Humans probably managed to survive millennia without language or internal dialogue. They made tools, made art, made music, made love. I am going to suggest that you could do without internal dialogue much better than you could do without all those mental operations which take place below the level of linguistic deliberation. What do you think goes on in the mind of those who can not hear or speak, they learn to function in the world. The “self” is a concept of organism, of memory, of boundaries or interface with the external world. Self dialogue is more dispensable than we might think. Thought precedes language. Animals think, have a concept of self, have goals and function quite well in the world, they even get us to take care of them. We also should not confuse language with consciousness.
Heh. I am the panpsychist in this conversation. I don’t think consciousness and language are remotely related.
You may be right about everything you say. However, I think this internal dialogue, for those who have it, is a large part of our identity. It’s not like one of my senses. If I became blind, I still have the inner dialogue. And I can predict, with a high level of confidence, that it would be running on and on about how I can no longer see. certainly in the beginning. Bless so overtime, but the dialogue will come back to it throughout the rest of my life.
But take my inner dialogue away from me? I truly cannot guess what that would be like. I don’t know how I would think. Someone at this site mentioned Ildefonso, who was born profoundly deaf, and lived the first 27 years of his life without any language whatsoever. At that point, a woman finally realize what was going on with him, and put a huge amount of effort into making him understand the concept of language, then teaching him ASL.
He managed to survive 27 years among humans without language at all. But when I asked what it was like, what he was like, he doesn’t know. He said, “I don’t know what it was like to be languageless, because language changed to me.”
Obviously, I would not be in the same position he was in before language. But I can’t imagine I would be the same as I am now. If I don’t have the inner dialogue, it might mean I couldn’t think in language. Who would take the chance?
Survival shouldn’t be our main purpose; even molecules are able to “survive.”
When you perform lot of tasks you don’t use internal dialogue- for example when driving car or riding bike and sometimes you probably visualise things in your head rather then narrating.
A lot of us are chained/locked to the perspective of what D. Dennett termed the Cartesian theater, the homonculus as self-represented witness. Insofar as we imagine ourselves as the conscious driver, “I am the doer of my deeds”, there is a sense that we have so much more control/autonomy than we do, as if I tell my body what to do rather than it telling me, and it issues from some neutral/external frame of deliberation (the veiw from “little man” that is me).
I can’t get rid of that little man. He has free will, but what that free will is unconditioned by is yet another metaphysical puzzle.
Certainly but when I am thinking and reflecting, the dialogue is everything. Do you think it’s not important, it is not a very large part of what you think of as you, and losing it would be unimportant? Someone who did not have language for the first 27 years of life doesn’t know what those first 27 years were like. He doesn’t know what he was like.
I understand your point of view (as I am using inner voice a lot) and I am not saying that someone should “get rid” of their inner voice- it certainly has its benefits and for lot of people it’s a central part of them- and that’s fine-
but it is not the only way of thinking, and lot of people think that they are using inner voice for thinking but they are not as it was discovered during research “Descriptive Experience Sampling“.
Other thing is that inner voice can get out of hand easily and I had a lot of issues with it and sometimes couldn’t sleep because what I call “Radio Gaga”- so I am actually trying to reduce it and would like to to exactly opposite of that person and be like him in his first 27 years.
I agree with people who say that our identity is a just an illusion, a mostly fake stories we are telling ourselves and at this point in time I don’t want anymore to be anything or anyone- I would just like to be.
Yes. I was only saying the inner dialog is important in response to prothero, who said:
I don’t mean to minimize what you’re going through, but this is the funniest 55 seconds! Wanda Sykes can’t sleep.
I don’t think our identity is an illusion. But I think the commonly held view of it is unexamined and vague idea.
I’m not sure why my inner voice turns out to be right so often. It feels like a truly mysterious force, something that doesn’t seem to exist materially, yet can have a profound impact on the material world. We don’t really know how much people gain by listening to their inner voice, but somehow, it is there, guiding us in ways we don’t fully understand.
It is a matter of perspective- so for some inner voice is most important for someone not, it is just a process of thinking and as far as I know it is learned habit that as any other habit becomes part of identity- which is perfectly fine, so you are absolutely correct in what you’re saying, I was just pointing that you could have been different and use different methods of thinking.
It is your thinking, and if it is often right it means that you are good thinker, to put it simply, and it certainly seems to me that you are.
Yeah, you are a good thinker too; I like your ideas.
I agree that a lot of mental processing happens outside conscious awareness. But I’d distinguish between something happening unconsciously and something being completely outside the self. Just because I’m not consciously directing a process doesn’t mean it isn’t still part of my mind. The interesting question, to me, is whether consciousness is the controller of these processes or simply one layer of a much larger system.
I’ve always been fascinated by how you can do things while unaware of what you are doing. For example, say you are playing a video game, and you keep getting stuck at one spot because you keep missing the jump. You keep trying when someone distracts you by asking you a question and make the jump while not paying attention.
Another example might be when you are singing along with a song and there is a part you do not know the words to. Consciously you know this because every time you skip it or make up your own words or mimic sounds. But something distracts you and you realize that you sang right through that part as if you knew the lyrics.
For those interested in the Unconscious Mind, I have read and enjoyed Guy Claxton’s books on the subject. I read the first of his ‘trilogy’, “Hare brain, tortoise mind” some years ago. I recently discovered and acquired the other two in the series, “Wayward Mind” and “Intelligence in the flesh”. I feel I have learned much from these books; perhaps you might enjoy them too? 
Yes, it is a good question. My thought is that the conscious mind-fragment is not the “controller”, but just a player in the orchestra. Perhaps a minor player?
You might be “unaware”, but you are not uncontrolled or undirected. You just did it without the aid of your conscious mind-fragment, I think.
We are not fully aware of the mind that is producing the awareness.
I assume you aren’t just saying that our minds are unaware of the parts of our minds that function outside conscious awareness. So what else could you mean?
I’m not sure. Perhaps you could clarify?
The unconscious mind is so deep that the conscious mind cannot fully catch up with it. There are layers of the psyche operating beneath our awareness
From a Jungian perspective, the unconscious is not merely a storage room for forgotten memories. It is a living, autonomous part of the psyche, containing symbols, archetypes, instincts, and psychological forces