What is the everyday sense of self that you have if not a linguistic construct?
Without language and higher order thinking, you'd be back to being an ape. Modern life drenched in information flows, much more so than the past, accellerates our fragmentation into multiple personalities.
Language and higher order thinking might not be as intrinsically related as we think.
For example, not everybody has an inner voice – and this usually comes as a surprise to both people having or not having one.
Another good counterexample might actually be LLMs: Definitely well-spoken, definitely still not the greatest abstract higher-order thinkers, and domain-specific “intelligences” run circles around them.
I have an inner voice when I think about dialogue. When I construct a discussion in my mind. And only then.
I don't use an inner voice when I think about other things, how to do things, or figure out problems. Way too slow, and after all you can't use an inner voice to figure out how to get through a tricky four-car driving situation. You have to figure out what do do by entirely non-verbal means.
(Just to add - I also don't use an inner voice when I read, unless I decide to. And when I do, reading slows down to a crawl, obviously. So in general I don't)
It's not solely about the inner voice. Abstract concepts, symbol manipulation, mathematical logic and reasoning are for the most part "linguistic" constructs.
Anecdotally, when I say I am thinking in English or Spanish, I’m not usually thinking in words, more in a cultural context and in concepts that are not symbolically articulated. Some of those concepts only exist (to me) in one cultural context or another and not in both. Basically wherever I learned something is where it “lives” in my mind. I can know “of” it in another context, but to think about it directly, in the first person, I need to “enter” the context in which it was acquired.
That’s why I can’t even -think- about math in Spanish, it just doesn’t work for me. I never learned mathematical concepts inside of that thought context.
And when I think of some people inside of English context, I can’t remember what it feels like to talk to them.
When I am tired I sometimes slip between contexts without knowing and cannot easily discern what language I am speaking or listening to.
I find it absolutely fascinating. It seems like there might be some insight to be had studying the phenomenon in people that experience it.
