On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 01:21:29PM +0100, Mark Tiller wrote: > I'm going to have to disagree with Steven, Language is NOT how we think, > it's how we communicate. We think at the subconcious level in the How do you know how we think at the subconcious level? > Pictures, Sounds and Feelings at least that's how memory is organised. Not entirely. Are smells supposed to count as feelings? ... more relevantly for this debate, it's a simple cognitive science experiment to have people read a passage, and then some time later try to identify the passage they read >from among others written differently with the same meaning. From what I've read, most people won't pick out the right passage. They can, though, reject passages with different meanings. Certainly I know that if I read something without intentionally paying attention to the specific words my ability to regenerate the exact words will be crap -- but I'll know the gist of what was said. So this somewhat argues against Steve's case -- there's a level of memory, and probably thinking, more abstract than that of the specific language we use. I think the ability to identify ambiguous sentences may be another argument -- we note the sentence doesn't resolve to a unique meaning. On the other hand, we may then wonder about the sentence in terms of more precise alternate sentences. This isn't something I've introspected about -- and I might be a bad example, because most of my conscious thinking _is_ me talking to myself in my head (or talking to other people in my head... but talking.) But I think my first example argues against your case as well, unless you expand 'feelings' to these hidden abstract meaning structures in our head. But I doubt that'd be useful. > We may CHOOSE at the concious level to verbalise our thoughts, it's good > if we are trying to follow a logic chain. But thinking in pictures is > much faster as in a picture's worth a thousand words. "Not if you can't draw." I do not think in pictures, okay? And I think fast. (Although not, perhaps, about pictorial stuff.) People are insisting their way is right. It's not. People think differently. Some people natter to themselves. Others can manipulate pictures in their brain. A few others have rather different experiences, associating colors with words and sounds all the time, seeing colors in different numbers, not as a choice but because they do -- I'd guess some neurons took a wrong path, but what do I know? Some people can't express themselves well in speech or writing but are good at figuring out mechanical things. Some are the opposite. Some are good at advanced math (and in different ways, if I believe Wolfram.) Some of us combine proficiencies. There is no one right way to proces information. It is universal that we seem hard-wired to pick up the languages around us at a young age. (In the case of creoles, even making a new language with other children, out of the parental mishmash.) How much we use that language to ourselves varies. -xx- Damien X-)