Thinking Without Proxies

We've evolved to think to ourselves as if we are having a conversation. We use spoken language to process thoughts because it's easy to synthesise. This comes at the cost of greatly reducing the thoughts it is possible for us to have. There s no doubt that communicating ideas through sound has carried us humans far in advancing knowledge and intelligence when compared to other animals who's primary thought type is visual, but I think it's time to advance to the next step. Pretending your thoughts are things happening outside, coming up with images, sounds, smells, tastes to handle logic is, well, primitive. We need to find out what it means to work with the raw logic of the brain with no abstactions, no alternate interpretations. This is how I believe we can be more than just this, just humans playing out their routines on repeat, struggling with the same unanswered questions, building and rebuilding the same civilisations for thousands of years, and create true meaning to existance and harmony in society.

>>4522 Do you think complex thought is possible without some form of language abstraction? Personally, I am not convinced thinking "without proxies" would be superior for any reason. In fact, it seems to me that without the (quasi-) logical structure of a language, thought would be a whole lot less useful.

>>4522 Alright kid. Maybe you've got what it takes- you're right about the necessity for n-dimensional hyperlinks. Problem is, your next step is too short- you really need to reach. Show me your moves. https://vimeo.com/131076011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMgyWT075KY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URq7m3-SOtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU47nhruN-Q

>>4522 um... I don't know about you but I'm pretty sure I think of lots of stuff without it being a conversation. I can imagine a shape I don't know how to describe in words and do various operations on it in multiple dimensions. but maybe I'm just stupid as I've heard some people sometimes call people that believe they think visually.

It is true our thoughts are often limited by language. For instance the trick to reading fast is to stop vocalizing the words in your head. Also if you read about idiot savants who can come up with very large prime numbers, they usually describe some sort of visualization or pattern based way of representing the numbers in their mind.

drugs can induce thought that is not describable with language. Unfortunately their very indescribability makes it difficult to properly judge and act on those thoughts. Language is a very, very deep structure in the human brain. It helps us discard nonsensical thoughts easily. In your native language, or a language you are very fluent in, you can tell a sentence is nonsensical almost instantly. And at the core language *is* raw logic, in the same way that formal languages are raw logic. Additionally, the ability to communicate an idea is fundamental. Who cares if you understand something if you can't accurately share your understanding? Even if you have some fancy soykaf like brain-to-brain transfers or something, there must be *some* medium which conveys semantic content, or you're just linking two minds into one. The two options for a language-less world is solitary beings each with their own incompatible understandings, or a hivemind, neither of which are particularly human. Not to argue against those options, of course, but you have to understand that what you're proposing is transhumanism. I do agree, though, that at least experiencing indescribable thoughts is important. That's why I think mass drug use(of the psychedelic variety in particular), in settings conducive to free thought, is a good thing.

On the one hand this is a totally possible thing, though it won't make you superman. On the other hand it's not quite as simple as that. It's a mistake to imagine that the words we hear in our heads are what thought is. In reality there's constantly tons going on in the background and the words are just the bits that are being presented to our consciousness. You can train yourself to alter how this presentation is done. Personally I often think in connectives. So listening in you'd hear "and... but... what if...". In the same way we never misinterpret the words we hear in our thoughts it's no problem to know what these snippets mean. Thing is it doesn't make the background stuff go any faster or come through any clearer. You know exactly what you mean either way. There are forms of meditation that focus on not having anything be presented at all. They're a very different story and you'd have a lot of trouble doing typical "thought based" tasks likes maths or coding. Also >no abstactions Even looking at each neuron and the connections between them you're still abstracting away from all the quarks and gluons that make them up. Everything we see and know is an abstraction, just pick the right ones.

>>4525 Explanation for why some people call you stupid (you're not) for that here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ tl;dr: >Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. The article then gives other examples and generalizes.

Thinking in pictures can be a sign of autism. http://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/07/05/research-shows-three-distinct-thought-styles-in-people-with-autism/#4811144f221e >I THINK IN PICTURES. Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. When somebody speaks to me, his words are instantly translated into pictures. Language-based thinkers often find this phenomenon difficult to understand, but in my job as an equipment designer for the livestock industry, visual thinking is a tremendous advantage. >Visual thinking has enabled me to build entire systems in my imagination. During my career I have designed all kinds of equipment, ranging from corrals for handling cattle on ranches to systems for handling cattle and hogs during veterinary procedures and slaughter. I have worked for many major livestock companies. In fact, one third of the cattle and hogs in the United States are handled in equipment I have designed. Some of the people I've worked for don't even know that their systems were designed by someone with autism. I value my ability to think visually, and I would never want to lose it. >One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills. When I was a child and a teenager, I thought everybody thought in pictures. I had no idea that my thought processes were different. In fact, I did not realize the full extent of the differences until very recently. At meetings and at work I started asking other people detailed questions about how they accessed information from their memories. From their answers I learned that my visualization skills far exceeded those of most other people.

Here is an alternative perspective: Complex language is fundamentally what separates us from other animals on this planet. The idea of 'self-awareness' is only possibly once you've developed the sufficiently abstract language concepts to describe yourself, and to describe yourself from the perspective of being yourself. Our internal narrative that drives analytical though could only develope after we had evolved a capability for external narrative. Many people who learn a second language say that it changes the way that they think in some way (there's a name for this phenomenon, but I can't remember it).

>>4522 Sometimes I found that I have thoughts in more of a primordial abstraction, but I can usually hold onto the memory of the raw impressions long enough to put them into words, even if just in my mind—and the important fact is that I do this not even necessarily to make them more communicable to other humans, but just for my own memory and synthesis. Articulation is indeed fundamental for our eclipse of the animals' mental process It's all fine and good to have free association, and I agree that in many cases while you're thinking thoughts, said thinking can be drastically accelerated without the "overhead" incurred by thinking "in" a language such as English, but I don't see any reason to believe our thoughts are somehow fundamentally limited in capacity when thinking in language. It's like having a scaffolding, which can be used to exploit the verbal loop as a small "extension" (think swap space in computer, or perhaps it belongs in the other end like some kind of CPU register) to the working memory. Sometimes the pure, abstract logic-crunching in my head chokes or stumbles, or I can't get past a certain threshold of figuring, and in many cases stopping to "take inventory" and articulate what the hell it is, exactly, that I've been thinking or realizing, allows to either realize that the epiphany was already had, or to proceed onward in the calculation/pondering So I guess in the end it's like how you can program in C or ASM and even include snippets of the other in the one, but at the end of the day it's all just the same logic. Likewise, any "thoughts" which one might have which fundamentally cannot be expressed in words are likely just emotional experiences. But our capacity for logic is actually matched, as far as I know, with the (let's say for instance) English Language's ability for expression.

>>4556 >So I guess in the end it's like how you can program in C or ASM and even include snippets of the other in the one, but at the end of the day it's all just the same logic. >Likewise, any "thoughts" which one might have which fundamentally cannot be expressed in words are likely just emotional experiences. But our capacity for logic is actually matched, as far as I know, with the (let's say for instance) English Language's ability for expression. I meant to drop some bit of analogy about turing-completeness in there but somehow neglected to Not sure how obvious that was

>>4541 What if I can switch between those two? When I talk to myself I usually think in pictures or movies but when I talk to others I either switch between verbally and movies/pictures or just remain verbal for easier and faster communication.

OP you misunderstand the problem. Even if you were to get to the centre of thoughts without a proxy it still has to be encoded for ease of use and transfer of information across your brain or across of communication medium to another person (whether that be pictures or words, whatever). In fact, I would argue that the encoding process by itself is automatic once we develop our brains enough and train it. So, yea, emotions give a bedrock for zhought processes we have and logic on top of it. If you were to encapsulate or try to transfer this sort of information you would then have to include all sort of past emotional stimuli, emotional current state, all mismatches of was we came to such way of thinking and what was actually going in our short and long term memory at the time, not to mention the memories that we used to come to such conclusions. In short you would have to transfer a good chunk of brain (or information stored on it) for the communication or thinking to even occur (if you are talking about just thinking about things by yourself) which is why I think some sort of encoding is a quick short hand for not being able to send vast amounts of info through our brains/through communication medium (even though picture/movies has more informational capacity that words)

>>4522 That's why the dumbing down of language is bad

>>4556 >Likewise, any "thoughts" which one might have which fundamentally cannot be expressed in words are likely just emotional experiences. well, a thought does not necessarily have to be logical. >>4563 language doesn't "dumb down", it changes. Maybe you're just complaining about the vulgar language used in non-ivory-tower contexts, but that has always existed in one way or another.