sitting here pondering whether or not the loneliness will take a toll on me.. started thinking about it and realized that i have never been alone, although ive always thought of myself as someone who relies on solitude, never have i been alone.. not for a week or even a day have i went without some sort of human interaction..
on a different note for a long time ive wondered if language helps or hinders a human beings thought process.. when you have a thought isnt it usually in your native tongue? i came to this realization playing chess and noticed that before each move i say to myself (or 'think' to myself) bishop b3 or pawn d4 rather than just mentally visualizing the move.. of course im referring to 'conscious' thought as subconscious thought seems much more natural and powerful (read 'blink' by malcolm caldwell).. anyway my question is this: does thinking in a language help the thought process by giving you tons of predetermined reference points (words), therefore giving your thoughts structure and speeding things up? or does it hinder the process by constricting you to conciously thinking only thoughts within that finite group of word, therefore making it very difficult to 'think outside the box'? a good example might be modern physics.. enormous amounts of evidence suggest many more than 3 dimensions exist all around us (11 seems to be the number that most can currently agree on) but because we only can perceive 3 with our senses it is very dificult for even the most intelligent of humans to begin to wrap their minds around the concept of these other dimensions.. in other words it is very difficult for us to understand things to which we ourselves are not organic (it wasnt until only 500 years ago that scientists realized that the earth is round, and revolves around the sun and not the other way around.. because of religion, everyone thought that the earth was the center of the universe.. and like many religious anecdotes, it's a cute thought and made perfect sense at the time of it's writing, but a very far cry from reality).. the same can be said for the countless mathematicians who have driven themselves to the brink of insanity trying to comprehend the concept of infinity.. life on earth evolved to survive here on earth, breathe oxygen from trees, fish derive oxygen from water, etc.. but if you take that life outside of earth's atmosphere its instantly fatal.. life relies on the habitat in which it has evolved the same way that thought seems to rely on the languages in which its evolved..
anyway sorry for rambling on but this has been on my mind for a long time so what i plan on doing is to spend a week or so completely alone.. and i mean ALONE.. i have a month in nz and should have about 2 weeks free time (its only 500 or so miles from auckland to christchurch) so i want to find a very secluded spot hopefully with no people or signs of people for miles, ideally near the ocean, running water, a river, or something constant and kinda hypnotic.. and i want to stay there completely alone for a week or so and really focus on thinking clearly without the english language (or any language).. focus on the natural world, the stars at night, etc and see what happens .) can thought transcend language? or will i be reduced to mindlessly looking for food, expressing myself through grunts and body language like my ancestors did before the invention of language.. (and apes still do!)
please feel free to leave any comments or thoughts in the comment box, thx
2 comments:
Everything you said was very interesting, and I cannot believe I sold back my Cognitive Psych book and didn't send it to you...we spent an entire two weeks in the course discussing the effect that language has on thought processes, and here is what I can remember...the "just in time" imperative only allows for us to use what's available, when it's available. So any two responses at any given time will be different, dependant on what information we have most recently processed. This sounds fairly obvious, but there's more to it than that. The lexical bias is our bias to produce words rather than non-words, thus the underlying MEANING is what counts. Speakers generate language in syntactic chunks, the evidence is that when we correct ourselves, we repeat/correct the whole phrase. (More evidence lies in where we pause in between words...more time in between clause boundaries). The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis was one of the most well-known studies on this topic... the Strong version said that language CONTROLS thought, that you can't think things you don't have words for. When testing the hypotheses, they did experiments across cultures and languages... The experiments showed that this hypothesis was too strong- language is flexible and both cultures made the same errors, regardless of the language. The weak version says that language favors some thought processes over others, that we tend to think in ways our language suggests. For example, many other cultures have a single word to convey an entire idea (ie: "that which is the un-said"). This weak version held up well, and the conclusion was that our language DOES affect how we think, but it's not so strong that it our thoughts. Phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics all play into our language processing, as well as the way in which we conceptualize and categorize the things in our world. I am sending you my Psychology of Personality book when the semester is over, it is the most interesting thing Mike... I am learning about Freud's contributions in both that and my religion course, and I am just fascinated by how ahead of his time he was. His categorization of the Id, Ego, and Supergo are still widely accepted today, although his emphasis on the Id and the unconscious has been reinterpreted and his emphasis on sexuality as a driving force has been essentially dropped. Many other psychologists also say that the way in which we were parented as infants severely affects who we are as adults. Our minds and personalities are so complex, I can't even remotely do the findinds any justice in a short summary, you will read it for yourself (I know you already have studied the mind a great deal, this will just add to your realm of knowledge) Sorry I went off on a tangent, but I hope this gave you a little bit of insight.
***but it's not so strong that it DETERMINES our thoughts
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