This was a big internet kerfuffle a little while back, kind of like the blue/white dress thing.
From what I gathered from people who don't have an inner-monologue, many of their thoughts are more like impressions or a series of memories mushed together in a way that makes sense to them.
They can describe these things if they put effort in, but their brains don't really interpret the world linguistically first. They have sounds, sights, smells, feelings, emotions, and these get shuffled like a kaleidoscope of meaning.
It's just a radically different way of making sense of the world and having qualia/internal experience. It is BIZARRE to someone like myself that basically has a near constant inner monologue, or I guess even something like a running self-dialogue. I find it tempting to feel chauvinistic towards people who don't have an inner voice, but I honestly can't even begin to imagine how vivid and sensual their world must seem. They may (and through exploring this difference with people I know, do) pity me for how sterile and 'wordy' my world is. My world is filled with libraries of descriptions, while theirs is more like a collage of Google image results if Google could also fetch smells and emotions and memories. I just have my fancy sounding little stories about the world while they FEEL it.
Really gives one a sense of awe and wonder at what kinds of things are beyond our cognitive horizon, or that we're blind to and cannot possibly hope to see. If human beings with all their commonalities can have such radically different cognitive structures, what else might be a possible arrangement of a mind? Would we know it if we saw it? And perhaps more frighteningly, would it even recognize us?
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
This was a big internet kerfuffle a little while back, kind of like the blue/white dress thing.
From what I gathered from people who don't have an inner-monologue, many of their thoughts are more like impressions or a series of memories mushed together in a way that makes sense to them.
They can describe these things if they put effort in, but their brains don't really interpret the world linguistically first. They have sounds, sights, smells, feelings, emotions, and these get shuffled like a kaleidoscope of meaning.
It's just a radically different way of making sense of the world and having qualia/internal experience. It is BIZARRE to someone like myself that basically has a near constant inner monologue, or I guess even something like a running self-dialogue. I find it tempting to feel chauvinistic towards people who don't have an inner voice, but I honestly can't even begin to imagine how vivid and sensual their world must seem. They may (and through exploring this difference with people I know, do) pity me for how sterile and 'wordy' my world is. My world is filled with libraries of descriptions, while theirs is more like a collage of Google image results if Google could also fetch smells and emotions and memories. I just have my fancy sounding little stories about the world while they FEEL it.
Really gives one a sense of awe and wonder at what kinds of things are beyond our cognitive horizon, or that we're blind to and cannot possibly hope to see. If human beings with all their commonalities can have such radically different cognitive structures, what else might be a possible arrangement of a mind? Would we know it if we saw it? And perhaps more frighteningly, would it even recognize us?
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
-HP Lovecraft
That’s so cool tbh. I often wonder about how radically different life can be. Aliens are cool. Also, that’s a banger quote.
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