1 point

I never had a goal of learning to think without verbal structure. I would just be thinking very hard and in long marathon sessions. Then I would find the smallest nuances and distinctinos matter, a lot like collding particles with gigatons of energy to find out that a mass with vanishing quantity seems to be missing.

I would find that I made some interference when pressed and I couldn't attribute it to any formal process. Search for the motivation for the alien thoguhts usual found a formal process that would be sympathetic to the end result. If it happened quickly enough I wouldhave just thought that I must have had thought taht thought wityh words as i can treat it afterwards as being equivalent to a verbal argument. However when this happened often enough I noticed that there was a delay or rather a small time that I didn't have any verbal representation but my thinking didn't seem to break down: I would still be confident that such an explanation would come forth but I could not be honest in beliefing that the representation would come/be first and the functionality second. It was as if the program was executing first and then later the source code would be written. In theory there is no snowball chance in hell for it to work like that but having empirical firsthand evidence that my brain didn't melt down or divide by zero, I knew I would need to hear the story the evidence was telling instead of the explanation I was used to give.

This behaviour was most apparent where multiple trains of thought could be given a sympathetic backing. If you do a math homework, the middle steps don't matter (or atleast should not). You can just omit the middle and pretnd they don't exist (the issue on which level of omission is appropriate). But when there are multiple valid options such as what TV channel to watch next what middle steps are triggered will "matter", a view where they get omitted would be probabilitistic. Having such a juncture point and treating your "middle steps" as a black box as correlating the outcome to external facttors can give clues what goes on in the black box. "I pick a channel" isn't one elementary action but "I pick a channel in the morning" and "I pick a channel when tired" will come two distinct but more well defined operations. And hold you have deduced that the alertness level seems to be a relevant factor in this process.

WhenI gathered this kind of correlation data on when a certain process when one way instead of another it became more essential to predicting on what kind sof thoughts were in my head. When I would be angry I would disagree. The content of the arguement I was disagreeing with didn't seem to be a relevant component like the tiredness in the channel switching. You could call this "bias" and try to fighht it but I was more interestyed in learnign what I do than trying to force it in to some "correct" flow. So I didn't distrub the object of study from its natural habitat too much.

Later on when I was familiar with these "contextdriven malfunction junctions" I started noticing correlations where the behaviour served me. When I was listening to a reputable speaker sometimes a tingling would appear. I later came to know it with the name "doubt". I didn't have whatever internal courage to come to mismatcing conclusions with a respected speaker. But at some level i was aware of this. And querying my brain on "what I belief about this issue" did not prompt my own reasoning to give it's input but only say waht the respectable speaker would say.

It was important that I first had the feeling that I didn't understand or could not label and then only identified it's conditions of generation and the role it served in my emotional eco(or ego?)system. Then it became clear on what it is to halfunderstand something. I could understanf that without reservation I would confidently belief X. But I could recognise that I was not confidently beliefing X. The tingle wasn't anything too explicit (you could guess that it was about the context grouping of the triggers) but I could identify if the "same kind" of tingle would appear and tell it appart from other "tingles" even if I was completely at a complete loss on assigning any attributes to the tingles.

I woudl then find that I didn't have a "spide sense" but taht my "honesty sense" could tingle or my "brutality sense" could tingle. Then it became clear taht there is room for great improvement. Lots of the tingles wiring to each other were very naive and as if set there by a mad man. And crucailly once I was familiar enough wit them to give names suggestive of tehir fucntion in my mind I could and would rearrange their realtionships without it being effortfull. It wasn't a issue of one side having one agenda and the other having other conflicting agenda. If I was tired I didn't want to watch a lenghty documentary. So no part of me fought for that. "the struggle for remote" was gone. Every tingle in me got it's needs served systematically instead of them fighting over scarce random resources in a free-for-all. The implication was that there were "emotional ecosystem f-ups" that had no other reason for their existence than not being spotted by anything. I had micromadness. But then I had stumbled with unheard technology. One could become less insane, more sane, more wise. And while I would want to state it here I won't bother arguing about it, but feel it will serve to be mentioned in the same go. Wisdom and intelligence/knowledge are different things. You can be poor in one and rich in other. Wisdom has a use. You can be deficient in wisdom. They have the property that they support each others growth which for many purposes makes it not that important to differentiate between them. If you explicitly try to convert you are usually wildly successful.

And that was where I was lucky. Me being interested in the technical validity of my thought lead me to gather information that was relevant to my psyches functional upkeep. I would not have put much faith in mushy fuzzy shades to get information processed at face value. But I learnt in my discovery process why they must have these properties (and indeed that they still are a down side that they are fuzzy). If offered without explanation I would have rejected it as humanistic mumbo jumbo. I was a "hostile investigator". It was like immersing yourslef in the letter of the law so much that eventually you get the spirit of it. What I have learned has not lessened the worries I feel about "humanistic" thought. But I have found that both technical "hard" people and "soft" are both right in their areas of expertise. What is the pity is that they try to impose their views where they have no good ground or reason to comment ie their equivalent of micromadness. They love to point out the deficiencies of the other, but always omit to try to provide a solution that would satisfy the full set of criteria for both branches. This kind of "dual wielding" is hard, I am not the least surprised that the "synthesis field" has not yet emerged.

note: I would like to note that "choosing to see it as bias" is a form of self-vionlence and an error in the "soft branch". Yes I know this can be generalised to an argument why the whole "bias moment" is destructive. In the same vein "winnnig a battle overyourself" where you spend effort to get yourself changed is only a very shallow solution, like making a stronger steel kettle rather than tuning down the temperature. What I have described uses increase in understanding as the pain by which we get gains. It is comparatively binary, you can't do it halfway. If you don't do it competely you will get a strange outcome taht has boundary conditions where it fails and this feels different than "falling short". Like being able to write an essay on it but not being able to apply it or vise versa.

to answer the question I stumbled upon a lead where thought without verbal structure was neccesary for the analysis

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Talking to yourself: A useful thinking tool that seems understudied and underdiscussed

33 points

Talking to yourself: A useful thinking tool that seems understudied and underdiscussed

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