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Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

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549 points orcul | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 12:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.291s | source
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fnordpiglet ◴[19 Oct 24 03:16 UTC] No.41885384[source]▶
For those who can’t and don’t think in words this is unsurprising.
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neom ◴[19 Oct 24 18:19 UTC] No.41889537[source]▶
How would someone think in words? You mean the words in the pictures or...?
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vivekd ◴[19 Oct 24 18:36 UTC] No.41889661[source]▶
I think in words. For me during thought there is a literal voice in my putting my thoughts into words.
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1. jerf ◴[19 Oct 24 18:52 UTC] No.41889779[source]▶
I have the standard internal monologue many people report, but I've never put much stock in the "words are necessary for thought" because while I think a lot in words, I also do a lot of thinking in not-words.

We recently put the project I've been working on for the last year out into the field for the first time. As was fully expected, some bugs emerged. I needed to solve one of them. I designed a system in my head for spawning off child processes based on the parent process to do certain distinct types of work in a way that gives us access to OS process-level controls over the work, and then got about halfway through implementing it. Little to none of this design involved "words". I can't even say it involved much "visualization" either, except maybe in a very loose sense. It's hard to describe in words how I didn't use words but I've been programming for long enough that I pretty much just directly work in system-architecture space for such designs, especially relatively small ones like that that are just a couple day's work.

Things like pattern language advocates aren't wrong that it can still be useful to put such things into words, especially for communication purposes, but I know through direct personal experience that words are not a necessary component of even quite complicated thought.

"Subjective experience reports are always tricky, jerf. How do you know that you aren't fooling yourself about not using words?" A good and reasonable question, to which my answer is, I don't even have words for the sort of design I was doing. Some, from the aforementioned pattern languages, yes, but not in general. So I don't think I was just fooling myself on the grounds that even if I tried to serialize what I did directly into English, a transliteration rather than a translation, I don't think I could. I don't have one.

I'm also not claiming to be special. I don't know the percentages but I'm sure many people do this too.