It looks like having internal monologue is a spectrum, perhaps related to spectra of aphantasia
IDK about people who claim this. I’d want to look at what kinds of tasks / what kinds of thinking they are doing. For example, it makes sense to me for someone to “think with their body”, e.g. figuring out how to climb up some object by sort of letting the motor coping skill play itself out. It’s harder to imagine, say, doing physics without doing something that’s very bound up with words. For reference, solving a geometric problem by visualizing things would probably still qualify, because the visualization and the candidate-solution-generator are probably structure by concepts that you only had because you had words.
optimized for covering a sufficiently diverse range of parameters of the aminoacid-space.
Interesting. Didn’t know about that. That reminds me of phonemes.
Additional persons
Oh cool. Yeah, lojban might.
(Partially) parametrized concepts?
Neh. I mean to ask for a word for [a word that one person has used in two different ways—not because they are using the word totally inconsistently, using it in two different ways in the same context, but because they are using the word differently in different contexts—but in some sense they “ought” to either use the word in “the same way” in both contexts, or else use two different words; they are confusing themselves, acting as though they think that they are using the word in the same way across different contexts]. (This requires some analogy / relation between the two contexts, or else there’s no way to say when someone uses a word “the same way”.)
Overall, I’m slightly surprised by no mention of dath ilan, as they seem to have invested quite a lot of labor-hours into optimizing language, including in some of the directions you sketch out in this post.
All I’ve read about dath ilan is the thing about moving houses around on wires. Where is it described what they do with language?
I’d want to look at what kinds of tasks / what kinds of thinking they are doing.
I don’t have specific examples in the literature of people without internal monologue but here’s a case of a person that apparently can do music without doing something very bound up with auditory imagination.
A case study of subject WD (male, 55) with sensory agnosia (auditory and visual) is reported. He describes his experiences with playing music to be similar to the experiences of people suffering from blindsight, maneuvering blindly in the auditory space, without the ability to imagine results of next move (hitting piano key). Yet after a long period of learning WD is able to improvise, surprising himself with correct cadencies, with no conscious influence on what he is playing. For him the only way to know what goes on in his brain is to act it out.
Anecdotal case: I worked with a person who claimed to have absolutely no inner monologue and “thinking in one’s head” seemed very weird to her. She’s one of the most elaborate arguers I know. A large part of her job at the time was argument mapping.
All I’ve read about dath ilan is the thing about moving houses around on wires. Where is it described what they do with language?
Mostly smeared across ProjectLawful (at least that’s where I read about all of it). Usually, it’s brought up when Keltham (the protagonist from dath ilan) gets irritated that Taldane (the language of the D&D world he was magically transported into) doesn’t have a short word (or doesn’t have a word at all) for an important concept that obviously should have a short word. Some excerpts (not necessarily very representative ones, just what I was able to find with quick search):
Occasionally Keltham thinks single-syllable or two-syllable words in Baseline that refer to mathematical concepts built on top of much larger bases, fluidly integrated into his everyday experience. link
The Baseline phrase for this trope is a polysyllabic monstrosity that would literally translate as Intrinsic-Characteristic Boundary-Edge. A translation that literal would be misleading; the second word-pair of Boundary-Edge is glued together in the particular way that indicates a tuple of words has taken on a meaning that isn’t a direct sum of the original components. A slight lilt or click of spoken Baseline; a common punctuation-marker in written Baseline. link
“We’ve pretty much got a proverb in nearly those exact words, yeah.” He utters it in Baseline: an eight-syllable couplet, which rhymes and scans because Baseline was designed in part to make that proverb be a rhyming couplet. link
IDK about people who claim this. I’d want to look at what kinds of tasks / what kinds of thinking they are doing. For example, it makes sense to me for someone to “think with their body”, e.g. figuring out how to climb up some object by sort of letting the motor coping skill play itself out. It’s harder to imagine, say, doing physics without doing something that’s very bound up with words. For reference, solving a geometric problem by visualizing things would probably still qualify, because the visualization and the candidate-solution-generator are probably structure by concepts that you only had because you had words.
Interesting. Didn’t know about that. That reminds me of phonemes.
Oh cool. Yeah, lojban might.
Neh. I mean to ask for a word for [a word that one person has used in two different ways—not because they are using the word totally inconsistently, using it in two different ways in the same context, but because they are using the word differently in different contexts—but in some sense they “ought” to either use the word in “the same way” in both contexts, or else use two different words; they are confusing themselves, acting as though they think that they are using the word in the same way across different contexts]. (This requires some analogy / relation between the two contexts, or else there’s no way to say when someone uses a word “the same way”.)
All I’ve read about dath ilan is the thing about moving houses around on wires. Where is it described what they do with language?
I don’t have specific examples in the literature of people without internal monologue but here’s a case of a person that apparently can do music without doing something very bound up with auditory imagination.
Anecdotal case: I worked with a person who claimed to have absolutely no inner monologue and “thinking in one’s head” seemed very weird to her. She’s one of the most elaborate arguers I know. A large part of her job at the time was argument mapping.
Mostly smeared across ProjectLawful (at least that’s where I read about all of it). Usually, it’s brought up when Keltham (the protagonist from dath ilan) gets irritated that Taldane (the language of the D&D world he was magically transported into) doesn’t have a short word (or doesn’t have a word at all) for an important concept that obviously should have a short word. Some excerpts (not necessarily very representative ones, just what I was able to find with quick search):