Re: OT: What is your qualia of consciousness / thought? (WAS: does conlanging change your sense of reality?)

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 2:00 AM, Sai Emrys <saizai@...> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
>> A possibly unusual feature of
>> my inner monologue (or dialogue?) is that it sometimes has
>> actual dialogue tags, e.g. "he said", "he asked"...
>
> Do you get these tags for your own innerly quoted speech?
Sometimes, yes.   It seems to be roughly correlated with
an auto-sarcasm mode where part of me is critical of what
another part of me is thinking, if that makes sense without
implying MPD, which I'm fairly sure this isn't.


>> There is also musical thought, which seems to be useful
>> only for composing music, as far as I can tell.
> Is this *thought* per se or merely audio-specific *modeling*?
>
> I make a distinction between modeling (where you rehearse various
> sensory stimuli to figure out how they'll be) and thinking (where you
> can do conscious-type stuff like figure out what you want to do to
> change the world or something).
It seems to be a form of imagination rather than reason, both
of which I conceive of as kinds of thought.  (Your term "modelling"
makes a useful distinction, but "thinking" seems too general a term
for the other category.)  And it's probably related
to musical memory, and to the well-known phenomenon
where you have a song you've heard "stuck in
your head", intensely remembering it even while
you go about doing and thinking of other things.
But this musical imagination creates something
new (though it may be based on music you've
heard before), which you may or may not eventually
sing or play on an instrument or write in musical
notation.  (I'm not competent to do either of
the latter two.)

Julian Jaynes, I think it was, reported that for
many years he "heard" symphonic music
(subconsciously composed, not remembered)
while thinking of other things.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/

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