Thought for the day: Inner wiring
Jan. 23rd, 2026 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteImagine a person who was born without the ability to hear. Ask yourself “what does their interior monologue sound like?”
You can tax your imagination trying to answer this, but you can also do another thought exercise that might explain why the question is a trap:
Imagine a new species of animals that communicate with each other through wireless signals, broadcast directly from one mind to the next, without anything visible or audible occurring. To be clear, this is not like using a telephone. They're not sending the sound of spoken words on some other frequency. The information that passes between them has no real equivalent in audible sound at all. You could try recording it and then playing it back as audio but it would sound like garbled hash to your ears.
Imagine that the animals call this activity “wiring”, and they can understand each other quite well using it.
Now imagine that, like you, these animals have an inner monologue -- the equivalent of what happens in your mind when you think a bunch of words, to figure something out, without actually speaking. But it's not exactly the same thing, because their primary method of communication is "wiring". So appropriately enough, when they think about sending signals without actually doing it, they call it “inner wiring”.
Now ask them what their “inner wiring” would “wire” like if they couldn’t “wire”.
The question is crazy because you don't know what the noun is, what the adjective means, or what the verb is doing. So you have to throw all that away. What you're really asking is, "how do you communicate with yourself, if you can't use the units of expression and reasoning that you need to communicate with others?"
It's obvious that you can think without "inner wiring". You yourself are proof of this. Want to know what it would be like? You have an answer: It would be like you. And yet, you can still think quite complicated things without engaging a wireless transmitter ... or opening your mouth.
You're using something adjacent to - underneath - those sensory means of communicating. It would be there, even if those means were stripped away. But here's a fun riddle for you: What would thinking be like, if all those sensory tools were stripped away? I don't mean, "what if you were suddenly struck deaf," I mean, "what if you somehow learned to think without having any senses at all?"
Give us even the faintest, most tenuous sense - anything at all - and with time and willpower we can conjure the most amazing thoughts. But what if there was nothing? I rather suspect there would be no thought either.
And so we arrive at ... "Sum, ergo cogitare possum". René Descartes would be proud?? Hmm.
You can tax your imagination trying to answer this, but you can also do another thought exercise that might explain why the question is a trap:
Imagine a new species of animals that communicate with each other through wireless signals, broadcast directly from one mind to the next, without anything visible or audible occurring. To be clear, this is not like using a telephone. They're not sending the sound of spoken words on some other frequency. The information that passes between them has no real equivalent in audible sound at all. You could try recording it and then playing it back as audio but it would sound like garbled hash to your ears.
Imagine that the animals call this activity “wiring”, and they can understand each other quite well using it.
Now imagine that, like you, these animals have an inner monologue -- the equivalent of what happens in your mind when you think a bunch of words, to figure something out, without actually speaking. But it's not exactly the same thing, because their primary method of communication is "wiring". So appropriately enough, when they think about sending signals without actually doing it, they call it “inner wiring”.
Now ask them what their “inner wiring” would “wire” like if they couldn’t “wire”.
The question is crazy because you don't know what the noun is, what the adjective means, or what the verb is doing. So you have to throw all that away. What you're really asking is, "how do you communicate with yourself, if you can't use the units of expression and reasoning that you need to communicate with others?"
It's obvious that you can think without "inner wiring". You yourself are proof of this. Want to know what it would be like? You have an answer: It would be like you. And yet, you can still think quite complicated things without engaging a wireless transmitter ... or opening your mouth.
You're using something adjacent to - underneath - those sensory means of communicating. It would be there, even if those means were stripped away. But here's a fun riddle for you: What would thinking be like, if all those sensory tools were stripped away? I don't mean, "what if you were suddenly struck deaf," I mean, "what if you somehow learned to think without having any senses at all?"
Give us even the faintest, most tenuous sense - anything at all - and with time and willpower we can conjure the most amazing thoughts. But what if there was nothing? I rather suspect there would be no thought either.
And so we arrive at ... "Sum, ergo cogitare possum". René Descartes would be proud?? Hmm.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-27 08:40 am (UTC)Another aspect of this: one of the weirdest, most drug-like experiences I’ve been able to tap repeatedly in longer meditations is losing all sense of the form of your own body, which for me now can happen in a meditation as short as 20 minutes. Some teacher I was listening to pointed out in a closed-eyes meditation that you cannot feel the shape of your hand, for example, from the inside. You feel pressure, heat, cold, moving air, or itching in various spots on the skin, and perhaps various aches and pains under it, but if you’re not looking at them and you focus your attention on the bare sensations, you can’t actually locate these sensations in space, and you can quickly lose all sense of where your fingers even are. You can then apply that lesson to the entire rest of your body, and eventually come to feel as though you are completely disembodied for as long as you allow this to go on. The first time it happened it freaked me out so much that I stood up involuntarily and stopped the session. But as I became more familiar with the state of mind, I grew less afraid of it, and came to find it extremely pleasant.
It’s quite difficult to put this next part into words, but when I got into this state it did start to feel as though I were somehow having experience without being connected to my physical senses (which to be clear, I know is a matter of selective attention). But in that case, what does experience even consist of? What is experience when there is nothing to experience but your own sense of existing? Thinking later about the vaguely troubled state of mind that I just put into words there, I wondered if this kind of experience wasn’t exactly what led to the Buddhist doctrine of non-existence of the self. Because in that state it sure feels intuitively as though you consist of nothing more than an awareness and what it is aware of.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-27 05:10 pm (UTC)There's a pseudoscience called "memetics" that, kind of, is supposed to study this.