[balamatom]

I'm definitely a stream of words.

My "abstract thoughts" are a stream of words too, they just don't get sounded out.

Tbf I'd rather they weren't there in the first place.

But bodies which refuse to harbor an "interiority" are fast-tracked to destruction because they can't suf^W^W^W be productive.

Funny movie scene from somewhere. The sergeant is drilling the troops: "You, private! What do you live for!", and expects an answer along the lines of dying for one's nation or some shit. Instead, the soldier replies: "Well, to see what happens next!"

[d-lisp]

I doubt words are involved when we e.g. solve a mathematical problem.

To me, solving problems happens in a logico/aesthetical space which may be the same as when you are intellectually affected by a work of art. I don't remember myself being able to translate directly into words what I feel for a great movie or piece of music, even if in the late I can translate this "complex mental entity" into words, exactly like I can tell to someone how we need to change the architecture of a program in order to solve something after having looked up and right for a few seconds.

It seems to me that we have an inner system that is much faster than language, that creates entities that can then beslowly and sometimes painfully translated to language.

I do note that I'm not sure about any of the previous statements though'

[balamatom]

My wordmangling and mathsolving happen in that sort of logico/aesthetical space, too!

The twist about words in particular is they are distinctly articulable symbols, i.e. you can sound 'em out - and thus, presumably, have a reasonable expectation for bearers of the same language to comprehend if not what you meant then at least some vaguely predictable meaning-cloud associated with the given speech act.

That's unlike e.g. the numbers (which are more compressed, and thus easier to get wrong), or the syntagms of a programming language (which don't even have a canonical sonic representation).

Therefore, it's usually words that are taught to a mind during the formative stages of its emergence. That is, the words that you are taught, your means of inner reflection, are still sort of an imposition from the outside.

Just consider what you life trajectory would've been if in your childhood you had refused to learn any words, or learned them and then refused to mistake them for the things they represent!

Infants and even some animals recognize their reflection in a mirror; however, practically speaking, introspection is something that one needs to be taught: after recognizing your reflection you still need to be instructed what is to be done about it.

Unfortunately, introspection needing to be taught means that introspection can be taught wrongly.

As you can see with the archetypical case of "old and wise person does something completely stupid in response to communication via digital device", a common failure mode of how people are taught introspection (and, I figure, an intentional one!) is not being able to tell apart yourself from your self, i.e. not having an intuitive sense of where the boundary lies between perception and cognition, i.e. going through life without ever learning the difference between the "you" and the "words about you".

It's extremely common, and IMO an extremely factory-farming kind of tragic.

I say it must be extremely intentional as well, because the well-known practice of using "introspection modulators" to establish some sort of perceptual point of reference (such as where the interior logicoaeshtetical space ends and exterior causalityspace begins) very often ends up with the user in, well, a cage of some sort.

[d-lisp]

What is your point exactly in regard to what I said earlier, how would you rephrase what you just said as a philosophical/epistemological statement ?

> It's extremely common

I cannot conceive this ? I am lacking the empirical knowledge you seem to have. (I don't understand your "archetypical case", I can't relate to it). I'd love a reexplanation of your point here, as your intent is unclear to me.

I didn't understand also the "introspection modulators" part :(, (a well known practice ?? I must be living on another planet haha...).

edit: or maybe that's a metaphor for "language" ??

[A4ET8a8uTh0_v2]

<< My "abstract thoughts" are a stream of words too, they just don't get sounded out.

Hmm, seems unlikely. They are not sounded out part is true, sure, but I question whether 'abstract thoughts' can be so easily dismissed as mere words.

edit: come to think of it and I am asking this for a reason: do you hear your abstract thoughts?

[carb]

Different people have different levels of internal monologuing or none at all. I don't generally think with words in sentences in my head, but many people I know do.

[jibal]

Internal monologue is a like a war correspondent's report of the daily battle. The journalist didn't plan or fight the battle, they just provided an after-the-fact description. Likewise the brain's thinking--a highly parallelized process involving billions of neurons--is not done with words.

Play a little game of "what word will I think of next?" ... just let it happen. Those word choices are fed to the monologue, they aren't a product of it.

[A4ET8a8uTh0_v2]

Hmm, yes, but, and it is not a small but, do people -- including full blown internal monologue people - think thoughts akin to:

move.panic.fear.run

that effectively becomes one thought and not a word exactly. I am stating it like this, because I worry that my initial point may have been lost.

edit: I can only really speak for myself, but I am curious how people might respond to the distinction.

[balamatom]

>do you hear your abstract thoughts?

Most of the fucking time, and I would prefer that I didn't. I even wrote that, lol.

I don't think they're really "mine", either. It's just all the stuff I heard somewhere, coalescing into potential verbalizations in response to perceiving my surroundings or introspecting my memory.

If you are a materialist positivist, well sure, the process underlying all that is some bunch of neural activation patterns or whatever; the words remain the qualia in which that process is available to my perception.

It's all cuz I grew up in a cargo cult - where not presenting the correct passwords would result in denial of sustenance, shelter, and eventually bodily integrity. While presenting the correct passwords had sufficient intimidation value to advance one's movement towards the "mock airbase" (i.e. the feeder and/or pleasure center activation button as provided during the given timeframe).

Furthermore - regardless whether I've been historically afforded any sort of choice in how to conceptualize my own thought processes, or indeed whether to have those in the first place - any entity which has actual power to determine my state of existence (think institutions, businesses, gangs, particularly capable individuals - all sorts of autonomous corpora) has no choice but to interpret me as either a sequence of words, a sequence of numbers, or some other symbol sequence (e.g. the ones printed on my identity documents, the ones recorded in my bank's database, or the metadata gathered from my online represence).

My first-person perspective, being constitutionally inaccessible to such entities, does not have practical significance to them, and is thus elided from the process of "self-determination". As far as anyone's concerned, "I" am a particular sequence of that anyone's preferred representational symbols. For example if you relate to me on the personal level, I will probably be a sequence of your emotions. Either way, what I may hypothetically be to myself is practically immaterial and therefore not a valid object of communication.

[throw4847285]

Then what are non-human animals doing?

[emp17344]

Excellent point. See also the failure of Sapir-Whorf to prove that language determines thought. I think we have plenty of evidence that, while language can influence thought, it is not thought itself. Many people invested in AI are happy to throw out decades of linguistic evidence that language and thought are separate.

[fc417fc802]

I was with you up to the last sentence. By what reasoning do you claim that LLMs only consist of words? The input and output are words but all the stuff in the middle - where the magic happens - does not appear to be quite that simple.

[balamatom]

Living and dying - and also, when humans are involved, being used.