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Why do we have an internal monologue?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Chomsky would say that the original purpose of language is to structure thought, with communication being solely secondary. (Or something like this, I don't recall it word-by-word.)
If that's correct, then internal monologues are simply a result of your brain processing your thoughts.
Yeah, language is an added analytical layer on top of our thoughts. We are clearly able to have thoughts without language (feral children for example are able to process their environment, plan and predict). But language adds a formality to it. Not to challenge Chomsky on his own turf but I don’t see how this can be separated from communication, since communication is how we acquire language. Does he really posit that even a feral child will have its own internal set of mouth sounds for organizing thoughts, even when it never speaks those to anyone? Seems backwards.
What do you think evolved first - verbal communication or thoughts? Presumably we were able to think before we could speak, no? The words we have in our language are like pointers to internal concepts, and it seems to me that those internal concepts would have existed before language was a thing. The mouth-sounds as you put it are not the thoughts themselves, rather just labels for specific concepts. It might be possible and even convenient to think in mouth-sounds but it's not necessary for logical thought.
Yeah I agree with you. There might be something to the other side of the coin though. For example, a feral human with no language will have “thoughts,” as we both agree. But they will probably be quite different than thoughts from someone with language. Having a word for something has a way of crystallizing a concept. With a lot of those at your disposal you might be capable of more sophisticated thought. It’s really hard to say since we don’t have feral people to study and we couldn’t examine their “thoughts” even if we did.