The inner self and the language of thought

See via lots of people. Another case of anti-clickbait, where the headline suggests something dull and plodding but it actually turns out to be really interesting.

The fact that thoughts often emerge in complete sentences is something I've wondered about for a long time. But they don't always do this, there's a definite phase - especially with complex problems - when things make sense but they're hard to articulate linguistically. Language is just a description of reality, not reality itself (I remain highly uncertain as to if and how, and how much, this applies to mathematics). Therefore the power of language is, I think, only partly in enabling different ideas in the first place. That is, linguistic descriptions may somewhat indirectly evoke different mental processes at a much deeper, non-linguistic level, as can direct observation and thinking. Our mental selves are multidimensional constructs of which our inner voices and consciousness are just one aspect, albeit a very important one. Thoughts flow between each other and throughout the external world; they shape and are shaped by our actions. In magnitude if not in influence, our conscious mental self is like the crest of a wave atop a deep ocean.

Language is much more important not in generating and enabling new concepts, but in transmitting and recording complex ideas. Once the key mental breakthrough has been made, it can be recorded and shared and so becomes exceptionally hard to kill. In contrast, ideas which never emerge from that formless mental void, that are never captured in the crystalline structure of language, are much more vulnerable to destruction by stray photons and random pictures of cuddly kitties.

Or maybe it's all nonsense. Anyway, here are some quotes :

A leader of that era was the American psychologist Laura Berk, professor emeritus at Illinois State University, an expert on childhood play. Berk observed children engage in imaginative, ‘make-believe’ play, and demonstrated that the substitution of objects – say a cup for a hat – requires internal thought (and self-talk) rather than impulse. Her studies show that during imaginative play, children’s self-talk helps them guide their own thoughts and behaviour and exert true self-control. She and many other child psychologists demonstrated the importance of the inner voice, beyond a doubt, elevating Vygotsky and burying Piaget for good.

Descriptive Experience Sampling requires careful skill to capture these kinds of experiences accurately – what Hurlburt terms, ‘high-fidelity, pristine’ inner speech as it naturally occurs. Freed from the mundane confines of a laboratory, the data come from ‘the wild’, as Hurlburt puts it. A participant wears the beeper, which can go off at any moment throughout the day. They go about their daily activities and are likely to forget its presence. When the beeper does go off, the participant makes a careful note of exactly what their inner experience was immediately beforehand. Subsequently, they are questioned by Hurlburt about that experience in a thorough but open-ended interview.

He takes care not to bias the participant in any way. ‘There are a lot of people who believe that you talk to yourself all of the time, so that’s a form of external pressure to say you were inner speaking when maybe you weren’t,’ he notes. For example, noted consciousness researcher Bernard Baars has asserted that ‘overt speech takes up perhaps a tenth of the waking day; but inner speech goes on all the time’. Hurlburt’s research shows this isn’t true; he finds that inner speech consumes about 25 per cent of an average person’s day, and thus, he is careful to not communicate any assumption about what type of inner experience a DES interviewee may have had at the time of the beep.

Hurlburt has found that we typically self-talk in voices we regard as our own and, though silent, we attribute to these voices sonic characteristics such as tone, pitch and pacing. We invest them with emotional qualities similar to external speech. Finally, inner speech mostly occurs in complete sentences and is nearly always actively produced rather than passively experienced.

Much as visual thought is similar to but distinct from actual visual perception, I guess. You can't be deafened by an imaginary sound or blinded by an imaginary light.

The second broad category of inner speech defined by Fernyhough is considerably more mysterious and enigmatic. He calls it ‘condensed’ inner speech, borne out of Vygotsky’s belief that as speech becomes internalised it can undergo profound transformations that set it distinctly apart from the expanded version. Condensed inner speech is defined as a highly abbreviated and ungrammatical version of regular speech. Although possibly linguistic – comprised of words – it is not intended to be communicated or even understood by others.

Hurlburt says inner speech can indeed involve elimination of words entirely, while the linguistic experience remains intact. ‘Sometimes there are words that are missing – “holes” in your inner speech. Sometimes the whole thing [all words] are missing and yet you still experience yourself speaking,’ he states. In this case, the person reports the experience of speaking, including its production, sense of loudness, pace etc, and senses what is being said but does not experience any words in their usual sense.

All this leads to another, confounding question: are verbal thoughts reaching awareness just the tip of a mental iceberg, offering only a glimpse of the unconscious mind?

Yes.

The possibility was posed by Vygotsky, but Fernyhough doesn’t like going there: ‘When we are talking about thinking, we are talking about conscious processes".

Nope.
https://aeon.co/essays/our-inner-narrator-gives-us-continuity-and-a-sense-of-self