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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality Quotes June 2013 - Less Wrong
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Your what?
No, I'm not letting it go this time. I've heard people talking about internal monologues before, but I've never been quite sure what those are - I'm pretty sure I don't have one. Could you try to define the term?
Gosh. New item added to my list of "Not everyone does that."
...I have difficulty imagining what it would be to be like someone who isn't the little voice in their own head, though. Seriously, who's posting that comment?
I may be in a somewhat unique position to address this question, as one of the many many many weird transient neurological things that happened to me after my stroke was a period I can best describe as my internal monologue going away.
So I know what it's like to be the voice in my head, and what it's like not to be.
And it's still godawful difficult to describe the difference in words.
One way I can try is this: have you ever experienced the difference between "I know what I'm going to say, and here I am saying it" and "words are coming out of my mouth, and I'm kind of surprised by what I'm hearing myself say"?
If so, I think I can say that losing my "little voice" is similar to that difference.
If not, I suspect the explanation will be just as inaccessible as the phenomenon it purported to explain, but I can try again.
I wasn't to add another data point, but I'm not sure the one I got can even be called that: I have no consistent memory on this subject. I am notoriously horrible at luminosity and introspection. When I do try to ask my brain, I receive a model/metaphor based of what I already know for neuroscience which may or may not contain data I couldn't access otherwise, and which is presented as a machine I can manipulate in the hopes of trying to manipulate the states of distant brains. The machine is clearly based on whatever concepts happen to be primed and the results would probably be completely different in every way if I tried this an hour later. Note that the usage of the word "I" here is inconsistent and ill-defined. This might be related to the fact this brain is self-diagnosed with posible ego-death (in the good way).
Edit: it is also noticed that like seemingly the case with most attempts to introspection, the act of observation strongly and aversely influence the functioning of the relevant circuity, in this case heavily altering my speech-patterns.
Huh. They way you describe attempting introspection is exactly the way our brain behaves when we try to access any personal memories outside of working memory. This doesn't seem to be as effective as whatever the typical way is, as our personal memory's notoriously atrocious compared with others.
I don't seem to have any sort of ego death. Vigil might have something similar, though.
Hmm, this seems related to another datapoint: reportedly, when I'm asked about my current mood and distracts, I answer "I can't remember".
A more tenuously related datapoint is that in fiction, I try to design BMIs around emulating having memorized GLUTs.
And some other thing come to think of it: I do have abnormal memory function in a bunch of various ways.
Basically; maybe a much larger chunk of my cognition passes through memory machinery for some reason?
What are GLUTs? I'm guessing you're not talking about Glucose Transporters.
This seems like a plausible hypothesis. Alternatively, perhaps your working memory is less differentiated from your long-term memory.
Hm. I have the same reaction if I'm asked what I'm thinking about, but I don't think it's because my thoughts are running through my long-term memory, so much as my train of thought usually gets flushed out of working memory when other people are talking.
GLUT=Giant Look-Up Table. Basically, implementing multiplication by memorizing the multiplication tables up to 2 147 483 647.
Hmm, that's an interesting theory. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
And no I'm not talking about trying to remember what happened a few seconds ago. I mean direct sensory experiences; as in someone holds p 3 fingers in the darkness and asks "how many fingers am I holding up right now" and I answer "I can't remember" instead of "I can't see".
Giant Look-Up Table
What are BMIs? I'm guessing you're not talking about body mass indexes.
:-)
Brain machine Interface.
...no, I haven't. I'm always in the state of "I know what I'm going to say, and here I am saying it" (sometimes modified very soon afterwards by "on second thoughts, that was a very poor way to phrase it and I've probably been misunderstood").
...what? Wow!
I'm dying to know whether we're stumbling on a difference in the way we think or the way we describe what we think, here. To me, the first state sounds like rehearsing what I'm going to say in my head before I say it, which I only do when I'm racking my brains on eg how to put something tactfully, where the latter sounds like what I do in conversation all the time, which is simply to let the words fall out of my mouth and find out what I've said.
My experience is that I generally have some kind of fuzzy idea of what I'm going to say before I say it. When I actually speak, sometimes it comes out as a coherent and streamlined sentence whose contents I figure out as a I speak it. At other times - particularly if I'm feeling nervous, or trying to communicate a complicated concept that I haven't expressed in speech before - my fuzzy idea seems to disintegrate at the moment I start talking, and even if I had carefully rehearsed a line many times in my mind, I forget most of it. Out comes either what feels to me like an incoherent jumble, or a lot of "umm, no, wait".
Writing feels a lot easier, possibly because I have the stuff-that-I've-already-written right in front of me and I only need to keep the stuff that I'm about to say in memory, instead of also needing to constantly remind myself about what I've said so far.
ETA: Here's an earlier explanation of how writing sometimes feels like to me.
My internal monologue is a lot faster than the words can get out of my mouth (when I was younger, I tried to speak as fast as I think, with the result that no-one could understand me; of course, to speak that fast, I needed to drop significant parts of most of the words, which didn't help). I don't always plan out every sentence in advance; but thinking about it, I think I do plan out every phrase in advance, relying on the speed of my internal monologue to produce the next phrase before or at worst very shortly after I complete the current phrase. (It often helps to include a brief pause at the end of a phrase in any case). It's very much a just-in-time thing.
If I'm making a special effort to be tactful, then I'll produce and consider a full sentence inside my head before saying it out loud.
Incidentally, I'm also a member of Toastmasters, and one thing that Toastmasters has is impromptu speaking, when a person is asked to give a one-to-two minute speech and is told the topic just before stepping up to give the speech. The topic could be anything (I've had "common sense", "stick", and "nail", among others). Most people seem to be scared of this, apparently seeing it as an opportunity to stand up and be embarrassed; I find that I enjoy it. I often start an impromptu speech with very little idea of how it's going to end; I usually make some sort of pun about the topic (I changed 'common sense' into a very snooty, upper-crust type of person complaining about commoners with money - 'common cents'), and often talk more-or-less total nonsense.
But, through the whole speech, I always know what I am saying. I am not surprised by my own words (no matter how surprised other people may be by the idea of 'common cents'). I don't think I know how to be surprised at what I am saying. (Of course, my words are not always well-considered, in hindsight; and sometimes I will be surprised at someone else's interpretation of my words, and be forced to explain that that's not what I meant)
Something that occurred to me on this topic; reading has a lot to do with the inner monologue. Writing is, in my view, a code of symbols on a piece of paper (or a screen) which tell the reader what their inner monologue should say. Reading, therefore, is the voluntary (and temporary) replacement of the reader's internal monologue with an internal monologue supplied and encoded by the author.
At least, that's what happens when I read. Do other people have the same experience?
Inner monologue test:
I. like. how. when. you. read. this. the. little. voice. in. your. head. takes. pauses..
Does anyone find that the periods don't make the sentence sound different?
Hypothesis: Since I am more used to read sentences without a full stop after each word than sentences like that, of course I will read the former more quickly -- because it takes less effort.
Experiment to test this hypothesis: Ilikehowwhenyoureadthisthelittlevoiceinyourheadspeaksveryquickly.
Result of the experiment: at least for me, my hypothesis is wrong. YMMV.
I can parse it both ways. Actually, on further experimentation, it appears to be tied directly to my eye-scanning speed! If I force my eyes to scan over the line quickly from left-to-right, I read it without pause; if I read the way I normally do (by staring at the 'When' to take a "snapshot" of I, like, how, when, you, and read all at once; then staring at the space between "little" and "voice" to take a snapshot of this, the, little, voice, in, and your all at once, then staring at the "pauses" to take a snapshot of head, takes, and pauses), then the pauses get inserted - but not as normal sentence stops; more like... a clipped robot.
Assuming you're literally talking about subvocalization, it depends on what I'm reading (I do it more with poetry than with academic papers), on how quickly I'm reading (I don't do that as much when skimming), on whether I know what the author's voice sounds like (in which case I subvocalize in their voice -- which slows me down a great deal if I'm reading stuff by someone who speaks slowly and with a strong foreign accent e.g. Benedict XVI), and possibly on something else I'm overlooking at the moment.
I do not notice that I am subvocalising when I read, even when I am looking for it (I tested this on the wiki page that you linked to). I do notice, however, that it mentions that subvocalising is often not detectable by the person doing the subvocalising.
More specifically, if I place my hand lightly on my throat while reading, I feel no movement of the muscles; and I am able to continue reading while swallowing.
So, no, I don't think I'm talking about subvocalising. I'm talking about an imaginary voice in my head that narrates my thought processes.
Hmmm... my inner monologue does not tend to speak in the voice of someone whose voice I know. I can get it to speak in other peoples' voices, or in what I imagine other people's voices to sound like, if I try to, but it defaults to a sort of neutral gear which, now that I think about it, sounds like a voice but not quite like my (external) voice. Similar, but not the same. (And, of course, the way that I hear my voice when I speak differs from how I hear it when recorded on tape - my inner monologue sounds more like the way I hear my voice, but still somewhat different)
...this is strange. I don't know who my inner monologue sounds like, if anyone.
Mine usually sounds more or less like I'm whispering.
I'm the same - except occasionally, when I'm 'flowing' in conversation, I'll find that my inner monologue fails to produce what I think it can, and my mouth just halts without input from it
I find that happens to me sometimes when I talk in Afrikaans; my Afrikaans vocabulary is poor enough that I often get halfway through a sentance and find that I can't remember the word for what I want to say.
It occasionally happens to me in any language. I usually manage to rephrase the sentence on the flight or to replace the word with something generic like “thing” and let the listener figure it out from the context, without much trouble.
The parts of your brain that generate speech and the part that generate your internal sense-of-self are less integrated than CCC's. An interesting experiment might be to stop ascribing ownership to your words when you find yourself surprised by them - i.e., instead of framing the phenomenon as "I said that", frame it as "my brain generated those words".
Learn to recognize that the parts of your brain that handle text generation and output are no more "you" than the parts of your brain that handle motor reflex control.
EDIT: Is there a problem with this post?
No! The parts of my brain that handle text generation are the only parts that... *slap*... Ow. Nevermind. It seems we have reached an 'understanding'.
Right!
I mean, I do realize you're being funny, but pretty much exactly this.
I don't recommend aphasia as a way of shock-treating this presumption, but I will admit it's effective. At some point I had the epiphany that my language-generating systems were offline but I was still there; I was still thinking the way I always did, I just wasn't using language to do it.
Which sounds almost reasonable expressed that way, but it was just about as creepy as the experience of moving my arm around normally while the flesh and bone of my arm lay immobile on the bed.
A good way I've found to reach this state is to start to describe a concept in your internal monologue but "cancel" the monologue right at the start - the concept will probably have been already synthesized and will just be hanging around in your mind, undescribed and unspoken but still recognizable.
[edit] Afaict the key step is noticing that you've started a monologue, and sort of interrupting yourself mentally.
So, FWIW, after about 20 minutes spent trying to do this I wasn't in a recognizably different state than I was when I started. I can kind of see what you're getting at, though.
That's... hm.
I'm not sure I know what you mean.
I'll experiment with behaving as if I did when I'm not in an airport waiting lounge and see what happens.
I've had this happen to me semi-accidentally, the resulting state is extremely unpleasant.
A smash equilibrium.
I'd certainly call them much more significant to my identity than a e.g. my deltoid muscle, or some motor function parts of my brain.
It may be useful to recognize that this is a choice, rather than an innate principle of identity. The parts that speak are just modules, just like the parts that handle motor control. They can (and often do) run autonomously, and then the module that handles generating a coherent narrative stitches together an explanation of why you "decided" to cause whatever they happened to generate.
This sounds like a theory of identity as epiphenomenal homunculus. A module whose job is to sit there weaving a narrative, but which has no effect on anything outside itself (except to make the speech module utter its narrative from time to time). "Mr Volition", as Greg Egan calls it in one of his stories. Is that your view?
More or less, yes. It does have some effect on things outside itself, of course, in that its 'narrative' tends to influence our emotional investment in situations, which in turn influences our reactions.
It's a bit rude to try to change others' definition of themselves unasked.
Where does that intersect with "that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be"?
"I'm dying to know whether we're stumbling on a difference in the way we think or the way we describe what we think, here." wasn't asking?
I appear to be confused.
Are you implying that subjective self-image is something that we should respect rather than analyze?
(nods) Yeah, OK. Take 2.
It's also broadly similar to the difference between explicit and implicit knowledge. Have you ever practiced a skill enough that it goes from being something where you hold the "outline" of the skill in explicit memory as you perform it, to being something where you simply perform it without that "outline"? For example, driving to an unfamiliar location and thinking "ok, turn right here, turn left here" vs. just turning in the correct direction at each intersection, or something similar to that?
Yes, I have. Driving is such a skill; when I was first learning to drive, I had to think about driving ("...need to change gear, which was the clutch again? Ordered CBA, so on the left..."). Now that I am more practiced, I can just think about changing gear and change gear, without having to examine my actions in so much detail. Which allows my internal monologue to wonder into other directions.
On a couple of occasions, as a result of this thread, I've tried just quietening down my internal monologue - just saying nothing for a bit - and observing my own thought processes. I find that the result is that I pay a lot more attention to audio cues - if I hear a bird in the distance, I picture a bird. There's associations going on inside my head that I'd never paid much attention to before.
Is this still true under significant influence of alcohol?
I wouldn't know, I don't drink alcohol.
Well, if you ever did want to experience what TheOtherDave describes, that might be a good way to induce it.
I've found I can quiet my internal monologue if I try. (It's tricky, though; the monologue starts up again at the slightest provocation - I try to observe my own though processes without the monologue, and as soon as something odd happens, the internal monologue says "That's odd... ooops.")
I'm not sure if I can talk without the monologue automatically starting up again, but I'll try that first.
BTW, my internal monologue usually sounds quite different from what I actually say in most casual situations: for example, it uses less dialectal/non-standard language and more technical terms. (IOW, it resembles the way I write more than the way I speak. So, "I know what I'm going to say, and here I am saying it" is my default state when writing, and "words are coming out of my mouth, and I'm kind of surprised by what I'm hearing myself say" is the state I'm most often in when speaking.) Anyone else finds the same?
That's pretty close to how I operate, except the words are more like the skeletons of the thoughts than the thoughts themselves, stripped of all the internal connotation and imagery that provided 99% of the internal meaning.
Well, which one do you prefer?
Oh, that's hard. The latter was awful, but of course most of that was due to all the other crap that was going on at the time. If I take my best shot at adjusting for that... well, I am most comfortable being the voice in my head. But not-being the voice in my head has an uncomfortable gloriousness associated with it. I doubt the latter is sustainable, though.
When you're playing a sport... wait, maybe you don't... okay, when you're playing an instrum—hm. Surely there is a kinesthetic skill you occasionally perform, during which your locus of identity is not in your articulatory loop? (If not, fixing that might be high value?) And you can imagine being in states similar to that much of the time? I would imagine intense computer programming sessions would be more kinesthetic than verbal. Comment linked to hints at what my default thinking process is like.
When I'm playing music or martial arts, and I'm doing it well, I'm usually in a state of flow--not exactly self-aware in the way I usually think of it.
When I'm working inside a computer or motorcycle, I think I'm less self-aware, and what I'm aware of is my manipulating actuators, and the objects than I need to manipulate, and what I need to do to them.
When I'm sitting in my armchair, thinking "who am I?" this is almost entirely symbolic, and I feel more self-aware than at the other times.
So, I think having my locus of identity in my articulatory loop is correlated with having a strong sense of identity.
I'm not sure whether my sense of identity would be weaker there, and stronger in a state of kinesthetic flow, if I spent more time sparring than sitting.
I wouldn't want to identify with the voice in my head. It can only think one thought at a time; it's slow.
How many things can you think of at once? I'm curious now.
I'm not sure how to answer that question. But when I think verbally I often lose track of the bigger picture of what I'm doing and get bogged down on details or tangents.
I play other people's voices through my head as I imagine what they would say (or are saying, when I interpret text,) but I don't have my own voice in my head as an internal monologue, and I think of "myself" as the conductor, which directs all the voices.
What happens when you are not thinking about what anyone else is saying or would say?
I think in terms of ideas and impulses, not voices. I can describe an impulse as if it had been expressed in words, but when it's going through my head, it's not.
I'd be kind of surprised if people who have internal monologues need an inner voice telling them "I'm so angry, I feel like throwing something!" in order to recognize that they feel angry and have an urge to throw something. I just recognize urges directly, including ones which are more subtle and don't need to be expressed externally, without needing to mediate them through language.
It definitely hasn't been my experience that not thinking in terms of a distinct inner "voice" makes it hard for me to pin down my thoughts; I have a much easier time following my own thought processes than most people I know.
In our case at least, you are correct that we don't need to vocalize impulses. Emotions and urges seem to run on a different, concurrent modality.
Do ideas and impulses both use the same modality for you?
Maybe not quite the same, but the difference feels smaller than that between impulse and language.
To me, words are what I need to communicate with other people, not something I need to represent complex ideas within my own head.
I can represent a voice in my head if I choose to, but I don't find much use for it.
Not quite the same thing, but I've discovered that "I feel ragged around the edges" is my internal code for "I need B12".
One part of therapy for some people is giving them a vocabulary for their emotions.
I can recognise that I'm angry without the voice. When I'm angry, the inner voice will often be saying unflattering things about the object of my anger; something along the lines of "Aaaaaargh, this is so frustrating! I wish it would just work like it's supposed to!" Wordless internal angry growls may also happen.
It's something like watching a movie. You can see hands typing and words appearing on the screen, but you aren't precisely thinking them. You can feel lips moving and hear words forming in the air, but you aren't precisely thinking them. They're just things your body is doing, like walking. When you walk, you don't consciously think of each muscle to move, do you? most of the time you don't even think about putting one foot in front of the other; you just think about where you're going (if that) and your motor control does the rest.
For some people, verbal articulation works the same way. Words get formed, maybe even in response to other peoples' words, but it's not something you're consciously acting on; those processes are running on their own without conscious input.
I find this very strange.
When I walk, yes, I don't consciously think of every muscle; but I do decide to walk. I decide my destination, I decide my route. (I may, if distracted, fall by force of habit into a default route; on noticing this, I can immediately override).
So... for someone without the internal monologue... how much do you decide about what you say? Do you just decide what subject to speak about, what opinions to express, and leave the exact phrasing up to the autopilot? Or do you not even decide that - do you sit there and enjoy the taste of icecream while letting the conversation run entirely by itself?
Didn't think this was going to be my first contribution to LessWrong, but here goes (hi, everybody, I'm Phil!)
I came to what I like to think was a realisation useful to my psychological health a few months ago when I was invited to realise that there is more to me than my inner monologue. That is, I came to understand that identifying myself as only the little voice in my head was not good for me in any sense. For one thing, my body is not part of my inner monologue, ergo I was a fat guy, because I didn't identify with it and therefore didn't care what I fed it on. For another, one of the things I explicitly excluded from my identity was the subprocess that talks to people. I had (and still have) an internal monologue, but it was at best only advisory to the talking process, so you can count me as one of the people for whom conversation is not something I'm consciously acting on. Result: I didn't consider the person people meet and talk to to be "me", but (as I came to understand), nevertheless I am held responsible for everything he says and does.
My approach to this was somewhat luminous avant (ma lecture de) la lettre: I now construe my identity as consisting of at least two sub-personalities. There is one for my inner monologue, and one for the version of me that people get to meet and talk to. I call them Al and Greg, respectively, so that by giving them names I hopefully remember that neither alone is Phil. So, to answer CCC's question: Al is Greg's lawyer, and Greg is Al's PR man. When I'm alone, I'm mostly Al, cogitating and opining and whatnot to the wall, with the occasional burst of non-verbal input from Greg that amounts to "That's not going to play in (Peoria|the office|LessWrong comment threads)". On the other hand, when other people are around, I'm mostly Greg, conversating in ways that Al would never have thought of, and getting closer and closer to an impersonation of Robin Williams depending on prettiness and proximity of the ladies in the room. Al could in theory sit back and let Greg do his thing, but he's usually too busy facepalming or yelling "SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP" in a way that I can't hear until I get alone again.
The problem I used to have was that I was all on Al's side. I'd berate myself (that is, I'd identify with Al berating Greg) incessantly for paranoid interpretations of the way people reacted to what I said, without ever noticing that, y'know what, people do generally seem to like Greg, and Greg is also me.
Single data point but: I can alternate between inner monologue (heard [in somebody else's voice not mine(!)]) and no monologue (mainly social activity - say stuff then catch myself saying it and keep going) - stuff just happens. When inner monologue is present it seems I'm in real time constructing what I imagine the future to be and then adapt to that. I can feel as if my body moved without moving it, but don't use it for thinking (mainly kinesthethic imagination or whatever). I can force myself to see images, and, at the fringe, close to sleep, can make up symphonies in my mind, but don't use them to think.
A collective of neural hardware collectively calling itself "Baughn". Everyone gets some input.
Who's speaking the voice in your head? Seems like another layer of abstraction.
Obviously the speaker is the homunculus that makes Eliezer conscious rather than a p-zombie.