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Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

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273 points geox | 1 comments | 17 Jun 24 21:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.228s | source
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gcanyon ◴[18 Jun 24 00:41 UTC] No.40712874[source]▶
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.
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dboreham ◴[18 Jun 24 01:03 UTC] No.40713012[source]▶
Theory: there are no humans without language. Consider: what language do you think in?
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mkl ◴[18 Jun 24 01:09 UTC] No.40713064[source]▶
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....
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olalonde ◴[18 Jun 24 02:22 UTC] No.40713482[source]▶
I'm highly suspicious that the whole "inner vs no-inner monologue" thing doesn't actually exist and has more to do with these things being extremely hard to explain using language, and people describing their subjective experience in subtly different ways.
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epgui ◴[18 Jun 24 03:10 UTC] No.40713731[source]▶
I 100% do not think in words or sentences or language. It feels more like node-traversing a graph of concepts, but it's all completely abstract. While I am able to consciously play back my thoughts linguistically or visually with some effort (and at the cost of efficiency), by default there are neither words nor images.

French is my first language, I'm fluent in English, and I know a bit about many languages... But I've never had an inner voice or thought in language, even when I was very young.

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olalonde ◴[18 Jun 24 09:10 UTC] No.40715550[source]▶
What I am saying is that probably everyone thinks the way you do, it's just that not everyone would describe it in that way. For example, I'm sure you came up with this comment in your head at some point before typing it and many people would describe this as an inner monologue, whereas you apparently do not.
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1. epgui ◴[18 Jun 24 20:04 UTC] No.40721681[source]▶
Oh, perhaps. And I didn't mean to suggest that I was special in any way, but... When I discuss this with people in real life, it is very rare that I find someone who relates to this way of describing how I think. Most people are just stuck in literal wide-eyed disbelief and either tell me they think in literal words, fragments or sentences, experiencing a real "inner voice", or they tell me that they visualize things somehow.

Sometimes people seem to not be sure how to describe the experience of thinking... Which I suppose explains a lot! /laughs