I've found that putting thoughts into words tends to crystalize them, giving them persistence. However, not every thought is put into words. For example, if I think about a solution to a plumbing problem, I visualize how pipes are connected, without putting the solution into words.
That seems like a reasonable summary: words are a set of tools we can use to understand some aspects of the world, but are not adequate to explain it all.
Having aphantasia, i have to draw everything that is out of sight. Weirdly a lot of people with aphantasia are in the creative fields but usually in a more practical setting like graphic designer or set designer / builder
I'm strongest in verbal intelligence, but I have the odd problem of frequently failing to be able to remember people's names--even when I recognize their faces and even can tell them their life stories back to them. Perhaps not so oddly, I was recently talking to an old classmate of mine, and we were trying to recall all our other classmates from elementary school (that's for kids aged six to eleven--for any non-Americans reading this). During this exercise, I was having trouble coming up with more than a handful of names--or even nameless faces. But then I started running through my mental map of the neighborhood where I grew up. I could identify every house where a classmate of mine lived. Sometimes that jogged my memory as to their name--and sometimes it didn't. But it does demonstrate an odd interconnection between verbal and spatial memory.
@@aLadNamedNathan How long ago were you in elementary school? I'm seventy and I don't worry about remembering names from that time-- I never see those people anyway! It's the names of people I see once in a while, today, that escape me, even some I know fairly well.
40:00 “People are not having a different reaction to the same experience, they are having a different experience.” - Adam Ragusea. This phrase has helped me understand people and has made my life so much easier.
I think maybe this helped me build empathy for other people. I have spent a lot of my life really just kind of angry at not understanding the motivations of others. Perhaps we are experiencing the world in a fundamentally different way and both are equally valid and invalid in respect to eachother. It's a bit distressing, it's going to take some time to integrate an idea like this into my worldview
@@annaclarafenyo8185 No one singled out philosophers. It was about each individual person having a unique experience. Either way, how can you be so sure?
@@mixturebeatz Because when I argued that "qualia" are not well-defined, I got the exact same response! Someone decided I must not have the experience of "redness" or "hearing a loud b-flat on a flute", and I got infuriated, because I know my internal experience is identical to everyone else's. Differences like "aphantasia" are minor, and can usually be corrected with meditation and appropriate conditioning.
Happened yesterday, I wrote 4 items on a paper to not forget. When I came home I had different items and forgot the oatdrink; the oatmilk was in first place why I went shopping. 😅 when I don't write down what I need, I normally don't forget to buy it. Because I go with focus into the store. When what is needed or planned and it's written down (written down, out of sight) the focus is gone because subconsciously we sourced the responsibility to remind us, onto that paper. People say write down what to do ect. Don't.
I don't think I've ever said this before, but one day I asked myself something like, "why do I feel *this* aware, and not more aware...?" I think we all know of readily accessible states where we're less aware - even from something as simple as blanking out in a classroom, to being half sleep; but in day to day life, my baseline awareness might as well be my peak. What's odd is that I can focus on something and I can have a feeling almost like something could give out, or pop through a membrane, and suddenly I'd be overwhelmed by it's "thingness". I think this is born out of a realisation that, under certain conditions, I have had fleeting glimpses of greater beauty (that feels "true") in thoroughly mundane things, mostly through an altering of awareness; and that leaves one asking, "what if I could open that door whenever I wanted to?" I think I have this feeling that I, and maybe we all are living with sunglasses on without even knowing it
While Lacanian philosophy is very complicated and nobody really understands it, least of all me, it sounds like you would be interested in it. Lacan talks about the Real, which is ungraspable for us as humans, because our consciousness is filtered through the realm of the Symbolic - that is, images, categories, language. We cannot see the Real because we as humans filter what we see through the realm of symbols. The third category (or Order) he talks about is the Imaginary, which is basically the myth we tell ourselves about singular personhood, the ego - the idea that we are an individual with a distinct identity - which is itself signified. It's much more complicated than that but he's sort of saying we can't grasp the true nature of things because we operate within these frameworks, but there exists this strata just outside of our awareness that we can catch glimpses of but never truly see.
@@Universal_Pig I don't know a whole lot about Buddhism beyond the basics, but this doesn't surprise me! I think a lot of it is deconstructivist in nature.
"Signs in the street, that say where you're going, are somewhere just being their own." What you are describing is a common experience on LSD. The full reality of things surprises you.
not to sound like a stereotypical stoner but i often ask myself those types of existential questions when i'm high. my sober self doesn't like entertaining those thoughts, but when i'm smoking they come to me. i also tend to feel like i process more information high, i'll find details in a friend's face that i have definitely seen but not noticed before. is this similar to your thoughts on this?
As someone with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder, I experience a non ending internal monologue. I have read some theories about schizophrenia spectrum disorders that posits hypermentalism as being a core feature of them, and it’s definitely in line with my experience. My mind is constantly over interpreting every small thing that happens, and connecting events that others would find completely unrelated. I don’t experience this black box he speaks of, and I can confidently say I’m conscious of everything before I do it, with very few exceptions like flinching when I get scared. There’s also something called a minimal self disorder that is a part of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and it makes me hyper reflective about my own acts of observation. I’m not just thinking about whatever is on my mind or what I’m observing, but am constantly thinking about the fact that I’m thinking, my own psyche becomes an object of my observation. The images in my minds eye are also extremely vivid, practically indistinguishable from the images I see with my physical eyes, although I’m not sure if that relates to my condition.
I looked this up and saw this on Wikipedia about it: "spatialization of experience", which is where the person experiences their thoughts as if they occurred within a space I thought this was normal... I feel my thoughts physically in my head.
Its no sign of sanity to be well adjusted to a sick society.. Most modern 'conditions' are probably just symptoms of your brain freaking out about the system we was born into, its alarm bells because your subconscious wants you to gtfo this situation kinda thing.. imo anyway 🤷i think 99% of the time we feel things because we know we r trapped no real freedom or choice basically slaves brainwashed to believe otherwise (they call it education ironically too!) and i think for anyone sufficiently aware/intelligent its just a hell our brains want out of so it freaks n badgers you.. Thats my guess anyway.. ✌❤️ Thers a great eric weinstein vid few days ago explains why our intelligence and progress is under control.. its 3h long packed with truth about the system tho highly recommend it
When I read I tend to find myself thinking like the author, but having just read, "I feel my thoughts, physically" , that thought was like a rubber band snapping behind my eyeballs but without the pain. Completely new experience. Ever read any of Douglas hostetter's books? He thinks very recursively, like it is because it is cuz it's self-defined.
Anyone who doubts that there a people who do not have verbal thoughts just needs to do a small exercise on a regular basis: mentally repeat every thought you just had. E.g. "I just had a thought that..." Very quickly you will come to realize that a) there are thoughts where you will have difficulty finding the right words (how can that be if you just had a verbal thought?) and b) there are even whole thought complexes that spring up in an _instant_ (impossible to have been verbalized internally in such a short time) - as a matter of fact, you will not only be groping for the right words, but you will even be groping internally to grasp exactly _what_ your non-verbal thought just "said". Once you had this experience and realize that you have non-verbal thoughts (and that probably all verbalized thoughts spring from non-verbal thoughts) it's just a small step to allow for the possibility that there are people who have _only_ non-verbal thoughts. And I say that as someone who has verbal thoughts and can't imagine what it would be like to be entirely without.
This is a fantastic and concise rebuttal. I love it. I have explained it to people in a way that likens their verbal thoughts to handwritten thoughts, and my nonverbal thoughts to a stamp. I can't imagine having to think every individual word in order to have a thought. I have people in my life that I know intimately however who seem to think opposite of me, as in they seem to really have to think every individual word in order to have a thought.
Ok, assuming that some people have both verbal and non-verbal thoughts, it's further assumed it's possible that other people have only non-verbal thoughts; the same argument says it's possible some people have only verbal thoughts. Your argument would not convince a verbal-only person because you assume their non-existence in the premise of the argument.
@@waelisc You are right, what I said does not logically prove that people with _only_ verbal thoughts do not exist. But it's not meant to be a proof anyway, but an experiment which anyone can do and which should convince the vast majority of people - if not all - that there do exist non-verbal thoughts, and that they can be quite complex. Now if someone says he tried it and never noticed a non-verbal thought and always found it easy to express every thought in words (since he had heard it first in his mind in a verbal form and just had to repeat it) then I'd be honestly quite astonished - but who am I to gainsay someone elses experience? It would definitely indicate a much slower thinking experience, since verbal thoughts - while faster than spoken words - do take time. It would also mean that this persons thoughts - which are obviously generated in the subconscious mind involving various areas of the brain - are _all_ funneled through the language network before reaching consciousness.
Another thing I think about is when I’m moving around. I’m not narrating my movements constantly yet I make so many decisions. What he said about wanting to get more milk also inspired me. I feel desires/a call to action that doesn’t require words, even though I do have a very chatty inner monologue
Even with my verbal thoughts, as you say, they emerge in the same way that Simon describes his physically verbalized thoughts emerging. To the extent that my verbalizations don't surprise me, it's because I've been internally verbalizing them ahead of time. But once I get on a roll/into the groove and speak extemporaneously then I have the same experience as Simon where I don't know precisely what I'm going to say next. My internal monologue feels more like a simulated conversation with a nebulous group of opposing/supporting perspectives. I presume that it actually IS a simulation, in that I expect that the brain is using the same speech centers etc, but feeding it internally-generated stimuli instead of externally gathered. Certainly I can't think in that way while writing, reading, listening, or otherwise processing language. But this simulated conversation is so ever-present for me that for a long time I thought that WAS thinking.
I have been thinking about this, the example of running out of milk, I wouldn't think in words that I needed more milk, my inner dialog isn't like a running commentary on what I am doing, it is more like a rehearsal of what I might say to someone.
How about in a dream. Some people say you don’t dream in any language but if you remember a dream, what language is it transcribed as in your head? I’m also bilingual and my thought is that I converted into English only after being surrounded by English as a dominant language for several years.
I will never forget this epiphany I had when I was a child, maybe 6 or so years old, sitting in the backseat of my mom's car. As we drove, I looked at the blue sky, the green trees, the red barn. I asked my mom whether she thought we saw color the same way: "How do I know if my blue is the same as your blue?" She responded along the lines of "I guess we will never truly know." My young mind was blown by the thought, and I've been fascinated with concepts of perception ever since. Thank you for the deep dive, I really enjoyed this. ✨
Easiest way to know is to pairs of matching blue cards.. of all different shades… Shuffle them And make them match up again If you both match equally, you must be seeing the same thing That’s my thought anyways haha
@@PWizz91 Why? The qualia of the colours could be smoothly shifted from one person to another, right? All we know is what appears similar to different people, but the experience of seeing it might still be totally different.
When I was in elementary school, I had trouble differentiating hot from cold, I actually had to take therapy for it. My parents noticed when I was really young, I would sometimes want to wear a jacket during summer. Because I didn't register it as hot, I just knew I didn't feel well, and when I had felt that during the winter, I had to put on a jacket. Only now it didn't help, because putting on a jacket made it even hotter. Another thing is that when I was younger, I couldn't register hunger. I could feel hungry, but I didn't know it was hunger and just thought it was a stomach ache. I distinctly remember feeling surprised the first few times it actually registered as hunger (which was only around age 12). Everyone around me always wrote those things off as side effects of autism though.
I wouldn't describe it as a side effect, but a lack of or reduced sense of interoception is a common autistic trait and while perhaps not as severly as you, it's definitely something I've experienced as well.
I suppose we call a stomach ache 'hunger' when we think it means we should eat. And when there is no thought to eat, it is simply called a stomach ache.
While I've never experienced what you describe, I've had some experiences I think might be of a similar nature. Sometimes when I feel pain, it just registers as an odd sensation--until it becomes more serious, and then I can identify it as pain. I also suffer from tinnitus. When I first started suffering from it, all I could tell was that I was having some odd sensation. I couldn't even tell I was hearing it. It wasn't until after a number of years of it getting worse that I realized it was a ringing in my ears. I've never been diagnosed as autistic, but according to Prof. Ed Dutton on the "Jolly Heretic" YT channel, people with high IQ's sometimes demonstrate autistic traits. Maybe that's what's wrong with me.
@@samuelwoods6648 I don't know. I feel like today, hunger feels like a different kind of sensation then when I have to go to the bathroom or when I've eaten something wrong. I don't know if that may be psychological. There may not actually be a big difference in the kinds of "stomach ache" you experience, but I don't know.
@@aLadNamedNathan I've also heard (though I don't know how credible that source is) that a lot of autistic people tend to have a high IQ (or the other way around) because those IQ tests specifically focus on a lot of things that autistic people are naturally good at from a young age. When I was younger, everyone always saw me as really smart, but I'm not exceptionally smart anymore, just average, I would say.
As a result of having covid my brain inflamed, and my daily consciousness shifted from a perspective of being up in my head into one of being in my chest. I was much more aware of the buzzing and other nerve impulses and heartbeat going on in my body than I was of external things, and my visual field, though presumably unchanged, had the feel of something coming to my awareness as through a periscope, and it was easily ignored and its importance diminished. The experience shed light on what it must be like to be a goose or giraffe, animals who must be very aware of their central body mass to control it, yet have their brain in an appendage longer than any other on their body. Eventually I "popped" back into regular consciousness which was as if you were used to watching a television from many meters away in a dark room filled with sounds you were monitoring and you suddenly found that you had to watch the television from such a close range that you could not even see the edges of the screen, it was shocking and felt ungainly, as if I were precariously sitting on a camel, I could not believe that THIS could be the "normal human mode". Spending a few months with this alternate consciousness taught me that I have no idea what qualities others' consciousnesses may have, and that I cannot assume that people in the past had the same kind of consciousnesses as we do today, it is not universal, and may be modulated by environmental factors, like viral infection. There is a lot of unperceived diversity in The Human Mind.
In some spiritual beliefs, consciousness is not solely located/confined to the head, and that one can 'think' from other parts of the body... e.g emotions and feelings held in the body, common sayings like feeling it in your waters,,, thinking with your balls etc :)
Shifting consciousness like that down to the mid-belly region is a technique that gives you yet another view of the world. It brings more consciousness of "energy". Some people can use it to perceive energy fields like elementals or whatever. It's hard to learn the shift required. I needed to experience it on a course. On one course I experienced the world going all cubist on me by "gazing" from that position. But apart from that, a belly-centred consciousness viewpoint eliminated all fear of the dark. I can wander through a dark forest now by touch and not be afraid. Consciousness is weird.
Only about 15 minutes in, but this comment you make about your thinking happening in a black box is very apt. I definitely have an internal monologue, and several years ago I got deeply into meditation as a mental hygiene exercise. A big part of this was learning how to shut off my internal monologue. I realized that, for me, even as someone with a strong internal monologue, most of my thinking still happens in a black box, its just that this box generates an internal monologue as an output. Another key thing I realized is that whatever this black box is doing, it is balancing competing desires and drives. So it is quite possible for the monologue generating desire to be different than the action generating components, which can lead to a lack of self-awareness and a lot of self deception. This is the negative self-talk, or coping self-talk that is sometimes mentioned. I found meditation was good at helping me recognize and work through a lot of that. Adding to that, I'd be very curious how you experience distraction. For me, this is when my internal monologue is completely disconnected from the activity I am performing. An example would be thinking about something, or 'day dreaming', while driving, and then suddenly realizing you are quite a ways down the road and not immediately remembering getting there. I can usually dredge up the memory after a moment of reflection, but I was basically operating on autopilot, with just enough consciousness of it to perform the task.
Oh yeah i didn't even think of distraction, does he even get distracted..? Also it's very funny that you talk about the "desire-balancing" part of the self as the black box, because to me that is a very core part of my self, and while i'm not always thinking about it, i can consciously manipulate it.
I've experienced what you describe as daydreaming and then realize I've been operating on autopilot for quite some time. I've also experienced a similar phenomenon where I basically go unconscious mentally while still functioning normally on a physical level. It takes something unusual to jar me out of that--like dropping something or tripping on something. I've also had this problem while speaking, and having to fight it off because speaking is one thing you certainly can't do on autopilot. I went to see a neurologist about this. He told me that until he was able to observe it under clinical conditions, all I had was an interesting story.
@@aLadNamedNathan I had a similar (or may be same) issue when I was younger (early to mid 20s). I would be speaking and then it was like I suddenly woke up mid sentence and couldn't remember what I was talking about. I'd get flustered and then have to go back and try to remember what I was on about. There is a framework in psychology known as internal family systems theory that basically puts forward the idea that we have many competing sub-personalities, and that what I referred to as the black box before is basically just trying to manage them. It seems wacky at first, and I will remain neutral on that theory itself, but it seems very close to the truth of it. We build subroutines over our lives that are very complex to handle certain situations, and then the main function of our program has to balance out the quirks of our subroutines.
I had a lucid dream once where there was a black telephone-booth shaped box inside a house. When I was in this box, I could think incredibly well--cosmically almost. When I awoke I remembered everything in the dream except the thoughts that I had had in this "black box." I think the isolation chamber aspect of the box was important, but it also made the whole thing very mysterious--like the part of me that does my best thinking I am not actually in touch with, at least in memory or reflection. It's just a dream, I know, but it seemed to be pointing to something important.
As someone with aphantasia, the "assuming it was just some sort of metaphor" definitely resonated with me. Imagine my reaction when I finished a 6 hour visual meditation class, very confused as people were saying they went on visual journies. I only see pulsing colors if I close my eyes, or just black I really like this video. We could dive so much deeper into the varities of our perceptions and consciousness.
I am in the same boat. I guess my conclusion is that the minds eye is basically a hallucination that I lack and is similar to an internal monologue, which I do have. I can talk to myself and "hear" it, and in a more abstract way I can imagine what a drum beat or singing sounds like. But when someone says "visualize an apple" I don't even know what visualize means
with aphantasia shrooms was a crazy experience because i was confused why nothing was happening. I never even realized that this wasn't normal until I was into my mid teens
His explanation of his thought process is wild. The only time I'm not in monologue is when I'm whistling a catchy loop of a song or I'm asleep I reckon.
To me, it's simple to imagine what living without an internal monologue is like. I just listen to this video and it drowns out any words that I could form in my head. I still function just fine, but to speak inside my mind, I would have to completely stop paying attention to what you are saying. On the other hand, I can sometimes make such loud noises in my mind that real world sounds feel slightly quieter. Not directly related, but I think it's interesting. Edit: after writing this comment I became very aware of how me reading is directly tied to my internal monologue. I cannot read my comment and listen to the video at the same time, because reading automatically produces a voiced recreation of the words on screen.
" because reading automatically produces a voiced recreation of the words on screen." No, it's probably because it's impossible to focus on two things at once. i think this is all just a miscommunication problem, everybody probably has an internal monologue but they either want to be special, or don't have the same definition of "internal monologue" and think it means something else like literally hearing with your ears your own internal monologue
Your edit reminds of Richard Feynman video where he talked about this, almost identical in how he discusses the abilities each of us have. Counting in his head he could hear numbers while his colleague engaged his visual mind to see a Rolodex counting up. Fascinating how different we can all be experiencing what we deem reality.
Regarding your edit: I too experience "internal dialog" when reading. Especially when reading dialog. And I treat these comments as "dialog" since we are communicating with each other. So, yes, there is vague sense that I am "listening" as I read. But I'm not listening to *my* thoughts. If I'm just reading a description of (say) a castle in a novel, I don't really "hear" that. Maybe a little. I find it difficult to both listen and "think" at the same time. I kind of have to pick one.
Interesting. Even when I listen, my mind is still chatting away. Usually, I have a main thought and a background thought going on simultaneously, and I find it very difficult to quiet my mind. It's like I'm talking to myself inside my head, and it's challenging to stop it.
yeah reading without an internal monologue is the one thing i really cannot wrap my head around. I guess abstractly i can understand that the underlying cognitive processes dont necessitate a hallucinated monologue to actually read, but I guess it’s just like…. the most quintessential inner monologue process. Even though I can understand it’s possible I cannot imagine what that would be like
"Cognition is possible without some kind of language overlay." Fascinating observation that I have long wondered about yet struggled to bring words to. You are very articulate and I enjoy listening to you speak!
That was really very well articulated, I just felt a need to point that out. This is one of the most fundamentally challenging things to actually communicate, I think you did it really well!
I was impressed by this too. Very precise and structured thoughts, which I suppose just strengthens his point about the internal monologue not being essential haha
I am a translator and interpreter. Hence, most of my day I am involved in an internal dialogue (in one of my working languages when I do written translation) or in a mix of Hungarian, English and Spanish (code-switching, basically, as well as entertaining myself). My internal dialogue is often an improvised commentary on what I am doing or what I am about to do. At the same time, I have another mode of operation, when I have almost no internal dialogue: when I am doing photography. In fact, one of the best thing about doing photography (nature, street, streetart, etc., without models I need to instruct) is that it SWITCHES OFF my internal dialogue. A few hours of just walking around and taking photos puts my mind to rest and refreshes me beautifully. Interesting.
I have a similar experience. My internal monologue can be calmed by a soothing activity, and I enjoy the silence and peace. When I don't get that quiet time for a few days due to high stress situations having me constantly on edge and thinking, I get really mentally exhausted.
@@llegedly Heh, go to a foreign country where you don't understand a single word of the language with only a phone and you're going to get some funny looks when you ask to buy a green pepper in the bus station or something.
I watched this several days ago. But I keep thinking about it. This answers some things I have often wondered about. Like why people say they are bored or lonely or especially when they say they feel the same inside as when they were in their 20s. Because in my experience, I always have my inner voice and visualizations to keep me company, entertained, and it constantly grows and evolves. Thank you for the explanation.
You are the coolest person I've ever had the opportunity to experience stream of consciousness with. Thanks for giving us your time. I would LOVE to pick your brain about some of this stuff over a beer someday, and I'm happy people like you are leading the march towards our understanding of ourselves.
I have realized that my internal monologue is (most of the time) as if I am speaking to someone else. Like as if I'm explaining to my friend whatever situation I'm in or whatever. This isn't always the case but I think it accounts for most of the "verbal" thoughts I have in my head
I'd say me too. I also can't think of complex things without talking aloud. Well I can, but it's like extremely awkward like my thoughts are slippery (it's fine for simple things). I hear my voice when I think in my head. I cannot contemplate how someone would consider a complex thought without talking aloud to self (or writing, that's another option). Something like mulling over a complex political question or life decision, or considering an academic thesis or something. It boggles my mind, especially as those things are then ultimately produced verbally. I very much lay everything out as if it's a debate
Yeah, I’m the same, when I was a young kid I pretended I was a presenter on a TV show explaining things to an audience. I grew out of that, of course, but I’m still almost explaining it to myself when I think it through.
I have the exact same experience of my internal monologue and my thoughts sometimes even take form of an imaginary dialogue, as if I'm in an actual conversation with somebody else
@@pintamilk568 im curious if they respond in your dialogue, a lot of times i get lost in dialogues with myself, or like i will talk to my therapist in my head and he asks questions.
Very similar to how I experience things. 1 voice is first person, and that voice is also what controls my body, 1 voice is 3rd person and only moves my tongue slightly when it “speaks” in my head, the 3rd person voice can take on the voices of other people if I need to simulate a conversation. The 2 voices are a little different as well, the 3rd person voice often acts as a conscience albeit a sometimes rude one, and tends to value long term planning and productivity, while the 1st person voice is a lot more impulsive, doesn’t care as much about personal safety, and is a bit more laid back. The 3rd person voice doesn’t “speak” as much as the 1st person voice in everyday life, but it is the voice that reads and does math. The only time the 3rd person voice has any form of control physically over my body that I’m physically aware of is when it very occasionally speaks out loud. It is possible that 3rd person me does lots of things physically that I’m not aware of, as most of my awareness comes from first person me.
I couldn’t have come across this video at a better time. I’m having insomnia and haven’t slept since 2 days ago. Also I have work in the morning. It’s hard not to stress. But then you swing in with your unparalleled chillness and give me something peaceful to listen to. Thank you for that
Hey! that's great to hear. I relate to you as well because I had to learn how to fall asleep at a reasonable pace. I myself find it easier to fall asleep when there is something to focus on but not think about, like perception but without judgment. For me, white or brown noise works quite well. Have you tried listening to static when falling asleep? You could give it a try. You might also consider mindfulness if you have problems with falling asleep because of an overactive mind. What works for me is giving myself several minutes to just think spontaneously, then meditate, and last try to fall asleep with a mind that has not only been sitmulated, but has also slowed down
@@alanszymon192 thanks for the advice, I’ll keep that in mind. Yeah I’m the type who can sometimes spiral into worry if my mind’s not occupied. And listening to a calming presentation on consciousness was a great way to both relax and be mindful. Glad to say I fell asleep, then gave the video a real listen at work today (and 5 more from the channel) I love TH-cam
Have you tried eliminating blue wavelengths of light? I read a study where insomniacs were taken camping for 2 weeks where there was no unnatural sources of light and 100% of them were cured by the study’s end.
Awe hope you got some sleep and to work not miserable; I also found this really helpful mind-wise. As well as recently started working again ; it is helpful yet crazy to think that everyone thinks differently in so many different aspects. I can’t imagine not having an internal dialogue, lol
@@HaleyOnTheRocks yeah, I’ve thought about it a lot and I think I have a mix of the two; my thoughts come in words when I want them to, but otherwise I’m just lookin around and having feelings. Gosh, this is the nicest comment section I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been having such a good time with this smart-cozy channel all week
I’ve tried to describe qualia a few times with close friends (not knowing the words for it); it seems like most people genuinely do experience qualia, but as an involuntary thought or memory resurfacing. They will seem confused as I attempt to describe it until I say something like “have you ever smelled a smell and it made you think of… the feeling of the scratchy guest bedsheets at your grandmother’s place?” You can quickly add more memories to it to create a fuller picture but just for a moment, especially if the memory is old or half-forgotten, you can feel an isolated sensory monad… People resonate with that frequently. From there it’s a matter of describing that’s one of the primary ways I create thoughts and experience phenomena. Ultimately my personal experience falls somewhere in the middle. My mental imagery is somewhat blurry, when I focus I can bring an image in but I can feel myself working to Realize the image by consciously adding qualia. “Okay, so the apple is red. It has a withered stem. There is one spot where the waxiness of the skin has rubbed off…” after a few visual qualia have been added I struggle to keep it in focus because I inevitably conjure nonvisual qualia, which make no sense when trying to visualize anything. After all, what does an apple that tastes too sweet look like; what does an apple that was just picked from a windy orchard look like? Looking at it that way, it almost makes the entire concept of visualization feel a bit silly. What is the ultimate Purpose of the ability to limit your mental “image” to a single sensation? If anything it limits your ability to make mental connections. I have a similar experience with internal monologue. Having just watched this video, the words I’m writing “appear” in my head in your voice. It’s likely the cadence of my writing reflects that in some way. But after a while that will fade, and in a vacuum my internal monologue is sparse. Exactly as you described, I just “feel” the sensation of needing to buy milk, and would pursue the task unconsciously. If my friend texted me and asked “what’s up” I’d immediately reply “I’m going to get milk, I’ve just run out,” so it’s not like I’m unaware of my experience. It’s just, there’s a meaningful difference in my mind between that and the kind of awareness you’d have after introspection. I can conjure an internal monologue for my thoughts, and can usually make it in any voice I want. But I quickly abandon it because it’s devastatingly SLOW to think that way. I feel like I’m thinking at 10% speed. Especially when I have to make decisions about what to do based on several factors (planning errands, for example), it feels hilariously inefficient to try and experience thoughts as words. If I abandon that, it feels like I can take all the considerations and perceive them in parallel, or at least blindingly fast compared to speaking a sentence. To me, it seems a deeply inefficient way to think certain types of thoughts.
What you mentioned about no internal monologue and yet being able to do stuff makes complete sense. Once you've learned to drive a car you need no inner monologue to drive it. Another example is once I was walking across a road and clearly hadn't looked properly since a car travelling quite quickly towards me came into my peripheral vision. I felt my leg drop into a run, started to run and *then* had the thought that I needed to get out of the way quickly. My conscious was behind real-time, my subconscious had already seen the threat and set me into a series of motions to evade the threat I then became conscious of. If this kind of realtime subconscious didn't work that way and I had to think everything through I'd have been splatted by that car. They say the same thing about professional tennis, the ball is travelling too fast to consciously react, it is your subconcious mind directing your muscles to move to intercept the ball.
I learned a long time ago that our brains have primitive areas and more recently developed areas. The primitive brain is much simpler and takes care of our quick reactions. The modern areas are complex and multi-layered - requiring more 'processing time'. The same can be said about our eyes, the centre of our vision takes a second or more to process what it sees, yet our peripheral vision is based on movement and can detect incoming threats in milliseconds.
I agree. Instinctive reactions and trained action sequences don't require monolog. I crochet a lot. I would hate to have to listen to an inner voice telling me what I am doing or about to do.
Visual stimuli is sent through the amygdala, the area of the brain associated with fear and aggression, before it can be properly deciphered and understood. I assume this is why it is possible to be startled by things which pose no threat and I believe it's evolutionary purpose is to be able to react quickly to sudden danger such as a predator pouncing towards you or, in this case, avoiding a car crash
I was struggling to understand this, but you made a good point. I think that my internal monolog is lagging behind my decision-making. However, I am so used to my internal monolog narrating everything that I correlate it with the decision-making itself.
Hey I came back to comment again. I was monitoring, as much as i remembered, my thinking, inspired by this video. And while I was playing video games, i got a revelation. While I was playing it I was having a voiced naration about something not game related, but I was playing the game completely regularly, teleporting, finishing work, collecting, fighting, different complex stuff, without ever hearing a voice in my head about it. So I remembered this video. I was able to notice the similar experience that you've described!
About the inner monologue - I can turn it on and off without any problems. I usually think a lot faster without it, because I skip the whole stage of putting something into words. However, I can continue with the internal monologue if I enjoy the subject and do not need to think quickly. I always thought that this was something that everyone did and I was surprised to find that most people cannot switch off the internal monologue or even think without it. The same is true with internal imagery - I thought one of my friends was joking when he said he could not do internal imagery - I can see objects vividly with any level of detail, down to the smallest detail. I find it really fascinating that there is such a huge difference in mental abilities between people.
Omg I'm the same way It takes a lot of "focus" for me, if that's the right word, to turn it off But it puts me in a different "mode" where things flow better and I do think a lot faster. Unfortunately because it takes so much effort I stay in the backseat driver mode most of the time. I honestly think we're not supposed to be able to communicate with our subconscious like this, mental diseases like schizophrenia is probably a wayyyyyy too strong of a bond to your subconscious and it just overwhelms your consciousness
Mine is mostly the same, but for me, there is myself, when I read, I hear my voice in my head, I can talk to myself without speaking with it. But I also have another voice that pulls on insecurities, brings up memories, or converses on its own whim alongside my own self. My imagination is as vivid as if seeing it for real, but It's contained in its own little mental box. The ID, the ego, the superego, and the subconscious counterparts one or more of each. It's definitely a fun subject I wish my friends would engage in the topic of with me.
I can turn off my inner monologue/dialogue/council meetings. I have to be alone when I do it. It takes calm concentration. I imagine nothingness as I "stare" at it. It being the nothingness. I keep staring until the words stop. When I first tried this, I remember saying, "Be quiet. Okay, stop. Shut up! Why can't I shut up?". Then I realized I was making it worse. I remembered teachers at the beginning of classes who would just stare at us until we stopped talking. So, I tried that and it works. The instant the voice stops, I begin to visualize solutions to problems. It is rapid. I can't maintain it for long. I taught myself to do this in an effort to produce inventions. I can visualize in 3D to some degree all the time. When the voice stops, ideas get mashed up until something useful occurs.
I can not monologue but it is hard to deliberately stop. Like if I'm making a sandwhich I don't think "gran the cheese, grab the turkey etc. I just get what I want. But I feel like I need to monologue about something if I want to actually understand what I'm thinking, such as if I'm constructing an argument about something in my head or deciding what movie to watch. I could never go get milk without thinking about it, but I could go to work without thinking about it, because it's not novel.
This video is absolutely fascinating to me, i never considered that not having an internal narrative could be an inessential part of cognition in the same manner that being able to visualize clearly also is. I feel like I am in a similar situation to you but with a different aspect of my cognition. I have no sense of self or agency, I do very much have an internal narrative, but i feel like an NPC automaton responding to sensory input with preprogrammed responses. Like if I try to move my hand in front of my face I cannot feel like it is me doing it. There is no feeling of "me" applied to any aspect of my experience. This is classified within psychology as depersonalization, and is very common. It doesn't seem to affect my ability to function at all, yet when I tell people this they are often very confused about how I could exist or even act like it is very sad and pitiful that I do not have a sense of self. There are other people who have derealization instead, who do not have a feeling of reality being "real". I assume that these are all aspects of standard cognition that seem essential when you have them, but don't seem to affect functioning too much if a person has never experienced what it is like to have them in the first place. The idea that qualia might be one of these as well is really interesting. But yeah, amazingly eloquent video, I love the way you describe consciousness and talk about it in terms of computer science like terms. Please keep it up, I would love to see more analysis like this from your channel!
To be honest, if I analyze my own experience, there also is no identity attached to the sensations of moving my hand in front of my face, except for a somatic registry of feeling some faint buzzing in my hands, and then if I focus with my vision, also in my head, or if I feel the connection of my hand with my arm and torso, a buzzing in my torso. The only actual identity sensation going on is a correlated buzzing, which I don't get if I look at an object, I might feel it in my eyes and head but no buzzing "in the object". A proficient meditator named Daniel Ingram I feel has given good descriptions of the experience of no-self, which sounds very similar to what you're describing. It's interesting that you feel like an automaton though, I mean, seems like an associated narrative as much as any? Curious, thanks for sharing either way! :)
@@cryoshakespeare4465 it sounds like you have some level of depersonalization to me, most people feel a sense that they are the ones moving their hand in front of their face. And I personally know Daniel Ingram, but have not read his books even though I own one of them, maybe I should check it out and ask if my description sounds analagous to him. Thanks!
Wow. I remember the day an image of myself became part of my internal model of the world. I was a very small child and it was a revelation. All my perceptions were changed after that due to the extra element in my model of the world.
A huge portion of my conscious experience is in my mind. I’m constantly playing out scenarios like a future prediction machine to try and make the most efficient choices. I almost always think before I speak and know exactly what I’m going to say. But also a lot my day to day life is routine and is basically autopilot. I can be thinking about something completely different while these day to day tasks play out. I can also visualize imagery to varying degrees. Anything from a fuzzy dark abstract representation of an image to a near photo realistic representation. The extremely vivid mental images only happen occasionally and very briefly. It usually happens if I focus for long enough on a specific thought. But when it happens it’s as clear as day. I may as well be looking at whatever I’m imagining. I can also imagine sound well and have composed the basis for songs before ever having played it physically.
This is interesting, I have a very similar experience to you, I can vaguely fantasize images but my musical fantasy powers are much stronger. When I took mushrooms I would hear loud full orchestral music being composed in real time by my brain. I'm not even good enough at musical theory to act as my own amanuensis and write it down as fast as my mind can come up with it but I really enjoy making up my own soundtracks or replaying songs I like and know well in my head in ways I can't do with say, a painting.
Here's the thing with the idea of being "surprised" about what you said out loud: Sure, I have an inner voice, and I can practice what I want to say out loud before I do so, but then the next question to ask is where did that inner voice originate from? I'm not surprised when I hear myself in my mind generating thoughts, I don't question where these thoughts are coming from or if I have ownership of them. So with or without an inner voice, there still is that same mystery.
Maybe the inner voice develops in one's early years, along with the development of the mind. I notice a qualitative difference in my memories between when I was three years old and when I was four years old. While I don't remember this specifically, I suspect that I didn't have an internal monologue when I was three, but that I had developed one by the time I was four.
Reminds me of this quote I heard once that made me laugh out loud “What enables you to make a decision? When you decide, do you first decide to decide?” (oh, btw cool mother 3 profile pic)
@@aLadNamedNathan I also remember being aware that I was somehow "more aware" or "more capable of thinking" than I used to be (and trying to explain this to my mother). I think I was about 7 at the time.
@@ronald3836 That's interesting. I wasn't aware that I became more aware at some point when I actually was a child, but looking back on it now, my memories of when I was three are very different from when I was four. My earliest memories are akin to a video camera being randomly switched on and off. The only difference is that they have emotions attached (usually bewilderment or fear). The memories have no story structure to them. They begin abruptly and end just as abruptly. The memories from when I was four have a beginning, a middle, and an end--and thus make sense as a story. I was surprised to learn that most people have an amnesia event somewhere between the ages of six and eight. This was brought to my attention after I had been speaking in front of a group of people, and I had tried to evoke their memories of their first day of school. None of them could remember it--which absolutely shocked me, since my first day of school remains a traumatic memory for me. I mistakenly assumed this was true for most people.
I do not have an internal monologue either. My parents used to get upset with me when I was younger when I said things “without thinking.” No one was aware of my autism back then, including me. They brushed off my bluntness and directness as rude or hostile, so much so that I was put into an anger management group as an elementary school student. My mother always told me to “think before you speak,” but I had no idea how to do that, as you would imagine. I asked her what she meant by that and she thought I was being difficult. Instead of explaining what she meant, she simply punished me for asking. Knowing what I know now about not having an internal monologue and the way I experience the world as a neurodivergent person, I regret ever feeling like there was something inherently wrong with the way I navigate and interact with the world. It is simply a different way to approach life, and it is not aggressive or bad or weird. My mother will not ever understand that because she refuses to entertain any sort of new way of thinking about things, but at least I know there is nothing wrong with me anymore.
"Think before you speak" seems to me to be about the activity of the prefrontal cortex predicting how others might react to your words, weighing the social consequences of what you might say, and adjusting your conversation and behavior to align with social norms. People are on a whole range of this phenomenon, from blurting everything out (sorry for not finding a more neutral word, traditional societal norms have tinged this verb negatively) to holding back most of their true thoughts. So what I think your parents were expecting from you is to make a break before speaking and consciously evaluate what you are about to say in light of the above-mentioned criteria - i.e. training yourself to do consciously what in many (but not all) people happens more or less automatically. But if I understand you right you are completely unaware (even in a non-verbal way) of what you are about to say, which would mean that it is impossible to do this evaluation consciously. Very interesting. It would also be interesting how other people with non-verbal thinking experience this. Simon seems to weigh his words carefully (I guess in a non-verbal way), probably this is done by his prefrontal cortex automatically and subconsciously. I do have verbal thought, but a lot of things I say are not verbalized internally before being expressed - still they are all scanned somehow for the above-mentioned criteria. There are also a lot of people who do have very strong internal verbalisation and still say things without filtering - sometimes regretting what they have said.
I would dare to say it’s healthier not to think “there’s nothing wrong with me”, but rather “there’s something wrong with everybody”; I admittedly may be splitting hairs here, and you already believe this
@@jacobpast5437 I agree about what the parents were probably expecting and trying to encourage. That can be problematic for at least some of those who are neurodivergent, even if we do have an internal monologue. Struggles with socialisation and communication are at the core of the diagnostic criteria, and social reciprocity gets a particular mention. The back and forth of conversation can be murky and poorly understood, we may be oblivious to nuance and nonverbal communication, and social norms are often opaque to us. So, not infrequently, we don't know how neurotypicals will react to what we're going to say. In fact, we may not know how they feel about it even AFTER we've said it, but even if we DO (or they explicitly tell us how they feel about what we said), we may not know WHY they feel that way. For some of us, NT thought processes are so opaque and incomprehensible that trying to predict them is an exercise in futility, because we just think too differently. That is, we don't just think different things, we think in different ways.
When someone says that one says things without thinking, it's not about an internal monologue. It's about knowing what to say and how to say it, when to say it and to who. For example one would be respectful of someone more senior and one would be courteous to a stranger. Why? Because those cues one learns from seeing others and by figuring out that one should treat others as one wants to be treated. There is no need for an internal monologue. One just asks if the intentional summary of a vocalised statement is appropriate. For example, you're at school and you could say that you need to use the bathroom but there are polite and rude ways of asking that. Hence one would ask politely because interaction with a teacher or stranger should be polite or courteous. Therefore one would not ask to take a sh-t but would ask to be excused to use the bathroom.
What most people fail to observe is that whole thoughts, conclusions and plans can arrive without narration. Like you said, I don't need to tell myself I don't have milk. I have a very wordy narrative brain, also a strong visualization brain, but there is that metatrak of Knowing without fanfare. It's not just milk: it might be a revelation of a complex series of connections.
@@buglepong how do you mean? i have an internal monologue but i'm quite aware that my inner voice does not reflect the full spectrum of my thoughts. my memory at least has only little to do with my inner voice. i only "hear" my inner voice when i need to store little bits of info for a short time or sometimes when initially memorising information. when i enter my usual supermarket i can just go and pick the things i need without any thought especially if they are the things i usually buy.
@@buglepong yes and no? my comment was mainly concerned with the issue of remembering things and there my inner voice is not that important for me. in general my inner voice is present a lot of the time i'm awake (e.g. always when i read, write or do math) but it isn't always concerned with the tasks that i'm doing at any given time. i can do a lot of things while my inner voice verbalizes unrelated thoughts. like when i read a book and the glass of water i'm drinking at the same time runs out i can go get another glass of water without conciously thinking about it, my inner voice would still be concerned with the book i had been reading or what i need to do the next day or whatever. on the other hand i can look out the window of my train to work and not have any concious thoughts or inner voice at all for the trip, i'm just visually experiencing the view from the window. and i have some control over it, if i really want, i can turn my inner voice on and off
@@nougatbit that sounds pretty normal. like its normal to have inner monologue at certain times. its rare to have none at all, or none that you can remember
What you said Simon about talking out loud to yourself is basically how my internal monologue manifests, just internally most of the time. I just bought beer and I didn’t think ‘oh I’ll pick up those two bottles and carry them to the self checkout’, I just did it. If I’d asked myself to explain what I was doing, or if someone had asked me to explain what I was doing, I could’ve; either externally or internally, but the black box that generates words doesn’t send them to my internal monologue first, it’s just two switched outputs, like headphones and speakers.
For me, I would speak to myself in my head imagining something like “I feel like having a few beers, where is the fridge” then I’ll find the beers and buy them, and if I’m with someone I’d think the same thing, then proceed to say it out loud to them.
@@happyfullfridge I've heard some people actually do do that, so there is a varying degree of internal monologue. At certain level it must turn into schizophrenia.
Oh wow, this video resonates with me so much! I do have qualia -- and in conversations trying to talk about it, I have never found a word for it. The way you seem to think about the world and conciousness and all the dilemmas mentioned is also very similar to how I do. (Although, I do have an internal monolog and I can differentiate between tastes like sour and bitter as well as salty and savory.) I really appreciate this video, because your thinking process is so clear, easy to follow and inclusive. I will show this video to friends as a way to aid my explanation on how I feel/think about conciousness and the world. Thank you for making it!
I'm a cognitive scientist. Cognitive science incorporates neuroscience as it pertains to perception and a few other things. Perhaps I can help. I'll do vision first. What we _see_ is a model of reality. We see colors, textures, spatial relationships, and so on. These are what is in the model, not in the light. The light continuously updates the model, mostly unconsciously. So do conscious things. If I have decided the Wittgensteinian animal is a rabbit or a duck, or the Necker cube is on a table and not the far wall, this feeds back into the model construction in such a way that the perception persists. The feedback loop is why the perception flips back and forth. It's like a flip-flop with its own feedback. A computer analogue is that what we see is the user interface of the reality we interact with. Internal monologues, dialogues, _etc._ (I have internal committee meetings) are about the relationship amongst Wernicke's and Broca's areas and the arcuate fasciculus between them and to the rest of the brain. A computer analogue might be how graphics cards can be used for calculations that have nothing to do with graphics. Maybe you're just talkative. This is consistent with being able to make videos. In other people who don't talk to themselves, it's likely the same mechanism, only they don't open their mouths, so they don't think of it as talking. As for taste, the whole idea of areas on the tongue is nonsense. Taste is in the brain. You say you do not distinguish tastes as _sour per se._ Everyone does this with what are called fantasia flavors, such as Coca Cola. The secret formula is known, but none of the flavors in it seem to have anything to do with the flavor. As for the rest, yes, you might undergo a transition such as in the movie _Ratatouille_ if you get into it enough. I found I could taste better the more I cooked. Now I can reverse-engineer recipes from what I taste in restaurants. It's a lot cheaper. I'll introduce a fourth: the similarity between linguistics and grammatology. Reading and writing are not exactly the same as listening and talking, but they overlap a great deal. The amount of overlap is important to my work. Phonemes and tagmemes are similar enough to be treated mostly the same, but there are important differences. Tonality may be part of a phoneme or not. In languages where it is not, tonality is also used but more at the sememe level. These are different functional mechanisms, but they are also sort of similar. The brain must at least be flexible enough to hear tonality in different ways that correspond with the different levels it is used for in various languages. Expressing language is also quite different in terms of mechanism, what I call _interpretactics,_ from understanding it, which leads to my closing benediction: As a linguist, I say do not pay attention to anything Noam Chomsky says. He is such a rationalist his picture is on the Encyclopædia Britannica page for _rationalism._ He is anti-empirical to the point of oblivion. He may have some idea what is in his own brain, but I wouldn't put it past him to lie about that. As for the world outside his skull, he is uninformed, to put it mildly.
@@bulkbogan4320 Chomsky has a reasonable brain, but he never payed attention to empirical evidence he got anything wrong and instead doubled down and built increasingly abstruse and implausible castles in the sky. I leave as an exercise for the reader whether his political thinking is similar to his philological thinking. (Without empiricism, it is not linguistics.)
I mostly agree with what you say here, but I have to disagree with your understanding of internal monologue. As someone with no or very little internal monologue (saved usually only for things like reading text, and even then, it is very quiet, if you will), and who is also not very talkative, I am still more than capable of system 2 thought, and at least according to those around me and tests I take, I am rather intelligent. To me, it would be unbearable to have to put my thought processes into words. It would slow me down and frustrate me by my inability to articulate to myself the minutia of what I develop in my mind. To boil it down to "all of your conscious thoughts are simply external instead" is unreasonable, at least for me. Perhaps that is the case for the video's author, the whole point of the video is of course how everyone experiences the world differently, but at a minimum for me at least, an internal monologue is by no means the only way of conscious thought, control, or communication with the subconscious.
22:00 : The technical difference between taste and flavour is actually quite important here. Taste is detected by the taste buds on the tongue, and there are five of them known to science: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and savory. Flavour is detected by olfactory sensors on the roof of the mouth and is essentially the same sense as smell; whether it comes through the roof of the mouth or through the nose, it's the same neural pathway to the brain. And flavours are _not_ composed of tastes in various degrees; rather, flavours are their own things: chocolate, cinnamon, vanilla, etc. (Although a given food item or odour may be a mixture of various flavours or scents.)
@@petevenuti7355 : Yes! Although it's more obvious that that's a different sense, people can forget how much it matters. (It's a big reason why fat is delicious, for example.)
@@vaar8584 Well let's say it's an apple. If the apple just overlays his vision like a png with a transparent background, then I would call it AR. But if it completely blocks his vision with an apple and some sort of background, then I would call it VR.
@DungeonClimber Yeah, I'd agree with that, just up to the original commenter to describe their AR/VR ability more. Who knows, maybe they could even play play Paper Mario without closing their eyes... Pukicho would be proud
Simon, on the topic of decoupling pain from its "negative valence", I have noticed that I don't typically experience any negative affect when why cats bite or scratch me. I have lived with cats my whole life, so bites and scratches are common. If I pay close attention, I notice that the level of pain I experience might otherwise cause me to feel badly about having experienced the pain, but in the context of a cat doing it, it just feels like an inconsequential feeling.
This reminds me of something a phlebotomist taught me about pain when I was a child. I was ill and had to have blood drawn a lot. She told me to close my eyes and imagine she was poking me a little too hard with a toothpick. It worked! It totally transformed my subjective experience of the pain of the needle stick. My aversion to the experience was only partly due to the sensation, and mostly due to my experience of the negative valence of a needle stick specifically.
WTF... this video just blew my mind, I didn't know that it was possible to not have an "inner voice". As you said yourself, that thought never crossed my mind since I never experienced it any other way. To me it always felt like the real unfiltered manifestation of my conciousness, my desires and limits... like you "hear" the tone of your own voice in your head speaking thoughts out loud, inside your brain before your filters get into action and tell you what of that thought is okay to utter in the current situation and what might be better kept for oneself. After this I'll probably sit outside for a few hours being absolutely silent and looking like I'm sleeping, but my head will be filled with a 15-page essay of thoughts on that topic. If I can't put a coherent string of words together in my head, then I can't think clearly about a topic, because while thinking about which specific wording I need to use to form the thought my brain starts to apply all the filters that I learned through life. Like what's inappropriate to say in what type of situation and which thoughts I shouldn't spend too much time on, if I want to focus on some specific aspect.
Without watching this, I am autistic and can tell you with confidence that my conscious experience is fundamentally different from most others. This is evident in any attempt to communicate my experiences to others.
I'm autistic too, and there's a decent chance that even our conscious experiences are fundamentally different ... I have DID and sometimes I even have multiple consciousnesses at the same time!
I am also autistic but I couldn't say that with confidence. As far as I know the difficulty of communicating anything to neurotypical people stems from a different brain structure that causes us to think more literally as well as explain things more literally and without the use of subtext, gestures or facial expressions, but none of that directly proves a fundamental difference in conscious experience
@@LoganDark4357 it's so fucky having several "people" in your head. have you found a way to deal well with it? it seems to be an issue with communication between them for me
@@Thornskade there is a difference in brain structure but I wouldn't say it's necessarily thinking more literally, but rather thinking more semantically. Autistic people connect concepts in their brain in a way that non-autistics may not. I'd encourage you to research "detail-oriented thinking" as that's typically the biggest difference between autistics and non-autistics, and that also tends to be the communication barrier, because autistics can be known to consider concepts in isolation that non-autistics would have considered within some fuzzy context, and this is mainly what causes the omission or unawareness of gestures or facial expressions or other social cues, because it literally makes zero logical sense why those would be relevant but non-autistics consider them anyway because they are part of the heuristic. Non-autistic brains typically operate on heuristics and aren't aware of their own operation. Self-awareness can be difficult for someone who isn't autistic because of how little they have to think in order to act. That's why people can never explain how that social cue mattered or why your reaction made them uncomfortable, all they know is you did something wrong and they don't like you now
I struggled with this for a bit when you were describing how decision making works to you until later when thinking about how I engineer. I didn't start off with the ability to visualize things in my head, I do have qualia completely and a nearly inescapable internal monologue. I could understand and think about a shape in my head but it wasn't visually in there and when people said they could visualize these vast scenes I was in disbelief, but after enough acid trips and deliberate practice at visualizing I can now chill and rotate a cow in my head and work on full designs to a pretty far level in the visual space inside my head. And it has made design a lot easier. I've had a lot of difficult discussions with people about the "hard problem of consciousness" as not a real problem, and it feels like you've helped me clear up my own position a lot. I suffered from cluster headaches for 10 years, so I learned how to dissociate from pain deeply and young. I could alter my subjective experience, my qualia, through the manner in which I focused attention (the same technique I'd use to build visualization ability later) directly on the qualia itself, which being not a material thing there is nothing to focus on and the pain becomes felt but abstractly instead of directly, "shutting off" the "qualia" Spending too much time in this state probably lead to my lack of belief in beauty, love, or wholesomeness as concepts until I'd healed a lot. Given the ability to change the subjective experience of the same physical phenomenon up through a significant fraction of the nervous system, qualia is likely some kind of mental tool for creating abstract categories instead of needing individual examples, to make it easier to perform rapid heuristics about things like "big cat" having a certain "catliness" about it so you don't get eaten just because it's a different kind of cat so you didn't immediately make the association. I had a buddy on an acid trip who, on stepping outside from our blue tinged inside lighting to a reddish sunset and ambiance immediately had his entire visual field saturate in the red qualia but while maintaining the shape, size, relationship between objects, etc. just everything "red"ified. I'd say people confident in Plato's ideal plane, confident that the hard problem of consciousness is hard, simply need to do more lysergamides and tryptamines, or experience torture or something like it, although some deliberate practice and instruction on safe, low doses of ketamine would probably do the trick too. This all makes me wonder what all the different modalities of experience people have and how many of them I can add to my toolbox.
While I don't think it touches on qualia specifically, Mel Chen's work on animacy feels relevant here insofar as it talks about how humans categorise consciousness and affect, and how it's sorted into linguistics. Being animate is an idea that encompasses freedom, consciousness, movement, life and identity. She discusses a hierarchy of animacy - the way in which, for example, a disabled person might be considered less animate than their peers and how this translates into being seen as fundamentally less of a person. She also discusses how non-human life falls on this spectrum, such as plants and animals (and the way we separate ourselves from animals as if we're something fundamentally different from them). I think this perspective is very important because it points towards the fact that human definitions are us imposing barriers on a world which exists on spectrums, and so the line between conscious and not, or even alive and dead, is significantly more blurry than we'd like to think.
Sounds interesting. You talk about it imposing barriers and it made me think that when we impose those barriers it seems we add a value judgement to each category at the same time.
I spent so much of my life as a child not understanding the people around me experienced so many small details about the world differently. I went undiagnosed with a severe form of Inattentive ADHD that I had learned to mask very well. A common (not always present) symptom of ADHD is that the internal monologue NEVER turns off. In my case almost all of my internal monologue is a narration of my own thoughts. Sometimes I can have multiple thoughts very quickly in a row and I “hear” multiple internal voices at the same time, but even if it’s seventeen voices at once I perfectly know what all of them are saying. However, it makes it hard to mentally grasp a thought and hold on to it because so many more voices have a new thought that needs to be narrated. I finally got diagnosed and took my first prescription dose. I was heading to work early on the weekend and while I was working I suddenly realized that all my thoughts were quiet. I experienced “black box” thoughts for the first time and I broke down crying and my boss came over to check on me I couldn’t speak for a few moments I was so overwhelmed. Additionally my mind’s eye is incredibly vivid. I definitely have some form of hyperphantasia. All of my thoughts can be translated into mental 3D objects. I once was bored at school and watched the LOTR movies in my head the whole day. Sometimes I imagined it on a screen. Other times I can “project” it. I can superimpose my mental images overtop of my vision. If I imagined Gandalf walking through the door. I’d see him physically enter, but I’ll unconsciously see that he’s not actually physical. If I look out my window I can imagine and “see” my neighbors house get hit by a meteor. Sometimes I imagined and saw tiny miniature men (in my youth it was Star Wars) on my desk fighting battles. Whenever I go somewhere I’m crafting a 3D topographical map in my head and can go back and see where I remember the map has been. When I took tests I could mentally imagine opening my notebooks and read what I had written. (Not literally, if I forgot something the page was blank). I can do this with sounds, tastes, physical touch like a feather or sandpaper, and with great difficulty feel a phantom heat or cold if something I’m projecting over my vision would also be hot or cold. I think of it like “self-aware” schizophrenia. Self-constructed but easily identifiable as hallucinations. but I have done an absurd amount of research compared to my actual Uni courses, and there’s basically nothing written on this condition anywhere that I can find. But maybe that’s a condemnation of my research skills. When I found out other people didn’t and couldn’t think like me. I felt such a sense of isolation it bordered on existential anxiety. A friend described that the only images they can imagine are words. Instead of an apple they see the text “apple” as printed letters like words in a book. I then described my thought process and she was so confused she brought me over to other strangers (we were in public at the time). And had me explain it to them and was met with confused looks. I also have a deep internal fantasy world almost akin to maladaptive daydreaming where I can watch my own original movies as if I’m an actor in a scene. My dreams are extremely vivid as well. I find as an outlook on my life: I can mentally separate myself from my body if I’m doing something boring or unpleasant. I can suppress my hunger, thirst, or sleepiness if I want to (I try not to). I often find most physical objects as pointless since the comfort sensation they provide can be constructed myself mentally. My dream is to retire in a small house either near the Rocky Mountains, or in Pacific Northwest America because I find rain incredibly soothing. The rain can help block out the noise. I was always fearful I had schizophrenia after I had the epiphany that others did not see the world as I did. The reason being, when I was young I remember waking up hearing police rush down my street. My parents didn’t tell me what happened for a few years. Eventually I heard that the single mother a few houses down had heard voices from hell of demons that said they would soon be released on the world and described how they would kill her and her two daughters (both under 10 but older than 5). So she stabbed her children to death and called her ex-husband who proceeded to call the police. She got life imprisonment and the father now has a charity event he holds that he named after his two daughters. We would go, but I learned the whole story later in my life when I had moved away. This scared me so much, but I’ve worked through therapy and my psychiatrist is very positive I don’t have it. For a list of all my diagnoses: I have been diagnosed with. ADHD with primarily Inattentive type, Major Depressive Disorder, and Schizoid Personality Disorder. I also have an above average of symptoms of OCD but not enough to be classified as a disorder. If you made it here thanks for reading this information dump of my life. Hope your day goes well.
Such an interesting, moving and touching story. Thanks for sharing- I do hope you're able to be at peace with yourself and to find contentment more and more as your life goes on.
Fascinating story, thanks for sharing. I feel like a lot of creative people must be similar to you. I find it very cool how you can imagine a meteor hitting a house that you are looking at. I always wondered how movie directors come up with some of the stuff they do, like say the way the dream worlds in Inception warp. But if they have the same kind of mental imaging capacity as you I could see how it would be much easier. I suppose as a kid I would look out the window of my parents car on a road trip and could visually "see" a guy running along beside me doing parkour. But now that I am an adult I have essentially lost this ability entirely. I could somewhat do it but nowhere near as vividly as I could as a kid.
You could well be on the autistic spectrum as adhd nowadays goes hand in hand with autism spectrum disorders, i notice. Its more so aspergers linked in with adhd conditions. You sound very intelligent, and its memory capacity, mental imagery and recall that serves intelligence, memory is intelligence! So celebrate that! Its a gift! Godbless W.COOK from Bristol England 🏴
I'm like you to some degree it seems, the mind is always talking/active (not necessarily always verbally). I have some degree of ADHD/autism I can visualize an apple in any color, in high definition with all details. I can visualize the inside of an apple and I can taste the apple and feel its texture vividly, all in my mind. Thoughts often have color and texture and sometimes words are written out visually. When I walk in nature I feel a complex mix of emotions/intuitions that there are no words for, trees have a distinct feel/energy, the world feels infinitely deep and mystical etc. When I listen to music I see colors and objects, sometimes entire scenes/stories imbued with emotional depth etc. Sounds have a visual shape. I'm pretty good at drawing but I don't see the point of actually doing it when I can visualize a complete drawing or painting in seconds. In general I'm very aware of my inner world (and outer, rarely get into accidents or block peoples path). This is all normal for me and I'm high functioning except it's sometimes hard to relate to other people socially and emotionally. I tried ADHD medication once and I felt uncomfortably calm and content, almost lobotomized, so I never took it again.
As an aphantasia-ist(?) and a former student of Dan Dennett, I loved this, and I need to compose a blog piece (or video) to agree, revise, and extend these ideas. In the interests of brevity, let me introduce one piece of terminology: the "Argument from Personal Incredulity". Many of the arguments in this domain are poorly-disguised versions of this: "I can't imagine how this could be true, so it must be false". There's a nice little video on YT where Dan talks about the seductive attraction of dualism, and once again the argument turns out to be an AFPI. Try applying that to qualia thinking. And then restructure all of this from an evolutionary standpoint. There's a great just-so story waiting to be told about the evolution of consciousness, and the varieties of consciousness such as internal monologues and aphantasia really help to explain it. More anon.
I think I finally understood what you meant when you talked about lack of inner monologue and particarly that you don't know what will come out of your mouth before you hear yourself say it. It seemed so impossible to me but after months and months of introspection I realized that actually, most of the time, and I believe this applies to most of us, the majority of all our chatter comes out like that. As someone with inner monologue imagine yourself writing a quick reaction to a post in social media. Do you typically give any thought inside your mind to what and how you will write before writing it? No, you just start typing based on your reaction. In everyday conversations, do you really stop to think how you formalize your words every time before opening your mouth? To me the answer is clear. Most of the time we just blurt out sentences and most of the time they come out very much as intended. Not that we write and talk without thinking. It's just that we don't always need the inner monologue. Suddenly it's not so difficult to imagine talking without inner monologue when you realize you do it most of the time.
To be clear I don't mean to say anything like "actually none of us have inner monologue". Only that imagining how it is even possible can be easier than it seems at first glance.
I always hear what i write in my inner voice while writing even if it's a reaction i just can't write without doing that, i can talk without doing that but for some reason it never works that way with writing for me.
99% of the time I plan out what I’m going to write or say out loud as if I don’t I tend to not make full sense as I am autistic and tend to struggle with saying things without thinking. I had no clue most people just say things without planning it out. I usually plan things out before I say it, or I pause before I answer to plan it out. I find this crazy to me that most people don’t
Truly fascinating. I've only come across one other person who doesn't have an internal monologue and that is my best friend who was child-minded by my mum since before we went to primary school. When I tell anyone that I don't utilise an internal monologue, they simply don't believe me and I find it baffling that everyone goes about life with a voice constantly talking, almost commentating on every decision they make. Whilst I don't use my internal monologue, I can hear an internal voice (anyone's voice, in fact) if I want to. I use it to read. And if I know a song, I can hear it perfectly in my mind. Very glad I've come across this video and looking forward to discovering what else you have on your channel.
Your comment and Noam Chomsky saying "we don't know what we are going to say before we say it" made me wonder: is this -- and in particular the existence of people who disagree with this statement -- discussed in the academic literature? It touches on something that has long been a pet interest/question of mine: are you a single or a multi-thinker? (I guess Simon is a no-thinker in this flawed terminology). I have always had the experience that when I talk there can be no internal monologue alongside it - my talking just externalises my internal monologue. But also, when I listen to other people I can't think verbally in my own mind. The only exception is by short internal interjections in pauses in their speech or by zoning out their voice so that I don't really take in what they are saying. While many people say they have a similar experience, some say that they do "know" what they are going to say before they say it. These people normally also report being able to do things like thinking (in words) about what they are going to have for breakfast while saying aloud what they will eat for dinner. I would referred to myself as a "single-thinker" and others as "multi-thinkers", but I now wonder whether it is possible that people like myself are actually more like Simon, we lack a conscious awareness of our speech generation process, but just as Simon can talk aloud to himself we just compensate for this "lack of awareness of our speech generation" by imagining ourselves hearing ourselves talk. This certainly fits with how it feels my internal monologue works, I hear it, much like I can hear an imagined sound of a dog barking. Furthermore, just as I cannot really picture an apple in my minds eye while concentrating on being conscious of my visual field I can't think while listening to someone talk.
I am a "single thinker" in the same way that you are, but with one really interesting notable thing recently. Often I have trouble falling asleep because I can't stop thinking. I can't stop following these really long trains of though that would keep me up for hours. So I started just counting to distract myself, and it worked pretty well. Occassionally, I would notice that at some point I had stopped counting and was now thinking about something, but even that started happening less. Now, the counting strategy is entirely ineffective because I've begun to simultaneously count (while keeping pace, i think) and think at the same time. It's not even like I'm switching between the next number and then back to my train of thought, its, as far as I can tell, both at the same time.
@@Hinotori_joj That is really interesting. I expect all of these things are on a continuum, and perhaps being better or worse just requires practice. I find that to fall asleep I just need to listen to something that stops me thinking without being too interesting -- I find episodes of BBC radio 4 comedy I have heard before are perfect, although I can't have heard it too recently.
I was and still am a little bit scared of talking because I can't think alongside it with which I mostly mean I can't have an internal monologue. A purpose of my internal monologue, I believe, is to pace my thoughts. If I talk, things (thoughts) still happen in my head but they're all over the place and run way ahead of the conversation, leaving me confused and distracted.
I'd say the best literature out there on this is WIlliam James' principles of psychology. ultimately everything is associationism. We have a thought internally as a response to external stimuli. that's a crude summary, please don't argue with me - just go and read his books. He was always regarded as the top dog in psychology before all the nonsense artists like freud and jung came in and washed him away. Something i've noticed in these comments is everyone thinking they are so unique. no, not really. it's all sophistry, the brain is a very mechanical associationist automaton
I’m a “multithinker” but I usually only have one “type” of thought at a time. I can say out loud what I want for dinner while thinking about what I want for breakfast, it’s not exactly in words but I know what I would say if I were to put it into words. It’s more than pictures in my minds eye. On that, with my eyes closed I can see with great detail an apple but the more I add to the picture, the lower quality it gets. When I try with my eyes opened it’s a lot less quality and appears as if I see it in a different place than my visual field
richard feynman had this anecdote about him discussing a certain personal experiment he did where he mentally timed himself reading something. when he discussed this experiment with a colleage his colleague couldn't believe that a person could read and count at the same time. he knew that counting was done verbally and he couldn't do two verbal things in parallel. but feynman counted by seeing a clicker in his mind's eye which could do its thing while he read. i've certainly misrembered or swapped around some details
I have an internal monologue and a mind's eye, but I would have difficulty with this in the same way that I would have difficulty with a polyrhythm. It requires a sort of multitasking skill that is difficult without training. If I was counting while reading, I would end up reading to the rhythm of my counting due to being unable to focus on both separately Actually after trying it, I find that I can do it, but I feel like I focus on the content of what I'm reading less fully than I would if I wasn't counting. I can think "one-one thousand, two-one thousand, etc." while I read.
tried this myself and my experience matches nick's exactly. it is mentally taxing, and it really is like juggling. if i lose count or lose my rhythm i have to start reading the text from the beginning. i can as describe what's going on up there very well too. i visualize a white number on a black background counting up. one of those old film countdowns but in reverse. i am saying the words as i see each number in my own voice but in my head, like when you hear yourself talk. what i am reading gets no visualization at all, just words on a screen but i still feel the meaning behind them. details are immediately lost though, just the rough impression of the emotion behind the comment.
This is fascinating as always. Thank you! Pain is something that one can get used to. I've been in severe pain for around twenty years. It's just as tangible to me now as it was when I first became seriously ill, but it's also deeply uninteresting to me, and I very rarely pay attention to it. Occasionally, if I'm given a strong analgesic for another reason, it abruptly becomes clear how much it has been affecting me, because I have vastly more energy than usual. People tend to assume I'm joking when I respond to an injury by saying "No worries, it's just pain,." but I'm really not. It's not upsetting like, say, lasting damage or even the short term experience of nausea or vertigo, it's just background noise which I can usually tune out. I expect that lots of people acquire this ability when they really need to.
I’m very sorry you deal with chronic pain! And I’m glad that you are able to navigate it. That said, when I was 19, I came to the realization, through meditation and studying Buddhism, this “decoupling” of pain and suffering that he was referring to. I’m sure I’m still very much under the sway of pain after a certain threshold, but I am generally able to separate the sensation of the pain from the mental suffering. It makes it even easier when (in my experience) alot of pain just feels like some level of intense cold, ironically, including burns (again, to a certain point).
this describes it really well. unless im having a bad flare up, the pain is always there but its in the background and not something i worry about or think about much. i personally find that flare ups are a different story and MUCH more annoying.
I guess I've always taken for granted what I now realize is extremely vivid mental imagery and dialog. I hear my own internal dialog almost constantly, narrating my thoughts. I can have conversations with familiar voices like friends, family, celebrities etc. I can hear any familiar song with a decent amount of clarity. I can visualize or picture things either in my mind's eye or as a projection in my visual field, basically in any way I want. If you asked me to visualize a giant apple on the foot of my bed it would be very easy, for example. My favorite part of all of this relates to mechanical things; I can see what I'd refer to as a interactive mental CAD model of my car, my mountain bikes, my motorcycle etc. where I can zoom in and out with immense detail, see exploded views and how the parts fit together exactly. This can come from hands on experience, diagrams and videos I've watched. To me, the idea that others cannot do this is hard to fathom, I had always assumed everyone else could. Tremendous and profound video.
i feel the same. people call me smart all the time but i just remember how everything happened? i don’t know how to explain it, but if i see it, i know it. i noticed this more when i started working on my car, and talking to other people. i know everything, as if i am looking at it in the moment. weird thought but yeah most people don’t have a memory like me. it was hard to beleive not everyone thought like that. but it’s nice to know someone else out there does.
Did you mention things like playing musical instruments? There are tasks you see in your minds eye until the point it becomes muscle memory, after which the very act of visualizing your hands makes you mess-up the whole thing! Isn't the phenomenon of "flow" one of turning off the inner monologue/minds eye? That's precisely why it's so fascinating.
Muscle memory is fascinating. I know how to play a few pieces on the piano. If you asked me what the notes were in order I'd have a hard time listing them, but I can sit down in front of a keyboard and my hands can just do it. I'm conscious of the stylistic choices I'm making, louder here, softer there, accent this note, etc., but not of the individual notes themselves. Actually I'm now realizing that I'm having the same experience typing up this sentence! My hands can produce words without having to think about each individual letter
@@Eidolon2003Things like hitting a ball with a bat or racquet, dancing, driving a car, knitting, eating, and many other physical activities that include frequently done, repetitive movements can be like that. Not necessarily always, or consistently throughout the whole of an activity, but intermittently. Our body is doing one thing while our consciousness is thinking about something else - or possibly we may not consciously be thinking of anything at all.
I've read in child development books that up to a certain age, people can only talk to themselves out loud but around the age of 8-9, we start to internalise this voice which then becomes our internal monologue. Perhaps for people like Simon, this just didn't happen for some reason.
This is fascinating to me because it made me realize that while my first solid memory is from when I was around 3 or 4 having a bizarrely existential thought process going wondering about what the sun and sky were looking back I realize that a sizable chunk of my young life did actually go without much of an internal monologue if any and as far as I can recall it only really seemed to kicked in when contemplating complex topics that legitimately interested me until about 4th grade, so around 9, at which point it ramped up activity corresponding with a perceptible-to-others shift in my personality where I became neurotic and developed anxiety and began to regularly have racing thoughts but also a large increase in creativity and a desire to engage in creative endeavors. I don't know what it means but it is extremely intriguing how everything lines up.
I remember hearing my internal voice at around age 4 or 5 sitting in the kitchen, and thinking it was a ghost! And then when I realized I could control what it said -- at first I wasn't sure if it was controlling what I said -- I thought, "this is my friendly ghost."
I unfortunately had that shit ASAP.. Probably why I'm so fucked now.. I remember a Lego piece falling into my grandma's couch when I was 2.. 34 years later she passed away and I probably thought about it's location 30,000 times betwixt those years.. I walked into her basement and found it.. Its permanently on my computer desk now and gives me relief when I see it.. 😂
Lordy, that description of, 'I open my mouth and the words just come out' has me so jealous. I have autism, but didn't have a diagnosis as a kid. I just had this thing where someone would ask I question, I'd have to process it and sift it through all my mental files to come to some conclusion, then very consciously force my mouth muscles into the correct position to make speech. Even once I got better at speech, I still couldn't just blurt out an answer. There was always a processing delay. And no matter how innocuous the question, if you have a pause before you answer it, people always think your answer is inauthentic. "How are you today?" Think about it, how am I? I am good. Access vocal cords. "I'm good, thanks." Half a beat too late. And then they're just staring at you a bit too intensely, wondering if you're having a joke at their expense. You *have* to just answer instantly, or they think you're lying.
All this makes me very nervous and a bit confused because I never knew this wasn't normal. I knew that at least something seemed different about the connection of how I thought & communicated but having it summed up so perfectly is kind of eery
@@shrimpypyeah Well, it feels perfectly normal, but it always seemed like it definitely wasn't universal, because if everyone else expects that instant answer, they must not have to need that extra beat of processing time. They say that when a baby is born, the very first thing it starts doing as it learns things is actually kill off neural links - it trims and prunes the wiring, the connections in its brain, to strengthen the pathways that seem important, to make the most efficient learning machine. Whereas an autistic brain seems to keep many, many more of those links and connections between every part of the brain to every other part. There's an order of magnitude more data for us to sift through, every single time. Solidarity, my dude. You are not alone
This reminds me, I struggle with hearing a piece of music in my head, but one time when I was dozing off I heard a symphony that was really bright and clear and it felt like I would be able to produce that feeling again after I woke up, but now being awake and trying to reproduce any symphony in my head it ends up being unclear and very "blurry", even with small aspects of music like a melody or a chord progression
Interesting! I'm like that for visual things. I have aphantasia, or at least my mind's eye is very weak, but I can still have visually vivid dreams that look indistinguishable from reality when I'm in them. Sometimes when I'm drifting off to sleep, in that middle stage when you start dreaming but are still partly conscious, my thoughts start to become vividly visual with colour and detail I usually can't imagine. A couple of times it's so shocking it jolts me awake. On the other hand, my audial imagination is very vivid. When I imagine a song I know well, i can hear it in my head with all its details almost as if I can hear it very faintly in the distance in real life
I have something kind of similar. Though I can play songs in good detail in my head, they're never in the right key. I'm incapable of recalling the actual pitch unless I've just heard it. But every now and then, as I'm drifting off to sleep, a song will play extremely vividly in my head. Sometimes this wakes me up and I immediately record myself humming the song. Then I play the actual thing on my phone, verifying that my humming was perfectly in tune. But when I'm awake, I can't make that vivid, perfect pitch song play no matter how hard I try.
I feel like I almost always have music running through my head. It's probably not all the time, but I certainly notice it a lot. And that's the thing, I notice it. I don't necessarily choose a certain song at a certain time, although I can if I want. I don't have perfect pitch as far as being able to quickly identify a note just from hearing it like some people can, but it seems like I can produce a pitch if it's, for example, the first note of a melody that I know really well.
@@AP-fo5cf I experience the same thing often. When awake I have the somewhat indistinct, fleeting, shifting mental imagery that I guess most people have, but in those few seconds between waking and sleeping I have extremely vivid and persistent mental images. Sometimes I stay in that state for up to twenty seconds without falling asleep, but the ability never continues when I'm fully awake. I wonder how many great artists have/had that same ability while awake.
My internal monologue has become more external since living alone. External or internal, it manifests with tier 3 consciousness, not with the noticing that I need to buy milk, or putting away clothes etc, but when having to make an important decision about something, agreeing or disagreeing with an opinion I’ve read, or when experiencing a strong emotion.
I agree, my internal monologue is for "tier 3" conscious thoughts, either through consciously thinking something through or allowing my mind to wonder. In adult life I've increasingly noticed I will go through the daily chores of life without noticing or sometimes even remembering what I'm doing, "on autopilot" while my tier 3 thoughts are somewhere else. Sometimes this will lead to "Senior moments" or Freudian slips
Amaaaaazing video. I was so moved, I have to share my personal story. I was first made aware of how we didn't see the real world while studying physics for school. I did a presentation on radiation. I remember being left in awe and excitement: the world was so much more than it had appeared to me. My perception and experience of the world was through a human lense: I wasn't able to see the world as it is, and I will never be. All the waves, radiation, stuff some animals could see but not us. And also the shades of color we perceived that some animals don't, and vice versa. How many versions of the world are there? What does the objective real world look like? I will never know! Then I realized how rich in variation the human experience itself was when I studied psychology on my own and even more while learning about myself in therapy. It's as if my metaphorical sight got broader. I was able to experience more and understand more thanks to the knowledge I was gaining. Then I learned about the part of the brain that filters the information our body perceives: explained a lot why I would start noticing a certain breed of dog suddenly, only after I learned about it for the first time. Or a certain brand. It was yet another amazing find. It made me feel like a curious child, gazing at the world for the first time. When it came to the senses, I had forever wondered how magical the world must appear to people with synesthesia: so colorful and rich in sensation. And to imagine some people don't have a mind's eye was... The abundance of diversity made me so excited. And then I found out I actually do have synesthesia! It was like a black swan event of my own universe. I needed a whole day to just process everything in my mind and rearrange my idea of the reality as I know it. I had just assumed everybody else had the same experience as I did and hadn't thought of it as unusual. Turns out no one in my close family had synesthesia. Nor the majority of my friends. Wild. To walk among each other for so long and to not know. What else don't we not know about each other??? Another realization I had was about blind people. I always imagined it, without a second thought, to be blind was to have a constant solid dark grey in front of your eyes. But then one day randomly I had a thought: impossible - if you cannot see then there's no darkness! I was so fast to subconsciously accept what it was like based on my own experience - which couldn't have been any more different!! So I googled in search for answers, where I read someone saying something like: imagine what does the visual field behind your head look like? And it made my head explode. The human experience is so diverse and broad! Then to comment on internal monologue. I remember when I first read about some people not having it, it was hard for me to believe. Because not only do I have a monologue, but sometimes when I have a neat stream of thought, another voice would interrupt me and correct me or try to debate me. Or sometimes the completely random unconnected words or phrases would pop into my mind out of nowhere while I'm thinking of something else, or just perceiveing something. Or if I know only the basic of the basics of grammar of a foreign language, my brain would get triggered upon hearin it and I'd start thinking in that language even though I don't speak it! I would have to make effort to switch it back to one that I speak fluently. Sometimes I'd even dream in that unknown language and my brain will make it up. I once woke up right after the dream where I was speaking german fluently (which I'm not fluent in at all) so I was able to remember what was daid in a dream. It sounded very german, but I had a suspicion that my brain was generating german - like words, assigning them meaning that wasn't real. And it was in fact what did happen, the german words from my dreams didn't exist. Dreams remind me so much of AI. So anyway, for me whose thoughts were always so loud and often involuntary, I just had to accept that some people don't have an internal monologue, unable to understand. I think only now after watching this video I have managed to get a better understanding of what it could feel like. And when we've been a certain way since birth, it's impossible to explain to each other the non mutual experiences (the elephant analogy from the video) and then to even understand them, but what we can do is to accept that. To accept there are things we cannot know or understand. To accept the differences. Just because we don't experience something or don't understand it, doesn't mean it isn't real. I think tolerance and acceptance form a breeding ground for peace, love and compassion. It always brings me so much joy knowing we're all so similar yet so different and the world's we live in aren't one in the same, even though the objectives exist, we can only interpret them as our subjective versions of them. Gosh this makes me so excited about life! What else do I not know about it? There is infinite amount of things we could learn from just one other human being. Imagine how much the entire humanity holds! 😊
What type of synesthesia do you have? I had the exact same experience, thinking “this condition sounds so cool,” then later realizing by chance that I had grapheme-color synesthesia. It was so baked into my experience of the world that I never really thought about it. It’s not something I see with my eyes. It’s very hard to explain. I don’t think I could put into words how I experience it, even though I’ve been aware of it for well over a decade now.
@@guyanomaly me as well! I remember once when I was in primary school, i had an argument with a girl in my class about which color was a certain number or a letter, i forgot which to be exact. And later i saw people on the internet arguing which colors are the days in the week and I was then certain that everybody has a color for each letter/number that is specific to them and if you talk about this you're bound to disagree. And i thought everybody thought the same so I never ever brought it up. And so I moved on and then about a year ago i was sat with my friends in a coffee shop, blabbing on and on and randomly the conversation got to a point where i thought i could be funny, so I said that 3 could only be green, trying to be sarcastic (the punchline being that they obviously have different colors for the same number). My two friends blinked and then one said: i suppose it could be green because... And I was like : COULD? BECAUSE? It either is or isn't, no rhyme or reason. They had not a single clue about what I was talking about. And so I googled it. Also turned out that having time organized in 3d space in my mind's eye is also a type of synesthesia. I don't remember being that shocked like ever.
@@guyanomaly if i have to explain my experience, I say that I see the letters words and everything as it is on paper, but there exists another letter in my mind's eye and it has a color. I was explaining it to my friend and said: in my mind's eye, that place where you see an elephant when you imagine it. And the friend was like: i don't see an elephant when I imagine it. And it turned out my mother also couldn't. I think it shocked me even more than synesthesia did.
I found this hugely interesting. I definitely *can* speak in an inner monologue, but it doesn't appear to be necessary for every kind of activity or decision; I find that it helps sometimes - I can rehearse what I'm going to say, inside my head, for example, but with the milk thing, I'm just thinking about the activity of getting more milk without words or pictures - maybe like some sort of flowchart, but not a graphical one I can see inside my head (unless I want to) - maybe more like awareness of a chain of events that have to take place in a certain order. Curious question: if you don't have a perceptible inner monologue, what happens if you lie about something? For me, if I deliberately choose to say something that isn't true, there's a whole process of rehearsal and realtime edit of the story happening in my head, before I speak the untruth. I expect this set of phenomena probably includes other senses and abilities too - I can imagine flavours in my head and to a certain extent I can mix them in my imagination - my imagined version of the mixture is not always completely accurate but more often than not, it's pretty close. There are also times when I try to do this and it simply fails me though - and it's like asking a question and just getting no answer.
Also I meant to say that, absent an inner monologue, I find it really remarkable that you're able to do all of the accent and dialect speech, simply because if I want to speak in an accent, I have to rehearse it in my head first - I have to try to hear myself speaking in that accent, before I can make my voice attempt to replicate what I rehearsed in my head. Obviously whatever process you have for doing that works better than what I have.
I'm sorry for missing this for so long! I'm actually trying to think about the last time I lied about something - it's difficult for me to remember, exactly. I think there is some process of preparation, but I think I'm quite bad at strategising in that way (I'm also very bad at things like chess), so I usually either just panic and say whatever's true, or have to think about the implications afterwards if there are any. Maybe the difficulty with strategising has something to do with the internal monologue thing. Does your process of rehearsal tend to be verbal? I've always sort of been able to imagine flavours - when I was a child I remember sometimes wondering why anyone would eat unhealthy things when they could just imagine the flavours without consuming the thing. I'd never tried to mix them until I read this comment, but I think I have the same thing as you describe - it's like the simulated flavour just dissolves when I try to create a mixture.
And on this - I really struggle to start doing an accent without rehearsing out loud. On the rare occasions I have to do one in an acting context, I usually leave the room for a couple of minutes so people can't hear me getting into the accent. In videos, abrupt transitions between accents are normally facilitated through editing! I'm trying to imagine your voice in different accents, now.
@@simonroper9218 Yeah, I mean, I try not to lie maliciously, of course, but scambaiting for example involves a lot of fabrication or even just writing fictional stories involves creating narratives that are not true. Typically, my internal process is sort of like very quiet subvocalisation - to try to describe that - if you can imagine talking to yourself out loud, then repeating yourself at lower and lower volume until you are inaudible to anyone else, then continuing to lower the volume and minimise the movement of mouth and tongue, but with the words still sort of playing - like if you had turned the volume down to zero on a TV - the machine is probably still *processing* audio, it's just not coming out of the speakers; that's the best way I can put it, I suppose. My process for writing a piece of fabricated nonsense is pretty much rehearsal at zero external volume - often over and over, making small changes to improve the planned piece in one way or another.
I understand the concept of qualia (at least I think I do) and I agree that they exist, but I guess I'm one of the people who don't find them to be particularly problematic. My brain takes sensory input and translates it into sensations that I'm capable of experiencing. It is arbitrary that I experience the colour of an apple or the sound of a high pitched note in the specific way that I do, but that doesn't really matter as long as it's consistent. There would be no way to represent something like that which wouldn't be arbitrary. I can't remember where I read this but I once saw an argument that the subjective experience of consciousness is a kind of "mental pollution", something which is not illusory but is unnecessary. As in, an animal could function identically without qualia, they don't really serve a purpose, they're just a by-product of our neurological processes. In the same way that a car engine makes noise, but that's not it's purpose, that's just a by-product of the process it uses to achieve its function. I'm probably not representing that argument very well here, but I found it fairly convincing, if a little depressing.
A privileged access to an authentic enquiring mind, who partners with my own rumination's on these issues. Brilliantly put and fully engrossing. TY Simon.
This reminds me of a legendary philosophy exam. The professor placed an apple on his desk, and told the students that they had thirty minutes to write a convincing argument that the apple did not exist. The winning student only wrote, 'What apple?'
I love stories like this. You'd think, wouldn't you, that philosophy exams would test students' understanding of the methodologies, frameworks and historical underpinnings of the philosophical concepts they'd been learning about, but apparently philosophy exams are just airy-fairy nonsense you can pass with a two-word answer!
I've heard a variation on this one before. It's the final exam in a philosophy class, and when the professor hands out the test papers, the students are dismayed to see only a single word on the test: "Why?". The supposed correct answer is "Why not?". I guess I would fail such a test since my natural reaction is to answer, "Because."
As someone who suffers from C.P.T.S.D. and thus has grown up experiencing intense mental imagery involuntarily through flashbacks, I find it difficult to imagine what it would be like to even have a control of what you visually imagine; even moreso difficult to imagine having to focus in order to picture things especially vividly. I have a very visual imagination and memory, which while itself is unrelated to anything traumatic I’ve experienced, I think it has made the effects of my condition like flashbacks and paranoid imagination that much more present in my consciousness. Paranoia being a symptom in my case that affects more than just my brain’s visual imagination, sound is another huge component I find myself fixating on and over-imagining to the point where at times I’ve questioned whether I’ve hallucinated something or am just over analyzing something I’ve truly heard to the point where I’m not sure whether it sounded like something to react to or not. On the topic of internal monologue, I definitely experience an extremely loud array of internal dialogue and voices consciously experienced in conversation with myself. It’s worth bringing up that these are not what I know to be auditory hallucinations or anything, but just very prominent thoughts. I’ve experienced hallucinations before both visual and auditory but it’s been a long time luckily, which is why I wouldn’t categorize these “loud” thoughts as auditory hallucinations comparable to something like actually hearing voices in your head, although at times I do question how much of a difference there would be if I could experience the two types of conscious moment side by side or one after the other without interruption. Sorry for the long comment, I really don’t talk publicly about my experience at all and just journal so trust me this isn’t just for attention or something. Thanks for reading if you did, I hope this offers something for discussion. I’m happy to answer questions.
Don't worry about leaving long comments. If people didn't share their own thoughts and experiences, what would there be to even discuss? The self-centered person is the one who isn't interested in hearing or reading what someone else has to say, and therefore wouldn't be interested in reading your comment.
I also have CPTSD and I relate to a lot of what you said! I had this friend who- this may seem a bit out of the box for some, but he had 'senses' about things I couldn't explain, you'd have to see it to believe it-could 'sense' people's inner worlds, and was always pretty accurate. When he 'listened' to my inner world, he said the best way to describe it was a big committee. He said it was like a big, long table, and everyone at the table is shouting over each other and not listening to anyone else. Since then, that's the best way I've been able to describe it as well. I also have adhd and trouble focusing, and my thoughts/internal monologue(s) just wear me out and I often feel frazzled, like I can't even think about any one thing. A lot of times when I'm trying to find some peace and quiet inside but I have a lot of nervous energy, it's like there's and AM/FM radio on scan mode, finding ANYTHING to just latch onto instead of quieting down.
@@juliana.x0x0 Yes! What you’re saying about your friend and what he said as well all resonates so much with my experience in coming to visualize and understand my own perspective of reality in comparison to other people around me. It’s so extraordinarily alienating feeling sometimes to feel like you’re hiding this whole inner world that seems impossible to explain unless someone already knows what that’s like in an intimate way.
I also have CPTSD, but I am an aphant, with no visual mental imagery. I also have very little inner voice - it's there, but it's quiet. I'm quite grateful to have a quiet, dark brain. I'm so sorry that you and others have to deal with visual flashbacks. There are some researchers who think that some people with aphantasia may have developed it as a way to protect themselves from traumatic visual memories. That resonates with me a lot. I can think of the visual aspects of my traumatic experiences, but I don't SEE them, I only KNOW what they look like. My worst traumatic experience is one that I know was painful, but I cannot remember feeling pain. (I won't say HOW I know it was highly painful unless I'm asked, because I've learned that it deeply upsets the people who haven't experienced it)
Simon, thank you for making this video, it is possibly my favourite one you have made so far. I think you did a great job of structuring and presenting your thoughts on this topic. I hope you decide to make a follow up video discussing further whether there are people who do not experience qualia, as it seems plausible that people might merely react to stimuli in their environment without having a 'label' for interpreting it. I share your thoughts on Dennet, I feel his views on some topics seemed to miss the point in an axiomatic way, such that it seemed he just wasn't viewing the world in the same way others do. Likewise in discussions with friends and people online, there seem to be people who have a hard time understanding qualitative experience, as if there is something axiomatically different about how they understand the world.
I was like you once, somewhere in my early childhood I LEARNED how to pre-meditate in a conscious way with monologuing. It was very gradual, tedious and arguably painful. I struggle to remember much but I know socialization and relational tensions were what motivated child-me
I find that when I'm dozing off, my visual imagery is the clearest. Clear as glass. I suppose it's using a similar circuitry to dreams. But I can't activate that freely. If I try to visualize something while fully awake, it looks similar to what you showed with the onion. It has color, but it's a little lacking in detail, and not as clear. As someone who has both inner monologue and the ability to visualize rough images of things, it does feel surprising to know that others have different ways of thinking (because those ways of thinking would feel alien to me). At least for me, your internal monologue can have a voice. Mine sounds like myself, but I can make it speak in a different voice if I wanted to. I find I can replicate regional accents I don't speak better in my internal monologue than I can when using my speech organs. For me, the only difference between my internal monologue and speech is whether it's said aloud or not. Both come out of a black box more or less. But the words that come out are the ones I'm intending to say. And sometimes there is a word I intend to say that I can't remember, and at that point I have to pause and try to recall it, which requires searching through associative memory (which feels like a graph) until I can strike upon the right memory that immediately makes the word come to my mind. Sometimes the act of trying to recall a word makes it impossible to recall, and the word will come out naturally later, at which point I am surprised that I ever forgot it. Sometimes the word that comes out is not the word I intended to say. It can be a different but related word that somehow got mixed up in the black box before it came out. The same thing happens when I'm typing. I might intend to type "estimate" but type "escalate" instead, without even being conscious that I typed the wrong word until I look over what I typed. I believe this is called a Freudian slip. I sometimes joke that there is an imbalance in the Freudian field that causes an increase in my Freudian slip rates. I think we can see our peripheral vision, but we just don't have access to it in the same way that we can access the center of our vision. I've heard of people training themselves to be able to read in their peripheral vision, and I can definitely detect changes or lack of changes in it. I can "tolerate" pain, which is a matter of detaching yourself from it. It feels like shifting your focus away from it. But it's still there, and it still feels like a negative thing. Taste words can be vague, and our vocabulary for them isn't perfect. People might call yogurt sour because it's soured milk, not necessarily because they experience it in the same way as a lemon, and they might use that word to refer to a slightly different taste than it is used to refer to in other contexts. I experience "sour" as a sensation that sort of pinches my tongue and causes my lips to pucker. I do think yogurt does that very faintly (I am eating some right now), but it is nowhere near as powerful as a lemon. I am also used to eating sweet yogurt, which may be less sour than other soured milk products. I would think that consciousness is irrelevant to the hardware that it runs on. It should be possible to virtualize it, copy it, etc. Heck, it should be possible to exist without hardware, e.g. in an abstract mathematical notation. I had a sense that the universe is an infinite recursion of formal languages at one time. But that's partly my view as someone who studied computer science, and I've been told, in criticism, that a clockmaker thinks the universe is made of gears and cogs. I'm not sure what it means to have or lack "qualia" as part of one's experience. Maybe I don't understand the definition of "qualia" being used here. I do feel that the brain operates with labels like "red" or "bumpy" which we apply to particular sensations, and that those are not intrinsic properties of objects. Is the suggestion that there are people who cannot separate the sensation from the label? I would think that is a learnable distinction and not a fundamental difference between people's brains. If I look at a red door, I don't intuitively "see" qualia. I intuitively see a red door. I may see two red doors that look completely different and understand both as "red doors". If I introspect, I can understand that the labels "red" and "door" are subjective interpretations of the mass of atoms in front of me, in the particular lighting conditions I am viewing them in. I also see color as a continuum, not as discrete qualia that would be suggested by the names of colors. I could describe the same color in different ways, but my expression is only an approximation of the real color I am seeing. "Red" is not a fundamental irreducible concept to me, but a label I apply to certain patterns of visual data, which may overlap with other labels like "vermillion" or "scarlet". I've reached the end of the video. Thanks for the thought experiment!
A quale is not “red” as a general category, but “this red”. Like, it isn’t the concept of “a thing being/looking red”, but the experience of a particular thing (or visualization) appearing red. I mean, the experiences of perceiving different shades of red are/involve different qualia.
@@drdca8263 I see. Thank you. I didn't really understand what was meant by some people not experiencing qualia when he mentioned that in the video. If qualia are defined as what we experience, then not experiencing them but still experiencing the world in some way would seem to contradict the definition. I thought the issue was whether or not people conceptually agreed with or understood the idea that reality and our experience of it can be separate (direct realism vs indirect realism). I can understand a direct realist refuting the idea of qualia, but I wouldn't understand someone not experiencing qualia (regardless of whether or not they agreed with the notion).
@@nickpatella1525 Uhhh, I think there might be multiple senses of “experience” that could be used here, and this might have caused some confusion, but I’m not sure. (Like, *really* not sure.) I didn’t mean for the word “experience” to be the point of my comment. I mainly meant to distinguish between the class “red” of all red […]s , vs a particular red […] .
Yes, I'm like that too. I can make a detailed image of something that doesn't exist, just as I now can with AI in 2024, when I'm on the edge of consciousness; but when I'm fully awake, my visualising capabilities are very fuzzy. I think it's because my brain has shut down input from my eyes and thus frees up all my visual processing power. Just closing my eyes doesn't suffice, as blackness is still info and I constantly see patterns of colour anyway.
As someone with strong internal and external monogues, the fact that you can learn languages without an internal monogue bewilders me. I did not know this about you. When I started learning French I started to think in French more and more. But it was more often when the French verbalisation was simpler than the English one. "I'm hungry" takes longer to think (if that makes sense) than "J'uis faim." This idea of a black box inside your mind is scary. I can't imagine.
I had a Cuban friend in school that spoke English very well and I asked him about how he learned a second language and we talked about how he switched back and forth between languages when talking with other bilingual people. One thing that stuck with me all these years later is when he said that he knew he could speak English well when he started dreaming in English.
@@MillieSlavidou This could be the case in your particular situation, but its not likely to be true in every individual who lacks internal monologue. These differences in perception have to do with how parts of our brain talk to each other. They form pathways as they develop, and these pathways have variations from person to person. In the case of someone like yourself who lacks an internal monologue but is still perfectly capable of processing speech, what I assume is happening is that there are parts of your brain that do not directly communicate with each other in both directions, and have to use another part of the brain as a middleman to communicate. In this case, the middleman is somewhere in the chain you use to process spoken language. I'm bad at explaining it, but its easier to understand as a flow chart.
As I grew older an internal monologue refined itself and grew louder, crowding out what you term qualia--those things I experienced so vividly as a child, in that I had very few distinctions between vision, sound, taste, smell, touch. The world was a synesthetic wonder. I believe the fundamental quality of consciousness is not information processing, but the ability to imagine. Even when you say you 'can't imagine' how a tree, bat, magpie experiences consciousness...you are, in fact, imagining it. It is stepping outside of the material world that defines consciousness I think.
When I was in university I participated in a stage hypnotism show at the student union. The hypnotist had a group of us on stage and put us all 'to sleep' then began to guide us through a scenario which we, being hypnotized, lived out. Except I was never hypnotized. My internal monologue was constantly present asking "am I hypnotized yet?". The hypnotist told us we were a famous rock band and we were giving a concert on stage. I was the bassist, and as we gave our 'concert' my IM kept asking 'how do you play the bass? Do you use your first two fingers or your thumb?', which I'm sure is not something that a hypnotized person would worry about. After our 'concert' the hypnotist told us we were boarding our private jet surrounded by groupies, and when it became clear that things were going to get very lewd indeed I stopped playing along and told him I wasn't hypnotized. He tried to snap be 'back' into it (though I'd never actually been under as I say) - in a weirdly aggressive way I thought - but I just said no and came off stage. My friends all thought I'd woken up somehow, and wouldn't believe me when I said I'd never been under - "Well why were you doing all those things?", "I was just waiting to see when the hypnotism kicked in!". Super weird experience, but I'm 100% certain that it was my very vocal IM that prevented me from being hypnotized.
I totally understand this. Do you also struggle to read fiction and watch films? I have a really strong internal monologue and really low hypnotic susceptibility, and it's really hard for me to play along and get drawn in.
@@sekwar that’s really interesting, but no I get very immersed in fiction, I read a lot. Possibly no two people’s experiences will ever be quite the same, which I guess is what this great video is all about!
@@idabrit thanks. Yeah it's interesting for sure. I suppose we are all different, but I bet there are a lot of common idiosyncrasies we could predict based on these things.
Hypnosis on stage are all for show, and volunteers just play along. I assure you, none of the people on the stage with you were hypnotized either. They are just following the orders, it is the milgram experiment and Asch's conformity experiment on display for entertainment. Real hypnosis, whenever it happens, it requires a quiet place and several sessions to loosen up, and not everyone is susceptible to suggestion. Btw, hypnosis and visualization techniques can alter your memory or even inject false memories, either by accident or on purpose. So better to stay away from it as far as possible.
Thank you Simon for such a rich video! You really made the mind cogs moving and writing this long comment spanning through most of the topics you raise in the video. I can't imagine what it feels like to exist without an internal monologue or an ability to imagine pictures, sound, speech, or music, even though I know it's very real for some part of the population. I would love to experience it though, in a controlled manner for a limited amount of time which may be possible with the aid of TMS perhaps. It's somewhat similar to experiencing certain "negative symptoms" when using psychoactive substances, even though they are usually associated with the "positive symptoms" like hallucinations. Inability to access memory, to identify oneself with a certain species or a physical object, absence of the time flow - indistinguishable "before" and "after", the non-ownership over the memories. Those things don't exist as a subjective phenomenon one can think of until they are suddenly gone, leaving oneself questioning what "I" essentially is and what else one has no idea about. There's no voice of the internal monologue, at least for me. I guess it loops through the brain areas not related to the sound. However, it makes the tongue and the voice box move slightly, at least sometimes. Your example with pain can be analyzed from the neurological perspective. The particular areas responsible for the pain perception are believed to be: cerebellum, somatosensory cortexi, prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and others. There is likely a couple of places which receive the pain signal immediately from the sensory neurons and propagate it further. Now, imagine that you severe most of those propagation links leaving only the connection to the prefrontal cortex. You will be perfectly aware of the presence of pain, but you can have absolutely no emotions associated with it. Now if you add the amygdala connection - you can learn to be afraid of pain. And so on. It's similar to how the visual stimulus comes through multiple pathways: shape, color, and motion are believed to be processed separately and then reintegrated back. This comes from the observation of the patients with neurological deficiencies as a result of trauma to certain parts of the visual cortex. What are your thoughts on consciousness inside of LLMs and artificial neural networks in general? There is Glasgow Coma Scale which evaluates consciousness in humans to some degree. What if qualia is no different from any other category the brain can construct? How redness is different from squareness, or USB-ness (that is, the state of being a USB), or polynomialness (the state of being a polynomial expression)? It's just a way some more or less complex stimulus, external or internal, pulls the strings, tickles the brain, is classified and acted upon, activating certain neurons or neuronal ensembles; something you can tell from everything else. It's a label, a tag for a certain area in the multidimensional space of the visual modality, certain patterns of the visual cortex activation. A qualia can be felt in a particular way emotionally just as any other tag. It can have cross-modal associations, like the smell of rain among the deep-green wet leaves. So yes, it's irreducible in a sense just like any other tag. One can build subclasses: is it just blue or maybe it's navy, or azure, or indigo? Those tags mark smaller areas in the modal space. When you can distinguish - you can name it. Or can you? Remember the projections go to multiple brain areas? Some people with brain trauma can experience blue but can't name it. Can it be that for a share of people some pathways are missing in such a way that they don't feel the quale or feel them differently? Don't you feel how the meaning of the word "feel" becomes blurred at that point? The touch with religion was excellent. Examples of epilepsy with religious experience are well documented. Can it be that some people experience "oneness with the world" or any sort of an indescribable otherwise presence or causality on a daily basis, predisposed by their brain wiring? TMS of a particular area is known to cause a strong sensation of a person standing right behind you. What if it's a similar mechanism?
That black box phenomenon is something I find so strange. There were so many times when I was younger where I tried to come up with a word without first thinking about it, and I couldn't do it even when speaking gibberish.
Does that mean when speaking to someone, you form whole sentences before you say them or do you think a word then say it, then think the next word and so on? I'm having trouble imagining how one would function like that. I can definitely think about a certain word or phrase to use if it's a bit tricky and I don't want it to come out wrong. But the majority of things I just say out loud, I don't consciously tell them to myself first.
So much to talk about so I'll go in order of each topic you spoke on lol. 1. I have aphantasia. I actually spent 22 years of my life not knowing the "mind's eye" was a real thing. I always thought it was fantasy mumbo jumbo. I do dream incredibly vividly though. I also experience auditory imgination as in I hear music and other stuff in my head sometimes. 2 I don't have a inner monologue in the way most people describe it. Its more like a dialague. There's 1 or more subconcious voice. And there's a few conscious voice. Sometimes I will have conversation like dialogues. It helps to remember certain things and reflect on social encounters. 3 On the topic of conscious speech. In a nonemotional or detached conversation I actively think about the words I speak. When emotional its kinda a flip of a coin on whether I control myself or if I just entirely shut down and just agree to get the other person to shut up. There are also times where I'll have coversational battles with someone I'm upset with in my head. And speak none of it as I realize no one gives a fuck. 4 I actually have pretty good peripheral vision. I believe it is due to being in a marching band where I was taught to use said perephials in order to navigate formation movements while facing one direction with an instrument in my face. Even now with some reduction in my visual capabilities, I am still very concious of my perephials. So much so that I often fail to see things right in front of me lol.
I just want to thank you for this Video. Thanks to you i finally got to know that what I always experienced is actually called Aphantasia. It took me 23 years to figure out, that almost everyone can in fact See things in their mind. Thats Crazy man 😂
As for thinking vs an inner monologue, I can give an example that (for me at least) seemingly proves that they cannot be the same thing: I sometimes struggle to find the right word to use in my inner monologue. My interpretation of that is that I have some thoughts first, and then translate them into an inner monologue. If they were the same thing then it shouldn't be possible to have a concept in mind and struggle to find the word, the only way to have the concept in mind would be by thinking about the word to begin with. Or maybe it works in yet some other way..
I love your thought here. If I was inclined to argue that inner monologue and thinking are essentially the same, I would argue that they are 2 discrete steps in a single process. The first step is the rough conception, in which a nebulous concept is birthed. It is crude and low fidelity. The second step is refinement, and we use language to crystalize the thought into something tangible and "real". The mental vocalization gives it form and allows the idea to be handled, studied, and acted upon consciously. Without which the idea remains subconscious, and if we act on it, it is without full awareness. Language is necessary to move the subconscious into the fully conscious. There is likely some matter of spectrum here. To apply it to your example, it could be said that the fact you may struggle to find a word to fit a thought doesn't mean it's not part of the process, but merely that you encounter a speed bump in the second step of crystalizing the thought. I'm not sure how much of this is my personal belief. It feels convincing to me, and the way Simon describes his thought process of getting milk seems to align with this. While my inner monologue is very very busy pretty much all the time, not all of my thoughts get turned into language. And it is these thoughts that "feel" much more "automatic" to me. Because, according to my argument, it remains subconscious.
I know I wasn’t as aware of how I processed the world consciously versus subconsciously in the same way 10 years ago as I did today, how things seem versus how they really are. It’s given me perspective of the spectrum of how reality may appear to others. It becomes interesting when you can visualize and extrapolate a possible scenario that may play out and feel (or empathize) the practical and emotional stakes for you if that played out to mentally prepare for or prevent it. When that goes into my subconscious black box I am then adept at performing in the clutch off the cuff.
I have an internal monologue about almost everything I do--but I have occasionally had the experience of reacting automatically without thinking about it at all on rare occasions. Maybe that's why I'm poor at sports and am generally a bit clumsy.
@@aLadNamedNathan If you look back at those situations, what level of existing knowledge or skill were involved in how you acted? One can master something to the point where a response is not only automatic but drives innovation via improvisation in the moment. I am less physically coordinated as well but have subconsciously saved objects (sometimes valuable) after being clumsily dropped or prevented auto accidents due to inattentiveness via subconscious, automatic reactions as a result of years of clumsiness. Athletes train hard for years to develop that in their own bodies.
20.44 This absolutely happens with body waxing. What started as an unpleasantly painful experience became an experience so relaxing it would send me to sleep. I still felt the sensations, I just enjoyed them rather than resisting and feeling them as pain. Took a few years though
Really interesting topic. I have always that the brain is interpolating due to the human brain being highly attuned to patterns. When I first went to an optometrist, I was amazed that my (for the first time diagnosed) astigmatism actually existed. Up until that point, I believed that my vision was flawless. It was only when I experienced the comparison between my native vision and my enhanced vision (with the optometrists lenses) that I realized that my brain had been filling the gaps in my actual perception of the world. In a way my brain was lying, but in reality my brain was helping me experience the world without having to waste reasoning power. That was also the point in my life that I realized that people's perception of the world is in no way objective. I vividly remember that day.
Oh! I had undiagnosed astigmatism as well, up until my early 20s. I was absolutely _shocked_ to experience depth perception that extended past about four foot in front of me. Made crossing the road a lot safer, and driving a car... possible at all. And suddenly the enduring mystery of 'how do you draw a circle, and make one end meet up with the other end?' was no longer a mystery at all. Actually - this is interesting, because up to that point I had _understood_ on a cognitive level that all points on the edge of a circle are equidistant from its centre, but had been unable to exactly _see_ that quality in the shape without measuring it - not in the way that it shows up with the glasses on, a clear and vivid mathematical primitive (or close to it) in a world of more complex shapes and forms. My brain did _not_ fill in that gap and circularise circles or square squares; they all looked like any other shape. Text also got a lot easier to read, both up-close and from a distance. Easier to read, but not appreciably different from the underlying shape which I already understood to be there - I just became more able to percieve it. In a way, I had the opposite realisation about subjectivity and objectivity; I had already grasped that people's perceptions of things could differ, but the glasses gave me the opportunity to perceive qualities of things which had already been described to me by others, and which I had already known of conceptually, if (unknown to me) not been able to experience firsthand. The first time I saw a circle properly, during the eye test, I can remember quite vividly calling out loud, 'Oh! It's a circle! It's actually - circular!'; the optometrist gave me a look like she couldn't believe what she was hearing. But the point is - I knew what a real, circular circle was, despite never having seen one firsthand before. I had been able to learn and understand that, in a way which made the standard perception of the thing immediately recognisable to me, despite coming from a position where I had been perceiving it differently. Which meant that - over all those years - something about other people's experience and perception of the world had made its way to me, across that difference in frames of reference. Which in turn shows that - even if there is not an ultimate objectivity to refer to, two subjective points of view can at least come to an understanding of the difference between their points of reference, account for that difference, and communicate _as if_ they were within the same objective frame of reference; at least in some times and with some things.
speaking of internal monologues, i do have one, but i find i rarely use it because since very early childhood i vocalise practically all my thoughts when i’m not around other people. i talk to myself genuinely 24/7 when no one else is there to think i’m strange for it, i could sit in my room for a couple hours just staring in the mirror and chatting away. things is, though i of course make small comments to myself about "oh, i ought to do this and that" or "you know, your hair looks a fright", basically all my talking-to-myself is really voicing conversations that i have in my head. problem is it makes getting over boys very difficult, how am i supposed to forget about a fella when my natural instinct when watching a tv show is to chat to him about what i’m watching, or when my natural instinct while walking through the country is to start some make-believe conversation with him lmao i don’t know if that’s normal or what, i think everyone makes small comments to themselves or has given a pretend interview in the bathroom mirror but i do that literally all day every day. sometimes i pause youtube videos just to stop and chat to whoever i imagine myself chatting to about whatever just popped into my head. my mum thinks i’m loony lol
I once noticed that the taste of a peach isn't in the peach, nor in my taste receptors, nor in my mind, but it is in the combination of those things coming together. It seems evident to me that if there is no taster, there is no taste. And that every single experience is like that. Every sound, taste, sight, shape, physical sensation, etc is not in the outside world alone, but they are a result of the coming together of the outside world, someone's physical sense organs, and their mind. When I told my daughter that, she said that this made her think nothing could exist without consciousness. I think about this ALL THE TIME. If I understand it, Simon, I think you call experiences of the sort I describe above, like the taste of a peach, "qualia." You talk about how you used to think qualia was an accurate description of reality, that green was an actual property of grass, when in fact, the actual property is mathematical, and the color experience, the qualia, is a mysterious overlay on top of this, reliant on consciousness. This makes me wonder: what exists without qualia/experience? What is here without the one who experiences? The idea that the world outside our eyes is just a mathematical field is bizarre, but I think it is accurate. Like, what is in the room when we leave it alone? The colors, smells, shapes, textures, etc- as we experience them- these all disappear. This is such a beautiful mystery!What a mysterious place the universe is. Thanks for your videos.
this reminds me a lot of hegel's "substance is subject", especially your daughter's statement you mentioned. i couldn't give the explanation justice i think so if you're interested, i could link you to a really nice video about it (i forgot the name of the video but it was made by a channel called bewegtbild). it's unfortunately not in english but does have english subtitles
@@BeyandEstrella I remember linking it in the comments here but somehow it doesn't seem to be here anymore. I think there might be a bot deleting comments with links to avoid scams, so instead I'll just tell you the name of the channel and video: "Hegel's Dialektik erklärt nach Slavoj Zizek: „Substanz ist Subjekt“ mit Sein und Nichts" by "BewegtBild - Kunst und Theorie"
This is a great way of interpreting the idea of “non-self” in Buddhism. The idea that nothing has inherent existence in and of itself. Everything- and I mean, EVERYTHING- is a product of multiple other things. As you have illustrated, down the thought itself, nothing exists without the conditions created by other things. For what it’s worth, even though I love talks like this that Simon is amazing at articulating- I embrace the mystery of life as being life itself. We are all living in different practical realities, and some of us are just more intent on finding things and ideas to hold on to than others, and that’s okay! But on an easy breezy level, as you said, when you leave the room, does it still exist? If you leave, but a friend stays in the room, does it still exist because the friend is still in there to experience the room around them? Or does the friend AND the room cease to exist when it is out of your scope of awareness? There is just too much subtlety in absolutely everything for me to try and keep track, when I could just be enjoying the Cheetos I’m eating for what they taste like, you know?
Okay, I've now watched the whole video and read some of the commentary and I have to say: Mind. Blown. 😮🤯 I'm not certain I entirely grasped the whole thing, but it's a fascinating topic. Your presentation was thought-provoking, cogent, and balanced. Regarding the questions you asked us, I do experience qualia so I can't provide the input you want. I now need to go away and digest all of this. Well done, Simon, well done! 🤔
Great phenomenology and discussion, really enjoyed this video and hope to see more like it. Question on the discussion of qualia at the end and postulating the existence of those who don't experience qualia: What I take qualia to describe is all encompassing with respect to experience. My entire experience is composed of color, sounds, feelings, etc which I would describe as qualia. So I don't see how someone who doesn't experience qualia would be conscious at all. Are you wondering if this kind of person exists (the so called "philosophical zombie")? Or are we working with a different definition of qualia?
I think he doesn't want to presuppose what someone's experience would be without qualia. I think we all can't imagine what that would be like but given that many people obviously also can't imagine someone thinking without an internal dialogue or without being able to visualise things, it's only fair to not jump to the conclusion that consciousness without qualia can't exist, just because I cannot imagine it. Maybe it can't but maybe it can.
I dveleoped an internal monologue during my teenage years, and it only occurs when im being very introspective, it serves as a verbalization of my subconscious thoughts that i use to explain them to myself consciously. Interestingly, when i have an internal monologue, i more often than not still utilize my vocal tract, subtly mouthing the consonsants and vowels within my closed mouth, altering my breathing in a similar manner to speech, so my brain usually interpets my inner speech as real speech.
i also subtly mouth the words when i am thinking but i also can do it without, but i dont really alter my breathing at all to do it. ive had an internal monologue as long as i rember
Yeah, subtly signaling your mouth to form words as you think them is a commonly observed trait. Probably just something to do with our internal monologue using parts of the same process as physically speaking would.
In case you don't know it, that theory stems from a book by Julian Jaynes called _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind._ Although the book is about 50 years old, it remains a fascinating read. The main problem with it is that since it cannot be subjected to scientific investigation, its thesis must forever remain within the realm of philosophy.
@@aLadNamedNathan thank you friend. I am going to see if I can purchase this book. It really makes you question your inner monologue and consciousness itself.
As an austistic person with synesthesia I kinda grew up knowing that other minds were different from mine. By my own nature I usually don't know how to predict what others are thinking (Theory of Mind) -- so the idea that people *can* do that was alien to me. I appreciate that you took a view similar to this -- that maybe the differences in various people's subjective experience can account for at least some of the difficulty to communicating our internal experience to others.
I don't have an internal monologue. If I need to I can replay and rehearse conversations - useful when translating languages. Mostly I work in concepts which can be put into words - with a large loss of meaning. However, I can play music and lyrics mentally at high fidelity.
It's super fascinating hearing these accounts! May I ask, when you read a book, or a comment on TH-cam like my own, do you hear a narrator reading the words? Or does it just "sink in" without any kind of "phantom audio" of an internal narrator
I have aphantasia, where I can visualise vaguely. At best, I get a splash of colour and my images are as fast as like old school presentations in the 70s and such. At worst, it's like a sketch on a blackboard. Very dark colours (if there are any), and outlines of things. My friend has absolutely no visual imagery in her head. It explains a lot why she went into pharmaceuticals and I went into cybersecurity, both areas where imagery is not a necessity.
@@SeanSMST I would say I have 3/10 virtualization capacity. Like a remote memory. I call m y thinking mode as conceptual - like bubbles in a lava lamp that occasionally hit the light source.
I haven't watched any of this yet. I just want to say how pleasantly blown away I am that Simon has branched out into this subject. It gave me pause. I think I'd very much like to buy this guy a pint and talk shop with this guy.
what a fantastic video, you made me think how my life would be if vin diesel narrated my thoughts lol. in regards to the thinking out loud part, i find that it helps me parse my thoughts and separate them from the noise
I've found that putting thoughts into words tends to crystalize them, giving them persistence. However, not every thought is put into words. For example, if I think about a solution to a plumbing problem, I visualize how pipes are connected, without putting the solution into words.
That seems like a reasonable summary: words are a set of tools we can use to understand some aspects of the world, but are not adequate to explain it all.
Having aphantasia, i have to draw everything that is out of sight. Weirdly a lot of people with aphantasia are in the creative fields but usually in a more practical setting like graphic designer or set designer / builder
I'm strongest in verbal intelligence, but I have the odd problem of frequently failing to be able to remember people's names--even when I recognize their faces and even can tell them their life stories back to them.
Perhaps not so oddly, I was recently talking to an old classmate of mine, and we were trying to recall all our other classmates from elementary school (that's for kids aged six to eleven--for any non-Americans reading this). During this exercise, I was having trouble coming up with more than a handful of names--or even nameless faces. But then I started running through my mental map of the neighborhood where I grew up. I could identify every house where a classmate of mine lived. Sometimes that jogged my memory as to their name--and sometimes it didn't. But it does demonstrate an odd interconnection between verbal and spatial memory.
If I think about a plumbing problem, I picture poo stuck and call a plumber
@@aLadNamedNathan How long ago were you in elementary school? I'm seventy and I don't worry about remembering names from that time-- I never see those people anyway! It's the names of people I see once in a while, today, that escape me, even some I know fairly well.
40:00 “People are not having a different reaction to the same experience, they are having a different experience.” - Adam Ragusea. This phrase has helped me understand people and has made my life so much easier.
I think maybe this helped me build empathy for other people. I have spent a lot of my life really just kind of angry at not understanding the motivations of others. Perhaps we are experiencing the world in a fundamentally different way and both are equally valid and invalid in respect to eachother. It's a bit distressing, it's going to take some time to integrate an idea like this into my worldview
This is a ridiculous misunderstanding of scientific-minded philosophers. They have the exact same experience of "qualia" as you do.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 No one singled out philosophers. It was about each individual person having a unique experience. Either way, how can you be so sure?
@@mixturebeatz Because when I argued that "qualia" are not well-defined, I got the exact same response! Someone decided I must not have the experience of "redness" or "hearing a loud b-flat on a flute", and I got infuriated, because I know my internal experience is identical to everyone else's. Differences like "aphantasia" are minor, and can usually be corrected with meditation and appropriate conditioning.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 “I know my internal experience is identical to everyone else’s.” And how exactly COULD you even know something like this?
I freaking love this kind of conversation, it’s fascinating to hear how other people experience the barest basics of human existence
My experience of going to get milk from the shop is getting home and realising that I have bought everything but milk.
What milk?
Ok but the new buzzer and dinosaur nuggets and snacks plus the cherry vanilla ice water were very distracting......
hahahaha
Happened yesterday, I wrote 4 items on a paper to not forget. When I came home I had different items and forgot the oatdrink; the oatmilk was in first place why I went shopping. 😅 when I don't write down what I need, I normally don't forget to buy it. Because I go with focus into the store. When what is needed or planned and it's written down (written down, out of sight) the focus is gone because subconsciously we sourced the responsibility to remind us, onto that paper. People say write down what to do ect. Don't.
😂😂😂
I don't think I've ever said this before, but one day I asked myself something like, "why do I feel *this* aware, and not more aware...?" I think we all know of readily accessible states where we're less aware - even from something as simple as blanking out in a classroom, to being half sleep; but in day to day life, my baseline awareness might as well be my peak. What's odd is that I can focus on something and I can have a feeling almost like something could give out, or pop through a membrane, and suddenly I'd be overwhelmed by it's "thingness". I think this is born out of a realisation that, under certain conditions, I have had fleeting glimpses of greater beauty (that feels "true") in thoroughly mundane things, mostly through an altering of awareness; and that leaves one asking, "what if I could open that door whenever I wanted to?"
I think I have this feeling that I, and maybe we all are living with sunglasses on without even knowing it
While Lacanian philosophy is very complicated and nobody really understands it, least of all me, it sounds like you would be interested in it. Lacan talks about the Real, which is ungraspable for us as humans, because our consciousness is filtered through the realm of the Symbolic - that is, images, categories, language. We cannot see the Real because we as humans filter what we see through the realm of symbols. The third category (or Order) he talks about is the Imaginary, which is basically the myth we tell ourselves about singular personhood, the ego - the idea that we are an individual with a distinct identity - which is itself signified. It's much more complicated than that but he's sort of saying we can't grasp the true nature of things because we operate within these frameworks, but there exists this strata just outside of our awareness that we can catch glimpses of but never truly see.
@@christofferoffthere are echoes of this in buddhist thought too and the fundamental ‘emptiness’ of concepts , forms etc
@@Universal_Pig I don't know a whole lot about Buddhism beyond the basics, but this doesn't surprise me! I think a lot of it is deconstructivist in nature.
"Signs in the street, that say where you're going, are somewhere just being their own." What you are describing is a common experience on LSD. The full reality of things surprises you.
not to sound like a stereotypical stoner but i often ask myself those types of existential questions when i'm high. my sober self doesn't like entertaining those thoughts, but when i'm smoking they come to me. i also tend to feel like i process more information high, i'll find details in a friend's face that i have definitely seen but not noticed before. is this similar to your thoughts on this?
As someone with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder, I experience a non ending internal monologue. I have read some theories about schizophrenia spectrum disorders that posits hypermentalism as being a core feature of them, and it’s definitely in line with my experience. My mind is constantly over interpreting every small thing that happens, and connecting events that others would find completely unrelated. I don’t experience this black box he speaks of, and I can confidently say I’m conscious of everything before I do it, with very few exceptions like flinching when I get scared.
There’s also something called a minimal self disorder that is a part of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and it makes me hyper reflective about my own acts of observation. I’m not just thinking about whatever is on my mind or what I’m observing, but am constantly thinking about the fact that I’m thinking, my own psyche becomes an object of my observation.
The images in my minds eye are also extremely vivid, practically indistinguishable from the images I see with my physical eyes, although I’m not sure if that relates to my condition.
I looked this up and saw this on Wikipedia about it:
"spatialization of experience", which is where the person experiences their thoughts as if they occurred within a space
I thought this was normal... I feel my thoughts physically in my head.
Its no sign of sanity to be well adjusted to a sick society..
Most modern 'conditions' are probably just symptoms of your brain freaking out about the system we was born into, its alarm bells because your subconscious wants you to gtfo this situation kinda thing.. imo anyway 🤷i think 99% of the time we feel things because we know we r trapped no real freedom or choice basically slaves brainwashed to believe otherwise (they call it education ironically too!) and i think for anyone sufficiently aware/intelligent its just a hell our brains want out of so it freaks n badgers you.. Thats my guess anyway.. ✌❤️
Thers a great eric weinstein vid few days ago explains why our intelligence and progress is under control.. its 3h long packed with truth about the system tho highly recommend it
When I read I tend to find myself thinking like the author, but having just read, "I feel my thoughts, physically" , that thought was like a rubber band snapping behind my eyeballs but without the pain. Completely new experience.
Ever read any of Douglas hostetter's books? He thinks very recursively, like it is because it is cuz it's self-defined.
@@peach0129like in a location in your head? or do you imagine spatially how thoughts and ideas connect and work together?
@@AEONIC_MUSIC thoughts feel like they are in my head behind my eyes
Anyone who doubts that there a people who do not have verbal thoughts just needs to do a small exercise on a regular basis: mentally repeat every thought you just had. E.g. "I just had a thought that..." Very quickly you will come to realize that a) there are thoughts where you will have difficulty finding the right words (how can that be if you just had a verbal thought?) and b) there are even whole thought complexes that spring up in an _instant_ (impossible to have been verbalized internally in such a short time) - as a matter of fact, you will not only be groping for the right words, but you will even be groping internally to grasp exactly _what_ your non-verbal thought just "said". Once you had this experience and realize that you have non-verbal thoughts (and that probably all verbalized thoughts spring from non-verbal thoughts) it's just a small step to allow for the possibility that there are people who have _only_ non-verbal thoughts. And I say that as someone who has verbal thoughts and can't imagine what it would be like to be entirely without.
This is a fantastic and concise rebuttal. I love it. I have explained it to people in a way that likens their verbal thoughts to handwritten thoughts, and my nonverbal thoughts to a stamp. I can't imagine having to think every individual word in order to have a thought. I have people in my life that I know intimately however who seem to think opposite of me, as in they seem to really have to think every individual word in order to have a thought.
Ok, assuming that some people have both verbal and non-verbal thoughts, it's further assumed it's possible that other people have only non-verbal thoughts; the same argument says it's possible some people have only verbal thoughts. Your argument would not convince a verbal-only person because you assume their non-existence in the premise of the argument.
@@waelisc You are right, what I said does not logically prove that people with _only_ verbal thoughts do not exist. But it's not meant to be a proof anyway, but an experiment which anyone can do and which should convince the vast majority of people - if not all - that there do exist non-verbal thoughts, and that they can be quite complex. Now if someone says he tried it and never noticed a non-verbal thought and always found it easy to express every thought in words (since he had heard it first in his mind in a verbal form and just had to repeat it) then I'd be honestly quite astonished - but who am I to gainsay someone elses experience? It would definitely indicate a much slower thinking experience, since verbal thoughts - while faster than spoken words - do take time. It would also mean that this persons thoughts - which are obviously generated in the subconscious mind involving various areas of the brain - are _all_ funneled through the language network before reaching consciousness.
Another thing I think about is when I’m moving around. I’m not narrating my movements constantly yet I make so many decisions. What he said about wanting to get more milk also inspired me. I feel desires/a call to action that doesn’t require words, even though I do have a very chatty inner monologue
Even with my verbal thoughts, as you say, they emerge in the same way that Simon describes his physically verbalized thoughts emerging. To the extent that my verbalizations don't surprise me, it's because I've been internally verbalizing them ahead of time. But once I get on a roll/into the groove and speak extemporaneously then I have the same experience as Simon where I don't know precisely what I'm going to say next.
My internal monologue feels more like a simulated conversation with a nebulous group of opposing/supporting perspectives. I presume that it actually IS a simulation, in that I expect that the brain is using the same speech centers etc, but feeding it internally-generated stimuli instead of externally gathered. Certainly I can't think in that way while writing, reading, listening, or otherwise processing language. But this simulated conversation is so ever-present for me that for a long time I thought that WAS thinking.
I am Welsh/English bilingual, and my internal monologue is in Welsh if I am thinking about my family, but English when I think about other things.
Same with me. Cymraeg efo rhai petha a Saesneg efo petha eraill.
I have been thinking about this, the example of running out of milk, I wouldn't think in words that I needed more milk, my inner dialog isn't like a running commentary on what I am doing, it is more like a rehearsal of what I might say to someone.
That's interesting. Maybe your heart is in Wales?
How about in a dream. Some people say you don’t dream in any language but if you remember a dream, what language is it transcribed as in your head? I’m also bilingual and my thought is that I converted into English only after being surrounded by English as a dominant language for several years.
In other words you speak English and a fantasy language
I will never forget this epiphany I had when I was a child, maybe 6 or so years old, sitting in the backseat of my mom's car. As we drove, I looked at the blue sky, the green trees, the red barn. I asked my mom whether she thought we saw color the same way: "How do I know if my blue is the same as your blue?" She responded along the lines of "I guess we will never truly know." My young mind was blown by the thought, and I've been fascinated with concepts of perception ever since.
Thank you for the deep dive, I really enjoyed this. ✨
Yeah, that never happened. Why the fuck are you lying in youtube comments???
Literally same
I thought the same thing!
Easiest way to know is to pairs of matching blue cards.. of all different shades…
Shuffle them
And make them match up again
If you both match equally, you must be seeing the same thing
That’s my thought anyways haha
@@PWizz91 Why?
The qualia of the colours could be smoothly shifted from one person to another, right?
All we know is what appears similar to different people, but the experience of seeing it might still be totally different.
When I was in elementary school, I had trouble differentiating hot from cold, I actually had to take therapy for it. My parents noticed when I was really young, I would sometimes want to wear a jacket during summer. Because I didn't register it as hot, I just knew I didn't feel well, and when I had felt that during the winter, I had to put on a jacket. Only now it didn't help, because putting on a jacket made it even hotter.
Another thing is that when I was younger, I couldn't register hunger. I could feel hungry, but I didn't know it was hunger and just thought it was a stomach ache. I distinctly remember feeling surprised the first few times it actually registered as hunger (which was only around age 12).
Everyone around me always wrote those things off as side effects of autism though.
I wouldn't describe it as a side effect, but a lack of or reduced sense of interoception is a common autistic trait and while perhaps not as severly as you, it's definitely something I've experienced as well.
I suppose we call a stomach ache 'hunger' when we think it means we should eat. And when there is no thought to eat, it is simply called a stomach ache.
While I've never experienced what you describe, I've had some experiences I think might be of a similar nature. Sometimes when I feel pain, it just registers as an odd sensation--until it becomes more serious, and then I can identify it as pain.
I also suffer from tinnitus. When I first started suffering from it, all I could tell was that I was having some odd sensation. I couldn't even tell I was hearing it. It wasn't until after a number of years of it getting worse that I realized it was a ringing in my ears.
I've never been diagnosed as autistic, but according to Prof. Ed Dutton on the "Jolly Heretic" YT channel, people with high IQ's sometimes demonstrate autistic traits. Maybe that's what's wrong with me.
@@samuelwoods6648 I don't know. I feel like today, hunger feels like a different kind of sensation then when I have to go to the bathroom or when I've eaten something wrong.
I don't know if that may be psychological. There may not actually be a big difference in the kinds of "stomach ache" you experience, but I don't know.
@@aLadNamedNathan I've also heard (though I don't know how credible that source is) that a lot of autistic people tend to have a high IQ (or the other way around) because those IQ tests specifically focus on a lot of things that autistic people are naturally good at from a young age.
When I was younger, everyone always saw me as really smart, but I'm not exceptionally smart anymore, just average, I would say.
As a result of having covid my brain inflamed, and my daily consciousness shifted from a perspective of being up in my head into one of being in my chest. I was much more aware of the buzzing and other nerve impulses and heartbeat going on in my body than I was of external things, and my visual field, though presumably unchanged, had the feel of something coming to my awareness as through a periscope, and it was easily ignored and its importance diminished. The experience shed light on what it must be like to be a goose or giraffe, animals who must be very aware of their central body mass to control it, yet have their brain in an appendage longer than any other on their body. Eventually I "popped" back into regular consciousness which was as if you were used to watching a television from many meters away in a dark room filled with sounds you were monitoring and you suddenly found that you had to watch the television from such a close range that you could not even see the edges of the screen, it was shocking and felt ungainly, as if I were precariously sitting on a camel, I could not believe that THIS could be the "normal human mode". Spending a few months with this alternate consciousness taught me that I have no idea what qualities others' consciousnesses may have, and that I cannot assume that people in the past had the same kind of consciousnesses as we do today, it is not universal, and may be modulated by environmental factors, like viral infection. There is a lot of unperceived diversity in The Human Mind.
how fascinating. Thanks for sharing your experience
In some spiritual beliefs, consciousness is not solely located/confined to the head, and that one can 'think' from other parts of the body... e.g emotions and feelings held in the body, common sayings like feeling it in your waters,,, thinking with your balls etc :)
@@jamz7999Feeling something in your bones. Trusting your gut. Men having two brains, one in each head. 😉
Not only is this an interesting perspective, it's really beautifully written. It could serve as the opening of a new chapter in a novel.
Shifting consciousness like that down to the mid-belly region is a technique that gives you yet another view of the world. It brings more consciousness of "energy". Some people can use it to perceive energy fields like elementals or whatever. It's hard to learn the shift required. I needed to experience it on a course. On one course I experienced the world going all cubist on me by "gazing" from that position. But apart from that, a belly-centred consciousness viewpoint eliminated all fear of the dark. I can wander through a dark forest now by touch and not be afraid. Consciousness is weird.
You have a striking gift for introspection and your content is a rare treasure. It is hard to express how valuable your work is.
Only about 15 minutes in, but this comment you make about your thinking happening in a black box is very apt. I definitely have an internal monologue, and several years ago I got deeply into meditation as a mental hygiene exercise. A big part of this was learning how to shut off my internal monologue. I realized that, for me, even as someone with a strong internal monologue, most of my thinking still happens in a black box, its just that this box generates an internal monologue as an output.
Another key thing I realized is that whatever this black box is doing, it is balancing competing desires and drives. So it is quite possible for the monologue generating desire to be different than the action generating components, which can lead to a lack of self-awareness and a lot of self deception. This is the negative self-talk, or coping self-talk that is sometimes mentioned. I found meditation was good at helping me recognize and work through a lot of that.
Adding to that, I'd be very curious how you experience distraction. For me, this is when my internal monologue is completely disconnected from the activity I am performing. An example would be thinking about something, or 'day dreaming', while driving, and then suddenly realizing you are quite a ways down the road and not immediately remembering getting there. I can usually dredge up the memory after a moment of reflection, but I was basically operating on autopilot, with just enough consciousness of it to perform the task.
Oh yeah i didn't even think of distraction, does he even get distracted..?
Also it's very funny that you talk about the "desire-balancing" part of the self as the black box, because to me that is a very core part of my self, and while i'm not always thinking about it, i can consciously manipulate it.
I've experienced what you describe as daydreaming and then realize I've been operating on autopilot for quite some time. I've also experienced a similar phenomenon where I basically go unconscious mentally while still functioning normally on a physical level. It takes something unusual to jar me out of that--like dropping something or tripping on something. I've also had this problem while speaking, and having to fight it off because speaking is one thing you certainly can't do on autopilot. I went to see a neurologist about this. He told me that until he was able to observe it under clinical conditions, all I had was an interesting story.
@@aLadNamedNathan I had a similar (or may be same) issue when I was younger (early to mid 20s). I would be speaking and then it was like I suddenly woke up mid sentence and couldn't remember what I was talking about. I'd get flustered and then have to go back and try to remember what I was on about.
There is a framework in psychology known as internal family systems theory that basically puts forward the idea that we have many competing sub-personalities, and that what I referred to as the black box before is basically just trying to manage them. It seems wacky at first, and I will remain neutral on that theory itself, but it seems very close to the truth of it. We build subroutines over our lives that are very complex to handle certain situations, and then the main function of our program has to balance out the quirks of our subroutines.
I had a lucid dream once where there was a black telephone-booth shaped box inside a house. When I was in this box, I could think incredibly well--cosmically almost. When I awoke I remembered everything in the dream except the thoughts that I had had in this "black box." I think the isolation chamber aspect of the box was important, but it also made the whole thing very mysterious--like the part of me that does my best thinking I am not actually in touch with, at least in memory or reflection. It's just a dream, I know, but it seemed to be pointing to something important.
You're all describing what some fields would call 'dissociation'.
As someone with aphantasia, the "assuming it was just some sort of metaphor" definitely resonated with me. Imagine my reaction when I finished a 6 hour visual meditation class, very confused as people were saying they went on visual journies.
I only see pulsing colors if I close my eyes, or just black
I really like this video. We could dive so much deeper into the varities of our perceptions and consciousness.
I am in the same boat. I guess my conclusion is that the minds eye is basically a hallucination that I lack and is similar to an internal monologue, which I do have. I can talk to myself and "hear" it, and in a more abstract way I can imagine what a drum beat or singing sounds like. But when someone says "visualize an apple" I don't even know what visualize means
@@Rugg-qk4plsame for me, the most I can do is recall details from what I have seen of an apple, but it's all in the form of logic and inner monologue
with aphantasia shrooms was a crazy experience because i was confused why nothing was happening. I never even realized that this wasn't normal until I was into my mid teens
@@tailmask4886 You should have at least felt something. Try better shrooms. It's not all hallucinating.
@@redactedandredactedaccesor7290 oh make no mistake many things happened (psychosis is fucking crazy) but I just didn’t see anything visually at all
His explanation of his thought process is wild. The only time I'm not in monologue is when I'm whistling a catchy loop of a song or I'm asleep I reckon.
To me, it's simple to imagine what living without an internal monologue is like. I just listen to this video and it drowns out any words that I could form in my head. I still function just fine, but to speak inside my mind, I would have to completely stop paying attention to what you are saying.
On the other hand, I can sometimes make such loud noises in my mind that real world sounds feel slightly quieter. Not directly related, but I think it's interesting.
Edit: after writing this comment I became very aware of how me reading is directly tied to my internal monologue. I cannot read my comment and listen to the video at the same time, because reading automatically produces a voiced recreation of the words on screen.
" because reading automatically produces a voiced recreation of the words on screen." No, it's probably because it's impossible to focus on two things at once. i think this is all just a miscommunication problem, everybody probably has an internal monologue but they either want to be special, or don't have the same definition of "internal monologue" and think it means something else like literally hearing with your ears your own internal monologue
Your edit reminds of Richard Feynman video where he talked about this, almost identical in how he discusses the abilities each of us have. Counting in his head he could hear numbers while his colleague engaged his visual mind to see a Rolodex counting up.
Fascinating how different we can all be experiencing what we deem reality.
Regarding your edit: I too experience "internal dialog" when reading. Especially when reading dialog. And I treat these comments as "dialog" since we are communicating with each other. So, yes, there is vague sense that I am "listening" as I read. But I'm not listening to *my* thoughts.
If I'm just reading a description of (say) a castle in a novel, I don't really "hear" that. Maybe a little.
I find it difficult to both listen and "think" at the same time. I kind of have to pick one.
Interesting. Even when I listen, my mind is still chatting away. Usually, I have a main thought and a background thought going on simultaneously, and I find it very difficult to quiet my mind. It's like I'm talking to myself inside my head, and it's challenging to stop it.
yeah reading without an internal monologue is the one thing i really cannot wrap my head around. I guess abstractly i can understand that the underlying cognitive processes dont necessitate a hallucinated monologue to actually read, but I guess it’s just like…. the most quintessential inner monologue process. Even though I can understand it’s possible I cannot imagine what that would be like
"Cognition is possible without some kind of language overlay." Fascinating observation that I have long wondered about yet struggled to bring words to. You are very articulate and I enjoy listening to you speak!
Thank you for being so open, it helps everyone to evaluate or even calibrate their world view.
That was really very well articulated, I just felt a need to point that out. This is one of the most fundamentally challenging things to actually communicate, I think you did it really well!
I was impressed by this too. Very precise and structured thoughts, which I suppose just strengthens his point about the internal monologue not being essential haha
agreed!
If you ask yourself a question do you do it out loud?
If not then whether you know it or not you have internal dialog.
I am a translator and interpreter. Hence, most of my day I am involved in an internal dialogue (in one of my working languages when I do written translation) or in a mix of Hungarian, English and Spanish (code-switching, basically, as well as entertaining myself). My internal dialogue is often an improvised commentary on what I am doing or what I am about to do. At the same time, I have another mode of operation, when I have almost no internal dialogue: when I am doing photography. In fact, one of the best thing about doing photography (nature, street, streetart, etc., without models I need to instruct) is that it SWITCHES OFF my internal dialogue. A few hours of just walking around and taking photos puts my mind to rest and refreshes me beautifully. Interesting.
My dream job !
I have a similar experience. My internal monologue can be calmed by a soothing activity, and I enjoy the silence and peace. When I don't get that quiet time for a few days due to high stress situations having me constantly on edge and thinking, I get really mentally exhausted.
Artistic flow 😊
@@llegedly Heh, go to a foreign country where you don't understand a single word of the language with only a phone and you're going to get some funny looks when you ask to buy a green pepper in the bus station or something.
i shut off everything when im dancing. you could call that meditation.
I watched this several days ago. But I keep thinking about it. This answers some things I have often wondered about. Like why people say they are bored or lonely or especially when they say they feel the same inside as when they were in their 20s. Because in my experience, I always have my inner voice and visualizations to keep me company, entertained, and it constantly grows and evolves. Thank you for the explanation.
Wow, what an incredible reflective monologue. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I am glad I caught this so early. Simon keep up the great work. Your topic are also so interesting
You are the coolest person I've ever had the opportunity to experience stream of consciousness with. Thanks for giving us your time. I would LOVE to pick your brain about some of this stuff over a beer someday, and I'm happy people like you are leading the march towards our understanding of ourselves.
I have realized that my internal monologue is (most of the time) as if I am speaking to someone else. Like as if I'm explaining to my friend whatever situation I'm in or whatever. This isn't always the case but I think it accounts for most of the "verbal" thoughts I have in my head
I'd say me too. I also can't think of complex things without talking aloud. Well I can, but it's like extremely awkward like my thoughts are slippery (it's fine for simple things). I hear my voice when I think in my head.
I cannot contemplate how someone would consider a complex thought without talking aloud to self (or writing, that's another option). Something like mulling over a complex political question or life decision, or considering an academic thesis or something. It boggles my mind, especially as those things are then ultimately produced verbally. I very much lay everything out as if it's a debate
Yeah, I’m the same, when I was a young kid I pretended I was a presenter on a TV show explaining things to an audience. I grew out of that, of course, but I’m still almost explaining it to myself when I think it through.
I have the exact same experience of my internal monologue and my thoughts sometimes even take form of an imaginary dialogue, as if I'm in an actual conversation with somebody else
@@pintamilk568 im curious if they respond in your dialogue, a lot of times i get lost in dialogues with myself, or like i will talk to my therapist in my head and he asks questions.
Very similar to how I experience things. 1 voice is first person, and that voice is also what controls my body, 1 voice is 3rd person and only moves my tongue slightly when it “speaks” in my head, the 3rd person voice can take on the voices of other people if I need to simulate a conversation. The 2 voices are a little different as well, the 3rd person voice often acts as a conscience albeit a sometimes rude one, and tends to value long term planning and productivity, while the 1st person voice is a lot more impulsive, doesn’t care as much about personal safety, and is a bit more laid back. The 3rd person voice doesn’t “speak” as much as the 1st person voice in everyday life, but it is the voice that reads and does math.
The only time the 3rd person voice has any form of control physically over my body that I’m physically aware of is when it very occasionally speaks out loud. It is possible that 3rd person me does lots of things physically that I’m not aware of, as most of my awareness comes from first person me.
I couldn’t have come across this video at a better time. I’m having insomnia and haven’t slept since 2 days ago. Also I have work in the morning. It’s hard not to stress. But then you swing in with your unparalleled chillness and give me something peaceful to listen to. Thank you for that
Hey! that's great to hear. I relate to you as well because I had to learn how to fall asleep at a reasonable pace. I myself find it easier to fall asleep when there is something to focus on but not think about, like perception but without judgment. For me, white or brown noise works quite well. Have you tried listening to static when falling asleep? You could give it a try. You might also consider mindfulness if you have problems with falling asleep because of an overactive mind. What works for me is giving myself several minutes to just think spontaneously, then meditate, and last try to fall asleep with a mind that has not only been sitmulated, but has also slowed down
@@alanszymon192 thanks for the advice, I’ll keep that in mind. Yeah I’m the type who can sometimes spiral into worry if my mind’s not occupied. And listening to a calming presentation on consciousness was a great way to both relax and be mindful. Glad to say I fell asleep, then gave the video a real listen at work today (and 5 more from the channel) I love TH-cam
Have you tried eliminating blue wavelengths of light? I read a study where insomniacs were taken camping for 2 weeks where there was no unnatural sources of light and 100% of them were cured by the study’s end.
Awe hope you got some sleep and to work not miserable; I also found this really helpful mind-wise. As well as recently started working again ; it is helpful yet crazy to think that everyone thinks differently in so many different aspects. I can’t imagine not having an internal dialogue, lol
@@HaleyOnTheRocks yeah, I’ve thought about it a lot and I think I have a mix of the two; my thoughts come in words when I want them to, but otherwise I’m just lookin around and having feelings. Gosh, this is the nicest comment section I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been having such a good time with this smart-cozy channel all week
I’ve tried to describe qualia a few times with close friends (not knowing the words for it); it seems like most people genuinely do experience qualia, but as an involuntary thought or memory resurfacing. They will seem confused as I attempt to describe it until I say something like “have you ever smelled a smell and it made you think of… the feeling of the scratchy guest bedsheets at your grandmother’s place?”
You can quickly add more memories to it to create a fuller picture but just for a moment, especially if the memory is old or half-forgotten, you can feel an isolated sensory monad… People resonate with that frequently. From there it’s a matter of describing that’s one of the primary ways I create thoughts and experience phenomena.
Ultimately my personal experience falls somewhere in the middle. My mental imagery is somewhat blurry, when I focus I can bring an image in but I can feel myself working to Realize the image by consciously adding qualia. “Okay, so the apple is red. It has a withered stem. There is one spot where the waxiness of the skin has rubbed off…” after a few visual qualia have been added I struggle to keep it in focus because I inevitably conjure nonvisual qualia, which make no sense when trying to visualize anything. After all, what does an apple that tastes too sweet look like; what does an apple that was just picked from a windy orchard look like? Looking at it that way, it almost makes the entire concept of visualization feel a bit silly. What is the ultimate Purpose of the ability to limit your mental “image” to a single sensation? If anything it limits your ability to make mental connections.
I have a similar experience with internal monologue. Having just watched this video, the words I’m writing “appear” in my head in your voice. It’s likely the cadence of my writing reflects that in some way. But after a while that will fade, and in a vacuum my internal monologue is sparse. Exactly as you described, I just “feel” the sensation of needing to buy milk, and would pursue the task unconsciously. If my friend texted me and asked “what’s up” I’d immediately reply “I’m going to get milk, I’ve just run out,” so it’s not like I’m unaware of my experience. It’s just, there’s a meaningful difference in my mind between that and the kind of awareness you’d have after introspection.
I can conjure an internal monologue for my thoughts, and can usually make it in any voice I want. But I quickly abandon it because it’s devastatingly SLOW to think that way. I feel like I’m thinking at 10% speed. Especially when I have to make decisions about what to do based on several factors (planning errands, for example), it feels hilariously inefficient to try and experience thoughts as words. If I abandon that, it feels like I can take all the considerations and perceive them in parallel, or at least blindingly fast compared to speaking a sentence. To me, it seems a deeply inefficient way to think certain types of thoughts.
❤
interesting
that moment when you suddenly realise you have no apples, just a bunch of onions....
😂😂💭💯%NEED To-Ⓜ️AKE 🧅🍲 #SOUP
What you mentioned about no internal monologue and yet being able to do stuff makes complete sense. Once you've learned to drive a car you need no inner monologue to drive it.
Another example is once I was walking across a road and clearly hadn't looked properly since a car travelling quite quickly towards me came into my peripheral vision. I felt my leg drop into a run, started to run and *then* had the thought that I needed to get out of the way quickly. My conscious was behind real-time, my subconscious had already seen the threat and set me into a series of motions to evade the threat I then became conscious of. If this kind of realtime subconscious didn't work that way and I had to think everything through I'd have been splatted by that car.
They say the same thing about professional tennis, the ball is travelling too fast to consciously react, it is your subconcious mind directing your muscles to move to intercept the ball.
I learned a long time ago that our brains have primitive areas and more recently developed areas. The primitive brain is much simpler and takes care of our quick reactions. The modern areas are complex and multi-layered - requiring more 'processing time'. The same can be said about our eyes, the centre of our vision takes a second or more to process what it sees, yet our peripheral vision is based on movement and can detect incoming threats in milliseconds.
I agree. Instinctive reactions and trained action sequences don't require monolog. I crochet a lot. I would hate to have to listen to an inner voice telling me what I am doing or about to do.
Visual stimuli is sent through the amygdala, the area of the brain associated with fear and aggression, before it can be properly deciphered and understood. I assume this is why it is possible to be startled by things which pose no threat and I believe it's evolutionary purpose is to be able to react quickly to sudden danger such as a predator pouncing towards you or, in this case, avoiding a car crash
@@DJ-Eyemovement and change. I've actually used my peripheral vision when waiting for a red light to change and I notice it almost instantly.
I was struggling to understand this, but you made a good point. I think that my internal monolog is lagging behind my decision-making. However, I am so used to my internal monolog narrating everything that I correlate it with the decision-making itself.
Hey I came back to comment again. I was monitoring, as much as i remembered, my thinking, inspired by this video. And while I was playing video games, i got a revelation. While I was playing it I was having a voiced naration about something not game related, but I was playing the game completely regularly, teleporting, finishing work, collecting, fighting, different complex stuff, without ever hearing a voice in my head about it. So I remembered this video. I was able to notice the similar experience that you've described!
About the inner monologue - I can turn it on and off without any problems. I usually think a lot faster without it, because I skip the whole stage of putting something into words. However, I can continue with the internal monologue if I enjoy the subject and do not need to think quickly. I always thought that this was something that everyone did and I was surprised to find that most people cannot switch off the internal monologue or even think without it.
The same is true with internal imagery - I thought one of my friends was joking when he said he could not do internal imagery - I can see objects vividly with any level of detail, down to the smallest detail.
I find it really fascinating that there is such a huge difference in mental abilities between people.
Omg I'm the same way
It takes a lot of "focus" for me, if that's the right word, to turn it off
But it puts me in a different "mode" where things flow better and I do think a lot faster.
Unfortunately because it takes so much effort I stay in the backseat driver mode most of the time.
I honestly think we're not supposed to be able to communicate with our subconscious like this, mental diseases like schizophrenia is probably a wayyyyyy too strong of a bond to your subconscious and it just overwhelms your consciousness
Mine is mostly the same, but for me, there is myself, when I read, I hear my voice in my head, I can talk to myself without speaking with it. But I also have another voice that pulls on insecurities, brings up memories, or converses on its own whim alongside my own self.
My imagination is as vivid as if seeing it for real, but It's contained in its own little mental box.
The ID, the ego, the superego, and the subconscious counterparts one or more of each. It's definitely a fun subject I wish my friends would engage in the topic of with me.
I can turn off my inner monologue/dialogue/council meetings. I have to be alone when I do it. It takes calm concentration. I imagine nothingness as I "stare" at it. It being the nothingness. I keep staring until the words stop. When I first tried this, I remember saying, "Be quiet. Okay, stop. Shut up! Why can't I shut up?". Then I realized I was making it worse. I remembered teachers at the beginning of classes who would just stare at us until we stopped talking. So, I tried that and it works. The instant the voice stops, I begin to visualize solutions to problems. It is rapid. I can't maintain it for long. I taught myself to do this in an effort to produce inventions. I can visualize in 3D to some degree all the time. When the voice stops, ideas get mashed up until something useful occurs.
I doubt most people can't or have difficulty turning it off, that's probably just a small subset of people
I can not monologue but it is hard to deliberately stop. Like if I'm making a sandwhich I don't think "gran the cheese, grab the turkey etc. I just get what I want. But I feel like I need to monologue about something if I want to actually understand what I'm thinking, such as if I'm constructing an argument about something in my head or deciding what movie to watch. I could never go get milk without thinking about it, but I could go to work without thinking about it, because it's not novel.
This video is absolutely fascinating to me, i never considered that not having an internal narrative could be an inessential part of cognition in the same manner that being able to visualize clearly also is. I feel like I am in a similar situation to you but with a different aspect of my cognition. I have no sense of self or agency, I do very much have an internal narrative, but i feel like an NPC automaton responding to sensory input with preprogrammed responses. Like if I try to move my hand in front of my face I cannot feel like it is me doing it. There is no feeling of "me" applied to any aspect of my experience. This is classified within psychology as depersonalization, and is very common. It doesn't seem to affect my ability to function at all, yet when I tell people this they are often very confused about how I could exist or even act like it is very sad and pitiful that I do not have a sense of self.
There are other people who have derealization instead, who do not have a feeling of reality being "real". I assume that these are all aspects of standard cognition that seem essential when you have them, but don't seem to affect functioning too much if a person has never experienced what it is like to have them in the first place. The idea that qualia might be one of these as well is really interesting.
But yeah, amazingly eloquent video, I love the way you describe consciousness and talk about it in terms of computer science like terms. Please keep it up, I would love to see more analysis like this from your channel!
To be honest, if I analyze my own experience, there also is no identity attached to the sensations of moving my hand in front of my face, except for a somatic registry of feeling some faint buzzing in my hands, and then if I focus with my vision, also in my head, or if I feel the connection of my hand with my arm and torso, a buzzing in my torso. The only actual identity sensation going on is a correlated buzzing, which I don't get if I look at an object, I might feel it in my eyes and head but no buzzing "in the object".
A proficient meditator named Daniel Ingram I feel has given good descriptions of the experience of no-self, which sounds very similar to what you're describing. It's interesting that you feel like an automaton though, I mean, seems like an associated narrative as much as any? Curious, thanks for sharing either way! :)
@@cryoshakespeare4465 it sounds like you have some level of depersonalization to me, most people feel a sense that they are the ones moving their hand in front of their face. And I personally know Daniel Ingram, but have not read his books even though I own one of them, maybe I should check it out and ask if my description sounds analagous to him. Thanks!
Do you have a sense of self at all?
@@Trophonix nope, not at all
Wow. I remember the day an image of myself became part of my internal model of the world. I was a very small child and it was a revelation. All my perceptions were changed after that due to the extra element in my model of the world.
A huge portion of my conscious experience is in my mind. I’m constantly playing out scenarios like a future prediction machine to try and make the most efficient choices. I almost always think before I speak and know exactly what I’m going to say. But also a lot my day to day life is routine and is basically autopilot. I can be thinking about something completely different while these day to day tasks play out. I can also visualize imagery to varying degrees. Anything from a fuzzy dark abstract representation of an image to a near photo realistic representation. The extremely vivid mental images only happen occasionally and very briefly. It usually happens if I focus for long enough on a specific thought. But when it happens it’s as clear as day. I may as well be looking at whatever I’m imagining. I can also imagine sound well and have composed the basis for songs before ever having played it physically.
This is interesting, I have a very similar experience to you, I can vaguely fantasize images but my musical fantasy powers are much stronger. When I took mushrooms I would hear loud full orchestral music being composed in real time by my brain. I'm not even good enough at musical theory to act as my own amanuensis and write it down as fast as my mind can come up with it but I really enjoy making up my own soundtracks or replaying songs I like and know well in my head in ways I can't do with say, a painting.
Here's the thing with the idea of being "surprised" about what you said out loud: Sure, I have an inner voice, and I can practice what I want to say out loud before I do so, but then the next question to ask is where did that inner voice originate from? I'm not surprised when I hear myself in my mind generating thoughts, I don't question where these thoughts are coming from or if I have ownership of them. So with or without an inner voice, there still is that same mystery.
Maybe the inner voice develops in one's early years, along with the development of the mind. I notice a qualitative difference in my memories between when I was three years old and when I was four years old. While I don't remember this specifically, I suspect that I didn't have an internal monologue when I was three, but that I had developed one by the time I was four.
Reminds me of this quote I heard once that made me laugh out loud “What enables you to make a decision? When you decide, do you first decide to decide?”
(oh, btw cool mother 3 profile pic)
Unless you have an inner inner voice that pre-narrates. And then, of course, it's inner voices all the way down.
@@aLadNamedNathan I also remember being aware that I was somehow "more aware" or "more capable of thinking" than I used to be (and trying to explain this to my mother). I think I was about 7 at the time.
@@ronald3836 That's interesting. I wasn't aware that I became more aware at some point when I actually was a child, but looking back on it now, my memories of when I was three are very different from when I was four.
My earliest memories are akin to a video camera being randomly switched on and off. The only difference is that they have emotions attached (usually bewilderment or fear). The memories have no story structure to them. They begin abruptly and end just as abruptly.
The memories from when I was four have a beginning, a middle, and an end--and thus make sense as a story.
I was surprised to learn that most people have an amnesia event somewhere between the ages of six and eight. This was brought to my attention after I had been speaking in front of a group of people, and I had tried to evoke their memories of their first day of school. None of them could remember it--which absolutely shocked me, since my first day of school remains a traumatic memory for me. I mistakenly assumed this was true for most people.
I do not have an internal monologue either. My parents used to get upset with me when I was younger when I said things “without thinking.” No one was aware of my autism back then, including me. They brushed off my bluntness and directness as rude or hostile, so much so that I was put into an anger management group as an elementary school student. My mother always told me to “think before you speak,” but I had no idea how to do that, as you would imagine. I asked her what she meant by that and she thought I was being difficult. Instead of explaining what she meant, she simply punished me for asking. Knowing what I know now about not having an internal monologue and the way I experience the world as a neurodivergent person, I regret ever feeling like there was something inherently wrong with the way I navigate and interact with the world. It is simply a different way to approach life, and it is not aggressive or bad or weird. My mother will not ever understand that because she refuses to entertain any sort of new way of thinking about things, but at least I know there is nothing wrong with me anymore.
"Think before you speak" seems to me to be about the activity of the prefrontal cortex predicting how others might react to your words, weighing the social consequences of what you might say, and adjusting your conversation and behavior to align with social norms. People are on a whole range of this phenomenon, from blurting everything out (sorry for not finding a more neutral word, traditional societal norms have tinged this verb negatively) to holding back most of their true thoughts. So what I think your parents were expecting from you is to make a break before speaking and consciously evaluate what you are about to say in light of the above-mentioned criteria - i.e. training yourself to do consciously what in many (but not all) people happens more or less automatically. But if I understand you right you are completely unaware (even in a non-verbal way) of what you are about to say, which would mean that it is impossible to do this evaluation consciously. Very interesting. It would also be interesting how other people with non-verbal thinking experience this. Simon seems to weigh his words carefully (I guess in a non-verbal way), probably this is done by his prefrontal cortex automatically and subconsciously. I do have verbal thought, but a lot of things I say are not verbalized internally before being expressed - still they are all scanned somehow for the above-mentioned criteria. There are also a lot of people who do have very strong internal verbalisation and still say things without filtering - sometimes regretting what they have said.
I would dare to say it’s healthier not to think “there’s nothing wrong with me”, but rather “there’s something wrong with everybody”; I admittedly may be splitting hairs here, and you already believe this
@@jacobpast5437 I agree about what the parents were probably expecting and trying to encourage. That can be problematic for at least some of those who are neurodivergent, even if we do have an internal monologue.
Struggles with socialisation and communication are at the core of the diagnostic criteria, and social reciprocity gets a particular mention. The back and forth of conversation can be murky and poorly understood, we may be oblivious to nuance and nonverbal communication, and social norms are often opaque to us.
So, not infrequently, we don't know how neurotypicals will react to what we're going to say. In fact, we may not know how they feel about it even AFTER we've said it, but even if we DO (or they explicitly tell us how they feel about what we said), we may not know WHY they feel that way. For some of us, NT thought processes are so opaque and incomprehensible that trying to predict them is an exercise in futility, because we just think too differently. That is, we don't just think different things, we think in different ways.
@@carolinejames7257 I do agree with you. Thanks for pointing these things out.
When someone says that one says things without thinking, it's not about an internal monologue. It's about knowing what to say and how to say it, when to say it and to who. For example one would be respectful of someone more senior and one would be courteous to a stranger. Why? Because those cues one learns from seeing others and by figuring out that one should treat others as one wants to be treated. There is no need for an internal monologue. One just asks if the intentional summary of a vocalised statement is appropriate. For example, you're at school and you could say that you need to use the bathroom but there are polite and rude ways of asking that. Hence one would ask politely because interaction with a teacher or stranger should be polite or courteous. Therefore one would not ask to take a sh-t but would ask to be excused to use the bathroom.
I love this. You presented your perspective of experience eloquently without being verbose. Thank you.
What most people fail to observe is that whole thoughts, conclusions and plans can arrive without narration. Like you said, I don't need to tell myself I don't have milk. I have a very wordy narrative brain, also a strong visualization brain, but there is that metatrak of Knowing without fanfare. It's not just milk: it might be a revelation of a complex series of connections.
okay, maybe it works for 1 item. what if you have a list of 10 items? how do you remember them?
@@buglepong how do you mean? i have an internal monologue but i'm quite aware that my inner voice does not reflect the full spectrum of my thoughts. my memory at least has only little to do with my inner voice. i only "hear" my inner voice when i need to store little bits of info for a short time or sometimes when initially memorising information. when i enter my usual supermarket i can just go and pick the things i need without any thought especially if they are the things i usually buy.
@@nougatbit so you do have an inner voice, its just that it doesnt say anything most of the time?
@@buglepong yes and no? my comment was mainly concerned with the issue of remembering things and there my inner voice is not that important for me. in general my inner voice is present a lot of the time i'm awake (e.g. always when i read, write or do math) but it isn't always concerned with the tasks that i'm doing at any given time. i can do a lot of things while my inner voice verbalizes unrelated thoughts. like when i read a book and the glass of water i'm drinking at the same time runs out i can go get another glass of water without conciously thinking about it, my inner voice would still be concerned with the book i had been reading or what i need to do the next day or whatever. on the other hand i can look out the window of my train to work and not have any concious thoughts or inner voice at all for the trip, i'm just visually experiencing the view from the window. and i have some control over it, if i really want, i can turn my inner voice on and off
@@nougatbit that sounds pretty normal. like its normal to have inner monologue at certain times. its rare to have none at all, or none that you can remember
What you said Simon about talking out loud to yourself is basically how my internal monologue manifests, just internally most of the time.
I just bought beer and I didn’t think ‘oh I’ll pick up those two bottles and carry them to the self checkout’, I just did it.
If I’d asked myself to explain what I was doing, or if someone had asked me to explain what I was doing, I could’ve; either externally or internally, but the black box that generates words doesn’t send them to my internal monologue first, it’s just two switched outputs, like headphones and speakers.
Ye, kinda funny how a person without an internal monologue imagines it as like literally narrating all your actions
For me, I would speak to myself in my head imagining something like “I feel like having a few beers, where is the fridge” then I’ll find the beers and buy them, and if I’m with someone I’d think the same thing, then proceed to say it out loud to them.
@@happyfullfridge I've heard some people actually do do that, so there is a varying degree of internal monologue. At certain level it must turn into schizophrenia.
@@Dragon_Slayer_Ornstein interesting! My internal monologue is almost separate to my real world actions
hmm
Oh wow, this video resonates with me so much!
I do have qualia -- and in conversations trying to talk about it, I have never found a word for it. The way you seem to think about the world and conciousness and all the dilemmas mentioned is also very similar to how I do.
(Although, I do have an internal monolog and I can differentiate between tastes like sour and bitter as well as salty and savory.)
I really appreciate this video, because your thinking process is so clear, easy to follow and inclusive. I will show this video to friends as a way to aid my explanation on how I feel/think about conciousness and the world.
Thank you for making it!
I'm a cognitive scientist. Cognitive science incorporates neuroscience as it pertains to perception and a few other things. Perhaps I can help.
I'll do vision first. What we _see_ is a model of reality. We see colors, textures, spatial relationships, and so on. These are what is in the model, not in the light. The light continuously updates the model, mostly unconsciously. So do conscious things. If I have decided the Wittgensteinian animal is a rabbit or a duck, or the Necker cube is on a table and not the far wall, this feeds back into the model construction in such a way that the perception persists. The feedback loop is why the perception flips back and forth. It's like a flip-flop with its own feedback. A computer analogue is that what we see is the user interface of the reality we interact with.
Internal monologues, dialogues, _etc._ (I have internal committee meetings) are about the relationship amongst Wernicke's and Broca's areas and the arcuate fasciculus between them and to the rest of the brain. A computer analogue might be how graphics cards can be used for calculations that have nothing to do with graphics. Maybe you're just talkative. This is consistent with being able to make videos. In other people who don't talk to themselves, it's likely the same mechanism, only they don't open their mouths, so they don't think of it as talking.
As for taste, the whole idea of areas on the tongue is nonsense. Taste is in the brain. You say you do not distinguish tastes as _sour per se._ Everyone does this with what are called fantasia flavors, such as Coca Cola. The secret formula is known, but none of the flavors in it seem to have anything to do with the flavor. As for the rest, yes, you might undergo a transition such as in the movie _Ratatouille_ if you get into it enough. I found I could taste better the more I cooked. Now I can reverse-engineer recipes from what I taste in restaurants. It's a lot cheaper.
I'll introduce a fourth: the similarity between linguistics and grammatology. Reading and writing are not exactly the same as listening and talking, but they overlap a great deal. The amount of overlap is important to my work. Phonemes and tagmemes are similar enough to be treated mostly the same, but there are important differences. Tonality may be part of a phoneme or not. In languages where it is not, tonality is also used but more at the sememe level. These are different functional mechanisms, but they are also sort of similar. The brain must at least be flexible enough to hear tonality in different ways that correspond with the different levels it is used for in various languages. Expressing language is also quite different in terms of mechanism, what I call _interpretactics,_ from understanding it, which leads to my closing benediction:
As a linguist, I say do not pay attention to anything Noam Chomsky says. He is such a rationalist his picture is on the Encyclopædia Britannica page for _rationalism._ He is anti-empirical to the point of oblivion. He may have some idea what is in his own brain, but I wouldn't put it past him to lie about that. As for the world outside his skull, he is uninformed, to put it mildly.
Yeah! Chomsky sucks! He coulda been cool AF.
@@bulkbogan4320 Chomsky has a reasonable brain, but he never payed attention to empirical evidence he got anything wrong and instead doubled down and built increasingly abstruse and implausible castles in the sky. I leave as an exercise for the reader whether his political thinking is similar to his philological thinking. (Without empiricism, it is not linguistics.)
I mostly agree with what you say here, but I have to disagree with your understanding of internal monologue. As someone with no or very little internal monologue (saved usually only for things like reading text, and even then, it is very quiet, if you will), and who is also not very talkative, I am still more than capable of system 2 thought, and at least according to those around me and tests I take, I am rather intelligent. To me, it would be unbearable to have to put my thought processes into words. It would slow me down and frustrate me by my inability to articulate to myself the minutia of what I develop in my mind. To boil it down to "all of your conscious thoughts are simply external instead" is unreasonable, at least for me. Perhaps that is the case for the video's author, the whole point of the video is of course how everyone experiences the world differently, but at a minimum for me at least, an internal monologue is by no means the only way of conscious thought, control, or communication with the subconscious.
22:00 : The technical difference between taste and flavour is actually quite important here. Taste is detected by the taste buds on the tongue, and there are five of them known to science: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and savory. Flavour is detected by olfactory sensors on the roof of the mouth and is essentially the same sense as smell; whether it comes through the roof of the mouth or through the nose, it's the same neural pathway to the brain. And flavours are _not_ composed of tastes in various degrees; rather, flavours are their own things: chocolate, cinnamon, vanilla, etc. (Although a given food item or odour may be a mixture of various flavours or scents.)
I had no idea
And of course texture
I hate lima beans.
@@petevenuti7355 : Yes! Although it's more obvious that that's a different sense, people can forget how much it matters. (It's a big reason why fat is delicious, for example.)
Wow, that’s amazing! Never knew that
oh
My mental imagery is so vivid that it blocks my vision for a moment sometimes
Fucking insane. This dude can put himself in VR at will.
@@DungeonClimberwould that be more AR? Whatever, bro's got hallucinations in 4K
@@vaar8584 Well let's say it's an apple. If the apple just overlays his vision like a png with a transparent background, then I would call it AR. But if it completely blocks his vision with an apple and some sort of background, then I would call it VR.
@DungeonClimber Yeah, I'd agree with that, just up to the original commenter to describe their AR/VR ability more. Who knows, maybe they could even play play Paper Mario without closing their eyes... Pukicho would be proud
Same man, its as if im just in my minds eye for some seconds instead of in the physical world.
Simon, on the topic of decoupling pain from its "negative valence", I have noticed that I don't typically experience any negative affect when why cats bite or scratch me. I have lived with cats my whole life, so bites and scratches are common. If I pay close attention, I notice that the level of pain I experience might otherwise cause me to feel badly about having experienced the pain, but in the context of a cat doing it, it just feels like an inconsequential feeling.
This reminds me of something a phlebotomist taught me about pain when I was a child. I was ill and had to have blood drawn a lot. She told me to close my eyes and imagine she was poking me a little too hard with a toothpick. It worked! It totally transformed my subjective experience of the pain of the needle stick. My aversion to the experience was only partly due to the sensation, and mostly due to my experience of the negative valence of a needle stick specifically.
Right. Sometimes when I squeeze my teeth together in a certain way I feel a pain that I actually enjoy.
WTF... this video just blew my mind, I didn't know that it was possible to not have an "inner voice". As you said yourself, that thought never crossed my mind since I never experienced it any other way. To me it always felt like the real unfiltered manifestation of my conciousness, my desires and limits... like you "hear" the tone of your own voice in your head speaking thoughts out loud, inside your brain before your filters get into action and tell you what of that thought is okay to utter in the current situation and what might be better kept for oneself.
After this I'll probably sit outside for a few hours being absolutely silent and looking like I'm sleeping, but my head will be filled with a 15-page essay of thoughts on that topic. If I can't put a coherent string of words together in my head, then I can't think clearly about a topic, because while thinking about which specific wording I need to use to form the thought my brain starts to apply all the filters that I learned through life. Like what's inappropriate to say in what type of situation and which thoughts I shouldn't spend too much time on, if I want to focus on some specific aspect.
I’ve been wondering this for years I’m so glad someone made a video about this
My inner monologue has always been really loud and overpowering, it does not stop. Every school report said i was a daydreamer
adult adhd
Without watching this, I am autistic and can tell you with confidence that my conscious experience is fundamentally different from most others. This is evident in any attempt to communicate my experiences to others.
Every conscious experience is different, because diversity of brain.
I'm autistic too, and there's a decent chance that even our conscious experiences are fundamentally different ... I have DID and sometimes I even have multiple consciousnesses at the same time!
I am also autistic but I couldn't say that with confidence. As far as I know the difficulty of communicating anything to neurotypical people stems from a different brain structure that causes us to think more literally as well as explain things more literally and without the use of subtext, gestures or facial expressions, but none of that directly proves a fundamental difference in conscious experience
@@LoganDark4357 it's so fucky having several "people" in your head. have you found a way to deal well with it? it seems to be an issue with communication between them for me
@@Thornskade there is a difference in brain structure but I wouldn't say it's necessarily thinking more literally, but rather thinking more semantically. Autistic people connect concepts in their brain in a way that non-autistics may not. I'd encourage you to research "detail-oriented thinking" as that's typically the biggest difference between autistics and non-autistics, and that also tends to be the communication barrier, because autistics can be known to consider concepts in isolation that non-autistics would have considered within some fuzzy context, and this is mainly what causes the omission or unawareness of gestures or facial expressions or other social cues, because it literally makes zero logical sense why those would be relevant but non-autistics consider them anyway because they are part of the heuristic.
Non-autistic brains typically operate on heuristics and aren't aware of their own operation. Self-awareness can be difficult for someone who isn't autistic because of how little they have to think in order to act. That's why people can never explain how that social cue mattered or why your reaction made them uncomfortable, all they know is you did something wrong and they don't like you now
I struggled with this for a bit when you were describing how decision making works to you until later when thinking about how I engineer. I didn't start off with the ability to visualize things in my head, I do have qualia completely and a nearly inescapable internal monologue. I could understand and think about a shape in my head but it wasn't visually in there and when people said they could visualize these vast scenes I was in disbelief, but after enough acid trips and deliberate practice at visualizing I can now chill and rotate a cow in my head and work on full designs to a pretty far level in the visual space inside my head. And it has made design a lot easier.
I've had a lot of difficult discussions with people about the "hard problem of consciousness" as not a real problem, and it feels like you've helped me clear up my own position a lot. I suffered from cluster headaches for 10 years, so I learned how to dissociate from pain deeply and young. I could alter my subjective experience, my qualia, through the manner in which I focused attention (the same technique I'd use to build visualization ability later) directly on the qualia itself, which being not a material thing there is nothing to focus on and the pain becomes felt but abstractly instead of directly, "shutting off" the "qualia" Spending too much time in this state probably lead to my lack of belief in beauty, love, or wholesomeness as concepts until I'd healed a lot.
Given the ability to change the subjective experience of the same physical phenomenon up through a significant fraction of the nervous system, qualia is likely some kind of mental tool for creating abstract categories instead of needing individual examples, to make it easier to perform rapid heuristics about things like "big cat" having a certain "catliness" about it so you don't get eaten just because it's a different kind of cat so you didn't immediately make the association. I had a buddy on an acid trip who, on stepping outside from our blue tinged inside lighting to a reddish sunset and ambiance immediately had his entire visual field saturate in the red qualia but while maintaining the shape, size, relationship between objects, etc. just everything "red"ified. I'd say people confident in Plato's ideal plane, confident that the hard problem of consciousness is hard, simply need to do more lysergamides and tryptamines, or experience torture or something like it, although some deliberate practice and instruction on safe, low doses of ketamine would probably do the trick too.
This all makes me wonder what all the different modalities of experience people have and how many of them I can add to my toolbox.
So are you saying the hard problem of consciousness is easy?
@@mrwhitemantv Yes.
@@ChrisSudlik Then what is qualia?
While I don't think it touches on qualia specifically, Mel Chen's work on animacy feels relevant here insofar as it talks about how humans categorise consciousness and affect, and how it's sorted into linguistics. Being animate is an idea that encompasses freedom, consciousness, movement, life and identity. She discusses a hierarchy of animacy - the way in which, for example, a disabled person might be considered less animate than their peers and how this translates into being seen as fundamentally less of a person. She also discusses how non-human life falls on this spectrum, such as plants and animals (and the way we separate ourselves from animals as if we're something fundamentally different from them). I think this perspective is very important because it points towards the fact that human definitions are us imposing barriers on a world which exists on spectrums, and so the line between conscious and not, or even alive and dead, is significantly more blurry than we'd like to think.
Sounds interesting. You talk about it imposing barriers and it made me think that when we impose those barriers it seems we add a value judgement to each category at the same time.
Thank you for this I’m going to look at it
I spent so much of my life as a child not understanding the people around me experienced so many small details about the world differently.
I went undiagnosed with a severe form of Inattentive ADHD that I had learned to mask very well. A common (not always present) symptom of ADHD is that the internal monologue NEVER turns off. In my case almost all of my internal monologue is a narration of my own thoughts. Sometimes I can have multiple thoughts very quickly in a row and I “hear” multiple internal voices at the same time, but even if it’s seventeen voices at once I perfectly know what all of them are saying. However, it makes it hard to mentally grasp a thought and hold on to it because so many more voices have a new thought that needs to be narrated.
I finally got diagnosed and took my first prescription dose. I was heading to work early on the weekend and while I was working I suddenly realized that all my thoughts were quiet. I experienced “black box” thoughts for the first time and I broke down crying and my boss came over to check on me I couldn’t speak for a few moments I was so overwhelmed.
Additionally my mind’s eye is incredibly vivid. I definitely have some form of hyperphantasia. All of my thoughts can be translated into mental 3D objects. I once was bored at school and watched the LOTR movies in my head the whole day. Sometimes I imagined it on a screen. Other times I can “project” it. I can superimpose my mental images overtop of my vision. If I imagined Gandalf walking through the door. I’d see him physically enter, but I’ll unconsciously see that he’s not actually physical. If I look out my window I can imagine and “see” my neighbors house get hit by a meteor. Sometimes I imagined and saw tiny miniature men (in my youth it was Star Wars) on my desk fighting battles. Whenever I go somewhere I’m crafting a 3D topographical map in my head and can go back and see where I remember the map has been. When I took tests I could mentally imagine opening my notebooks and read what I had written. (Not literally, if I forgot something the page was blank). I can do this with sounds, tastes, physical touch like a feather or sandpaper, and with great difficulty feel a phantom heat or cold if something I’m projecting over my vision would also be hot or cold.
I think of it like “self-aware” schizophrenia. Self-constructed but easily identifiable as hallucinations. but I have done an absurd amount of research compared to my actual Uni courses, and there’s basically nothing written on this condition anywhere that I can find. But maybe that’s a condemnation of my research skills.
When I found out other people didn’t and couldn’t think like me. I felt such a sense of isolation it bordered on existential anxiety. A friend described that the only images they can imagine are words. Instead of an apple they see the text “apple” as printed letters like words in a book. I then described my thought process and she was so confused she brought me over to other strangers (we were in public at the time). And had me explain it to them and was met with confused looks.
I also have a deep internal fantasy world almost akin to maladaptive daydreaming where I can watch my own original movies as if I’m an actor in a scene. My dreams are extremely vivid as well.
I find as an outlook on my life: I can mentally separate myself from my body if I’m doing something boring or unpleasant. I can suppress my hunger, thirst, or sleepiness if I want to (I try not to). I often find most physical objects as pointless since the comfort sensation they provide can be constructed myself mentally. My dream is to retire in a small house either near the Rocky Mountains, or in Pacific Northwest America because I find rain incredibly soothing. The rain can help block out the noise.
I was always fearful I had schizophrenia after I had the epiphany that others did not see the world as I did. The reason being, when I was young I remember waking up hearing police rush down my street. My parents didn’t tell me what happened for a few years. Eventually I heard that the single mother a few houses down had heard voices from hell of demons that said they would soon be released on the world and described how they would kill her and her two daughters (both under 10 but older than 5). So she stabbed her children to death and called her ex-husband who proceeded to call the police. She got life imprisonment and the father now has a charity event he holds that he named after his two daughters. We would go, but I learned the whole story later in my life when I had moved away. This scared me so much, but I’ve worked through therapy and my psychiatrist is very positive I don’t have it.
For a list of all my diagnoses: I have been diagnosed with. ADHD with primarily Inattentive type, Major Depressive Disorder, and Schizoid Personality Disorder. I also have an above average of symptoms of OCD but not enough to be classified as a disorder.
If you made it here thanks for reading this information dump of my life. Hope your day goes well.
Such an interesting, moving and touching story. Thanks for sharing- I do hope you're able to be at peace with yourself and to find contentment more and more as your life goes on.
Fascinating story, thanks for sharing. I feel like a lot of creative people must be similar to you. I find it very cool how you can imagine a meteor hitting a house that you are looking at. I always wondered how movie directors come up with some of the stuff they do, like say the way the dream worlds in Inception warp. But if they have the same kind of mental imaging capacity as you I could see how it would be much easier. I suppose as a kid I would look out the window of my parents car on a road trip and could visually "see" a guy running along beside me doing parkour. But now that I am an adult I have essentially lost this ability entirely. I could somewhat do it but nowhere near as vividly as I could as a kid.
You could well be on the autistic spectrum as adhd nowadays goes hand in hand with autism spectrum disorders, i notice. Its more so aspergers linked in with adhd conditions. You sound very intelligent, and its memory capacity, mental imagery and recall that serves intelligence, memory is intelligence! So celebrate that! Its a gift! Godbless W.COOK from Bristol England 🏴
I'm like you to some degree it seems, the mind is always talking/active (not necessarily always verbally). I have some degree of ADHD/autism I can visualize an apple in any color, in high definition with all details. I can visualize the inside of an apple and I can taste the apple and feel its texture vividly, all in my mind. Thoughts often have color and texture and sometimes words are written out visually. When I walk in nature I feel a complex mix of emotions/intuitions that there are no words for, trees have a distinct feel/energy, the world feels infinitely deep and mystical etc.
When I listen to music I see colors and objects, sometimes entire scenes/stories imbued with emotional depth etc. Sounds have a visual shape. I'm pretty good at drawing but I don't see the point of actually doing it when I can visualize a complete drawing or painting in seconds. In general I'm very aware of my inner world (and outer, rarely get into accidents or block peoples path).
This is all normal for me and I'm high functioning except it's sometimes hard to relate to other people socially and emotionally. I tried ADHD medication once and I felt uncomfortably calm and content, almost lobotomized, so I never took it again.
Being able to superimpose images onto your visual field is incredible to me
I sometimes wish I had no internal monologue, mostly because I suffer from intrusive thoughts
As an aphantasia-ist(?) and a former student of Dan Dennett, I loved this, and I need to compose a blog piece (or video) to agree, revise, and extend these ideas. In the interests of brevity, let me introduce one piece of terminology: the "Argument from Personal Incredulity". Many of the arguments in this domain are poorly-disguised versions of this: "I can't imagine how this could be true, so it must be false". There's a nice little video on YT where Dan talks about the seductive attraction of dualism, and once again the argument turns out to be an AFPI. Try applying that to qualia thinking. And then restructure all of this from an evolutionary standpoint. There's a great just-so story waiting to be told about the evolution of consciousness, and the varieties of consciousness such as internal monologues and aphantasia really help to explain it. More anon.
>aphantasia-ist(?)
'Aphantasiac' maybe? 🤔
@@uku4171 I've heard aphantasiac or aphantasic used in some discussions as well
I usually say "Aphantastic!"
But mostly in the community, we are referred to as simply "aphants".
.
I think I finally understood what you meant when you talked about lack of inner monologue and particarly that you don't know what will come out of your mouth before you hear yourself say it. It seemed so impossible to me but after months and months of introspection I realized that actually, most of the time, and I believe this applies to most of us, the majority of all our chatter comes out like that.
As someone with inner monologue imagine yourself writing a quick reaction to a post in social media. Do you typically give any thought inside your mind to what and how you will write before writing it? No, you just start typing based on your reaction. In everyday conversations, do you really stop to think how you formalize your words every time before opening your mouth? To me the answer is clear. Most of the time we just blurt out sentences and most of the time they come out very much as intended. Not that we write and talk without thinking. It's just that we don't always need the inner monologue.
Suddenly it's not so difficult to imagine talking without inner monologue when you realize you do it most of the time.
To be clear I don't mean to say anything like "actually none of us have inner monologue". Only that imagining how it is even possible can be easier than it seems at first glance.
I always hear what i write in my inner voice while writing even if it's a reaction i just can't write without doing that, i can talk without doing that but for some reason it never works that way with writing for me.
99% of the time I plan out what I’m going to write or say out loud as if I don’t I tend to not make full sense as I am autistic and tend to struggle with saying things without thinking. I had no clue most people just say things without planning it out. I usually plan things out before I say it, or I pause before I answer to plan it out. I find this crazy to me that most people don’t
Truly fascinating. I've only come across one other person who doesn't have an internal monologue and that is my best friend who was child-minded by my mum since before we went to primary school.
When I tell anyone that I don't utilise an internal monologue, they simply don't believe me and I find it baffling that everyone goes about life with a voice constantly talking, almost commentating on every decision they make.
Whilst I don't use my internal monologue, I can hear an internal voice (anyone's voice, in fact) if I want to. I use it to read. And if I know a song, I can hear it perfectly in my mind.
Very glad I've come across this video and looking forward to discovering what else you have on your channel.
Your comment and Noam Chomsky saying "we don't know what we are going to say before we say it" made me wonder: is this -- and in particular the existence of people who disagree with this statement -- discussed in the academic literature?
It touches on something that has long been a pet interest/question of mine: are you a single or a multi-thinker? (I guess Simon is a no-thinker in this flawed terminology).
I have always had the experience that when I talk there can be no internal monologue alongside it - my talking just externalises my internal monologue. But also, when I listen to other people I can't think verbally in my own mind. The only exception is by short internal interjections in pauses in their speech or by zoning out their voice so that I don't really take in what they are saying. While many people say they have a similar experience, some say that they do "know" what they are going to say before they say it. These people normally also report being able to do things like thinking (in words) about what they are going to have for breakfast while saying aloud what they will eat for dinner.
I would referred to myself as a "single-thinker" and others as "multi-thinkers", but I now wonder whether it is possible that people like myself are actually more like Simon, we lack a conscious awareness of our speech generation process, but just as Simon can talk aloud to himself we just compensate for this "lack of awareness of our speech generation" by imagining ourselves hearing ourselves talk. This certainly fits with how it feels my internal monologue works, I hear it, much like I can hear an imagined sound of a dog barking. Furthermore, just as I cannot really picture an apple in my minds eye while concentrating on being conscious of my visual field I can't think while listening to someone talk.
I am a "single thinker" in the same way that you are, but with one really interesting notable thing recently. Often I have trouble falling asleep because I can't stop thinking. I can't stop following these really long trains of though that would keep me up for hours. So I started just counting to distract myself, and it worked pretty well. Occassionally, I would notice that at some point I had stopped counting and was now thinking about something, but even that started happening less. Now, the counting strategy is entirely ineffective because I've begun to simultaneously count (while keeping pace, i think) and think at the same time. It's not even like I'm switching between the next number and then back to my train of thought, its, as far as I can tell, both at the same time.
@@Hinotori_joj That is really interesting. I expect all of these things are on a continuum, and perhaps being better or worse just requires practice. I find that to fall asleep I just need to listen to something that stops me thinking without being too interesting -- I find episodes of BBC radio 4 comedy I have heard before are perfect, although I can't have heard it too recently.
I was and still am a little bit scared of talking because I can't think alongside it with which I mostly mean I can't have an internal monologue. A purpose of my internal monologue, I believe, is to pace my thoughts. If I talk, things (thoughts) still happen in my head but they're all over the place and run way ahead of the conversation, leaving me confused and distracted.
I'd say the best literature out there on this is WIlliam James' principles of psychology. ultimately everything is associationism. We have a thought internally as a response to external stimuli. that's a crude summary, please don't argue with me - just go and read his books. He was always regarded as the top dog in psychology before all the nonsense artists like freud and jung came in and washed him away. Something i've noticed in these comments is everyone thinking they are so unique. no, not really. it's all sophistry, the brain is a very mechanical associationist automaton
I’m a “multithinker” but I usually only have one “type” of thought at a time. I can say out loud what I want for dinner while thinking about what I want for breakfast, it’s not exactly in words but I know what I would say if I were to put it into words. It’s more than pictures in my minds eye.
On that, with my eyes closed I can see with great detail an apple but the more I add to the picture, the lower quality it gets. When I try with my eyes opened it’s a lot less quality and appears as if I see it in a different place than my visual field
richard feynman had this anecdote about him discussing a certain personal experiment he did where he mentally timed himself reading something. when he discussed this experiment with a colleage his colleague couldn't believe that a person could read and count at the same time. he knew that counting was done verbally and he couldn't do two verbal things in parallel. but feynman counted by seeing a clicker in his mind's eye which could do its thing while he read. i've certainly misrembered or swapped around some details
I have an internal monologue and a mind's eye, but I would have difficulty with this in the same way that I would have difficulty with a polyrhythm. It requires a sort of multitasking skill that is difficult without training. If I was counting while reading, I would end up reading to the rhythm of my counting due to being unable to focus on both separately
Actually after trying it, I find that I can do it, but I feel like I focus on the content of what I'm reading less fully than I would if I wasn't counting. I can think "one-one thousand, two-one thousand, etc." while I read.
tried this myself and my experience matches nick's exactly. it is mentally taxing, and it really is like juggling. if i lose count or lose my rhythm i have to start reading the text from the beginning.
i can as describe what's going on up there very well too. i visualize a white number on a black background counting up. one of those old film countdowns but in reverse. i am saying the words as i see each number in my own voice but in my head, like when you hear yourself talk. what i am reading gets no visualization at all, just words on a screen but i still feel the meaning behind them. details are immediately lost though, just the rough impression of the emotion behind the comment.
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Interestingly, Feynman was known for being a percussionist, at a hobby level, at least. So maybe drummers would be better able to do this?
@@nickpatella1525same, but for some reason I have to read faster.
I am so intrigued by this video. I watched this way too late into the night and lost you at the 15th qualia, rest assured ill rewind it. Great post!
This is fascinating as always. Thank you!
Pain is something that one can get used to. I've been in severe pain for around twenty years. It's just as tangible to me now as it was when I first became seriously ill, but it's also deeply uninteresting to me, and I very rarely pay attention to it. Occasionally, if I'm given a strong analgesic for another reason, it abruptly becomes clear how much it has been affecting me, because I have vastly more energy than usual. People tend to assume I'm joking when I respond to an injury by saying "No worries, it's just pain,." but I'm really not. It's not upsetting like, say, lasting damage or even the short term experience of nausea or vertigo, it's just background noise which I can usually tune out. I expect that lots of people acquire this ability when they really need to.
I’m very sorry you deal with chronic pain! And I’m glad that you are able to navigate it.
That said, when I was 19, I came to the realization, through meditation and studying Buddhism, this “decoupling” of pain and suffering that he was referring to. I’m sure I’m still very much under the sway of pain after a certain threshold, but I am generally able to separate the sensation of the pain from the mental suffering. It makes it even easier when (in my experience) alot of pain just feels like some level of intense cold, ironically, including burns (again, to a certain point).
Pain is a free action.
this describes it really well. unless im having a bad flare up, the pain is always there but its in the background and not something i worry about or think about much. i personally find that flare ups are a different story and MUCH more annoying.
@@fullbin1162 My experience is much the same.
I guess I've always taken for granted what I now realize is extremely vivid mental imagery and dialog. I hear my own internal dialog almost constantly, narrating my thoughts. I can have conversations with familiar voices like friends, family, celebrities etc. I can hear any familiar song with a decent amount of clarity. I can visualize or picture things either in my mind's eye or as a projection in my visual field, basically in any way I want. If you asked me to visualize a giant apple on the foot of my bed it would be very easy, for example. My favorite part of all of this relates to mechanical things; I can see what I'd refer to as a interactive mental CAD model of my car, my mountain bikes, my motorcycle etc. where I can zoom in and out with immense detail, see exploded views and how the parts fit together exactly. This can come from hands on experience, diagrams and videos I've watched. To me, the idea that others cannot do this is hard to fathom, I had always assumed everyone else could. Tremendous and profound video.
That's awesome, I would love it if I could do that ha
Can you learn to be humble too?
i feel the same. people call me smart all the time but i just remember how everything happened? i don’t know how to explain it, but if i see it, i know it. i noticed this more when i started working on my car, and talking to other people. i know everything, as if i am looking at it in the moment. weird thought but yeah most people don’t have a memory like me. it was hard to beleive not everyone thought like that. but it’s nice to know someone else out there does.
@@jonasastrom7422 HAHAHA you rock!
you sound normal to me
The black box is something I can relate to as well. I've never been able to really put it into words, but your description helps a lot!
Did you mention things like playing musical instruments? There are tasks you see in your minds eye until the point it becomes muscle memory, after which the very act of visualizing your hands makes you mess-up the whole thing! Isn't the phenomenon of "flow" one of turning off the inner monologue/minds eye? That's precisely why it's so fascinating.
Reminds me of never thinking about walking down steps, as soon as I think about it I muck it up and nearly fall over.
@robert-wr6md hah! Exactly! Lol... When an inner monologue is detrimental...
Muscle memory is fascinating. I know how to play a few pieces on the piano. If you asked me what the notes were in order I'd have a hard time listing them, but I can sit down in front of a keyboard and my hands can just do it. I'm conscious of the stylistic choices I'm making, louder here, softer there, accent this note, etc., but not of the individual notes themselves. Actually I'm now realizing that I'm having the same experience typing up this sentence! My hands can produce words without having to think about each individual letter
@@Eidolon2003Things like hitting a ball with a bat or racquet, dancing, driving a car, knitting, eating, and many other physical activities that include frequently done, repetitive movements can be like that. Not necessarily always, or consistently throughout the whole of an activity, but intermittently. Our body is doing one thing while our consciousness is thinking about something else - or possibly we may not consciously be thinking of anything at all.
This is something Hubert Dreyfus has written and lectured about, if you want to learn about it
I've read in child development books that up to a certain age, people can only talk to themselves out loud but around the age of 8-9, we start to internalise this voice which then becomes our internal monologue. Perhaps for people like Simon, this just didn't happen for some reason.
This is fascinating to me because it made me realize that while my first solid memory is from when I was around 3 or 4 having a bizarrely existential thought process going wondering about what the sun and sky were looking back I realize that a sizable chunk of my young life did actually go without much of an internal monologue if any and as far as I can recall it only really seemed to kicked in when contemplating complex topics that legitimately interested me until about 4th grade, so around 9, at which point it ramped up activity corresponding with a perceptible-to-others shift in my personality where I became neurotic and developed anxiety and began to regularly have racing thoughts but also a large increase in creativity and a desire to engage in creative endeavors. I don't know what it means but it is extremely intriguing how everything lines up.
LOL, I used to walk around talking to myself like a crazy person when I was a kid. I guess this explains it, if true.
I remember hearing my internal voice at around age 4 or 5 sitting in the kitchen, and thinking it was a ghost! And then when I realized I could control what it said -- at first I wasn't sure if it was controlling what I said -- I thought, "this is my friendly ghost."
I live alone, so I talk out loud to myself constantly.
I unfortunately had that shit ASAP.. Probably why I'm so fucked now.. I remember a Lego piece falling into my grandma's couch when I was 2.. 34 years later she passed away and I probably thought about it's location 30,000 times betwixt those years.. I walked into her basement and found it.. Its permanently on my computer desk now and gives me relief when I see it.. 😂
Lordy, that description of, 'I open my mouth and the words just come out' has me so jealous. I have autism, but didn't have a diagnosis as a kid. I just had this thing where someone would ask I question, I'd have to process it and sift it through all my mental files to come to some conclusion, then very consciously force my mouth muscles into the correct position to make speech.
Even once I got better at speech, I still couldn't just blurt out an answer. There was always a processing delay.
And no matter how innocuous the question, if you have a pause before you answer it, people always think your answer is inauthentic. "How are you today?" Think about it, how am I? I am good. Access vocal cords. "I'm good, thanks." Half a beat too late. And then they're just staring at you a bit too intensely, wondering if you're having a joke at their expense. You *have* to just answer instantly, or they think you're lying.
All this makes me very nervous and a bit confused because I never knew this wasn't normal. I knew that at least something seemed different about the connection of how I thought & communicated but having it summed up so perfectly is kind of eery
@@shrimpypyeah Well, it feels perfectly normal, but it always seemed like it definitely wasn't universal, because if everyone else expects that instant answer, they must not have to need that extra beat of processing time.
They say that when a baby is born, the very first thing it starts doing as it learns things is actually kill off neural links - it trims and prunes the wiring, the connections in its brain, to strengthen the pathways that seem important, to make the most efficient learning machine.
Whereas an autistic brain seems to keep many, many more of those links and connections between every part of the brain to every other part. There's an order of magnitude more data for us to sift through, every single time.
Solidarity, my dude. You are not alone
This reminds me, I struggle with hearing a piece of music in my head, but one time when I was dozing off I heard a symphony that was really bright and clear and it felt like I would be able to produce that feeling again after I woke up, but now being awake and trying to reproduce any symphony in my head it ends up being unclear and very "blurry", even with small aspects of music like a melody or a chord progression
Interesting! I'm like that for visual things. I have aphantasia, or at least my mind's eye is very weak, but I can still have visually vivid dreams that look indistinguishable from reality when I'm in them. Sometimes when I'm drifting off to sleep, in that middle stage when you start dreaming but are still partly conscious, my thoughts start to become vividly visual with colour and detail I usually can't imagine. A couple of times it's so shocking it jolts me awake.
On the other hand, my audial imagination is very vivid. When I imagine a song I know well, i can hear it in my head with all its details almost as if I can hear it very faintly in the distance in real life
I have something kind of similar. Though I can play songs in good detail in my head, they're never in the right key. I'm incapable of recalling the actual pitch unless I've just heard it.
But every now and then, as I'm drifting off to sleep, a song will play extremely vividly in my head. Sometimes this wakes me up and I immediately record myself humming the song. Then I play the actual thing on my phone, verifying that my humming was perfectly in tune.
But when I'm awake, I can't make that vivid, perfect pitch song play no matter how hard I try.
I feel like I almost always have music running through my head. It's probably not all the time, but I certainly notice it a lot. And that's the thing, I notice it. I don't necessarily choose a certain song at a certain time, although I can if I want. I don't have perfect pitch as far as being able to quickly identify a note just from hearing it like some people can, but it seems like I can produce a pitch if it's, for example, the first note of a melody that I know really well.
@@AP-fo5cf I experience the same thing often. When awake I have the somewhat indistinct, fleeting, shifting mental imagery that I guess most people have, but in those few seconds between waking and sleeping I have extremely vivid and persistent mental images. Sometimes I stay in that state for up to twenty seconds without falling asleep, but the ability never continues when I'm fully awake. I wonder how many great artists have/had that same ability while awake.
I have something like that, make up entire songs in your head then forget them as soon as you wake up.
My internal monologue has become more external since living alone. External or internal, it manifests with tier 3 consciousness, not with the noticing that I need to buy milk, or putting away clothes etc, but when having to make an important decision about something, agreeing or disagreeing with an opinion I’ve read, or when experiencing a strong emotion.
I agree, my internal monologue is for "tier 3" conscious thoughts, either through consciously thinking something through or allowing my mind to wonder.
In adult life I've increasingly noticed I will go through the daily chores of life without noticing or sometimes even remembering what I'm doing, "on autopilot" while my tier 3 thoughts are somewhere else. Sometimes this will lead to "Senior moments" or Freudian slips
@@CyclicPilot that sounds very familiar!
how are we putting consciousness tier rankings on thoughts though. i wanna do it too
Amaaaaazing video.
I was so moved, I have to share my personal story. I was first made aware of how we didn't see the real world while studying physics for school. I did a presentation on radiation. I remember being left in awe and excitement: the world was so much more than it had appeared to me. My perception and experience of the world was through a human lense: I wasn't able to see the world as it is, and I will never be. All the waves, radiation, stuff some animals could see but not us. And also the shades of color we perceived that some animals don't, and vice versa. How many versions of the world are there? What does the objective real world look like? I will never know!
Then I realized how rich in variation the human experience itself was when I studied psychology on my own and even more while learning about myself in therapy. It's as if my metaphorical sight got broader. I was able to experience more and understand more thanks to the knowledge I was gaining.
Then I learned about the part of the brain that filters the information our body perceives: explained a lot why I would start noticing a certain breed of dog suddenly, only after I learned about it for the first time. Or a certain brand. It was yet another amazing find. It made me feel like a curious child, gazing at the world for the first time.
When it came to the senses, I had forever wondered how magical the world must appear to people with synesthesia: so colorful and rich in sensation. And to imagine some people don't have a mind's eye was... The abundance of diversity made me so excited.
And then I found out I actually do have synesthesia! It was like a black swan event of my own universe. I needed a whole day to just process everything in my mind and rearrange my idea of the reality as I know it. I had just assumed everybody else had the same experience as I did and hadn't thought of it as unusual. Turns out no one in my close family had synesthesia. Nor the majority of my friends. Wild. To walk among each other for so long and to not know. What else don't we not know about each other???
Another realization I had was about blind people. I always imagined it, without a second thought, to be blind was to have a constant solid dark grey in front of your eyes. But then one day randomly I had a thought: impossible - if you cannot see then there's no darkness! I was so fast to subconsciously accept what it was like based on my own experience - which couldn't have been any more different!! So I googled in search for answers, where I read someone saying something like: imagine what does the visual field behind your head look like? And it made my head explode. The human experience is so diverse and broad!
Then to comment on internal monologue. I remember when I first read about some people not having it, it was hard for me to believe. Because not only do I have a monologue, but sometimes when I have a neat stream of thought, another voice would interrupt me and correct me or try to debate me. Or sometimes the completely random unconnected words or phrases would pop into my mind out of nowhere while I'm thinking of something else, or just perceiveing something. Or if I know only the basic of the basics of grammar of a foreign language, my brain would get triggered upon hearin it and I'd start thinking in that language even though I don't speak it! I would have to make effort to switch it back to one that I speak fluently. Sometimes I'd even dream in that unknown language and my brain will make it up. I once woke up right after the dream where I was speaking german fluently (which I'm not fluent in at all) so I was able to remember what was daid in a dream. It sounded very german, but I had a suspicion that my brain was generating german - like words, assigning them meaning that wasn't real. And it was in fact what did happen, the german words from my dreams didn't exist. Dreams remind me so much of AI.
So anyway, for me whose thoughts were always so loud and often involuntary, I just had to accept that some people don't have an internal monologue, unable to understand. I think only now after watching this video I have managed to get a better understanding of what it could feel like. And when we've been a certain way since birth, it's impossible to explain to each other the non mutual experiences (the elephant analogy from the video) and then to even understand them, but what we can do is to accept that. To accept there are things we cannot know or understand. To accept the differences. Just because we don't experience something or don't understand it, doesn't mean it isn't real. I think tolerance and acceptance form a breeding ground for peace, love and compassion. It always brings me so much joy knowing we're all so similar yet so different and the world's we live in aren't one in the same, even though the objectives exist, we can only interpret them as our subjective versions of them. Gosh this makes me so excited about life! What else do I not know about it? There is infinite amount of things we could learn from just one other human being. Imagine how much the entire humanity holds! 😊
What type of synesthesia do you have? I had the exact same experience, thinking “this condition sounds so cool,” then later realizing by chance that I had grapheme-color synesthesia. It was so baked into my experience of the world that I never really thought about it. It’s not something I see with my eyes. It’s very hard to explain. I don’t think I could put into words how I experience it, even though I’ve been aware of it for well over a decade now.
@@guyanomaly me as well! I remember once when I was in primary school, i had an argument with a girl in my class about which color was a certain number or a letter, i forgot which to be exact. And later i saw people on the internet arguing which colors are the days in the week and I was then certain that everybody has a color for each letter/number that is specific to them and if you talk about this you're bound to disagree. And i thought everybody thought the same so I never ever brought it up. And so I moved on and then about a year ago i was sat with my friends in a coffee shop, blabbing on and on and randomly the conversation got to a point where i thought i could be funny, so I said that 3 could only be green, trying to be sarcastic (the punchline being that they obviously have different colors for the same number).
My two friends blinked and then one said: i suppose it could be green because...
And I was like : COULD? BECAUSE? It either is or isn't, no rhyme or reason. They had not a single clue about what I was talking about. And so I googled it. Also turned out that having time organized in 3d space in my mind's eye is also a type of synesthesia.
I don't remember being that shocked like ever.
@@guyanomaly if i have to explain my experience, I say that I see the letters words and everything as it is on paper, but there exists another letter in my mind's eye and it has a color. I was explaining it to my friend and said: in my mind's eye, that place where you see an elephant when you imagine it. And the friend was like: i don't see an elephant when I imagine it. And it turned out my mother also couldn't. I think it shocked me even more than synesthesia did.
I found this hugely interesting. I definitely *can* speak in an inner monologue, but it doesn't appear to be necessary for every kind of activity or decision; I find that it helps sometimes - I can rehearse what I'm going to say, inside my head, for example, but with the milk thing, I'm just thinking about the activity of getting more milk without words or pictures - maybe like some sort of flowchart, but not a graphical one I can see inside my head (unless I want to) - maybe more like awareness of a chain of events that have to take place in a certain order.
Curious question: if you don't have a perceptible inner monologue, what happens if you lie about something? For me, if I deliberately choose to say something that isn't true, there's a whole process of rehearsal and realtime edit of the story happening in my head, before I speak the untruth.
I expect this set of phenomena probably includes other senses and abilities too - I can imagine flavours in my head and to a certain extent I can mix them in my imagination - my imagined version of the mixture is not always completely accurate but more often than not, it's pretty close. There are also times when I try to do this and it simply fails me though - and it's like asking a question and just getting no answer.
Also I meant to say that, absent an inner monologue, I find it really remarkable that you're able to do all of the accent and dialect speech, simply because if I want to speak in an accent, I have to rehearse it in my head first - I have to try to hear myself speaking in that accent, before I can make my voice attempt to replicate what I rehearsed in my head. Obviously whatever process you have for doing that works better than what I have.
Huh, would you believe this video autoplayed for me after one of yours? I don't even normally watch philosophy videos.
I'm sorry for missing this for so long! I'm actually trying to think about the last time I lied about something - it's difficult for me to remember, exactly. I think there is some process of preparation, but I think I'm quite bad at strategising in that way (I'm also very bad at things like chess), so I usually either just panic and say whatever's true, or have to think about the implications afterwards if there are any. Maybe the difficulty with strategising has something to do with the internal monologue thing. Does your process of rehearsal tend to be verbal?
I've always sort of been able to imagine flavours - when I was a child I remember sometimes wondering why anyone would eat unhealthy things when they could just imagine the flavours without consuming the thing. I'd never tried to mix them until I read this comment, but I think I have the same thing as you describe - it's like the simulated flavour just dissolves when I try to create a mixture.
And on this - I really struggle to start doing an accent without rehearsing out loud. On the rare occasions I have to do one in an acting context, I usually leave the room for a couple of minutes so people can't hear me getting into the accent. In videos, abrupt transitions between accents are normally facilitated through editing! I'm trying to imagine your voice in different accents, now.
@@simonroper9218 Yeah, I mean, I try not to lie maliciously, of course, but scambaiting for example involves a lot of fabrication or even just writing fictional stories involves creating narratives that are not true. Typically, my internal process is sort of like very quiet subvocalisation - to try to describe that - if you can imagine talking to yourself out loud, then repeating yourself at lower and lower volume until you are inaudible to anyone else, then continuing to lower the volume and minimise the movement of mouth and tongue, but with the words still sort of playing - like if you had turned the volume down to zero on a TV - the machine is probably still *processing* audio, it's just not coming out of the speakers; that's the best way I can put it, I suppose. My process for writing a piece of fabricated nonsense is pretty much rehearsal at zero external volume - often over and over, making small changes to improve the planned piece in one way or another.
I understand the concept of qualia (at least I think I do) and I agree that they exist, but I guess I'm one of the people who don't find them to be particularly problematic. My brain takes sensory input and translates it into sensations that I'm capable of experiencing. It is arbitrary that I experience the colour of an apple or the sound of a high pitched note in the specific way that I do, but that doesn't really matter as long as it's consistent. There would be no way to represent something like that which wouldn't be arbitrary.
I can't remember where I read this but I once saw an argument that the subjective experience of consciousness is a kind of "mental pollution", something which is not illusory but is unnecessary. As in, an animal could function identically without qualia, they don't really serve a purpose, they're just a by-product of our neurological processes. In the same way that a car engine makes noise, but that's not it's purpose, that's just a by-product of the process it uses to achieve its function. I'm probably not representing that argument very well here, but I found it fairly convincing, if a little depressing.
Wow, I love this. These are things I’ve felt and inkling of for a long time but never knew how to fully process.
A privileged access to an authentic enquiring mind, who partners with my own rumination's on these issues. Brilliantly put and fully engrossing. TY Simon.
This was beautiful.. It answered so many things I came up with myself. I thought I was alone in this shit.
This reminds me of a legendary philosophy exam. The professor placed an apple on his desk, and told the students that they had thirty minutes to write a convincing argument that the apple did not exist. The winning student only wrote, 'What apple?'
I love stories like this. You'd think, wouldn't you, that philosophy exams would test students' understanding of the methodologies, frameworks and historical underpinnings of the philosophical concepts they'd been learning about, but apparently philosophy exams are just airy-fairy nonsense you can pass with a two-word answer!
I've heard a variation on this one before. It's the final exam in a philosophy class, and when the professor hands out the test papers, the students are dismayed to see only a single word on the test: "Why?".
The supposed correct answer is "Why not?". I guess I would fail such a test since my natural reaction is to answer, "Because."
"you missed the exam"
"what exam?"
College entrance exam essay: “What is courage?”
“This is.”
How do you win an exam?
I love this! you came by at the perfect time!
As someone who suffers from C.P.T.S.D. and thus has grown up experiencing intense mental imagery involuntarily through flashbacks, I find it difficult to imagine what it would be like to even have a control of what you visually imagine; even moreso difficult to imagine having to focus in order to picture things especially vividly.
I have a very visual imagination and memory, which while itself is unrelated to anything traumatic I’ve experienced, I think it has made the effects of my condition like flashbacks and paranoid imagination that much more present in my consciousness. Paranoia being a symptom in my case that affects more than just my brain’s visual imagination, sound is another huge component I find myself fixating on and over-imagining to the point where at times I’ve questioned whether I’ve hallucinated something or am just over analyzing something I’ve truly heard to the point where I’m not sure whether it sounded like something to react to or not.
On the topic of internal monologue, I definitely experience an extremely loud array of internal dialogue and voices consciously experienced in conversation with myself. It’s worth bringing up that these are not what I know to be auditory hallucinations or anything, but just very prominent thoughts. I’ve experienced hallucinations before both visual and auditory but it’s been a long time luckily, which is why I wouldn’t categorize these “loud” thoughts as auditory hallucinations comparable to something like actually hearing voices in your head, although at times I do question how much of a difference there would be if I could experience the two types of conscious moment side by side or one after the other without interruption.
Sorry for the long comment, I really don’t talk publicly about my experience at all and just journal so trust me this isn’t just for attention or something. Thanks for reading if you did, I hope this offers something for discussion. I’m happy to answer questions.
Don't worry about leaving long comments. If people didn't share their own thoughts and experiences, what would there be to even discuss? The self-centered person is the one who isn't interested in hearing or reading what someone else has to say, and therefore wouldn't be interested in reading your comment.
I also have CPTSD and I relate to a lot of what you said! I had this friend who- this may seem a bit out of the box for some, but he had 'senses' about things I couldn't explain, you'd have to see it to believe it-could 'sense' people's inner worlds, and was always pretty accurate.
When he 'listened' to my inner world, he said the best way to describe it was a big committee. He said it was like a big, long table, and everyone at the table is shouting over each other and not listening to anyone else.
Since then, that's the best way I've been able to describe it as well. I also have adhd and trouble focusing, and my thoughts/internal monologue(s) just wear me out and I often feel frazzled, like I can't even think about any one thing. A lot of times when I'm trying to find some peace and quiet inside but I have a lot of nervous energy, it's like there's and AM/FM radio on scan mode, finding ANYTHING to just latch onto instead of quieting down.
@@juliana.x0x0 Yes! What you’re saying about your friend and what he said as well all resonates so much with my experience in coming to visualize and understand my own perspective of reality in comparison to other people around me. It’s so extraordinarily alienating feeling sometimes to feel like you’re hiding this whole inner world that seems impossible to explain unless someone already knows what that’s like in an intimate way.
I also have CPTSD, but I am an aphant, with no visual mental imagery. I also have very little inner voice - it's there, but it's quiet.
I'm quite grateful to have a quiet, dark brain. I'm so sorry that you and others have to deal with visual flashbacks.
There are some researchers who think that some people with aphantasia may have developed it as a way to protect themselves from traumatic visual memories. That resonates with me a lot. I can think of the visual aspects of my traumatic experiences, but I don't SEE them, I only KNOW what they look like.
My worst traumatic experience is one that I know was painful, but I cannot remember feeling pain. (I won't say HOW I know it was highly painful unless I'm asked, because I've learned that it deeply upsets the people who haven't experienced it)
Simon, thank you for making this video, it is possibly my favourite one you have made so far.
I think you did a great job of structuring and presenting your thoughts on this topic. I hope you decide to make a follow up video discussing further whether there are people who do not experience qualia, as it seems plausible that people might merely react to stimuli in their environment without having a 'label' for interpreting it. I share your thoughts on Dennet, I feel his views on some topics seemed to miss the point in an axiomatic way, such that it seemed he just wasn't viewing the world in the same way others do. Likewise in discussions with friends and people online, there seem to be people who have a hard time understanding qualitative experience, as if there is something axiomatically different about how they understand the world.
I was like you once, somewhere in my early childhood I LEARNED how to pre-meditate in a conscious way with monologuing. It was very gradual, tedious and arguably painful. I struggle to remember much but I know socialization and relational tensions were what motivated child-me
I find that when I'm dozing off, my visual imagery is the clearest. Clear as glass. I suppose it's using a similar circuitry to dreams. But I can't activate that freely. If I try to visualize something while fully awake, it looks similar to what you showed with the onion. It has color, but it's a little lacking in detail, and not as clear.
As someone who has both inner monologue and the ability to visualize rough images of things, it does feel surprising to know that others have different ways of thinking (because those ways of thinking would feel alien to me).
At least for me, your internal monologue can have a voice. Mine sounds like myself, but I can make it speak in a different voice if I wanted to. I find I can replicate regional accents I don't speak better in my internal monologue than I can when using my speech organs.
For me, the only difference between my internal monologue and speech is whether it's said aloud or not. Both come out of a black box more or less. But the words that come out are the ones I'm intending to say. And sometimes there is a word I intend to say that I can't remember, and at that point I have to pause and try to recall it, which requires searching through associative memory (which feels like a graph) until I can strike upon the right memory that immediately makes the word come to my mind. Sometimes the act of trying to recall a word makes it impossible to recall, and the word will come out naturally later, at which point I am surprised that I ever forgot it.
Sometimes the word that comes out is not the word I intended to say. It can be a different but related word that somehow got mixed up in the black box before it came out. The same thing happens when I'm typing. I might intend to type "estimate" but type "escalate" instead, without even being conscious that I typed the wrong word until I look over what I typed. I believe this is called a Freudian slip. I sometimes joke that there is an imbalance in the Freudian field that causes an increase in my Freudian slip rates.
I think we can see our peripheral vision, but we just don't have access to it in the same way that we can access the center of our vision. I've heard of people training themselves to be able to read in their peripheral vision, and I can definitely detect changes or lack of changes in it.
I can "tolerate" pain, which is a matter of detaching yourself from it. It feels like shifting your focus away from it. But it's still there, and it still feels like a negative thing.
Taste words can be vague, and our vocabulary for them isn't perfect. People might call yogurt sour because it's soured milk, not necessarily because they experience it in the same way as a lemon, and they might use that word to refer to a slightly different taste than it is used to refer to in other contexts. I experience "sour" as a sensation that sort of pinches my tongue and causes my lips to pucker. I do think yogurt does that very faintly (I am eating some right now), but it is nowhere near as powerful as a lemon. I am also used to eating sweet yogurt, which may be less sour than other soured milk products.
I would think that consciousness is irrelevant to the hardware that it runs on. It should be possible to virtualize it, copy it, etc. Heck, it should be possible to exist without hardware, e.g. in an abstract mathematical notation. I had a sense that the universe is an infinite recursion of formal languages at one time. But that's partly my view as someone who studied computer science, and I've been told, in criticism, that a clockmaker thinks the universe is made of gears and cogs.
I'm not sure what it means to have or lack "qualia" as part of one's experience. Maybe I don't understand the definition of "qualia" being used here. I do feel that the brain operates with labels like "red" or "bumpy" which we apply to particular sensations, and that those are not intrinsic properties of objects. Is the suggestion that there are people who cannot separate the sensation from the label? I would think that is a learnable distinction and not a fundamental difference between people's brains.
If I look at a red door, I don't intuitively "see" qualia. I intuitively see a red door. I may see two red doors that look completely different and understand both as "red doors". If I introspect, I can understand that the labels "red" and "door" are subjective interpretations of the mass of atoms in front of me, in the particular lighting conditions I am viewing them in. I also see color as a continuum, not as discrete qualia that would be suggested by the names of colors. I could describe the same color in different ways, but my expression is only an approximation of the real color I am seeing. "Red" is not a fundamental irreducible concept to me, but a label I apply to certain patterns of visual data, which may overlap with other labels like "vermillion" or "scarlet".
I've reached the end of the video. Thanks for the thought experiment!
I need to read this again.
A quale is not “red” as a general category, but “this red”. Like, it isn’t the concept of “a thing being/looking red”, but the experience of a particular thing (or visualization) appearing red. I mean, the experiences of perceiving different shades of red are/involve different qualia.
@@drdca8263 I see. Thank you. I didn't really understand what was meant by some people not experiencing qualia when he mentioned that in the video. If qualia are defined as what we experience, then not experiencing them but still experiencing the world in some way would seem to contradict the definition.
I thought the issue was whether or not people conceptually agreed with or understood the idea that reality and our experience of it can be separate (direct realism vs indirect realism). I can understand a direct realist refuting the idea of qualia, but I wouldn't understand someone not experiencing qualia (regardless of whether or not they agreed with the notion).
@@nickpatella1525 Uhhh,
I think there might be multiple senses of “experience” that could be used here, and this might have caused some confusion, but I’m not sure. (Like, *really* not sure.)
I didn’t mean for the word “experience” to be the point of my comment. I mainly meant to distinguish between the class “red” of all red […]s , vs a particular red […] .
Yes, I'm like that too. I can make a detailed image of something that doesn't exist, just as I now can with AI in 2024, when I'm on the edge of consciousness; but when I'm fully awake, my visualising capabilities are very fuzzy.
I think it's because my brain has shut down input from my eyes and thus frees up all my visual processing power. Just closing my eyes doesn't suffice, as blackness is still info and I constantly see patterns of colour anyway.
As someone with strong internal and external monogues, the fact that you can learn languages without an internal monogue bewilders me. I did not know this about you.
When I started learning French I started to think in French more and more. But it was more often when the French verbalisation was simpler than the English one. "I'm hungry" takes longer to think (if that makes sense) than "J'uis faim." This idea of a black box inside your mind is scary. I can't imagine.
Its j'ai faim
I had a Cuban friend in school that spoke English very well and I asked him about how he learned a second language and we talked about how he switched back and forth between languages when talking with other bilingual people. One thing that stuck with me all these years later is when he said that he knew he could speak English well when he started dreaming in English.
Interesting. I've always thought that my ability to learn languages easily stems from my lack of internal monologue.
@@MillieSlavidou This could be the case in your particular situation, but its not likely to be true in every individual who lacks internal monologue. These differences in perception have to do with how parts of our brain talk to each other. They form pathways as they develop, and these pathways have variations from person to person.
In the case of someone like yourself who lacks an internal monologue but is still perfectly capable of processing speech, what I assume is happening is that there are parts of your brain that do not directly communicate with each other in both directions, and have to use another part of the brain as a middleman to communicate. In this case, the middleman is somewhere in the chain you use to process spoken language.
I'm bad at explaining it, but its easier to understand as a flow chart.
an enjoyable monologue bud, thanks for sharing
As I grew older an internal monologue refined itself and grew louder, crowding out what you term qualia--those things I experienced so vividly as a child, in that I had very few distinctions between vision, sound, taste, smell, touch. The world was a synesthetic wonder. I believe the fundamental quality of consciousness is not information processing, but the ability to imagine. Even when you say you 'can't imagine' how a tree, bat, magpie experiences consciousness...you are, in fact, imagining it. It is stepping outside of the material world that defines consciousness I think.
When I was in university I participated in a stage hypnotism show at the student union. The hypnotist had a group of us on stage and put us all 'to sleep' then began to guide us through a scenario which we, being hypnotized, lived out. Except I was never hypnotized. My internal monologue was constantly present asking "am I hypnotized yet?". The hypnotist told us we were a famous rock band and we were giving a concert on stage. I was the bassist, and as we gave our 'concert' my IM kept asking 'how do you play the bass? Do you use your first two fingers or your thumb?', which I'm sure is not something that a hypnotized person would worry about. After our 'concert' the hypnotist told us we were boarding our private jet surrounded by groupies, and when it became clear that things were going to get very lewd indeed I stopped playing along and told him I wasn't hypnotized. He tried to snap be 'back' into it (though I'd never actually been under as I say) - in a weirdly aggressive way I thought - but I just said no and came off stage. My friends all thought I'd woken up somehow, and wouldn't believe me when I said I'd never been under - "Well why were you doing all those things?", "I was just waiting to see when the hypnotism kicked in!". Super weird experience, but I'm 100% certain that it was my very vocal IM that prevented me from being hypnotized.
I totally understand this. Do you also struggle to read fiction and watch films? I have a really strong internal monologue and really low hypnotic susceptibility, and it's really hard for me to play along and get drawn in.
@@sekwar that’s really interesting, but no I get very immersed in fiction, I read a lot. Possibly no two people’s experiences will ever be quite the same, which I guess is what this great video is all about!
@@idabrit thanks. Yeah it's interesting for sure. I suppose we are all different, but I bet there are a lot of common idiosyncrasies we could predict based on these things.
whatever part of you just didnt wanna lose control, lose the ego, get embarassed, whatever. so you clung to consciousness.
Hypnosis on stage are all for show, and volunteers just play along. I assure you, none of the people on the stage with you were hypnotized either.
They are just following the orders, it is the milgram experiment and Asch's conformity experiment on display for entertainment.
Real hypnosis, whenever it happens, it requires a quiet place and several sessions to loosen up, and not everyone is susceptible to suggestion.
Btw, hypnosis and visualization techniques can alter your memory or even inject false memories, either by accident or on purpose. So better to stay away from it as far as possible.
Thank you Simon for such a rich video! You really made the mind cogs moving and writing this long comment spanning through most of the topics you raise in the video.
I can't imagine what it feels like to exist without an internal monologue or an ability to imagine pictures, sound, speech, or music, even though I know it's very real for some part of the population. I would love to experience it though, in a controlled manner for a limited amount of time which may be possible with the aid of TMS perhaps. It's somewhat similar to experiencing certain "negative symptoms" when using psychoactive substances, even though they are usually associated with the "positive symptoms" like hallucinations. Inability to access memory, to identify oneself with a certain species or a physical object, absence of the time flow - indistinguishable "before" and "after", the non-ownership over the memories. Those things don't exist as a subjective phenomenon one can think of until they are suddenly gone, leaving oneself questioning what "I" essentially is and what else one has no idea about.
There's no voice of the internal monologue, at least for me. I guess it loops through the brain areas not related to the sound. However, it makes the tongue and the voice box move slightly, at least sometimes.
Your example with pain can be analyzed from the neurological perspective. The particular areas responsible for the pain perception are believed to be: cerebellum, somatosensory cortexi, prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and others. There is likely a couple of places which receive the pain signal immediately from the sensory neurons and propagate it further. Now, imagine that you severe most of those propagation links leaving only the connection to the prefrontal cortex. You will be perfectly aware of the presence of pain, but you can have absolutely no emotions associated with it. Now if you add the amygdala connection - you can learn to be afraid of pain. And so on. It's similar to how the visual stimulus comes through multiple pathways: shape, color, and motion are believed to be processed separately and then reintegrated back. This comes from the observation of the patients with neurological deficiencies as a result of trauma to certain parts of the visual cortex.
What are your thoughts on consciousness inside of LLMs and artificial neural networks in general? There is Glasgow Coma Scale which evaluates consciousness in humans to some degree.
What if qualia is no different from any other category the brain can construct? How redness is different from squareness, or USB-ness (that is, the state of being a USB), or polynomialness (the state of being a polynomial expression)? It's just a way some more or less complex stimulus, external or internal, pulls the strings, tickles the brain, is classified and acted upon, activating certain neurons or neuronal ensembles; something you can tell from everything else. It's a label, a tag for a certain area in the multidimensional space of the visual modality, certain patterns of the visual cortex activation. A qualia can be felt in a particular way emotionally just as any other tag. It can have cross-modal associations, like the smell of rain among the deep-green wet leaves. So yes, it's irreducible in a sense just like any other tag. One can build subclasses: is it just blue or maybe it's navy, or azure, or indigo? Those tags mark smaller areas in the modal space. When you can distinguish - you can name it. Or can you? Remember the projections go to multiple brain areas? Some people with brain trauma can experience blue but can't name it. Can it be that for a share of people some pathways are missing in such a way that they don't feel the quale or feel them differently? Don't you feel how the meaning of the word "feel" becomes blurred at that point?
The touch with religion was excellent. Examples of epilepsy with religious experience are well documented. Can it be that some people experience "oneness with the world" or any sort of an indescribable otherwise presence or causality on a daily basis, predisposed by their brain wiring? TMS of a particular area is known to cause a strong sensation of a person standing right behind you. What if it's a similar mechanism?
That black box phenomenon is something I find so strange. There were so many times when I was younger where I tried to come up with a word without first thinking about it, and I couldn't do it even when speaking gibberish.
Does that mean when speaking to someone, you form whole sentences before you say them or do you think a word then say it, then think the next word and so on? I'm having trouble imagining how one would function like that. I can definitely think about a certain word or phrase to use if it's a bit tricky and I don't want it to come out wrong. But the majority of things I just say out loud, I don't consciously tell them to myself first.
So much to talk about so I'll go in order of each topic you spoke on lol.
1. I have aphantasia. I actually spent 22 years of my life not knowing the "mind's eye" was a real thing. I always thought it was fantasy mumbo jumbo. I do dream incredibly vividly though. I also experience auditory imgination as in I hear music and other stuff in my head sometimes.
2 I don't have a inner monologue in the way most people describe it. Its more like a dialague. There's 1 or more subconcious voice. And there's a few conscious voice. Sometimes I will have conversation like dialogues. It helps to remember certain things and reflect on social encounters.
3 On the topic of conscious speech. In a nonemotional or detached conversation I actively think about the words I speak. When emotional its kinda a flip of a coin on whether I control myself or if I just entirely shut down and just agree to get the other person to shut up. There are also times where I'll have coversational battles with someone I'm upset with in my head. And speak none of it as I realize no one gives a fuck.
4 I actually have pretty good peripheral vision. I believe it is due to being in a marching band where I was taught to use said perephials in order to navigate formation movements while facing one direction with an instrument in my face. Even now with some reduction in my visual capabilities, I am still very concious of my perephials. So much so that I often fail to see things right in front of me lol.
oh
I just want to thank you for this Video. Thanks to you i finally got to know that what I always experienced is actually called Aphantasia. It took me 23 years to figure out, that almost everyone can in fact See things in their mind. Thats Crazy man 😂
As for thinking vs an inner monologue, I can give an example that (for me at least) seemingly proves that they cannot be the same thing: I sometimes struggle to find the right word to use in my inner monologue. My interpretation of that is that I have some thoughts first, and then translate them into an inner monologue. If they were the same thing then it shouldn't be possible to have a concept in mind and struggle to find the word, the only way to have the concept in mind would be by thinking about the word to begin with. Or maybe it works in yet some other way..
I love your thought here. If I was inclined to argue that inner monologue and thinking are essentially the same, I would argue that they are 2 discrete steps in a single process. The first step is the rough conception, in which a nebulous concept is birthed. It is crude and low fidelity. The second step is refinement, and we use language to crystalize the thought into something tangible and "real". The mental vocalization gives it form and allows the idea to be handled, studied, and acted upon consciously. Without which the idea remains subconscious, and if we act on it, it is without full awareness. Language is necessary to move the subconscious into the fully conscious. There is likely some matter of spectrum here.
To apply it to your example, it could be said that the fact you may struggle to find a word to fit a thought doesn't mean it's not part of the process, but merely that you encounter a speed bump in the second step of crystalizing the thought.
I'm not sure how much of this is my personal belief. It feels convincing to me, and the way Simon describes his thought process of getting milk seems to align with this. While my inner monologue is very very busy pretty much all the time, not all of my thoughts get turned into language. And it is these thoughts that "feel" much more "automatic" to me. Because, according to my argument, it remains subconscious.
I know I wasn’t as aware of how I processed the world consciously versus subconsciously in the same way 10 years ago as I did today, how things seem versus how they really are. It’s given me perspective of the spectrum of how reality may appear to others.
It becomes interesting when you can visualize and extrapolate a possible scenario that may play out and feel (or empathize) the practical and emotional stakes for you if that played out to mentally prepare for or prevent it.
When that goes into my subconscious black box I am then adept at performing in the clutch off the cuff.
I have an internal monologue about almost everything I do--but I have occasionally had the experience of reacting automatically without thinking about it at all on rare occasions. Maybe that's why I'm poor at sports and am generally a bit clumsy.
@@aLadNamedNathan If you look back at those situations, what level of existing knowledge or skill were involved in how you acted? One can master something to the point where a response is not only automatic but drives innovation via improvisation in the moment.
I am less physically coordinated as well but have subconsciously saved objects (sometimes valuable) after being clumsily dropped or prevented auto accidents due to inattentiveness via subconscious, automatic reactions as a result of years of clumsiness. Athletes train hard for years to develop that in their own bodies.
I can not only can I make a mental imagine of a room I was in yesterday, but can look around that room to remember more about it.
20.44 This absolutely happens with body waxing. What started as an unpleasantly painful experience became an experience so relaxing it would send me to sleep. I still felt the sensations, I just enjoyed them rather than resisting and feeling them as pain. Took a few years though
Really interesting topic. I have always that the brain is interpolating due to the human brain being highly attuned to patterns. When I first went to an optometrist, I was amazed that my (for the first time diagnosed) astigmatism actually existed. Up until that point, I believed that my vision was flawless. It was only when I experienced the comparison between my native vision and my enhanced vision (with the optometrists lenses) that I realized that my brain had been filling the gaps in my actual perception of the world. In a way my brain was lying, but in reality my brain was helping me experience the world without having to waste reasoning power. That was also the point in my life that I realized that people's perception of the world is in no way objective. I vividly remember that day.
Oh! I had undiagnosed astigmatism as well, up until my early 20s.
I was absolutely _shocked_ to experience depth perception that extended past about four foot in front of me. Made crossing the road a lot safer, and driving a car... possible at all. And suddenly the enduring mystery of 'how do you draw a circle, and make one end meet up with the other end?' was no longer a mystery at all.
Actually - this is interesting, because up to that point I had _understood_ on a cognitive level that all points on the edge of a circle are equidistant from its centre, but had been unable to exactly _see_ that quality in the shape without measuring it - not in the way that it shows up with the glasses on, a clear and vivid mathematical primitive (or close to it) in a world of more complex shapes and forms. My brain did _not_ fill in that gap and circularise circles or square squares; they all looked like any other shape. Text also got a lot easier to read, both up-close and from a distance. Easier to read, but not appreciably different from the underlying shape which I already understood to be there - I just became more able to percieve it.
In a way, I had the opposite realisation about subjectivity and objectivity; I had already grasped that people's perceptions of things could differ, but the glasses gave me the opportunity to perceive qualities of things which had already been described to me by others, and which I had already known of conceptually, if (unknown to me) not been able to experience firsthand. The first time I saw a circle properly, during the eye test, I can remember quite vividly calling out loud, 'Oh! It's a circle! It's actually - circular!'; the optometrist gave me a look like she couldn't believe what she was hearing. But the point is - I knew what a real, circular circle was, despite never having seen one firsthand before. I had been able to learn and understand that, in a way which made the standard perception of the thing immediately recognisable to me, despite coming from a position where I had been perceiving it differently. Which meant that - over all those years - something about other people's experience and perception of the world had made its way to me, across that difference in frames of reference. Which in turn shows that - even if there is not an ultimate objectivity to refer to, two subjective points of view can at least come to an understanding of the difference between their points of reference, account for that difference, and communicate _as if_ they were within the same objective frame of reference; at least in some times and with some things.
speaking of internal monologues, i do have one, but i find i rarely use it because since very early childhood i vocalise practically all my thoughts when i’m not around other people. i talk to myself genuinely 24/7 when no one else is there to think i’m strange for it, i could sit in my room for a couple hours just staring in the mirror and chatting away. things is, though i of course make small comments to myself about "oh, i ought to do this and that" or "you know, your hair looks a fright", basically all my talking-to-myself is really voicing conversations that i have in my head. problem is it makes getting over boys very difficult, how am i supposed to forget about a fella when my natural instinct when watching a tv show is to chat to him about what i’m watching, or when my natural instinct while walking through the country is to start some make-believe conversation with him lmao
i don’t know if that’s normal or what, i think everyone makes small comments to themselves or has given a pretend interview in the bathroom mirror but i do that literally all day every day. sometimes i pause youtube videos just to stop and chat to whoever i imagine myself chatting to about whatever just popped into my head. my mum thinks i’m loony lol
I once noticed that the taste of a peach isn't in the peach, nor in my taste receptors, nor in my mind, but it is in the combination of those things coming together. It seems evident to me that if there is no taster, there is no taste. And that every single experience is like that. Every sound, taste, sight, shape, physical sensation, etc is not in the outside world alone, but they are a result of the coming together of the outside world, someone's physical sense organs, and their mind. When I told my daughter that, she said that this made her think nothing could exist without consciousness. I think about this ALL THE TIME.
If I understand it, Simon, I think you call experiences of the sort I describe above, like the taste of a peach, "qualia." You talk about how you used to think qualia was an accurate description of reality, that green was an actual property of grass, when in fact, the actual property is mathematical, and the color experience, the qualia, is a mysterious overlay on top of this, reliant on consciousness.
This makes me wonder: what exists without qualia/experience? What is here without the one who experiences? The idea that the world outside our eyes is just a mathematical field is bizarre, but I think it is accurate. Like, what is in the room when we leave it alone? The colors, smells, shapes, textures, etc- as we experience them- these all disappear.
This is such a beautiful mystery!What a mysterious place the universe is.
Thanks for your videos.
this reminds me a lot of hegel's "substance is subject", especially your daughter's statement you mentioned. i couldn't give the explanation justice i think so if you're interested, i could link you to a really nice video about it (i forgot the name of the video but it was made by a channel called bewegtbild). it's unfortunately not in english but does have english subtitles
@@benney9908 Yes, please link the video! I would be very interested.
I think this is the answer to hard problem of conciousness, that the outside world and the conciousness are actually the same thing.
@@BeyandEstrella I remember linking it in the comments here but somehow it doesn't seem to be here anymore. I think there might be a bot deleting comments with links to avoid scams, so instead I'll just tell you the name of the channel and video: "Hegel's Dialektik erklärt nach Slavoj Zizek: „Substanz ist Subjekt“ mit Sein und Nichts" by "BewegtBild - Kunst und Theorie"
This is a great way of interpreting the idea of “non-self” in Buddhism. The idea that nothing has inherent existence in and of itself. Everything- and I mean, EVERYTHING- is a product of multiple other things. As you have illustrated, down the thought itself, nothing exists without the conditions created by other things.
For what it’s worth, even though I love talks like this that Simon is amazing at articulating- I embrace the mystery of life as being life itself. We are all living in different practical realities, and some of us are just more intent on finding things and ideas to hold on to than others, and that’s okay!
But on an easy breezy level, as you said, when you leave the room, does it still exist? If you leave, but a friend stays in the room, does it still exist because the friend is still in there to experience the room around them? Or does the friend AND the room cease to exist when it is out of your scope of awareness?
There is just too much subtlety in absolutely everything for me to try and keep track, when I could just be enjoying the Cheetos I’m eating for what they taste like, you know?
Okay, I've now watched the whole video and read some of the commentary and I have to say: Mind. Blown. 😮🤯
I'm not certain I entirely grasped the whole thing, but it's a fascinating topic. Your presentation was thought-provoking, cogent, and balanced.
Regarding the questions you asked us, I do experience qualia so I can't provide the input you want.
I now need to go away and digest all of this. Well done, Simon, well done! 🤔
Great phenomenology and discussion, really enjoyed this video and hope to see more like it.
Question on the discussion of qualia at the end and postulating the existence of those who don't experience qualia:
What I take qualia to describe is all encompassing with respect to experience. My entire experience is composed of color, sounds, feelings, etc which I would describe as qualia. So I don't see how someone who doesn't experience qualia would be conscious at all. Are you wondering if this kind of person exists (the so called "philosophical zombie")? Or are we working with a different definition of qualia?
I think he doesn't want to presuppose what someone's experience would be without qualia. I think we all can't imagine what that would be like but given that many people obviously also can't imagine someone thinking without an internal dialogue or without being able to visualise things, it's only fair to not jump to the conclusion that consciousness without qualia can't exist, just because I cannot imagine it. Maybe it can't but maybe it can.
I dveleoped an internal monologue during my teenage years, and it only occurs when im being very introspective, it serves as a verbalization of my subconscious thoughts that i use to explain them to myself consciously. Interestingly, when i have an internal monologue, i more often than not still utilize my vocal tract, subtly mouthing the consonsants and vowels within my closed mouth, altering my breathing in a similar manner to speech, so my brain usually interpets my inner speech as real speech.
i also subtly mouth the words when i am thinking but i also can do it without, but i dont really alter my breathing at all to do it. ive had an internal monologue as long as i rember
Yeah, subtly signaling your mouth to form words as you think them is a commonly observed trait. Probably just something to do with our internal monologue using parts of the same process as physically speaking would.
The theory of the bicameral mind mentioned in the Westworld series fascinates me.
In case you don't know it, that theory stems from a book by Julian Jaynes called _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind._ Although the book is about 50 years old, it remains a fascinating read. The main problem with it is that since it cannot be subjected to scientific investigation, its thesis must forever remain within the realm of philosophy.
@@aLadNamedNathan thank you friend. I am going to see if I can purchase this book. It really makes you question your inner monologue and consciousness itself.
As an austistic person with synesthesia I kinda grew up knowing that other minds were different from mine. By my own nature I usually don't know how to predict what others are thinking (Theory of Mind) -- so the idea that people *can* do that was alien to me. I appreciate that you took a view similar to this -- that maybe the differences in various people's subjective experience can account for at least some of the difficulty to communicating our internal experience to others.
I don't have an internal monologue. If I need to I can replay and rehearse conversations - useful when translating languages. Mostly I work in concepts which can be put into words - with a large loss of meaning. However, I can play music and lyrics mentally at high fidelity.
It's super fascinating hearing these accounts! May I ask, when you read a book, or a comment on TH-cam like my own, do you hear a narrator reading the words? Or does it just "sink in" without any kind of "phantom audio" of an internal narrator
I have aphantasia, where I can visualise vaguely. At best, I get a splash of colour and my images are as fast as like old school presentations in the 70s and such. At worst, it's like a sketch on a blackboard. Very dark colours (if there are any), and outlines of things.
My friend has absolutely no visual imagery in her head. It explains a lot why she went into pharmaceuticals and I went into cybersecurity, both areas where imagery is not a necessity.
Can you compose music and lyrics in your head, or merely recall them?
@@SeanSMST I would say I have 3/10 virtualization capacity. Like a remote memory. I call m y thinking mode as conceptual - like bubbles in a lava lamp that occasionally hit the light source.
If you can play music at high fidelity in your mind can you internalise externalised linguistic thought by imagining it as singing?
I haven't watched any of this yet. I just want to say how pleasantly blown away I am that Simon has branched out into this subject. It gave me pause. I think I'd very much like to buy this guy a pint and talk shop with this guy.
what a fantastic video, you made me think how my life would be if vin diesel narrated my thoughts lol. in regards to the thinking out loud part, i find that it helps me parse my thoughts and separate them from the noise
You said "You asked yourself"... THAT is your internal monologue.
Not necessarily. I usually think without internal monologue and asking a question (or stating a problem or a task) works perfectly fine without words.
@@bladdnun3016”stating,” XHuntonator is correct
@@Brad2117 Duh. I can't think of a word for "non-verbal stating".