Linguistics thought
Feb. 18th, 2018 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kengrI encountered some interesting topics in junior high or perhaps earlier. Mostly due to my reading science fiction.
A couple of the fun ones were "how do we know that (for example) what you see as green is the same as what I see as green. That is, how do we know the the 'sensations' inside our heads are the same?"
These days with things like functional MRIs, we may actually be able to answer that sort of question.
Another fascinating one was "Do we actually think in English or do we think in something else and translate to & from English as we hear things and say things?"
Well, I'm convinced of the latter. Even in junior high I'd had a number of moments where I'd have a quite clear, simple concept in my head, only to discover that it took a fair bit of expostion to get it into English.
Much of my internal language (actually I think of it as more of a symbol set. Think of the difference between words and ideograms) may have a one-to-one correspondence with English words. But some of it definitely doesn't.
A couple of the fun ones were "how do we know that (for example) what you see as green is the same as what I see as green. That is, how do we know the the 'sensations' inside our heads are the same?"
These days with things like functional MRIs, we may actually be able to answer that sort of question.
Another fascinating one was "Do we actually think in English or do we think in something else and translate to & from English as we hear things and say things?"
Well, I'm convinced of the latter. Even in junior high I'd had a number of moments where I'd have a quite clear, simple concept in my head, only to discover that it took a fair bit of expostion to get it into English.
Much of my internal language (actually I think of it as more of a symbol set. Think of the difference between words and ideograms) may have a one-to-one correspondence with English words. But some of it definitely doesn't.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-19 11:44 am (UTC)My wife is a terachromtat, she has an extra form of retinol, or photosensitive pigment in her eyes... she sees more colours and shades of colour.
Means what I see as pink or purple... she sees as something else for which there's no name, and about half a million more shades of green that is commonly accepted.
Makes picking out colours for decorating difficult to say the lest.
As for the second.. it depends upon what mode of thinking you mean... there's internal narration, where you think like you speak, as if silently narrating your thoughts.. and there's silent mode... where you don't..and thoughts flow like chain-lightening, a tumble of notions and images. The sort of thing you do n an emergency because it's so much faster, but less accurate.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-19 01:59 pm (UTC)One of the main principles of the martial arts is the "mushin no shin" or "mind of no mind." The idea is to put your conscious mind on hold in a fight and let your unconscious mind guide you through the needed movements. It's a meditative state during physical activity. Similar ideas are used in many sports.
I like to think of it as running your brain on machine code. :-) If that's the case, English (or French or whatever) is a high-level computer language. Easier to program in but slower.