Can you think of anything without words? At first that seems hard. Everything we think about is precoded in definitions and semantical structures that give it meaning. But focus now on a sensation. The color red for example. Or a headache. Summon the experience--the quality--of that datum clearly without recourse to words. It's kinda hard, but it IS possible. Red...that strangely hot visual sensation that glows and radiates off of blood and apples and stop signs. Headache..that deep dull sharpness that pulses behind your eyeballs. But these are still just words. Try to envision a qualia without description or example. Feel it as it is in it's raw presence. This is an exercise in awareness. An isometric of purely extrospected being. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Like most people on the planet, I can't remember anything from my earliest months. Or even during the learning period of language acquisition, where probably little more than quasi-psittacism is transpiring. (That is, one could be outwardly talking at age two but still be "thinking" internally the way an animal does). That common absence of recollected content is at least one thing that possibly prevents Daniel Dennet's belief here from being completely outlandish. In the context of which [subjectiveness dependent upon language], even if there were buried memories of having some kind of consciousness of events from a toddler era, this subjective-less variety might be consigned to a data-storage mode fit for a p-zombie. Ergo a reason for the blankness of it. I feel that sufferers of aphasia at best have a difficulty recalling particular words / syntax at times, and a total lack of being able to verbally communicate doesn't necessarily reflect "nothing at all" is going on language-wise in their thoughts. In years past, anyhow, it was notoriously difficult to track down any doctor / researcher who had curiosity and interest in figuring out / verifying what such supposed "radical cases" of aphasia were substituting for words in their thoughts. As well as accounts directly from "recovered-from-aphasia" patients clarifying much of anything detail-wise in regard to their claims or what they actually meant. If literally true, then one reflexively assumes it would have to be the way Temple Grandin claims she thinks below. Except that this can't be wholly the situation since she would have to convert sensory impressions into descriptions / language when she communicated to others. "Since animals do not have verbal language, they have to store memories as pictures, sounds, or other sensory impressions." And sensory-based information, she [Grandin] says, is inherently more detailed than word-based memories. "As a person with autism, all my thoughts are in photo-realistic pictures," she explains. "The main similarity between animal thought and my thought is the lack of verbal language." --Do Animals Think Like Autistic Savants?
Potentially removing most "non-immediate" cognition from experience, that extended "understanding" of presented objects or environmental circumstances falling out of booking learning, products of inference, classification schemes and other language dependent processes (at least for humans). Getting truly lost in the "now" of the manifestations themselves, with only the impetus of conditioned and instinctive body responses providing any "meaning" for them.
It is possible to "think nothing", but the feeling is more like cognition: you are not verbalising your thought, but rather simply "thinking." When young (thirteen or fourteen) I was thinking "nothing" but I became aware of "time". It sounds rather stereotypical given a world of time travellers but it's true: the skill I gained was one of time. However such cognition costs: you may use time to discover truth in a study but it TAKES TIME! After becoming aware of time I wondered what the future would be like, and what my grandmother would say about what I had discovered. My grandmother had passed away shortly earlier and this coupled with the question of the future gave me a vision of my own grave, with me buried below the ground and the world simply continuing above ground without me. After I pass away my Mother will returned from the future (my death and grave) and accuse me of abusing her (something she has already done) to which I reply: no, I love you. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Possibly I possess the only human mind that has mastered being able to think any (even quite complex) thoughts without referencing it to a single word in any human language. This is much easier if you understand what is the single concept in every dictionary of every human language that is not self-referential. That concept is simply length. I worked for a time managing a calibration laboratory, and basically every single measurement on every single instrument reduced to this. Of course it did. All of our senses process the world in this way. Light reaching our eyes measure length by estimating parallax and perspective; colors by retinal cell estimation of wavelengths, sounds by resonance with different length hairs attached to neurons. A computer works on data converted to binary numbers. Our minds collect and organize sensory data characterized by sensory responses corresponding to external stimuli that are analogs of various lengths. Who were our greatest minds? Newton and Einstein come to mind. What principally did their brilliant minds deal with at its most fundamental level? But asking anyone what a length actually is, is comparable to asking a computer AI what a number is. Do you think it could answer? Neither can we.
Most people do most of their thinking in words. But people whose work or avocation requires them to think in other ways spend more time thinking non-verbally than we do. Carpenters, photographers, dancers, pianists, sculptors, arborists, etc.
I agree! If only philosophers could accomplish the same (thinking without words or symbols), the world would be a whole lot less full of circular or treadmill reasoning. I do blame symbology for this singularly unproductive activity. It isn't even communication really; just verbose ambiguous and equivocated gobbledegook.
The natural collective human language is actually visual based. Verbal language is not universal in the same way. People from all cultures, can see an apple on the table, because the visual energy or photons from the apple and table enter the eyes in the same way for all. On the other hand, different people from different cultures will label this with different words/sounds. Verbal language is cultural and not universal. If you had a Chinese and a French person, they can both see the same apple on the table. However, each will call it something different, since verbal is not universal in terms of the audio waves, like visual is to light waves. Visual is innate within the brain, while verbal and written language is a manmade invention. The need for the invention of language was connected to movement of data between people. Although I/we can all see the apple on the table, it is not easy for me to transfer the image in my mind, unless you are close and I can point. Spoken language was invented as a way to transmit the collective visual data, when it was difficult to transfer the data. If I say apple on the table, you can visualize this, allowing me to transfer the visualization. One does not need words to be conscious to think, since words came second as an invention about 6000-10000 years ago. However, it would difficult to transfer any complex visualizations to others, unless there was a subtle language to act a transmission link to another person's visual centers. Say a scientist goes to the rain forest and finds a new species of plant. It sees it before it has a name. From his mind's eye, he might then describe it with close words so others can begin to see it, remotely, from his description. He also gets to name it, with this language link coming last. When language was being invented and developed, visualizations by authors, spawned new words that helped to compact the transmission link. Males tend to be more visual and female more verbal. This suggests it may be easier for men to visualize without language. From an evolutionary POV the male needs to be in contact with universal reality for survival. Rhetoric does not help even of it fluff things out. Science is not about cultural nuance, but universals analogous to collective visuals. The scientific method was not about the subjectivity of language. The verbal aspect of the female is more about cultural uniqueness and the memory capacitance of verbal associations for visuals. A more feminized culture would be expected to drift away from universals into cultural dissociations connected to language; diversity.
I've done carpentry and sculpture. Sometimes I find it difficult to put thoughts into words. I'll have a brilliant response to a post but when I go to type it in, there's nothing.
If all your knowledge comes from books, then your mind would think primarily in words. But if you learn from doing, then learning by seeing becomes more important, allowing you to also think based on visual imagery. For example, if you were a dancer learning a new dance step, it may be difficult for someone to use only words to explain what needs to be done from another room. A meeting of the minds will be easier, if there is also a demonstration of the dance step, so there is a visual template. One of the reasons this is so, is words can become too slow to explain in real time something that has too much nuance. The higher speed of visual would also explain why you can think of something in your minds eye, but have a tough time putting it into words. You start out fast and once you slow down the visualization to language, the thought may change away from the whole as your focus on a detail. The value of spoken language is connected to slowing down reality, so it becomes easier to notice details. The carpenter may do a task with ease, but it may take an entire chapter in a book to break it down in a way, one can learn via books and language. If you need speed, you can have him show you. Education is often a combination of showing and then book learning, to detail the nuances via the microscope of language. The way the brain is set up language is processed in the left brain, while our visual language is processed in both sides of the brain. The left brain is differential causing language to differentiate reality into details. The right brain is more spatial. When we see the environment, we notice the big picture; awe of the landscape. We can also zoom in and focus on a particular aspect within the landscape. The zoom is easier to translation with language. The spatial aspect of the visual is not easy to translate with spoken language, since the amount of visual detail is high requiring too many words to set up the visual. Normally the imagination will use an internal visualization to fill in the words, allowing us to see the intent of the author, as he/she describes the scene. A good experiment is to climb a mountain or sky scraper and look at the distant landscape. Next, try to describe all the details you see. This language link is to slow to show how it all integrates into a whole; something is lost in translation. With me, I am not good remembering names, but I can remember people in terms of visual context. I can describe the scene of the meeting and even what was talked about, but the name will escape me. My brain prefers visual and it takes effort to slow the visual down into language. Sometime my writing gets fuzzy, trying to maintain visual speed with written language; esoteric. Other times I can slow it down and paint good pictures of a snap shot of the visual.
