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

Sai Emrys wrote:

> O CONLANGers: what is *your* qualia of thought?
Qualia sounds like a kind of Pokémon (well, there's Quilava, which
sounds pretty close, but I imagine Qualia is more of a bird-type, with a
question mark-shaped feather on its head).

Definitely some kind of audio-like quality. Unless I'm thinking about
something that's inherently visual, like colors. I frequently have a
musical soundtrack running in the background, which doesn't necessarily
have anything to do with what I'm thinking about. It doesn't sound like
actual music -- it doesn't have any actual perception of sound with it,
or even the kind of sensation of hearing sounds in a dream, but it does
have the same qualities of actual music -- the pitch, timbre, and
timing. I guess it's kind of an abstraction of the distilled sonic
properties of sounds -- while writing this I have the same internal
sensation as if I heard the words "abstraction" and "distilled", but
without any illusion of actually hearing anything. Although conscious
thought usually comes in the form of words, I do occasionally have
thoughts that I can't think of the word to express.

So how is it like audio? I guess most obviously it has a serial quality
to it, with words or more abstract ideas strung together one at a time.
The more abstract ideas can trigger various word responses, but not more
than one at the same time in the same train of thought. I get the
impression that more than one train of thought might be going on at a
time, but each one runs more or less in a linear fashion. I can picture
things in two dimensions, but that's more along the lines of
"imagination" than "thought". I'm not good at visualizing more than two
dimensions.

It could be that the words are just the aspects of thought that I'm most
aware of. And they're not entirely audio-like: if I'm wondering what
time it is, there's no potential confusion between "time" and "thyme".
Even the word "time" in an expression like "how many times do I have to
try this before I get it right?" doesn't seem exactly like the "time" in
"what time is it?", although it's expressed with the same word in
English (possibly an influence from other languages I've learned).