughts appear as emotions or images; on the other end was our bassist, who experienced his thoughts as fully formed sentences. He said when he's getting to a difficult passage in a song the words "better focus here, don't mess up" will ring out in his head. He also said he has fully dictated mental conversations with himself.
I also read very quickly because I look at the shape of paragraphs and assemble the word-shapes into mental images and pick up meaning that way; high speed, but low comprehension. I struggle greatly to read philosophy because it's quite difficult to visualize. My wife reads slowly but hears every word in her head; her comprehension is much higher. I can do high comprehension reading by slowing down and looking at every word, but it feels like holding back an excitable dog.
I kind of understand what you mean about reading, I find I have to invest a lot of time to comprehend the same amount as others. If I encounter an unconventional style or shape of writing it’s much harder.
It makes me not very good at anagram/word rearranging/finding games where you have to test for a large number of possibilities.
Identifying and searching for morel mushrooms in the woods also feels largely nonverbal (although near a dying elm in late spring after a rain captures an essence of the idea, and those words provide a good starting point).
Coding ends in “words”, or at least some form of written language. But when I try to solve problems I do not think in words until it is time to put fingers to keyboard.
Words are useful (I could not convey this comment otherwise), but they’re not everything. It feels extremely difficult to convey my nonverbal thoughts through an inherently verbal medium like an HN comment. Perhaps to make a wordful analogy, the difficulty is like translating an idiom from one language to one of completely different context and origin.
I don’t deny that words do shape some of my thinking, but to me it’s just one part of the whole stream of conscious.
I’m curious if anyone else feels this way about words?
> If we can avoid the compression step, and do the manipulations directly in the high-dimensional, non-linguistic, conceptual space, we can move much faster
With my neurodivergent brain I've always conducted my thoughts in an "uncompressed format" and then eternally struggled to confine it all into words. Only then for people to misinterpret and question it. They might get caught up in the first sentence when the end of the paragraph is where you need to be!
That's why when you meet someone who thinks like you the depth of conversation and thinking you can achieve together is vast and also incredibly liberating! Your no longer limited by words in same way.
Since becoming ill I've suffered badly with brainfog. The cutesy name for a cruel experience. Sometimes there's no memories to draw on when your thinking, the cupboards are bare. You can't leap from thought to thought because they disappear before you get there or after like a cursed platformer. You might be able to grab hold of the thought but you can't reach inside or read it. It's all wrong somehow like when your suddenly convinced a word is spelt wrong even though you know it's right. You can't maintain focus long enough to finish your train of thought.
Even that subconscious processing is affected I used to prime my brain with information all day and instead of waking up with the solution I'll wake up frustrated but not knowing why. Just the vague notion that I failed at something that used to come so easily.
One pattern is that I'm a very prolific connection-forming machine.
Exhibit A: The first thing that enters my mind for each word. (OnePlus One) (android pattern unlock) (Islamic State) (unit vector named t) (ich bin) (emoji-blood-type-A) (Latin etymology word root with verily) (https://prolificusa.com/) (New York Times Connections) (roll-forming, blow moulding, sheet metal stamping...) ("my body is a machine" meme)
Are you a native German speaker? or additional language? (it's an interesting/seemingly-random association)
The rest is similar to my (dyslexic) reading process. From what I can tell, I coped by memorizing the "shape" or image of words and associated them other things/images/sounds/feeling/emotions/experiences or some other abstract things I don't know how to describe. The biggest issue is words like (is, that, a, etc) since the associations are weak at best, leading to them being disappeared/changed/moved or replaced by others in the same sentence/paragraph. Sometime when it's really messed up, leads to rereading a sentence or paragraph multiple times until the sequence of all of that makes sense.
But sounding out words is an absolute disaster no matter how much I try and fell behind in early grade school until my overwhelming need to not disappoint family, who were getting frustrated with me, kicked in and I developed my coping methods. It takes longer to read and learn new words but the associating and pattern matching resulted in my comprehension and language scores in school being so high no one picked up on how slow I read (or the disaster that reading aloud is) and how poorly I spell as being something off.
She had assumed that all people think in this mode. I had assumed that all people think in "thoughts" and went through a separate step to articulate them.
Made both of us aware of a difference in people.
I don't feel vibrations or sensations though, and I definitely don't think in images. I only have a thought level, and it's very independent of any external presentation.
wrp•2h ago
Although TFA doesn't refer to it by name, "insight" problem solving is when you are stuck on something and then suddenly realize the solution. The common explanation for being stuck is "fixation" on the wrong things. In agreement with TFA, there is indication that verbalization supports fixation more than visualization.