I don’t get this all the time or get into it because most people don’t understand or dismiss it. I just hope I can explain well enough.

When I write it’s almost always flow of consciousness style and I make a lot of mistakes. In online or chat kind of settings it makes me look a little dumber than I am, I mix words up on the spot a lot, it’s probably the closest thing to whatever would be my “internal” narrative, also because I am limited by the speed at which I can type. So when to type a paragraph if I am being serious it usually takes 70+ revisions (not changing what I am saying) for me to consider it perfect. I don’t usually bother and go 1/10th of that for professional writing and tend to be called a decent writer (again, I have to try).

So that’s probably the lack of narrative thing. writing my thoughts out helps. I have always kept extensive journals going back to when I was 5 or 6 or whenever I could write.

for your second scenario yea that’s a very easy thing for me. I often argue with myself anyway. I mutter out loud sometimes, probably makes me seem a little unhinged but with what I do it fits right in with other “types.”

I do visualize and play out scenarios a lot in my head, they are very vivid, and I am pretty proficient at going farther with this with lucid dreaming. Sights/sounds in my head are very easy for me. I just don’t really hear my own voice, or whatever.

I think it comes with some downsides with introspection sometimes but I’ve been well aware of this for a while - which is why I think the “argue with yourself with two conflicting arguments” thing is probably easy for me. I am constantly in “arguments” with my own assumptions. I think this last thing is why I’ve always been fairly proficient with abstract math.

This is quite a swampy bit of territory you're joining me in here so please excuse the mess.

I'm going to attempt a good faith interpretation here so we're clear. I want to understand your position, because I think it's, if nothing else, very interesting to contemplate these matters.

First of all, I have to clear the obvious debris out of the way.

I can read and I can cogitate lingual constructs. That includes creating monologues. Sometimes I "role-play" some professor or something and talk through my problem out loud - when alone. I tend to do this with philosophical problems, but it's unnatural and quite entertaining. The last time I did this must have been a few months ago when pondering Hume's problem of "necessary connection" or Kant's .. everything. I think this is the closest I get to "inner monologue" and it does have its uses, because language in and of itself has a computational character of sorts. By speaking the words out loud I sometimes trigger snippets of verbal knowledge that wouldn't be triggered otherwise.

If this qualifies me as "having inner monologue" already then we're done. By that definition I am in your club and I'm fine with that.

What would still remain however is that those role-playing sessions are deliberate and unnecessary. I can quite easily go without them. It's a trick I've picked up, but it's by no means the only way to make progress. Their nature is comparable to rubber duck debugging: by explaining your problem you work through it differently somehow than if you'd remain "stuck in your head". I can go without rubber ducking, but it's still a useful trick.

Another way of approaching this problem is through programming - assuming you code. You don't literally think "Ah, I see a linked list here and it gets initialized here.. [etc]"? Or maybe you do? I can tell you quite firmly that I don't. If you also don't then just assume I go through my life in the same abstract wordless mode.

> I don't buy that there is "another inner language of thoughts", of the same or greater complexity than our known language, which has not been discovered or described at all.

I find this quite interesting, because I don't understand it. Our language is made of rules and in and of itself has no content. It's literally made out of just rules. Any intelligence has to be brought into it. This was quite clear with GPT-2 era transformers spewing sentences like: "The bear and the snake are wearing stairs". You have to know quite a lot before you can explain why this is nonsense despite it being a valid sentence and it's not clear to me at all that this knowledge itself is purely lingual.

This "inner language" you speak of is just raw cogitation and surely you employ it just as much as me but we assign different words to things. This "inner language" is not to be put "besides" our natural languages, it's the core of it. Without it, there would be no "natural language". I view natural language as a communication convenience, built on top of and not besides raw wordless thought.

I'm not 100% sure how to handle your analogy because, as you've indicated, it's quite tricky, but I'll try something. Sorry for the mess again:

I agree that higher level abstractions enable cognitive moves that just won't be obvious from raw assembly.

Where we disagree, I think, is that these "higher level concepts" are somehow spontaneously lingual by nature. In my view of things these higher level concepts are still raw thought, but .. higher. More complex. Encoding these new more complex cogitations necessitates more complicated lingual structures.

Let's put it this way: do you first cogitate the "class concept" or does the "class syntax" enable the "class"-cogitation? Perhaps for a programmer it's the second, but for the one inventing the abstraction surely the cogitation must come first and, lacking existing lingual constructs, must be cogitated in a purer form.

My problem would thus be: how could you possibly cogitate something that doesn't yet exist in language if all you have is language? "class" does not "fall out of" assembly naturally - inside of it. You need to bring cogitation from outside and then realize it and be able to think of an encoding for that new concept to communicate the idea.

> In this scenario, would the phrase "My favorite flowers are roses" have materialized in your mind?

That depends on the situation. I thought I'd mentioned it in this thread, but apparently I'd mentioned it on the post about aphasia a few days ago. I don't think in words anymore except when I'm either conversing with or thinking about conversing with someone else.

If I was just thinking to myself about my favorite things, that phrase would never pop into my head at all. It wouldn't even occur to me to even try putting it into words in that situation.

> Or if this scenario would be: you have been asked "What are your favorite flowers?", and you would just speak out those words to the other person without rehearsing in your head, would you be capable of recreating that scenario at another time, including the person asking you and you answering, in your head?

Yes, I'm autistic (AuDHD), so I often replay social interactions in my head over and over and try to think of better responses than I was able to come up with on the spur of the moment, and this, necessarily, involves thinking in words.

So, while my natural mode of thinking post-stroke is now word-free, I am still capable of thinking in words and do so when I'm thinking about something I may need to communicate to someone else soon.

Immediately post-stroke, of course, I was incapable of thinking in words at all, but I rebuilt that capability over time. It definitely does not feel natural to me, still, to the point I sometimes stutter or pause for awkward seconds to find the right words if I'm suddenly asked to talk about a new topic I haven't rehearsed. I do have a safe subset of English that I try to stay within to avoid any potential stumbling.

I still think in my non-word way the vast, vast majority of the time, then translate to words, unless I'm saying something that's become an automatic response. If someone says to me, "How are you?" I immediately respond, "I'm doing well, thanks. How are you today?" all in words. But if I'm posed a novel question like yours, one that I've never considered before, I have to carefully find a way to translate my thoughts to words before I can answer.

You convert the language statement into semantic space. That's where you do the theorizing and then you convert it back. I can't think in text space. It's way too slow and I very much suck at it.

It's hard to see how this works with such a complex question though. By its nature it's actually impossible to put into words. It's my theory that we all think like this, because it's literally impossible to think "in language", but some people need to have it as some type of security blanket and some don't.

Every time someone says they have some inner monologue I can ask where this comes from. Your inner monologue also needs a source and that can't be language again. You cannot source all thought you have about this question just from those words alone. Your mind is making all types of connections that might eventually be convertable into words, but are themselves absolutely not verbal.

I have no inner monologue unless I switch it on consciously, which I don’t like doing as it slows down thinking by orders of magnitude. In your example, I see things like graphs, numbers, maps, make connections and see possible futures, no explicit words involved.

Edit: I also tend to “simulate” what is going to happen by conjuring up a small video of people dealing with the situation, or myself in that situation.

> curious, did you start reading at a very early age? I started around 3

I did! I also learnt to read at 3. Your observation was really impressive.

I've never thought about it being the cause of my weird quirks, I thought it was actually another consequence/symptom of being wired a bit different, but maybe you are right. Have you ever met anyone else who learnt to read early? Do they also behave like that?

I don't know if I'm in the spectrum (I suspect I do, but I don't want to know). In any case, if I do, then I'm also a functioning one.

> if you’re literally sounding out every word in your head you’d never be able to keep up with whatever it is I do

Another possibility is that they overestimate how much they use their inner monologue without realizing. For example, I really doubt they think "time to move the left leg, now the right leg, now the left..." whenever they walk. Maybe they just don't enter into that "mode" as often as us

My point is that "I hate that guy, but I must greet him friendly, or else I will be in trouble" is already being concluded by the brain at the semantic space way before running the language encoder and playing the inner voice. That voice already knows what is going to say before saying it.

The brain can extract those conclusions in mere milliseconds and act in consequence, and that doesn't mean being guided by feelings.

I'd argue that skipping the language lets you think in more complex scenarios where visualizing something is required, like when playing a sport, painting, or composing a melody.

Removing the noise of language also allows you to think in parallel and solve problems faster. In my case I'd say I can run a couple of "threads" only, but I wouldn't be surprised if top chess players could run a dozen.