Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

You have to think that there were breakthroughs in communication technology — not just language in general but possibly also one individual who happened to be good at explaining things, either before or after language, who both taught more people, but also taught them how to teach — that led to step changes in technology.

Theory: there are no humans without language. Consider: what language do you think in?

Quite a lot of humans don't think in language, or do only some of the time, see e.g. https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue..., https://www.livescience.com/does-everyone-have-inner-monolog..., https://www.bustle.com/wellness/does-everyone-have-an-intern....

There are also humans who can’t conjure up an image in their head. Mozilla cofounder wrote a fairly famous piece about his own experience.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/25/11501230/blake-ross-cant-...

If there are people who can’t picture and people who don’t have an inner dialogue, I think it lends more credence to the idea that we don’t have free will and are just a bunch of chemicals controlling our behavior. It also makes you think about consciousness and whether it’s even real.

I find it hard to believe that they can't at all imagine what a tree looks like or imagine a face of a friend. I can understand some difficulty in a perfect image, but nothing?

The fun thing is that for those of us who cannot it’s as hard to believe others can conjure images. Yes the idea of mental imagery is deeply ingrained in our language but I’d always assumed it was allusion till I learned of aphantasia when I was 30.

One of the more cliche, and not super useful tests, is “imagine a ball on a table, someone pushes the ball and it begins to roll. What color is the ball?” For me that was a revelatory statement because I’d never consider that others might give the ball a color, or size, or texture as the imagine it. I assume not everyone with the ability to visualize does but it seems like many do according to the literature. To me it’s just a statement, a ball is rolling pushed by a nondescript person.

So for me I definitely visualized a ball on a table, but the color wasn’t resolved, if that makes sense. After hearing the question asked it kind of snaps out of superposition into a red color (but there was definitely a color-choosing step that happened after hearing the question).

Same thing happens if you ask “what surface is the table on” or “what country is this image in”. It’s layers I can add to the mental state, but if they’re not important they’re just not there.

I’d say the closest thing to what I was “seeing” before the color question is something like a wireframe, or maybe the gray color of a Blender model without colors/textures applied. Grey in the sense that you don’t really notice it’s grey, you just understand the grey color means color is absent.

You described my experience well as well, except my abstract colorless ball was barely even visual. I was quite happy to entertain the idea of a ball on a table with very few concepts activated - roundness for the ball, flatness for the table, gravity holding the ball on the table. Rather like a physics problem.

When forced to dereference a color, it felt like an entire system was booted up. Not only did the ball have color, it also had specular reflections. There was lighting. The table gained an abstract sense of having texture.

What I find particularly fascinating is that my mind also assigned "red". I wonder if that is a coincidence, or a deep reflection of something about how brains work. Supporting evidence: in languages with only three words for color, the three colors are "light", "dark", and "red": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Stage_II_(red)